Kha'Zix and Evelynn, the rise of a different style of jungle

This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

Throughout this season of LCS, many things have changed in the metagame, whether based on nerfs or buffs, one interesting change has been the shifting of junglers played. Earlier in the season, junglers were simply a CC machine with a bit of burst, with Vi, Elise, and a bit of Wukong running the primary picked junglers. However, now we are seeing a transition towards a more damage-oriented, but tank built, junglers with Evelynn and Kha’Zix.

Kha'Zix and Evelynn have a unique tank playstyle, most tanks have a large amount of CC or sustained damage in order to make them a threat in a fight and use their defense steroid abilities to soak large amounts of damage. Kha’Zix and Evelynn break this mold, they are traditionally an “assassin” type, so they draw the attention of the opposing team by rushing into the center of a teamfight immediately, getting the team to change focus to them. However, since they built heavily tank and have mobility they just simply end up distracting the other team (and not dying) by running around long enough for the rest of Eve/Kha’s team to come in and clean up the enemies as they chase Eve/Kha. The playstyle and rise of these champions are worth examining as well as how they are played in each region, and what caused their recent surge.

Return of Evelynn

The first champion to look at is Evelynn, The Widowmaker. She has been in and out of the competitive scene in a variety of capacities, and she has now returned as an AD oriented Tank-Jungler. As we can see she only had 8 picks before week 7, and since has had 26 in weeks 8-9, with rise in both regions concurrently. Not only has she been getting significantly more play, but she is getting play from a variety of people, not just one person specializing in her, getting played by 7 different junglers in NA, and all 8 junglers in EU. She also has an immense popularity spike in Korea, maintaining over a 50% pick/ban rate in OGN Spring and OGN Masters. Overall, Eve is one of the junglers making a huge re-emergence with this AD-Tank Style.

Regional Differences in Play

With her rise to power simultaneously in NA, EU, and Korea, we have seen a variance of success and style. While she has been “successful” in all regions, boasting a greater than 50% win rate, she has seen the most success in Korea, having the highest win rate and the highest pick/ban rate. But what is more interesting is the difference in playstyle between regions. Both NA and Korea buy Spirit of the Elder Lizard 100% of the time, playing a specific style of AD-Tank hybrid Eve. EU however, while they were the first to start utilizing Eve in the jungle once again, have had a bit more variance in how they build her (especially at the beginning of her usage), with the junglers would vary choosing between Elder Lizard, Spectral Wraith or Elder Golem. Since week 7 there have been 12 Eve picks in EU, where only 2 of them (Diamond and Araneae) would buy Spectral Wraith, the rest got Elder Lizard. Albeit, the data shows that each region is leaning towards Eve’s new AD Tanky playstyle

Built as AD Tank, not AP.

The interesting part of her rise to LCS success is as it was mentioned, how she is built and her playstyle. In the recent past of last season, Eve was built as an “assassin” type champion, often building Deathfire Grasp, utilizing her stealth to jump and burst on an opponent. Her builds now consist of building one AD item (Spirit of the Elder Lizard), and then primarily tank items, with the next item being defensive boots (Merc treads or Ninja tabi), compared to previous patches where she would get either Sorcerer Shoes or Boots of Mobility. After that, players will typically rush a defensive item like Randiun’s then follow it up with a Hexdrinker or Banshee’s Veil. This AD-Tank hybrid brings her to a unique playstyle where she turns into somewhat of an initiator or “distraction” in team fights with sustained damage, rather than the burst assassin she once was. This started because of a shift of her E to physical damage instead of magical damage, along with the changes of AD ratios to her Q and E a while ago. Evelynn’s ratios and kit have allowed her to re-emerge in a different light allowing players to use her in a way we haven’t seen in past years.

Rise of Jungle Kha’Zix, Mid vs Jungle

The next rising jungler was another champion previously played middle, Kha’Zix. Over the last 2 weeks, Kha’Zix has seen 12 jungle picks, and in week 9 he was picked as jungle exclusively. This huge spike of activity has been mostly because of the recent 4.3 patch which nerfed his Q and E, but buffed his ultimate which has lead him to popularity in Korea with a different playstyle than we typically see in the EU and NA scenes.

Regional Comparison

What has been interesting in the popularity of Kha’Zix has been how it has been a global rise of play. Kha’Zix was picked in the first several weeks of LCS as an assassin evolving his jump first to proc his resets with him being able to jump in and out of fights, but after the 4.3 patch with the change to his stealth, he started seeing a lot of play in Korea with priority on evolving his R first. This spin on the character quickly spread to NA and eventually to EU, as we see it now consistently in week 10. However, it still is entertaining to see the different approaches thus far. In Korea, Kha has been picked almost exclusively as jungler, with only 1 pick for mid lane, compared to NA and EU where a significant percentage has been picked middle at about the 40% rate. This has something to do with how a higher percentage of games for Korea has been played on the more recent patches, while EU/NA LCS have gone on for several months on previous patches.

Evolve shifts due to patch 4.3 changes.

The biggest reason as we discussed for the emergence of jungle Kha’Zix is the big changes in patch 4.3. From riot the changes were:

Q - Evolved Enlarged Claws

MISSING HEALTH DAMAGE 8% ⇒ 6%

MAXIMUM DAMAGE VS. MONSTERS 200 ⇒ 100

E - Leap

BONUS ATTACK DAMAGE RATIO 0.8 ⇒ 0.2

R - Void Assault

UTILITY Kha’Zix ignores unit collision while in stealth

R - Evolved Active Camouflage

UTILITY Void Assault Duration 1 seconds (total 2 seconds)

These changed his playstyle, and as you can see from the graph, changed which skill Junglers prioritized in evolving. Junglers used to prioritize evolving Leap first so that they could get in and out of fights easier; however, the change to the Evolved Void Assault made it so that due to the extended duration and the 3 charges you could easily get in and out of fights with the stealth alone. This provided an added bonus of teamfight evasiveness adding to Kha’Zix’s role later which has improved his viability significantly, allocating substantial tankiness and allowing him to play an almost initiator-flanker role giving him better options than having to rely on bursting a target for a reset to survive fights. Now Kha has transformed into a jungler similar to Eve who can jump into the heart of a team fight and use his kit/build to escape or chase down opponents as they flee, or even bait the enemy long enough for your team to come back you up (Insec-style). While this did nerf Kha’Zix’s damage overall, the added shift into an almost tank/initiator style of play that has been utilized for him helps to make up for it and makes for an example of an exciting shift in champion style of play.

The scene has always had players and teams that try to bring new life to whatever the current meta is at a time, but the new playstyles for Evelynn and Kha’Zix are successful examples of that it is just not a flavor of the month for one region but for multiple.

Overall, both Eve and Kha have seen a huge surge in popularity for the last two weeks, and it seems like there is no stopping this trend. In this most recent day of EU LCS we've seen several picks and bans of both Eve and Kha and even Diamond has said that the top 3 Junglers currently are Kha'Zix, Evelynn, and Lee Sin.

Data collected with help by the onGamers Stats team: Derek 'Kathix' Adams, Steven 'whedgehead' Falgout, Kent 'Traepoint' Frasure, Jake Morales, and James 'PelkaSupaFresh' Pelkey. Design by Ben 'Sarcasmappreciated' Li.