Which heroes can Jungle?

Considerations

You could jungle with any hero, but there are a lot of considerations:

• How quickly/efficiently you can jungle
• Strength of the lane vs. your opponent while you have a jungler
• What you're putting your jungler there to do (just farm? Gank? To free up lane XP?)

Having a jungler is kind of greedy in some ways. Now you have 4 effectively farming lanes. However, you can also hurt your team if no one keeps the opposing offlane in check.

What Makes a Jungler Good?

1. Need to be able to clear camps quickly

• attacking a single creep at a time makes it slow, unless you have a lot of summons also attacking that creep

2. Take minimal damage in doing so

• you can sustain jungling
• you're not a gankable target

3. The earlier your hero can do this, the better

• if your hero takes 4 minutes to hit level 2, you wasted a lot of time

4. You can be effective early on (i.e. you're not AFK farming for 40 fucking minutes being dead weight)

• you get farm fast and you do something with it like gank or push

That means:

• Summon/Micro/Minion heroes are usually pretty good, especially if you micro your creeps to juggle aggro
• AoE spells can be useful

Who Jungles Effectively

S Tier

Properties of this tier:

• Very fast and efficient junglers
• Need minimal starting items
• Can make use of the farm they get
• Can harass and gank lanes if needed

Heroes:

Chen

• Able to possess creeps permanently, therefore gaining more XP than a hero like Enchantress over time
• Able to jungle quickly with his creeps
• Able to gank early on, if needed (some players tend towards this, others are more farmers until level 5-6)
• Purchases big team items quickly (e.g. Mekansm) and is able to push towers with the fast levels
• Can stack camps + Kill with Wildwing Tornado for even faster jungling

Enigma

• Jungles extremely fast with some basic Eidelon micro
• His mini-stuns are pretty effective for ganking
• Able to farm big team items quickly
• Able to push towers early with the extra XP

A Tier

Properties of this tier:

• Jungle pretty quickly
• May be a slower start or not as efficient in the long run

Heroes:

Enchantress

• Pretty fast, similar to Chen
• Issue is that her creeps expire and she doesn't get gold/XP for them
• Able to gank/push a lot sooner than Chen

Nature's Prophet

• Treants to tank damage, but they aren't that good early on (need a level or 2 in them)
• Able to gank effectively with Teleportation /Sprout (but need a few levels)

Batrider

• Able to stack camps and then kill them with Firefly 
• Later on, use Firefly +  Sticky Napalm stacks to jungle faster
• Slow start, relies on stacks of neutrals to be more efficient

Dark Seer

• Able to jungle fairly fast with Ion Shell
• Takes a decent amount of creep damage, unless you use Smoke of Deceit (creeps will scatter still)
• Not as fast as laning him, but it can be safer

B Tier

Properties:

• Jungle decently fast or have reasons to jungle
• Tank a lot of the creep damage
• Very slow build up in jungling speed

Heroes:

Doom

• Can use Devour to eat creeps and expedite jungling
• You can use tricks to jungle faster like eating a Troll for the skeleton summons, or eating a Wildwing and stacking creeps --> Tornado them down
• Takes a lot of damage in the jungle, so very gankable
• Devour takes a long time early on
• His limited mana pool doesn't allow for max effectiveness out of creep spells early on

Lone Druid

• Able to jungle by tanking damage with Spirit Bear
• Spirit Bear will get low on HP
• Doesn't kill camps very quickly
• Very gankable, and easy for them to gank your Spirit Bear and get 300g easy
• Level slowly, which hurts Lone Druid a lot

C Tier

Properties:

• Have a way to jungle at an above average pace
• Very easy to gank while they jungle because they have to tank creep damage
• Can use things like Choke Point jungling to help a bit

Heroes:

Ursa

• Fury Swipes is stacking damage
• Need a lot of regen before you're very effective in the jungle

Lifestealer

• Feast and  Open Wounds allow you to heal while jungling
• Very slow jungling, single target only
• Take a lot of damage still - easy to be ganked before level 5 or so, when you can sustain yourself better
• You can stack a camp and use your ult at level 6 to kill it a bit faster

Wraith King

• Able to jungle with  Vampiric Aura
• Very slow, has issues similar to Lifestealer

