Riot attempted to gut gold funneling in League of Legends in last week’s Patch 8.14. Now, if you have a jungle item and the most gold on your team, killing lane minions will net you a lot less gold.
It worked, at least, but there were some massive side effects. That’s not exactly surprising, as the changes themselves were incredibly heavy-handed and quite dramatic.
While lowering income on lane minions worked to slow down gold funnelers, it ended up hurting junglers quite a bit, too. Gold funneling is only a common strat on the pro stage and at the very top of the ranked ladder, which means the jungle impact has been felt much more than the nerf to funneling itself.
The largest side effect of the change is that junglers on teams that fall behind have a very difficult time coming back into the game. For example, if your team is down 10,000 gold, and you run to a lane as a jungler to pick up some gold, it’ll be a complete waste of time. Even though your team is so behind, you’ll still only get four gold from caster minions just for being slightly ahead of your teammates.
This is obviously a very unhealthy interaction, because it cripples junglers on losing teams and therefore reinforces snowballing for the team that’s ahead. If Riot wants to fix this issue, it could possibly apply the gold nerf to only the winning team, or maybe only to someone with the most gold in the entire game. Another possible fix could be limiting it to champions that pass a certain gold threshold, like 4,000 more gold than their team, rather than just anyone with the most gold.
Either way, something needs to happen, because this change feels incredibly bad for anyone locked into the jungle position.
