Jungler: Hecarim

Now that my jungle Hecarim video is finished it's time to discuss him as a jungler, and to illustrate the process I followed while investigating his abilities.

The first thing I noticed about Hecarim is that he's not particularly durable during his first clear. In fact, my initial attempts at jungling on him were all failures; he was unable to clear without dying or recalling. The challenge, then, was to figure out a setup which would allow him to at least finish. It became obvious after a few tests that that it was necessary to take W at level 1 and run at least 12 in Defense masteries.

The next step I took was to examine Hecarim's skillset, which seems well suited to a gank-heavy playstyle. Using that assumption as an anchor made refining skill order, runes, and masteries significantly easier. I chose to max Q first, use APen quints, and take the buff duration mastery in order to strengthen Hecarim's ganks, while incidentally also speeding up his clear.

After a few more runs and tweaks the final remaining issue was Hecarim's item build. Because he uses abilities more than auto-attacks to clear Wriggle's is somewhat awkward. Instead I decided to build Philosopher's Stone, Avarice Blade, and Brutalizer for early items. These items provide everything Hecarim is interested in, sustain, mana regen, CDR, APen, and build into items with movement speed boosts.

Everything up until this point was mostly theory. I hadn't actually played a game as Hecarim, only tested, observed, hypothesized, and tested again. After actually playing him in games with my setup I took away the following impressions.

First and foremost, Hecarim is an extremely strong ganker. His movement speed is such while E is active that there's very little time to react. As long as you don't run into a ward you are guaranteed to force summoner spells. With Q he also does a great deal of damage, which you can dish out even if an enemy is just outside of auto-attack range. His ganks only becomes stronger once he gets his ultimate.

Second, Hecarim can do well without blue. Like Skarner and Olaf he really loves to have blue, but with Philosopher's Stone I found him more than capable of dealing without. In fact, the effect was so good I've reconsidered purchasing those items on his aforementioned peers.

Finally, Hecarim is simply fun. He looks cool, sounds cool, and there are few things as fun as zooming into a lane at Mach 5 before leaping halfway across the screen, blades whirling, to crush a fleeing enemy.

Whether or not he's truly viable or a top tier jungler is difficult to say so soon after release, but at the very least I felt well rewarded for my efforts when I went 8/1/8 in my first ever game as him. That sort of success doesn't always happen with a new jungler, but when it does it's a great feeling.