Jungle Fun: Part 1 – Wraith Camp

Looking at recent tournaments early game invading and early game knowledge has become more essential to get a good early advantage. Many teams may do this by either invading and stealing some of the enemies jungler's buffs, trying to force or surprise a team with a level one team fight or they may simply just ward and leave it at that.

Though the latter is also becoming much more prevalent within high level solo queue for anyone who watches streams. The main places for early level wards are either at your opponents or your own buffs depending on whether your team is expecting an invade or wants to track the enemy. The last place to ward is your opponents wraith camp which is the easiest place to ward and probably the single most efficient early level ward.

The wards at the buffs may provide some information depending on whether they are in your jungle or not. Being in your jungle obviously simply allows you to know if the enemy team is invading your jungle buffs, while warding their jungle either helps you with an invade or gives you a timer for their buff.

Though wraith ward might not help as much to see if the enemy team is invading or not since it does not give vision of the buff. However it does provide a lot more information than simply watching a buff. If the enemy jungler starts blue and doesn't pass by either circled area on the pictures below you know that they aren't going to finish their jungle route and are headed for one of three possible choices.

Before I move on, for clarification I will be assuming that you are on the purple side of the map. The first place where the enemy jungler could be headed is to invade your jungle and try to steal the red buff or kill your jungler while he tries to take the buff. Nunu, Shaco or any strong duelist jungler will be able to do this. There are a few tell tale signs that you can look for while trying to spot this.

You can usually tell if this is happening if the enemy top lane shows up to the lane a bit later than normal. By later that usually means the minions are either close to or have killed 1 opposing minion themselves. This will happen because the enemy jungler will want to save his smite so that he can use it on your red buff. The enemy middle player might also be trying to push up the lane so that if it is needed the middle player will be able to move up into the jungle helping their jungler while your middle will have to chose to lose cs and go help your jungler or take the cs and leave them to fight for themselves.

The last two places that the jungler can go are to either gank your top lane or go gank your middle lane. This is a bit harder to predict since some junglers will just chose to go in while both players are at level one or try to wait to allow their top lane to get level two. That means you really can't tell from whether the enemy is pushing or not. Your team just needs to play normally until the enemy jungler is spotted.

However there are only a few junglers who are really able to do a level two gank without the red buff slow. Lee Sin is the first one that comes to mind. Other junglers who have some sort of crowd control ability can also attempt to do this though they mainly go after the top lane since it is easier to gank there than it is to gank the middle lane.

Though the above reasons really only discuss the wards usage in the first few minutes of the game, the wraith ward is a great ward to have during the majority of the game, for it helps you keep an eye on the jungler. It does this because the wraith camp is the best jungle camp to clear for anyone who has decent area of effect abilities.

It is the best camp to clear for it is the lowest total hp in one jungle camp starting with only 1225 hit points spread out over four monsters while the wolf camp has 1270 hp over three monsters and the double golem camp has 1400 total hp. Since it has the lowest health and the most targets it usually goes down faster than the others.

The more vision you have of the enemy jungler and where they are headed allows all of your lanes to play more aggressive if they want to. It also allows you to keep tabs on some of the middle lane champions who like to push up the lane and then move away into the fog of war. Most times they will be just going to clear the wraith camp instead of actually roaming for a gank.

I know that the idea of wards are good, wards are important and buying more wards has been pounded into a lot of players minds. So instead of just harping on that I hope that this reveals at least a little bit into the why certain wards are good. In the next “Jungle Fun: Part 2” the impact of wraith camp on middle lane will be examined along with the impact of the double golem on the bottom lane.