Which one is better? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each one?
Offlane >>> Jungle
Jungle is done when you cannot lane him in the offlane / you'll get (and need) more farm from the jungle. (NOTE: he can be run as a "carry" or even mid in this patch, due to how lineups are structured -- carry is often more utility and more early aggression, which
Nature's Prophet can build for).
Jungling him is very slow, compared to top tier junglers like
Enigma,
Chen and
Enchantress. He's a decent jungler, but not great at early levels.
Also, he provides many of the same benefits as an offlane that you can get out of jungling him, making the jungle less useful. A lot of junglers will roam (e.g.
Enchantress,
Chen) or push.
Nature's Prophet can always port into fights and help gank. In addition, his abilities fit a "core" role moreso than a 2nd support/jungler (in the event you run him as a jungler
and pick up another offlane). He does not provide as much to ganks as a better jungler.
Basically, it is just very inefficient to jungle him, unless the laning situation is so bad that you need to.
Later on, he is fine to jungle. It's really the early levels that he's a bad jungler in.
Comparison
Offlane
- More farm, in certain scenarios
- A lot more XP, depending on scenario
- Kill potential, in some 1v1 matchups
- Ability to creep kite with Treants, which can really fuck up enemy supports or the carry
- i.e. using the treants to pull the creep wave from the lane and to somewhere where you can farm it
- Ability to rotate to ancients if needed (on Dire lane)
- Ability to block neutral spawns (with treants) and force supports to
roam instead of farm --> turn lane into 1v1 or gimp support
Jungle
- Consistent farm & XP
- Low skill cap (i.e. basic micro and aggro juggling)
- You're MIA all the time, so ganks may be less readable
- Potential to rotate another hero to offlane to mooch XP (e.g. a support to just play super safe and hit lvl 6)
- Ability to stack multiple camps while jungling, can be good for some carries to help them farm