League of Legends could soon have yet another jungling champion to fear as the latest PBE patch hints that Nautilus could return to the role.
Patch 11.10 brought massive changes to the jungle role and along with a plethora of Project skins, the latest PBE patch has also buffed Nautilus’ jungle clear. The tanky champion with a ton of Crowd Control (CC) could end up dominating the meta.
Nautilus has long been played primarily as a support due to the fact that his kit is loaded with four different CC options. Yet, at Worlds 2019, the LoL Pro League’s (LPL’s) FunPlus Phoenix managed to lift the Summoner’s Cup with help from Kim ‘Doinb’ Tae-sang playing Nautilus mid.
Now, the Bilgewater champion could be viable in the jungle once more – a position he hasn’t been played in professionally since 2017. And that was a one-off game in Russia’s LoL Continental League.
This year, the jungle had been dominated by fast champions with Udyr and Hecarim taking the Phase Rush Keystone rune and Turbo Chemtank mythic item to create extremely effective ganks. However, those two have slowly fallen out of favour as Riot Games targeted the playstyle with a flurry of nerfs.
Alongside that, Riot buffed a lot of different champions’ damage to jungle camps in hopes of adding more variety to the role and encouraging more people to play it. The ongoing LoL Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) tournament has seen the jungle meta dominated by Morgana and Rumble who both benefited from said jungle clear buffs.
Now, Nautilus could be getting the same treatment as the damage of his E, an AoE slow, has had its damage to jungle camps increased to 200%.
However, Rioter Ray Yonggi later pointed out on Reddit that these numbers have been skewed a bit higher as a proof of concept. Should these changes make it to the live server, the increased damage to jungle monsters likely won’t be as high as 200%.
Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter.
Follow Metro Gaming on Twitter and email us at gamecentral@metro.co.uk
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
