Nunu: The Yeti Rider Who is Probably Better than you Think

These days, the jungling meta has been rattled around a fair bit. While M5 was able to dominate the scene by using a strategy of aggressive counterjungling and contesting nearly every buff on the map as it came up, HotshotGG proved at MLG Anaheim that this strategy can be worked around by simply running a champion who is capable of ganking any lane at any time, such as Nautilus.

However, champions like Nautilus who are heavily gank oriented junglers will often have slow clear times. This is not always the case (Nautilus has excellent clear speed after his first), but characters such as Alistar and Shaco will have a difficult time keeping up with anybody with a quick cleartime and high mobility.

This means that it is quite difficult for them to gain enough ground or enough of a lead to make wandering into the opposing jungle worth their time, simply because that time is better spent ganking. But what if we were able to compensate for that, and instead find a jungle who has the capacity to gank extremely effectively, as well as weave in and out of the jungle as he so pleases?

Once upon a time, there was a little fellow who rode a yeti, and his sole purpose in the jungle was to take half of your stuff, then walk away with you wondering what to do. In the past, Nunu was an extremely common pick in the jungle, due to his Q being able to take a jungle creep, and just allow him to walk away. However, the jungle rework came around, and clear speed started to become more and more important and so Nunu fell out of favor. However:

Visionary
Attacks required to activate reduced to 5 from 7
Consume
Damage increased to 500/600/700/800/900 from 400/525/650/775/900
Damage dealt to Dragon and Baron increased to 100% from 50%
Cooldown reduced to 16/14/12/10/8 seconds from 18/16/14/12/10 seconds
Absolute Zero
Minimum damage if interrupted increased to 12.5% from 0%
Maximum damage if interrupted increased to 87% from 70%

With the Jayce patch, Nunu got a whole bunch of help. Buffs to his Consume make him one of the best junglers in the game at keeping Baron and Dragon under control, at later levels being able to effectively smite it from 1700 health, as opposed to the 800 that other junglers are used to. Not only this, but the increased early game damage on his Consume make it so that he clears buff camps even faster than before; being able to control buff camps and kill them almost immediately allows him to follow right into the niche of a heavy counterjungling metagame.

At the 7:30 mark (approximately when the second blue buff of the game will spawn), even if Nunu only has a level one Consume, he only really needs to get that golem down to 1000 health, that is, Nunu has to do less than one thousand damage to the opposing teams blue buff, in order to steal the second one with Smite and Consume. This is a huge advantage that no other jungler can come close to matching. He even has his bloodboil and a 4 second slow to help his escape; all of this is by level 4 or even earlier.

Nunu doesn’t have to just steal buffs; he is able to walk up to any small camp, Consume the large creep, hit it a few times and just walk away unscathed. Simply taking the big creep at any given camp will give you approximately 80% of the total experience, and this adds up very quickly. Unlike other counterjunglers, Nunu takes minimal damage from counterjungling small camps, even at the earliest levels. He doesn't have to wait until level 6, or level 4, he can do it right at level 2, or even at level 1 with ease. With buffs to his passive as well, he can jungle without blue buff extremely easily, so unlike many mana-based junglers, he is extremely unreliant on the golem.

Even lane terrorists such as Nautilus and Alistar are perfectly able to be hindered by Nunu. Nautilus and Alistar both rely heavily on succeeding in early ganks, however, should anything go wrong on that front, it makes it nearly impossible for Alistar to catch up and become a recognizable entity in the game. Someone like Alistar is very powerful, but has the potential to be relatively unreliable. If anything goes wrong for him it becomes very difficult to pull the game back under control. If he falls behind, he has no backup plan.

Someone like Alistar recovers from failed ganks poorly. He jungles very slowly, and does not have a skillset conducive to aggressive counterjungling. However, aggressive counterjungling is where Nunu shines and if your team is well coordinated, instead of letting the enemy jungler catch up, either throw a ward in your jungle and wait for him to show up, or start donating your jungle camps to your lanes. Either one of these strategies will allow your lanes even further gold and experience, helping your team to even further snowball out of control.

Many champions, such as Shyvana or Mundo that were popular fell out of favor due to a lack of lane presence throughout most of the laning phase. They sacrificed the ability to gank extraordinarily well as a tradeoff to jungle control and fast clears. But again, look back to your Nunu: this guy has a targetted, 4 second slow that is also an attack speed debuff for those pesky AD carries bottom lane, or those autoattacking bruisers top lane. His move speed buff also allows him to help people with no gap closers to close the gap.

Nunu is capable of ganking for almost any combination of champions, and it takes a very, very slippery champion to escape a ganking Nunu that has help from his teammates in the lane.

However, many of the issues that people have with Nunu is that he has minimal, or even no lategame presence. Although the base damage on his snowball is very high, after a period of time he eventually becomes a champion whose main job is to minimize the impact of the opposing ad carry, while using your Bloodboil to make your AD Carry as scary as possible.

