2012-03-30, 08:10 PM
SolicShooter Wrote:Tired of sheeps, you said it yourself there are champions who can jungle without smite, without significantly hurting their clearing speed. There are plenty of champion skills that can function as smite. A fed carry's ultimate like lux' finales funkeln or ezreals trueshot barrage, nunu's consume, cho'gaths feast work perfectly for securing baron/dragon.
If you take snowballing into account, you might make that gank work, just because you were able to pop that ignite/exhaust/ghost, which allows you to actually go dragon, while almost being impossible to be contested. Buff steals are only going to happen by the likes of Shaco, because the rest of the junglers can't risk to play against another jungler who has an extra ignite/exhaust, whatever. I long for the day when certain junglers aren't shunned anymore for picking something differnt.
Team set up is a lot more important then you think. For example, when we've a tristana bottom, a gangplank top, enemy has no strong healers, bursty jungler like lee sin, then it'd be perfectly okay to stray from the meta and take clairvoyance, teleport, ghost, clarity on a lux mid, instead of the usual ignite.
I don't mind it so much when people pick a solid clearer like Skarner, Udyr, WW, Cho'gath, Nunu, Nocturne, Shy, Fiddle, and Mundo. Any of them can clear while maintaining a fairly nice balance of health/mana while keeping a decent jungle speed. I'd prefer if they picked up smite to improve their clear times and health when ganking, but I can see an argument for taking another summoners, especially if we're up against a team that we need to have at least x number of exhausts for, or multiple ignites, or something along those lines. Xin on the other hand, he is not a fast jungle clearer, and not a very strong ganker. By picking ignite over smite, you're shooting your jungle clear times in the foot when they're already pretty poor, and giving the enemy jungler a huge incentive to steal buffs from you each and every time they come up. Add to the fact that without smite, you're going to be significantly lower health after each camp, and well, you've just made it that much longer between ganks, assuming you can even gank without falling even further behind in levels because of your decision. All in all, I don't mind seeing a jungle xin, I don't mind an aggressive ganking xin with ignite smite or exhaust smite, but I can't condone him choosing ignite and flash. He's just not strong enough on his own to make that a worthwhile swap, and no matter how much he might claim otherwise, it was not going to be a fun game to be had. When you know your jungler is going into the game severely handicapped, and then going to handicap all the other lanes with his choice . . . well there just isn't a good reason to play with that person imo.
Generally speaking, I disagree that you only have Shaco to worry about as far as buff steals. If I'm a jungler, and I see a lack of smite on the enemy, I'm going to buy wards and camp their pomegranate all day because unless they're Cho'Gath and maybe Nunu, there is no way they can take it down with me having smite. And even in those cases, a lot of junglers will just use consume/feast too early, so there's still a chance to steal.
As for lux or Ez being able to secure baron, I disagree, you can't rely on them having enough damage items to ensure you take it. It's far better to rely on a certain damage skill than hope they're fed/farmed enough to blow it up. Nunu and Cho are good at assisting in securing it, with Cho'gath obviously being the best of the best, but having Feast + smite available will always make it more secure than just Feast would.
And as far as nonstandard summoners go, Lux taking clairvoyance is perfectly fine with me, a jungler picking up heal, fine with me, bot lane taking a teleport, fine with me. Nonstandard summoners are fine in a lot of roles, but if there is a role I feel needs one summoner to succeed, it's a jungler, and smite for that jungler. Perhaps if they add an item with a similar ability, we'll start to see people pick up different summoners, but until then, I want to see a majority of junglers having smite, because I've played far too many losing games with people who claim they don't need smite to jungle. And as it turned out, they did, they needed it to jungle successfully and our team needed it badly to win objectives like dragon and baron.