League of Legends tier lists are a great way to showcase the viability of champions in the current solo queue meta. Knowing which champions are at the top and the bottom will allow you to maximize your chances of winning games and climbing into higher ranks. When checking out tier lists always keep in mind that they're mostly opinion based— which can be good and bad, depending on how you look at them. We encourage you to look at a few Jungle Tier lists and make the conclusions yourself, but in general you are going to be seeing similar trending champions within certain tiers on most tier lists.
Please take into account that this is mostly a Jungler Tier list for solo queue, meaning that some low-tiered champions may actually be better for highly organized team play such as Flex 5v5 and Clash. Our Jungler Tier list is updated approximately every two weeks when new patches go live, or whenever a major emergency patch hits if it changes the champion enough to warrant updates to the tier list. If you're looking to find the best jungle champions for solo queue for the current patch, JunglerGG has your back!
The criteria that our tier list consists of:
- Official patch notes that bring champion changes which result in a shift within the jungle meta
- Individual champions' win-rate, popularity, pick/ban-rate and other statistics, a high win-rate champion will usually be in one of the upper tiers
- Champion's viability for climbing through ranks (their spell kit, game impact and whether they're able to solo carry games)
- Performance in different skill brackets: Gold-Plat, Plat-Diamond, Diamond-Challenger
- Skill cap— for example, Kha'Zix is much easier to master than Rengar, so he may be positioned higher in the Tier List if they're rated similar in other criteria
- Number of counter champions with high popularity and low ban-rate
Keeping all of these different points of criteria in our mind, we've manually ranked the most jungle-viable champions into five different tiers (their position within a certain tier does not matter).
S Tier champions are characters that are incredible in the latest patch. Most of these champions are impossible to keep down and if a team doesn't make it a priority to negate them Gold/XP and objectives, they're going to become a huge problem. Picking any of these champions is a great choice if you want to win a majority of your games.
A Tier champions that are very popular and will prove to be great for competitive play, especially in ranked SoloQ games. They perform really well and generally have an advantage over other jungle picks, along with that, most of these champions excel in at least three aspects of the game: early game, late game, objectives, ganks or map control. Most of these champions are strong and very suitable for beginners to the jungle.
B Tier champions mostly consist of champions that hover around the fifty percent win-rate mark. These champions are alright for casuals and can prove to be great carries in the hands of experienced players. None of these are overpowered and they don't excel in as many aspects of the game as higher-tiered champions do.
C Tier champions generally have sub-optimal performance and tend to be hard to play and/or have low win-rates. These champions will need a lot more than a bit of snowballing to get ahead of the enemies and they have a decent amount of weaknesses that can and will be exploited.
D Tier champions are heavily underpowered in many aspects of the jungle role and that is shown in multiple criteria brackets. These champions will get steamrolled by any other jungler from other tiers and are usually best avoided if the player is looking to climb.
Major patches that come out every two weeks can shift the meta quite quickly depending on the amount of champion changes that Riot has decided to make. This is why we always update the Jungler Tier list after a patch goes live in the event that it changes a certain champion's viability and strength. Such patches can also contain changes to runes and/or items, which can inadvertently affect a champion's win-rate, popularity and ban-rate. Doing so pushes junglers to the top and bottom of the meta, as their viability for solo queue climbing changes.
The champion's performance is also equally as important as the other points. Most champions perform very differently when played throughout different skill brackets— even though Karthus is a great pick for high elo, he won't perform as well in Bronze simply because the player may not get enough time to scale up and carry the game. His allies will often flame him for not being able to contest objectives or put as much gank pressure as some other champions might and games will be done before they even begin.
At the end of the day, champion statistics are possibly the heaviest points of criteria we have. As you already know, JunglerGG acquires champion statistics from multiple sites in order to get the average values that are shown in our individual champion guides. These statistics are aimed towards the Platinum rank and above, with most focusing on getting a general idea of what champions are doing well in the current meta.
Even though statistics aren't everything, a 54% win-rate champion is still going to be somewhere between the S and A tier, simply because a high win-rate is usually coupled by other things such as: ease of play, high performance, great build diversity and a low number of counters.
The main purpose of this jungle tier list is to keep you up to date on which jungle champions are great picks for your solo queue games and to give you insight on the current meta. If you're eager to learn more about a certain jungler champion, such as which rune and item build to go for, or what jungle path to follow, click on a specific champion in the tier list to open their dedicated guide.
