Everyone knows that if there’s anything League of Legends’ Nasus needs, it’s more stacks. As if 400 stacks by 20 minutes wasn’t enough, Riot is amping up the old dog’s scaling by doubling the amount of stacks he gets on certain targets, according to the latest PBE update.
After the change hits, Nasus will receive 12, not six, stacks from large monsters, large minions, and champions. Now, in lane, that’s not actually too big of a jump. After all, you don’t run into that many large minions, so the likelihood of his top lane performance skyrocketing isn’t too high. What we might see a lot more of after this change, however, is Nasus in the jungle.
For those of you that don’t know, and this might be selling you all a bit short, but there is a large monster in every camp of the jungle. In total, there’s six. The Gromp, the Blue Sentinel, the Red Brambleback, the large Raptor, the large Wolf, and the large Krug all reside in the jungle within their respective camps. That means if Nasus kills all of the large monsters in a single jungle clear with his Q, he can rack up 72 stacks alone.
We know it’s not likely, but if he Qs every single small monster, too, that number jumps up above 100. With three full clears, assuming he can nab a Scuttle Crab and a champion here and there, Nasus is teamfight ready. And suddenly, jungle Nasus isn’t looking too shabby, is he? In fact, he wouldn’t just be considered viable, he’d be downright good.
With that being said, we need to evaluate if jungle Nasus has a place in the meta, and if the game gains value by seeing him in that role. In this case, we think he’d be even stronger than he’d be in a lane, so there’s the possibility that he’d be played there even more often than top. But is that necessarily a good thing? In our opinion, not entirely. Nasus struggles in the top lane, his home since he was created, due to a high damage top lane meta. Making his jungle so much stronger shouldn’t be excusable as a Band-Aid while he can’t lane at home.
If he were at least a slightly more plausible pick in the top lane, we wouldn’t have issue with it, though. Because, frankly, the game doesn’t really have any farm junglers at all anymore, and that’s exactly what he’d be. There’s an opening that he could fill, and he’d fill it well. If this change goes live, it’ll be in Patch 8.24b next week. At least then we’d finally have an answer to “Who let the dogs out?” Because it’d be Riot.
