Jungle Karma Tips

When you choose this character for this role, without a doubt, nine times out of ten, you will get a reaction.  If your team is in any way communicating, you will get either screams of doubt about you jungling the wild untamed neutral monster camps of the Summoner’s Rift, or a polite intrigue with the hopes your seemingly experimental idea pans out.  

When you choose Karma, be strong of your resolve because you are going against the normatives of who should be in the role of jungler.  However, should you brave the initial storm, and take something away from the guide I am writing, you will discover the most fun experience that will lead to many victories and many intense games. 

Runes and Masteries

As you can see in my runes page, unlike many of the common runes pages for junglers, I like to focus on amor ability power and mana regen.  Of course, if you can afford to have all tier three runes of these then go for it, unfortunately I spent all my IP on my ADC and APC pages.  

With Karma, you will want to have her be the tank that the laners will focus so that your laner can get good hits in, escape a bad fight, or help you kill or kill an enemy.  With that in mind, the masteries page.

This is the selected masteries page I made for Karma jungler in preseason 4. It focuses on CDR for abilities and cd on smite to speed up clear speeds in jungle camps.  Also the Defense gives her some innate tankiness.

Item set:

For Karma,I decided on the items for these reasons:

• SOSW – for cooldowns, AP, mana regen
• Mobis – because they are awesome for speed, ganks, crossing the map and catching running champs
• Mori – CDR, AP, mana regen, and the grievous wounds
• Zhonyas – All AP champs benefit from this
• Gauntlet – CDR, slow, AP, amor
• Liandry’s – AP, Health, and grievous
• RC – Late game scaling, AP
• Homeguard – For stopping Nasus and Jax split pushes

Jungle path:

For Karma, the prefer path I choose to take:

• I ask for a leash at blue, otherwise known as the blue buff, or ancient golem,
• I get the mad dogs, and by then I am level two
• I go to the wraiths near mid lane
• Finally get red buff, otherwise known as the Elder lizard

I only use my smite for blue and red buff.  Do not waste it on the wraiths or the dogs, as the time it takes for it to cooldown will mean you taking more hits than necessary when you want to save pots for ganks.  

After you have both buffs, gank top lane, initiating with a ping, a shield on yourself to speed you up, a focus resolve(W) to tether that will stun them in two seconds, followed up with a mantra empowered inner flame (R+Q).  You or your laner should be able to finish the enemy off.

After that, you can just keep ganking the top lane, push it to the turret and try to get that turret early so top can also roam. Then help bot and mid.  Do not camp top too long after a kill because the enemy jungler will come and most likely score a double on you and your laner.  

Get the kill push quickly get a few hits off, then run to gank mid–wait for the return of the enemy laner to return top.  DO NOT CALL TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO ANY ONE LANE.  I hate junglers who camp and draw four enemies in mid lane because they decided to camp it out so long that other lanes want to join the fight to help out.  In my opinion it causes the forced sustaining laners to attempt to stop the minon waves as well as stopping enemy champs from diving which is very difficult and will most likely not be able to last long because of mana and health chip depletion.  Always be active and moving to help lanes.

Late game, you will be super tanky and have loads of armor as well as substaintial poke, so do not be afraid to engage the enemies first and remember to spam your shield, because when maxed, it can really take a lot of damage–plus it has the awesome speed boost.