Axe

• Able to farm with  Counter Helix
• IMPORTANT NOTE - only get 1 level in this, his other spells are stupid good early game. They level much better than  Counter Helix does and have far more utility. Gank the lane a lot.
• Still takes a lot of damage, and some of your jungling relies on luck
• You basically need Tranquil Boots

D Tier

Properties:

• Usually have some gimmicky way to jungle, but it's not very practical
• No real reason to jungle these heroes over laning

Heroes:

Crystal Maiden

• Frostbite lasts for 10 seconds on creeps at all levels (i.e. deals 700 damage over time)
• You can sustain yourself with Frostbite + levels of mana aura
• Not very fast or effective (Crystal Maiden is way better as an aggressive hero at level 1-2 in lane)

Storm Spirit

• Able to stack camps, then use Smoke of Deceit +  Static Remnant to kill camps

Keeper of the Light

• Stack camps then use  Illuminate to kill them (takes a while at level 1)
• Very slow and Keeper of the Light is a better laner

Bloodseeker

• Every time you kill a creep, you heal a bit
• Takes too much damage to do this effectively

Shadow Demon

• Able to stack Shadow Poison on stacked camps
• Very slow / stupid to do as your whole early game strat

Lycan

• Used to be a strong jungler, but now his summons take too much damage
• Avoid jungling until level 5+ or so

Centaur

• Has damage Return, but that won't be enough to be very effective
• Better off laning / doing this after a few levels in lane

Bristleback

• Quill Spray on stacks of creeps
• Can micro and get lots of use from Bristleback (passive)
• Very slow

etc...

Ancients

Some heroes can farm the ancients because they have spells that aren't blocked by magic immunity. Examples would be:

• Beastmaster -- Wild Axes
• Tinker --  March of the Machines
• Alchemist -- Acid Spray (not really an ancient farmer hero though)

You can also do Funn1k style ancient farming with ranged heroes + Quelling Blade, making a path through the trees where you can farm the ancients as they trudge towards you and then find themselves out of leash time. Some heroes that do this are:

• Windranger
• Mirana

Some players do Medusa ancienting with  Quelling Blade +  Split Shot, but it's very easy to gank her while she does this, it's also incredibly slow. As a hard carry, you need to be in lane farming. Offlaners can manage with less farm.

There are various heroes that can jungle. In theory, every hero can gain experience in the jungle, but most would have to take the support's task of stacking and pulling in order to jungle effectively.

A selection of junglers would be:

Strength:

• Centaur Warrunner (Uses Return. Starts off rather weak, but can become really fast using  Double Edge in combination with high-regen items like hood/tranquils and stacking camps)
• Bristleback (Relies on stacking and uses  Quill Spray, not a common jungler)
• Legion Commander ( uses  Moment of Courage)
• Axe (Uses Counter Helix)
• Doom (Uses Devour )
• Lifestealer (Uses Feast )
• Lycanthrope (Uses  Summon Wolves)
• Wraith King (Uses Vampiric Aura)

Agility:

• Lone Druid (Uses Spirit Bear)
• Ursa(Uses  Fury Swipes Overpower)
• Bloodseeker (Uses Blood Bath, not a common jungler since he is effective in other lanes like the mid lane and is rather inefficient)
• Broodmother (Uses  Spawn Spiderlings)
• Venomancer (Uses Plague Ward, very uncommon)
• Medusa (special case: Only used for Ancient Jungling, i.e. the super hard spots. Also uncommon and risky if enemies find her)

Intelligence:

• Enchantress (Uses Enchant, difficult to play)
• Chen (Uses  Holy Persuasion, very difficult to play)
• Nature's Prophet (Uses  Nature's Call and/or Teleportation  - note: Don't use Teleportation, it is very ineffective)
• Storm Spirit (Uses  Static Remnant, relies on stacking/smoke - note: I don't know how well that works by now, it got changed a bit)
• Tinker (Uses March of the Machines, usually with ancients, but also works with normal camps. Rather uncommon since he is a powerful midlaner. Dangerous, but effective if not detected. Would not recommend though)
• Dark Seer (Uses  Ion Shell)
• Enigma(Uses Demonic Conversion)
• Batrider (Uses Firefly, relies on stacking)