League of Legends Throwback Thursday: Feral Flare

Feral Flare thus spawned an era of heavy power farming. Champions like Master Yi, Shyvana, and Udyr could clear the jungle so quickly and get that Wriggle’s Lantern upgraded within 10-15 minutes that they would have enough stacks to have almost 100 bonus damage by the mid to late game. It made junglers true carries on the level of laners for really the first time in League of Legends history, but it also came with a downside.

You see, because power farming jungle camps had such a high payoff, early game dominant junglers like Lee Sin, Kha’Zix, and Jarvan IV started to fall out of favor in solo queue. Why take the risk that you couldn’t snowball the game before that farming Master Yi came online? Instead, junglers were more content to sit in their own jungle, clearing camps over and over.

This, in turn, took a toll on laners. For one, laners in bad match-ups that would often rely on jungle pressure for assistance suffered. But, more often, laners began to see junglers emerge from the fog of war with a fully-stacked Feral Flare dealing out massive amounts of damage.

It felt unfair, that a champion could spend his entire laning phase growing in power without even having to touch an enemy champion. Jungle was decried as an “uninteractive” and unfair role, for good reason. Many players felt that if jungle was going to be a role with the ability to scale up so heavily, they should need to take risks to do it.

Feral Flare was eventually removed in Patch 4.20, replaced with the Devourer/Sated Devourer enchantment. This enchantment functioned essentially the same way as Feral Flare did and ran into the same problems despite multiple adjustments to how it stacked (particularly how many stacks camps, kills, and epic monsters would give). After two seasons, the scaling jungle item was finally put to death in Patch 6.9.