Jungling with Shen

    This is my first use of a blog and I thought that I would talk about my last game I had with Jungle Shen. If you have a team that has sufficient damage output i.e. you aren't all tanky champions without much dps, Shen is an extremely viable jungler. I would go so far as to say he is one of the strongest in the game. I was reading a Jungler guide the other day that put Shen in a third tier for jungling champions and I laughed out loud.

   An absolutely mediocre Shen could sit in his jungle all day and do nothing until a gank happened. He could then ultimate the focused ally and turn the fight onto the enemy. This is a great way to bait out a tower dive on a ally and pick up some easy kills.

That is the bare minimum that Shen has to do to help his team out. Before we dive into his actual ganks instead of counter ganks, lets look at teamfights. Obviously the goal of team fights is to kill the enemy champions, specifically their carries. Carry champions are going to be the ones that are doing the most amount of damage and usually it ends up like this. The AD (Attack Damage Carry) is the hard carry which means he is doing the most amount of damage. The second carry would be the AP Mid (Ability power Carry). Now since both teams have this you need to balance killing their carries while protecting yours. Shen is great at disrupting and protection. Not only can Shen Ultimate a friendly carry to protect them. However Shen's Taunt can easily pull the aggression of enemy bruisers (enemy jungler, top lane) from attacking your carries, and make them focus on you.

Keep in my team fights usually last at most a minute, but most are decided within the first few seconds. That means that if the enemy bruisers are focused on you for 2 seconds at the start of the fight, and your carries have full reign to unleash their arsenal of damage, it is going to go well for you. While their bruisers are tied up playing with you (by the way you arent taking much damage because of Shen's shield and his tankiness), Your team's top bruiser and carries are taking out their carries, thus winning the team fight.

This assumes that the early game went well. Well assuming your team can ward and has decent map awareness, they should do pretty well, there isn't much you can do to help this besides warding the map (which you need to do as a jungler) and also to call enemy ganks that are incoming (you are in the jungle auto attacking, you shouldn't even need to look at your champion to do this correctly). Therefore they shouldn't get ganked too badly. Shen is great at ganking for your team. He can immediately taunt someone with his slide, allowing your team mates to put the damage on and more CC (crowd control, stuns slows, silenced etc.).

This allows your team to get ahead for the mid-late game.

You know all this already.

I start blue buff and either gank top or bottom immediately at lvl 2 or I do a full clear of my jungle and then gank. After the gank you should have enough or be close enough to getting a heart of gold on the way back. The blue buff is going to let you regen energy faster so that you can get shields and vorpal blades off more often.

Lets talk build. Shen starts boots pots for early ganking, he should do fine in the jungle with a shield and life regen from his q. After that heart of gold is usually what you want to get more gold for the rest of the game. After that I like to get a recurve bow and to get mercury treads and start to work on randuins and aegis of the legion, I finish wit's end in there somewhere. (wit's is great because it adds more magic damage and it also makes Shen's Ki strike activate more often.)

After that all you really need to do is stay tanky, counter their damage with resistences and get down and dirty with the enemy team.

Feel free to comment with questions or to spark a discussion on builds, routes, playstyles etc.