More champions are being considered by Riot Games in order to widen the champion pool for Jungle.
With the release of League Patch 11.8 several days before, Riot took the very first steps of their plan on expanding the champion pool for the Jungle role. With Darius, Morgana, Diana, Morderkaiser, and Zed all received buffs that provide them better camp clear, these champions are now available as a Jungler besides their usual position. After the release of Patch 11.8, we had seen rising stats from Morgana and Diana jungle, it seems like the new changes have helped them a lot since they are now really decent champions to play in the meta.
Thanks to the success that Morgana and Diana achieve in the latest version, Riot shared on a blog that they are trying to add even more champions to the rotation. They also shared that they intend to buff champions without affecting them in general in their normal laning phase as other rosters.
If we take a closer look at the 5 champions that have recently been added to the champion pool by Riot, we can easily recognize that all of them are non-popular champions at tournaments. Morgana, Morderkaiser, and Darius are only picked 7, 5, and 3 times across all professional matches while Diana and Zed had completely disappeared from pro play this season.
This is part of the reason why the community had made many predictions about the next champions to join the rotation. Many posts about whether which champions should be picked and what adjustments could be made in order to make them fit in their new role without affecting their original laning ability.
Many predictions have been made, including Braum, Ezreal, Kled or even Zyra… to be the possible choices in the following patches.
Earlier this Season, Riot mentioned that Jungle is currently the most troublesome roster for them to establish changes and balancing it. The role possesses way too much power and influence on each match while having a surprisingly low play rate. Adding more familiar champions to the role might be their answer to such a dilemma. Let’s hope that they can keep up with what they have been doing with Morgana and Diana’s success and won’t follow their old track of last year’s failure.