League of Legends: a look at all the problems of the jungle

4. Rubberband experience has gotten out of whack

It might surprise people (it did for me) that the first version of rubberbanded XP was introduced back in Season 4. With this mechanic, the levels of jungle monsters were determined by the average level of the players in the game. If you, as the jungler, killed a monster that was higher level than you, you’d get bonus experience, but if you were higher level than the beast you’d get reduced experience.

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Skillcapped points out that, during this time there was reduced pressure on the laners because junglers could not hit level three earlier than laners in their ganks. In addition, by reducing experience from lower-level camps, junglers got less of an advantage by hyper-farming.

Unfortunately, this all changed in Season 7, when Riot added brackets of experience so that monsters within the same level bracket would be worth the same (i.e. a level four Gromp could be worth the same amount of XP as a level six Gromp). This meant that there would be less experience in the jungle overall because junglers would tend to be a higher level than the level of the monster they were killing. Combined with overall reduced experience on camps and longer camp respawn timers, this change meant that rubberbanded experience would only apply at certain level breakpoints in the game and junglers wouldn’t be punished for ganking more.

Because of the brackets of monster levels, killing camps that were lower level than you, ganking, then refarming those camps on respawn once they reached the new experience bracket would give massive amounts of catch-up experience. This meant that players who ganked massively after their first rotation of camps or first few camps could come back in levels quickly with just a couple rotations of clears. By contrast, hard-farming junglers wouldn’t get a ton of experience from killing their camps over and over and see themselves equal level to the enemy jungle even as he was snowballing his own lanes.