🔥Naafiri Jungle Build Guides, Runes, Items, and Abilities🕹️

🚀🌲Naafiri is the second champion to be released in 2023, following the Ixtal support Milio. She will be the AD, Darkin, mid lane assassin who wants to hunt down her prey. However, in this guide, I will build her playstyle around her jungle potential.🐺

Naafiri has always been designed as a straightforward midlane assassin, but with the adjustments in Patch 26.06, she now finds a new home in the jungle. Riot’s latest changes add more depth to her kit, making her a dynamic and viable jungle pick. The key to her newfound jungle strength lies in her pack-oriented playstyle, allowing her to clear camps efficiently and execute high-mobility ganks with precision.

🔄 Kit Adjustments for the Jungle 🔄

One of the biggest shifts is the swap between her W (Call of the Pack) and R (Hounds’ Pursuit), making her jungle clears smoother and her gank potential even deadlier. Her new W – Call of the Pack now grants her untargetability for a brief moment, extra packmates, and bonus AD—perfect for extended skirmishes and securing objectives. Meanwhile, her R – Hounds’ Pursuit locks onto a priority target, ensuring her ganks hit hard and leave no escape.

🔥 Why Naafiri Works in the Jungle 🔥

✔ Fast Camp Clears – Her Q – Darkin Daggers executes jungle monsters below a threshold, making her clear speed highly efficient.

✔ High Mobility – With E – Eviscerate, she can dash through walls and reposition instantly.

✔ Powerful Ganks – The synergy between her R – Hounds’ Pursuit and W – Call of the Pack ensures strong lockdown and burst damage against unsuspecting enemies.

✔ Sustained Combat – Her passive We Are More continuously summons packmates, adding extra DPS and sustain in prolonged fights.

📌Naafiri’s transition into the jungle in Patch 26.06 feels natural, emphasizing her pack-hunting identity while granting her the tools to thrive in the role. If you’re looking for a jungle champion with relentless pursuit, swift clears, and devastating ganks, Naafiri is the perfect pick to dominate Cyber City’s wild terrain!📌

🔹 Are you ready to unleash the pack? 🔹

1. Pros:

✔️Good Mobility

✔️ Burst damge

✔️ Good Gank

✔️Can tank Jungle monsters Hits with packmates (Safe Jungler)

✔️Good Mid - Late Game

2. Cons:

❌Slow Jungle Clear

❌Squishy

❌ Bad Early Game

❌Bad teamfights

❌ No crowd-control (No CC)

• Get as many Packmates down as possible before committing to an all-in, or else you’ll miss out on a lot of additional damage.
• To makes trades more favourable, bait out abilities first and then cast your W or E and all-in the enemy.
• In team fights, look to flank the enemy and jump in with your allies. You shouldn’t go in unless they’re their to back you up.

• Q1 + Q2 + W + AA + E + AA: Press Q and Q again, then W, AA, E and AA.
• W + AA + Q + E + AA + Q + AA: Press W, then AA, Q & E, AA, Q and AA again to finish.
• R + W + AA + Q + AA + E + AA + Q + AA: Press R, then W, AA, Q, AA, then E, AA, Q and AA again to finish.
• Q + E + AA + Q + AA: Press Q & E, then AA, Q and AA.
• R + W + FLASH + AA + Q + E + AA + Q + AA: Pop R then W and Flash, then AA, Q, E, AA, Q and AA.

📖Here comes the hard part. I want to start by saying that I would not recommend Naafiri jungle if you're new to jungle. While an easy champ, I feel like she's pretty damn difficult to jungle with as your clearspeed is so abysmally slow relative to most other champs. As such, it's incredibly easy to fall behind if you're unsure of yourself in pathing or when to gank.

Now that that's out of the way: I always 3 camp to a gank, if I can (blue buff -> gromp -> red buff or red buff -> gromp -> blue buff based on who I'm trying to gank). Unfortunately, your lanes aren't always gonna be in great states, and sometimes you just need to keep clearing until scuttle spawns, then go for that into a gank. Getting an early kill or assist (really just enough gold for a dirk first back) is really, really important. It makes your clears way smoother and makes dueling + ganking far more likely to succeed.

Your clear's also a little weird compared to other junglers, since you want to keep your pets alive and juggle aggro with them to keep your HP in check while making sure your dogs aren't constantly dead. For the first buff, I generally Darkin Daggers -> auto -> Q on top of the buff and then just tank it and auto until it reaches ~1000 hp, then back up and let my packmates tank. Your dogs can survive 2 hits from buffs early on and then will die on the 3rd. Once my first dog dies, immediately use both of your Qs on the buff to start lowering the cooldown (Do not use your Q a second time until your first dog dies, this is very important for keeping your dogs up for your first clear [moreso if you're on blue side, since your 2nd camp is right there and your passive won't have time to come off cooldown]). Hopefully you still have 2 dogs alive at this point, though if it was a poor leash you might only have one, which isn't a huge deal.