What people underestimate is simply how much of an impact that his iceball has on an AD carry. Unlike attack speed buffs, which are based off of base attack, the attack speed debuff Nunu provides goes directly to their attack speed. This is huge, as it effectively negates the attack speed of a Phantom Dancer in the late game and also obviously completely overwrites any movement speed bonus it adds; this is almost 1500 gold worth of stats.

Nunu is capable of removing five kills worth of gold from the opposing carry's effectiveness in the late game, while adding 1800 gold to his own carry with Bloodboil. He is able to indirectly create almost an Infinity Edge worth of difference, simply by pressing buttons. As an added bonus, this attack speed debuff will stack with effects such as Frozen Heart and Randuins Omen. His ultimate is extremely powerful, as even without build any AP, he is still capable of doing extraordinarily high amount of damage if he manages to land a fully charged ultimate.

On the other hand, if you are out of position when you fire it up, you’re even more likely to just allow the other team to walk away; Nunu’s Absolute Zero acts very similarly to Morgana’s Soul Shackles. If the other team is able to get away, the effect is diminished significantly; because of this expect to not do damage, but instead absorb at least one major crowd control effect, which puts your carries and squishies at a significantly lower risk. Nunu’s other limitation in teamfights is the effectiveness of your own AD carry.

If you carry is underfarmed or plays poorly, then your bloodboil will be less likely to send him spiralling out of control. Not only this, but any carry that doesn't rely simply on autoattacks such as Corki or Ezreal for damage will give Nunu lower returns on his bloodboil. At times this can be frustrating, as being team dependent puts your effectiveness not entirely in your hands.

So where does that leave him? In a very similar place as the early game. Nunu is astonishingly good at controlling baron and other such buffs. Although he does not have the teamfight impact of someone such as Nautilus, you will never get your baron stolen as Nunu, and you will be able to steal many away from the opposing team. The team with a Nunu is a very scary one to start baron against if you aren't completely positive where he is, as a flash-consume-smite combo puts baron out of reach of even the most well timed smites.

Even during the pick process, Nunu acts as a very good safety pick early on. He is an extraordinarily powerful support, so even if the other team decides to pick somebody that he would do poorly in the jungle against, you can easily change plans, choose a stronger jungler counterpick and then move Nunu into the support role, where he can perform just as well. Nunu acts as a very versatile pick, and is perfectly capable in the jungle as a high-presence ganking counterjungler, and is a very underrated pick who is capable of performing better than many people give him credit for.

Recently, a common build for Nunu has been to stack him with as much gold as possible. Running GP/5 seals, quintessences, masteries, and building Philosopher's Stone, Heart of Gold and Kage's Lucky Pick allow for an insane amount of gold generation, and allows you to reach your late game extremely quickly.

You are also able to avoid using too many defensive masteries and can shirk armor seals completely due to the incredible amount of sustain you gain from your Q. With a little bit of farm, and perhaps a successful gank here and there, you can find yourself building an Abyssal Scepter or Rod of Ages very quickly.

Abyssal Scepter acts as the perfect item for a jungling Nunu due to the incredible synergy on the MR, ability power and MR debuff that has a radius that is higher than your ultimate. This is a huge amplification of damage for a surprisingly small amount of gold. It is important not to fall into the trap of trying to build Nunu like a straight AP caster, however. By doing this, you sacrifice far too much survivability; keep in mind, as Nunu, your first goal is not to do damage, but to try to neuter their AD carry while making yours a steroid laden monstrosity.

Any damage you manage to do in the meantime is just gravy. If you're building full glass cannon AP with items such as Deathcap and Rod of Ages, you'll end up with a reasonably high level of HP, but sitting at 90 armor and 110 magic resist will leave you much squishier than you might think despite the fact that Nunu has the highest base HP at level 18 of any champion in the game.

Because of how quickly you're getting gold, you end up having your first end-game item long before anybody else does. Because of this, Nunu is very good at grabbing a lead and keeping hold of it by keeping others afraid of his painful snowballs and ultimate. Nunu has terrific ratios on his damaging spells, allowing for even the small amount of AP that he receives even from just Kage's to ramp up a surprising amount.

He also can utilize all three of the upgrades that these items provide extremely well. A Nunu holding Shurelya's Reveries is not someone that another champion is going to be able to outrun, and being melee by nature the tankiness and the slow that Randuins provides helps him to keep people in his ultimate, as well as survive standing still in the middle of a teamfight. All three of these items give him the cooldown reduction that he wants to very much to make sure that his ice blast remains a perma-slow, and to even keep bloodboil on two people at once for a period of time.

Jungle Nunu relies heavily on the passive gold generation to keep himself ahead on items, otherwise he will fall behind in effectiveness.

Nunu is consistently overshadowed by other junglers largely due to what seems like a lack of knowledge; his utility is extremely high, and his ability to turn ganks around by completely disabling at least one of the aggressors is extremely high due to his snowballs. Especially in the presence of an aggressive laner, a jungling Nunu can easily crash any party and help his team snowball a team to victory.