Double jungle

While I'm trying to discuss the idea in a serious way, I don't feel that it's viable - I'm using the theorycrafting as a tool to better understand why the current meta works the way it does. I know the basics (AP mid because scale better with level, 2 man bottom for dragon control, etc) but there are subtleties there that I would like to understand better.

So, to repeat, I'm just theorycrafting a bit. I'm aware that this probably isn't viable, but at the there's probably something I can learn from looking at the idea seriously.

1. Advantages:
- Increased Dragon/Baron security/kill speed
- Increased ability to invade enemy jungle (if enemy jungler starts blue, the jungler clearing YOUR blue can invade their red immediately and likely before the enemy jungler notices/retaliates)
- Junglers could be less reliant on Smite
- Faster leveling for bottom lane while solo
- Junglers can "camp" lanes without getting as far behind

2. Disadvantages
- "Jungler" activities become a lot more transparent due to normalized lane presence
- Less experience and/or farm for top lane
- More reliance on mid lane for ganks
- Mid lane becomes more vulnerable to ganks
- Bottom likely to be a 1v2 lane at least 25% of the time
- 1 less offensive summoner spell for team fights
- No "support" role (Alistar can do blue and move to bottom for Purple side) or reliance on leash
- Less dragon control - harder to get a 3rd body to Dragon, since there's a 2nd person hanging around top lane
- Top lane could easily become more pushed than desirable

3. What would be the best "split" for the junglers?
- [Blue+Wolves] and [Red+Wraiths+Little Golems] seems to be the best potential split

Overall, I don't see it working against the current metagame outside of a dedicated team composition. You'd need someone like Morgana, who is difficult to gank and can farm fairly well under pressure, mid. You'd need a carry with a decent early game bottom, someone that can hold their own in a 1v2 lane without falling too far behind in CS.

The main drawback I see is information - that the junglers wouldn't be able to do anything without tipping off the enemy. The instant they set foot away from their lanes, especially if they do so at the same time to secure buffs, it becomes clear what they're doing - this makes it simple for the enemy to establish approximate timers on your jungle's buffs (and easy to set up ambushes). If either jungler leaves lane, middle lane gets a nice tipoff early on that something may be about to go down. Dragon control would suffer by having 1 person glued to top lane - if they leave to go set up at dragon, the enemy gets alerted. If they don't, then you're down 1 body for dragon control.

So yeah. Any angles I may have missed with this, or other things to take into consideration? Any examples of a double jungle setup being done at any significant levels of play, and what worked/failed?

Keep in mind I'll be making my comments as fit for the current elo I'm at. Obviously things can work out differently in low elo (because it's so chaotic), and high elo (the disparity of competency between players can result in others getting massively outplayed).

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Originally Posted by MasPan

1. Advantages:
- Increased Dragon/Baron security/kill speed
- Increased ability to invade enemy jungle (if enemy jungler starts blue, the jungler clearing YOUR blue can invade their red immediately and likely before the enemy jungler notices/retaliates)
- Junglers could be less reliant on Smite
- Faster leveling for bottom lane while solo
- Junglers can "camp" lanes without getting as far behind

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- True.
- Depends on where your dudes are at. Some champions are adept at invasion and frankly it's better to send them in alone.
- What?
- That is true, but it's also extremely likely that bottom lane will get denied. Very few champs can 1v2 during laning phase, let alone the current meta bot lane. Even said champions can't do it for very long.
- What? If you're talking about holding the lane for someone, that's kinda standard. I suppose the fluidity of swapping lane assignments is worth exploring, but for the most part I believe bot lane is locked in place for the current meta.

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2. Disadvantages
- "Jungler" activities become a lot more transparent due to normalized lane presence
- Less experience and/or farm for top lane
- More reliance on mid lane for ganks
- Mid lane becomes more vulnerable to ganks
- Bottom likely to be a 1v2 lane at least 25% of the time
- 1 less offensive summoner spell for team fights
- No "support" role (Alistar can do blue and move to bottom for Purple side) or reliance on leash
- Less dragon control - harder to get a 3rd body to Dragon, since there's a 2nd person hanging around top lane
- Top lane could easily become more pushed than desirable

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- No idea what you're talking about.
- Top lane is usually a solo lane in the current meta.
- That's very wrong.
- Also very wrong.
- True.
- Not necessarily. When people "double jungle", sometimes one is actually more of an active roamer than a jungler. One of the things that happened in this patch was that lower leveled champions get even more exp for killing a higher level champion. This encourages running a roamer that has very strong ganks at early levels. For example, when we double jungled last night with you as Skarnerssss and me as Fizz, I did a lot more killing than actual jungling. You had high jungle clearing speeds. I had excellent ganking abilities.
- Depends on the team comp. I think it's totally legit to run AP Janna mid, or Taric top.
- What? Top lane has less relevance than mid or bot lane. Additionally, since two people could conceivably gank any lane, you could just roflstomp mid, then bring your mid to dragon with you. Grabbing mid to help you dragon isn't ideal, but two champs with Smite could conceivably make a fast dragon.
- Top lanes are usually 1v1 bruisers. It'd be difficult to imagine one tower diving the other if there's no kills on either side. Even if that's not true, usually top lane is the most vulnerable to ganks. It's kinda silly actually.

