With the full NA LCS 2015 Spring split wrapped up, post-mortem season is in full swing. One way to review player performances over the past few months is to compare statistics, and today we’re going to mull over the Jungler position and see what trends we can identify.
I’ve chosen to highlight a few specific stats with charts, but there are many more statistics available in the complete table at the bottom of this article.
The statistics in this article are based on all NA LCS 2015 Spring split games, including the nine weeks of the regular season, tiebreaker games, and playoff games.
Note to Readers
Statistics are only one tool available for measuring player performance. This article is not meant to be a comprehensive player assessment to rank North American Jungle players. It may show us some interesting things, but the findings from these numbers should always be put in context with other factors such as individual and team play style, champions used, game lengths, and so on.
- The “Earned Gold Differential at 10 Minutes” statistic measures the Jungler’s and opposing Jungler’s earned gold at the 10-minute mark, takes the difference, and then averages that difference across all games played. These numbers are based on gold values rounded to the nearest hundred, which is the level of detail available in Riot’s match histories. Rounding errors may have some small influence on the values.
The best gold differentials at 10 minutes belonged to Santorin and Meteos, who did a fantastic job of securing early leads. IWDominate and Porpoise also did respectable jobs of getting ahead in the first 10 minutes.
Given CLG’s strong early games as a team, it’s somewhat surprising that Xmithie was hardly able to come out ahead of his opposing Jungler, on average.
The various Dignitas Junglers struggled heavily early in games, as did WTHeaven in his few games with Coast towards the end of the split.
Food for Thought:
Early gold amounts come not only from farm, but also from kills/assists and early towers. High gold differential numbers could reflect successful ganks, early-game power farming, or even lane swap scenarios where one team rapidly shoves down an enemy turret.
Based on other stats available to us, we can get a decent idea of where a few players’ numbers come from:
Meteos
Based on his incredibly high neutral minions killed per minute (discussed later on in this article), Meteos seems to get a lot of his gold from just power farming. But Meteos also contributed to 12 First Blood kills in 28 games, the second-best pace of any Jungler behind only Xmithie. So Meteos built his gold leads with both farming and ganks, which is pretty impressive.
Santorin
Meanwhile, Santorin contributed to slightly fewer First Blood kills than Meteos (9 FB contributions in 26 games), and farmed the jungle a little bit slower overall, so his higher average gold differential, compared to Meteos, may have come from non-FB kills, or better denial of the opposing Jungler.
Xmithie
It would seem like Xmithie’s gold differential at 10 minutes should be much higher: he was in on 15 First Bloods in 22 games (insane!), with only two First Blood deaths. He farmed the jungle at an above-average rate. But evidently something kept his differentials small. One issue is that he was very strong in wins, but pretty weak in losses: Xmithie’s gold differential at 10 minutes was +175 in wins and -180 in losses. Compare that to a more consistent performer like Meteos, who was +324 in wins and -55 in losses (or Santorin: +300 in wins, -19 in losses, or IWDominate: +233 in wins, -79 in losses).
Keep Digging: Curious about gold differentials @ 10 minutes in wins vs. losses? Check out this bonus chart.
- The “Average Neutral Minions Killed per Minute” statistic measures the number of jungle monsters killed, divided by game length, and then averages across all games played.
As explored in more detail in a recent article, Meteos was clearly the King of the Jungle this split. Cloud9’s Jungler killed 22% more jungle monsters per minute than the next contender, Santorin, and killed 65% more jungle monsters than ShorterACE.
This was in part due to how Cloud9 distributed jungle farm: both Hai and Sneaky took very few jungle camps for themselves, allowing Meteos to hoard his jungle money (taking advantage of the bonus gold granted by the Hunter’s Machete items).
- Damage to champions per minute is calculated separately for each game, then averaged across all games played. Bear in mind that this stat can be inflated by playing longer games, or by playing high-poke champions.
Unlike ADCs and Mid laners, Junglers are not defined by how much damage they do to champions, especially with the rise of the tank meta later in the split. Still, damage is an interesting and potentially useful statistic, if only to compare different Junglers’ play styles.
