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

5. Scuttle Crab massively warped early pathing

There’s not much to say about Scuttle Crab other than the fact it has massively unbalanced the jungle. In Season 8, this neutral monster was buffed to give massive amounts of experience early, more than some camps. This meant that players prioritized getting the Scuttle Crab more than their camps (as noted above, the rubberband experience system meant they weren’t missing much from not farming their camps).

The Scuttle Crab change made it the highest priority early objective to contest. This meant two things happened.

First, early game junglers who could duel over the Scuttle Crab became more powerful. These also tended to be early-ganking junglers, which led to a hyper-aggressive early game giving laners a feeling that their lane was being determined by the enemy jungler.

Second, junglers began to feel a loss in agency by being forced to play around Scuttle Crab. If you were a jungler with a weaker early game champion or your laners around Scuttle didn’t have push priority to assist you if a fight broke out, you could find yourself denied massive amounts of experience.

Thus, both laners and junglers felt their impact diminished due to the changes to Scuttle Crab. But there was one other unintended effect.