Volibear has quickly become one of those heroes I don't like playing against very much... I feel like his output is a little too high relative to offensive items needed to do damage. His skillset is the sort of thing that would be annoying anyway with the whole gapcloser+fling thing but the whole scales with own hp + execute effect thing on his W is pretty absurd since he obliterates people with it when used well with just tank stats and CDR.
However I thought this was hilarious:
http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueofleg..._what_happens_when_there_is_a_volibear_and_a/
Really not enjoying the XP rate in current jungle. Haven't jungled much myself, but observing from lane the opportunity cost for attempting a gank seems too high and can too easily put the junglers almost irreversibly behind, and free farming a faster respawning jungle doesn't seem like it even gives as much XP as you'd expect it to relative to old jungle or lanes. I feel like junglers without a lot of movespeed or aoe damage(or preferably both) are way too easy to fall behind on right now. There's a relatively small pool consisting of Udyr, Skarner, Maokai, Shyvana, and Rammus that can probably keep reasonably close without hitting every gank because of speed/aoe (just amazing aoe in Maokai's case, only lost like 20s to 4 since last patch) but I think it hurts the viable choices in serious matches a lot(or viable choices period for most of us I guess). I know saint and some of the other junglers were talking about how it was almost worth it to run a duo lane top instead of a jungle and Jatt posted on Reddit that it might start looking more like roaming a few months ago where ganks could still happen a few levels down because of CC which is something I've seen pulled off quite a lot in our games so far (Cath played Jungle Alistar in all but two or three games we played today and put up pretty gaudy scores ganking, though XPwise he was only staying about level with me as the support). I feel like some of the other typical jungle types that don't have those qualities will fall off too much, notably champs like Fiddlesticks who weren't particularly strong at the jungle part of jungling to begin with.
I'm hoping with a few more days people will figure out some tricks beyond "hope laners overextend left and right and you convert all your ganks" to stay at a reasonable level but if not I may have to suck it up and buy Shyvana to give me some jungle variety as Maokai doesn't have enough damage output in ganks for my tastes and I'm not sure Udyr, Skarner, and Rammus are enough for me !
EDIT: Also on the ranked thing I think in spite of the fire you'll get from your team for it that it's way more important to play something you're good at that necessarily the perfect fit for your team, though it's tough to win without a jungle and support once your ELO climbs at all. I've been tanking my rating a bit lately by not making a big enough difference in games but at least speaking from the trainwrecks I've been seeing in the bronze range I'm surprised at how many games I've won where my teammates made horrible matchup and team composition choices because their opponents were playing champs they weren't very experienced with(usually FOTM) and they picked something they actually knew how to play. I remember a Vlad I'm pretty sure had some sort of serious mental disorder roasting some super sustainy bruiser top, Katarina feeding on a Morgana when the other team had tons of CC and still getting like 15 kills and drawing a surrender, and just yesterday I had a guy rage pick Twitch because our low ELO demanded solo top and then dominated a Graves/Soraka lane with his Twitch+my Alistar. I think in general in solo queue it's good not to get too worried about the result of individual games anyway, just gotta try and do your job well every time and it's easier to do that with champs you know.
Also while I'm posting everything I thought about posting the past week or so anyway, I'm not enjoying the whole Ranked 5 man queue thing very much right now. I think in about a month it'll be a good time, but ELO is hilariously unrepresentative right now which is making it really difficult to get a good match. I've seen teams in the 1150-1250 range that are full of Platinum Solo Queue players and teams in that range that can barely last hit. We started out 4-1 and have only been about even since because it seems like one game we get players similarly ranked to us in solo queue and outplay them (bronze/silver range) and then the next game everyone on the other team is Gold/Plat and we're just not playing at a level across our team that's competitive with that most games. I guess at least getting better teams the replays are a lot more useful to try to learn from, but we've played like 12 games and I don't think we've actually had a game where the result was in question after the 10 minute mark yet, in our favor or against it. We've gotten some annoying stuff like getting teams 150~ rating ahead of us and getting the same team full of Platinums twice in three games... I wish that they'd let queue times go a bit longer and create better matchups.