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3. What would be the best "split" for the junglers?
- [Blue+Wolves] and [Red+Wraiths+Little Golems] seems to be the best potential split

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The usual invasion strategies could work. Alternatively, if someone had CV or started with wards, one person could camp their red/blue buff safely and steal it.

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Overall, I don't see it working against the current metagame outside of a dedicated team composition. You'd need someone like Morgana, who is difficult to gank and can farm fairly well under pressure, mid. You'd need a carry with a decent early game bottom, someone that can hold their own in a 1v2 lane without falling too far behind in CS.

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Bot lane is the weakest link in the current meta. I honestly can't think of anyone that can do the job that you described. It might be possible to sic the AD carry on their mid laner instead, or even top. Singed up top? Counter with Vayne/Kog'Maw/Caitlyn. An alternative I would propose is to have a caster/support go bot, and a caster/support/bruiser go mid.

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The main drawback I see is information - that the junglers wouldn't be able to do anything without tipping off the enemy. The instant they set foot away from their lanes, especially if they do so at the same time to secure buffs, it becomes clear what they're doing - this makes it simple for the enemy to establish approximate timers on your jungle's buffs (and easy to set up ambushes). If either jungler leaves lane, middle lane gets a nice tipoff early on that something may be about to go down. Dragon control would suffer by having 1 person glued to top lane - if they leave to go set up at dragon, the enemy gets alerted. If they don't, then you're down 1 body for dragon control.

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That already happens with one jungler. Hell, even seeing their mid with blue buff is already an indication of their blue buff timer. Seeing their jungler with red buff is already an indicator of their timer. Level 2 red buff gank? Their red buff respawns at 7:05. No level 2 red buff gank? Their blue buff respawns at 7:05.

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So yeah. Any angles I may have missed with this, or other things to take into consideration? Any examples of a double jungle setup being done at any significant levels of play, and what worked/failed?

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It's a very niche composition, and it would work a lot better with team coordination. As such, you could see it in 5-man ranked plays, but it should only be done with lots of theorycrafting and practice before-hand. There's also a very limited pool of champions for you to choose, should you try something like double-jungle or jungle+roamer.

I guess I didn't explain, I was imagining more of a "clear the jungle then lane as normal until jungle respawns" kind of situation. What we were doing does seem to be more viable but also more risky - moreso than normal jungling, the "roamer" would be crippled without successful ganking.

And I agree, bottom lane would likely be free farm for the enemy carry. I can't really think of a champion that can hold off a 1v2 lane on their own while still being able to limit enemy farming. Yeah, M5 pulled it off with blue buff Urgot, but I don't think that would work with a double jungle setup.

Couldn't really put a mage bottom, they have a hard enough time when an AD decides to go mid, let alone dealing with that + a support. Bruisers that normally top would probably be helpless to do much without a gank. Another ranged AD would lose to trades. I think the best bet would be to throw someone in there that's bulky enough to shrug off a few pokes but still has a bit of range to get some CS.

As for the invasion, I was referring to one person killing own blue, then immediately moving into enemy jungle to take enemy red before the enemy jungler can get there. Or red/blue if enemy starts red. The other jungler could still be clearing own jungle.

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Originally Posted by MasPan

Couldn't really put a mage bottom, they have a hard enough time when an AD decides to go mid, let alone dealing with that + a support. Bruisers that normally top would probably be helpless to do much without a gank. Another ranged AD would lose to trades. I think the best bet would be to throw someone in there that's bulky enough to shrug off a few pokes but still has a bit of range to get some CS.

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There's a couple of champs that come to mind when you mention "bulky" and "still has a bit of range to get some CS". The best one would be Galio. He will go oom really fast without a Chalice though. All the other alternatives are even worse.

The reason why I mention putting a mage bot lane is because untargeted abilities typically have a longer range than a ranged champion's auto-attack. Yes, even Kog'Maw with W on still has to worry about getting gibbed by random spells flying through the air. The point here is that it would be harder to completely zone a caster champ, because they have an obnoxiously long range. Some AD carries do give some caster champs a hard time (notably Caitlyn and Kog'Maw), but it really depends on the matchup.

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As for the invasion, I was referring to one person killing own blue, then immediately moving into enemy jungle to take enemy red before the enemy jungler can get there. Or red/blue if enemy starts red. The other jungler could still be clearing own jungle.

