Preseason 5: Early jungle results

Starting with this patch the real season five preseason changes are landing, and they are super-interesting. By far the biggest changes that have hit so far are in the jungle and I can't wait to see how they shake things up, especially in the LCS.

The new items and jungle mechanics are going to definitely change the balance of power among jungle champions, and now that patch 4.20 has been out for a few days I wanted to look at which champions and item combinations are doing well in the jungle so far.

For a summary of the new items and their enchantments, you can check out the patch notes. For some data you can't get anywhere else, you can read on.

I scraped every challenger and master elo (mmr) solo queue game that has been played in NA on patch 4.20 so far, and I looked at what is being picked and built in the jungle. This table shows the summarized results; with champions ordered by win rate and items ordered by popularity on that champion.

(mmm... data)

Now, of course, some of these numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt. Since the patch has only been out for a few days, the dataset is unfortunately small for some of these champions. For instance, Fizz was picked in about 2% of games, so his unbelievably high win rate may be anomalous here. However, chilling smite fizz with the magus enchantment does sound pretty horrifying. Go get your freelo while you can, I guess.

Smiting champions has been a long time dream of mine (going on 6 years now), and that dream seems to be shared by other players, note the popularity of the Stalker's Blade in this table. The fact that it comes with a bonus slow is just too fun. The only champions preferring the Skirmisher's Sabre are Warwick and Master Yi. Warwick seems to be having a better time of it.

Not everyone is smiting champions however, the most popular new jungle item seems to be the Ranger's Trailblazer. AOE smite on a reduced cooldown does sound pretty juicy, and probably plays the closest to the old Feral Flare. It will be interesting to track these trends over time.

Chilling smite warrior enchanted Wukong, Olaf, Jarvan IV, and Riven; buckle up. The slow from the smite is 50% over 2 seconds, at the moment. I wonder how the buffs and nerfs will go on these new mechanics. So much interesting data to track here as the season progresses.

Udyr is surprisingly low on this table. This may be due to the fact that these are all high-level games. I think that better players know how to handle him and mitigate some of his game-carrying sillyness with careful positioning, etc... Like Fizz, he is not picked super-frequently, so we are working with a small sample size on him as well.

I've only stared at this table for a little while, and while I've noticed some interesting patterns, I'm sure there's more to say here. Hit me up if you see something I've missed.

Poor Zac and Evelynn.

Now, off to the jungle with you! I hope you liked this table, I sure had fun making it. It's time to find out who is a juggernaut and who is a magus. Which team will be the first in the LCS to bring out five smites?

I can't wait for season 5.

Do stay cool (or warm if you're somewhere cold), and don't stray far; I'll be bringing more league and math fun here at LeagueMath.com.

Zac's feelings were not harmed in the making of this article. Is your favorite champion near the bottom of the table? Climb up to challenger in the jungle and I'll re-evaluate it for you. Until then...

Peace.