I picked up Nocturne and I'm currently trying to learn how to jungle.
Holy crap, jungling is hard. I can clear the camps no problem, but the real trouble is with ganking. It seems everyone wants their opponent to be constantly ganked, and if you're not ganking them, then you're a crappy jungler (well, I am a crappy jungler, but I'm working on it). It's a lot to have in mind as you try to balance farming, ganking, and just overall map awareness. Heck, even if I decide not to be a jungler once I give this a good go, I'll at least have way better map awareness.
With jungling, for me, theres 3 main options: Farming, Ganking, and Counter-Jungling.
all have their own risks/rewards.
Ganking means kills, which gives your laners free time to farm/push not to mention the gold bonus for killing another player. But a kill on a gank is NEVER guaranteed, not only that, sometimes, ganking can get either yourself killed or your laner killed (even if they're asking for the gank in the first place)
Farming your own jungle is an option that guarantees you gold income. This is really good for champions who require their ultimates for strong ganks (like Nocturne, or more noteably, Warwick and Rengar), this method is also good for farming Feral Flare stacks, and mo9st of the time, its just outright safer to just farm your jungle. The drawbacks to this are if you get counterjungled, you're going to get noticeably behind, also because you are fasrming your jungle, you bring very little to the team as you are not ganking.
Counterjungling involves some map awareness, buff timer knowledge, and warding. In addition to either ganking or farming your own jungle, if you see the enemy jungler ganking a lane, this opens an opportunity to
deep ward the enemy jungle or go and steal a big creep from one of their creep camps. The drawback to this is if you're found in the enemy jungle, unless your name is Lee sin with a sightstone, consider yourself dead, also this method requires to have an eye on the map at all times as well as investing in wards.
As a jungle main, I can say I am a huge fan of the counterjungling method, purely because I can provide vision for my team, which in turn allows me to either keep the enemy jungler shut down due to me stealing his camps, or I can see where they're going, prewarn my allies, and get ready and in position for a coutergank. Good ward placement can grant your team so much power. Counterjungling can be done with pretty much every champion, wards cost approximately 1 creep camp, and you should buy one every time you go back, whether you ward for your ally, or ward offensively into their jungle.
I am at the stage where I am learning to control enemy vision as well as my own, learning where and when to place pink wards, when to get a sweeper (becasue 95% of the time i will start with the warding trinket). Basically itst the idea of granting your team vision, while denying the enemy team vision. I am desperately trying to learn to do this effectively.
Earlier I mentioned buff timers, this can also include Dragon and Baron Nashor.
For the purpose of learning timers, I would switch on chat timestamps, using the timestamps can allow you to better effectively work out the respawn times of certain camps. but anyway, heres the stuff you need to know:
Regular camps (Wolves, Wraiths, Golems and Wight): 1 minute
Buff camps (Red buff, Blue buff): 5 Minutes (take a note of these especially when counterjungling)
Epic camps (Dragon, Baron Nashor):6 Minutes for Dragon, 7 Minutes for Baron Nashor.
These are called Epic camps because they are immune to crowd control effects, they take reduced damage and they have attacks which WILL reduce your damage further if you're tanking them, with the exception of true damage sources (smite, consume, feast etc)
FYI: ALL neutral monsters will focus the
target which is closest to them
I hope some of what I posted helps with your jungling perdicament.
oh, and you might want to ignore quite a lot of your allies before the game starts, Junglers are notoriously flamed a lot even though 80% of the time its genuinely not their fault...