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There's a strat I like to run when I do jungle Fizz. I tell my teammates to do as much damage as possible to the wolves and blue buff camp without actually killing them, then I scoop up all the kills for enough exp for level 2. If done properly, my teammates will still have enough time to return to lanes without losing exp, and I don't have to blow Smite. With level 2, I can use Playful to hop the wall over Baron/Dragon cave (alternatively you could Flash), which significantly decreases travel time, and I can drag their Lizard to some strange place before their jungler reaches Lizard. Whether I can successfully take Lizard before they find out about the ruse is a tricky issue. Honestly, the timing can't really be done much better than this, and if the second person were to be involved in this, they'd mind as well start at Lizard rather than be at blue buff.

the 1v2 lane is highly dependent on champ selection and enemy skill

if your enemies just push, anyone who can last hit under tower is perfect for 2v1 (enemy skill)

otherwise, you need sustainable champs who can last hit under tower early and wipe waves after several levels. morg, gp, cho, irelia, or anyone with wave wiping abilities + blue buff would work well. one of the reasons it worked so well last night WAS that you sent cho bot against people who pushed and didnt try to deny cho, netting you an xp and farm advantage overall by *not* having another person in lane.

against more organized teams, itll often fail hard because the 2v1 will get pushed over within 10 minutes and by double jungling you sort lock yourselves in to invading and the enemy team will jump on the invader really hard.

if you want to have an ad carry, send him mid. thats the way ive done it the couple times ive tried this with my old group, works fine.

I've double jungled as a troll mach with a 5 man premade of my Reddit friends once.I jungled Eve and the other jungle was Twitch. We had Chogath top, Vlad mid, and Soraka(post nerf) solo bot. Worked out really well actually. We got Vlad and Cho fed Soraka was able to hold her lane AND out farm them. I started at blue because of my passive slow and reliance on blue, and Twitch started at red because of his lack of constant cc. After we both acquired our buffs we moved into the enemy jungle and stole their red for me and killed the enemy jungler to get Twitch blue. Rest of the game was us counter jungleing, and ganking lanes together. Oh, and with 2 smites we were able to take Baron at 16 minutes... and every Baron after that exactly when it spawned. We won something like... 34-5 or some pomegranate like that. There's a LoL replay of it somewhere...

So although the meta is bruiser top, ap mid, support + range ad bot, and usually tank/bruiser jungle, there are other options available. I have seen double jungle work before, but it's a rather gimmicky strategy that falls apart once you get to a certain level of teamwork. Against anyone with no coordination and people who like to push a ton, it's devastating, against anyone who plays reasonable safe and smart, probably not going to work so well. The reason being, the longer the game goes on, the worse having two underleveled champions start to be. It can already be hard enough with just a support who is underleveled, but to have both your jungler and what would be our support be undereleveled means you really have to rely on the other 3 people of your team to do all the heavy work in team fights. And come mid to late game, that's just not enough most of the time. It can work if you really make one of the hyper carries get a huge lead, or otherwise gimp the enemy team to an even greater extent than your team, but again, you're relying on them making mistakes rather than your own play, so it's not going to work all the time and you're also relying on the rest of your team to play pretty much flawlessly as it's more of a 3 v 5, or 3 v 4, than a 5 v 5.

Now that's not to say that the current meta is perfect as is, or that you can't change things up. Corki, Caitlyn, Vayne could go top. Ez, Ashe, Graves could do jungle. Karthus, Ziggs, Cass could go bot, though when you do that you generally want Soraka to go with them, so that's another gimmicky bot lane imo. Anyway, you can also do kill lanes bot, to some extent Graves + Taric does that, but you can do stuff like Jarvan + Leona, Pantheon + anyone else with a stun, or something like Lux + Garen. You could also go for a pure harass lane, something like Maokai + Zilean or Nidalee + Soraka or GP + Talon. Not all of those are optimal lanes, and if they don't win their lanes, it can be very bad for your team, but the important thing is that there are combinations that will work that don't follow the meta exactly. Still, it's hard to break out of the current meta because it's proven to be a very successful strategy. If you follow it, you generally ensure your range ad gets farmed, your ap gets the levels to do it's burst, and your bruisers are tanky enough to get to the enemy range ad, and that your jungler can influence the lanes via ganks. Unless the jungle or lanes change some more, I don't think we'll see any vast changes. Though, we might get to a point that people figure out specific combos against specific bot lane comps. Which could make things more interesting. After all, if you know w + x champion beats y + z champion, you're going to run that bot lane to destroy them. So then you move y champion to top or mid, and put your AP bot to beat that comp, but then maybe there's a counter to that AP Carry you can send bot, so then it has to jungle or top. And so on, to the point that picks and bans become that much more valuable, even though they already are very important.

Like I said, the point was at least partially...I guess you'd call it a thought exercise. I learned a few things while I was digging into this idea, oddly enough things almost entirely unrelated but still useful, and it helped me understand a bit more why the lanes are the way they are and what is flexible/what isn't about them in the current meta.

@ Six, I don't know how noteworthy the experience change that was implemented with Hecarim is, but it may be enough to offset low level jungler/support as long as they're able to pull off successful ganks (incidentally, it makes ganking mid/top a bit more rewarding than bottom [unless you get a double kill]).

I wouldn't do this unless I was pulling an M5 and giving Urgot blue bottom lane or maybe playing Caitlyn just for the ridiculous range she has.

I suppose it would be nice for two smites to go bumrush someone as they're trying to take their red or what have you.

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Originally Posted by Blaine

I suppose it would be nice for two smites to go bumrush someone as they're trying to take their red or what have you.

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While not a direct alternative, your team can build 3+ Wriggle's Lanterns to make Baron/Dragon go down ridiculously fast. TSM has done this a couple of times, sniping Baron while the other team was distracted/out of position.