Rush had the highest damage output, followed closely by Porpoise, Santorin, and Meteos.
On the low end, Crumbzz, Azingy, and CloudNguyen struggled to output much damage, but small sample sizes make their play difficult to judge.
Xmithie is somewhat more deserving of comment: his damage numbers are quite low, in part because he heavily used early-game champions like Jarvan IV, Vi, and Rek’Sai who do relatively little damage in the mid and late game. (Champions like Gragas and Sejuani tend to have higher damage per minute numbers because of their area-of-effect damage and stronger scaling.)
- Damage share is the percentage of the team’s total damage to champions that was contributed by the player, calculated separately for each game and then averaged across all games played.
- Gold share is based on earned gold, which excludes each player’s 475 starting gold and the inherent gold gain of 1.9 per second that starts at 90 seconds.
Gold share and damage share aren’t directly related, but they do influence one another. A few players stand out to me as especially interesting based on this chart.
Meteos
As discussed previously, Cloud9 allowed Meteos to take a much higher than average share of jungle camps, which translated into a very large gold share. Meteos used that gold share to provide a lot more of his team’s damage than most other Junglers.
Rush and Porpoise
The Junglers for Team Impulse and Team 8 turned very slightly above-average gold shares into a ton of damage for their teams. Porpoise had the highest damage share of any Jungler.
IWDominate
IWD had a slightly above-average gold share, but didn’t translate that into a high damage share. But put that in context with his league-average damage per minute and we can see that his low damage share is based on the rest of his team doing more damage, not on Dom himself doing less.
- Wards placed per minute and wards cleared per minute are calculated separately for each game, then averaged across all games played. All ward types are included.
Some of the biggest contributors to vision control were Helios, Crumbzz, WTHeaven, Porpoise, Saintvicious, and Xmithie. Many of these are players who contributed less in other ways, so it’s interesting to see the trade-off in play style.
That trade-off is especially evident when looking at Rush, who had the lowest ward placement and ward clear rates among all Junglers. Expect the TiP coaching staff to keep working with Rush on this aspect of his game.
Santorin’s low ward placement number may be partly a symptom of TSM’s tendency to be in the lead most of the time, or maybe it was just that Santorin focused more on clearing wards than placing them: he had the third-highest ward clear rate among Junglers.
In a post-game interview during the regular season, Meteos discussed his preference for an upgraded yellow trinket over buying a Sightstone. That preference (which he didn’t hold to during the later parts of the season) doesn’t seem to have hurt his vision numbers too badly: he was still slightly above average in wards placed and ward clears.
Xmithie placed slightly above average numbers of wards, but his ward clearing was highest among starters, at 0.37 per minute. His heavy focus on ward clearing may have contributed to his lower damage totals.
Full Stats Table
Click the image below for a giant table of Jungler statistics from the entire NA LCS 2015 Spring split. If you’re interested in sortable, scrollable tables, head to the Statistics section of Oracle’s Elixir and enter “Jungle” into the Search bar of the Player Statistics tables.
Click the image for a full-size, readable view.
A few other interesting findings from these statistics:
- Santorin’s KDA was a ridiculously high 8.0 this split.
- Team Coast may have flopped hard, but it wasn’t because of Impaler’s lack of effort: Impaler was in on 80% of his team’s kills! Helios and Meteos weren’t far behind, both with 76% kill participation.
- As highlighted elsewhere, Meteos took, on average, a whopping 38.7% of all jungle CS across the entire map. All your jungle are belong to Meteos.
- Rush’s headlong, gank-heavy play style generated 10 First Blood participations in 31 games, but also led to him giving up First Blood 5 times, whether through counterganks or simply being caught out by a roam.
If you found these stats interesting or useful, leave a comment and let me know! There’s plenty to discuss here, so go ahead and share your interpretations and explanations.
You can find more NA LCS statistics for both players and teams in the Statistics section of Oracle’s Elixir.
Statistics and Interpretation: Tim “Mag1c” Sevenhuysen
Graphics: “Daniel “Exorant” Hume“