After you have Eviscerate, clearing becomes a bit easier since you can refresh their health. Moving onto gromp, start it and let the dogs take aggro, then E the gromp once it dies (again, your dogs can survive 2 hits from gromp, then die on the third early on).

Once gromp and your second buff are dead, you now have W, and should look for a gank between middle or whichever lane is on your side of the map. If you know where their jungler was clearing to and they're likely to do an early gank, setting up for a counter gank is a really good idea. If no lanes are gankable, just clear wolves or raptors and set up for scuttle or look for another gank. Using your W on camps is good very early on (pre 6), since if you're struggling to keep dogs alive you can W to either take aggro or hope that the monsters aggro on another dog with full hp, but I wouldn't recommend it mid game when it's got a longer cooldown and the game starts moving a lot faster.

Moving past that, objective control is really important, but unfortunately a pain on Naafiri. I'm not sure if it's a bug or intended, but due to how your packmates take aggro dragon can and will reset multiple times if you're soloing it, especially if you pull it, (I've seen up to 3 or 4), which makes it completely miserable and makes it more likely to be contested. Always try to get help with dragons if you can at any point in the game. It's better for everyone if you're not left soloing it, but if you see a really good drake opportunity and need to solo it, it's not the end of the world.

Early Heralds are a lot easier to get since it won't constantly reset and push you away and you can pop the eye for a lot of damage since you don't have that much early on. Just make sure that at least one of top and mid have priority in case you end up needing help, though it's almost always free if the enemy jungler shows bot lane. I'd also almost always recommend trading dragon to get the first herald if it comes down to it - the early plate gold is huge, and helps your laner of choice with getting first tower.📖

📖I sort of mentioned this when talking about what Hounds' Pursuit does, but I want to reiterate that most of the time you shouldn't engage with it early on. If the enemy laner that you're ganking is in the middle of the lane, go through tri-bush if you can - remember, you can use Eviscerate to jump over over dragon and baron walls which makes this a lot easier if you're worried about vision or can't safely get around.

*This isn't related to ganking, but E'ing over one of those walls is also a great time to drop a pink deep in their jungle which can be huge early on - the bushes behind the red buff wall are very rarely checked for some reason, and can provide a LOT of information on the enemy junglers whereabouts.

Once moving through tri, simply walk up and E to the enemy laner, pop your Qs, and try to kill. If they commit to the fight, you may not have to use your W at all unless they hard dive your laner, but if they try backing off or flashing away, your W can very quickly close the gap and give you time to hopefully finish them off.

If they're hard shoving and under your tower, then chances are they're confident they can win lane and your laner's probably missing a good amount of HP at this point. W'ing on them to start might be better here, because if it's something like a Renekton, Illaoi, or Sett, they're likely going to hard commit on and possibly even dive your laner, and you need to make sure that doesn't happen because you will NOT be able to solo them. If they're not committing, though, then I'd recommend holding W and playing it the same way.

Once you hit 6, ganking gets a lot easier. Instead of just walking up to them, you can sprint at them with youre 50% decaying movement speed and very quickly collapse on them with your packmates. Hounds' Pursuit also becomes more viable to engage with at this point - particularly if they don't have much mobility - because with 4 dogs going in with it, it's going to do a pretty solid amount of damage early on in the game.

I feel like Naafiri's ganks go best when you're counterganking the enemy jungler. If you're anywhere on that side of the jungle, you can start walking up, ult when you're a screen or two away, and then rush into the fight and collapse on them, hopefully before your laners die and turning the fightaround in your favor. As such, keeping up vision is REALLY important, and helping your lanes with it by sweeping whenever you can is a great way to both build pressure on that side of the map and set up for potential future ganks.

Naafiri's also a great dive champion - your W allows you to easily get on them from under tower, and honestly, if the minion wave's arriving after the dive you can even use it as an escape by W'ing to the wave once they're dead. Just make sure it's with laners that can follow up and it's not a champion that is always a very risky dive, such as Nasus, Thresh, or Vladimir.📖

📖Teamfighting on Naafiri is honestly a breeze. With this build you are... surprisingly tanky, and enemies are going to have a tough time trying to blow you up. Depending on whether you're the one engaging or not, you can pop ult and W into their team from the front and try diving their carries, regardless of whether or not your W is blocked, or - my preferred choice - look for a flank. If both teams are kinda just in a stalemate mid, I like going into their jungle before engaging. Assuming you're level 11 at this point, your Hounds' Pursuit has pretty decent range at this point and you should be able to lock onto a squishy over the wall, hopefully before their teammates have time to react and body block you. This'll bring all the focus to you and, again, since you're incredibly tanky, you'll be able to hold off while your team moves in to follow up, and you'll hopefully get a kill or two pretty quickly.

Fighting near objectives is probably my favorite area to skirmish as Naafiri. A lot of the time, their ranged carries (ie ADCs, artillery mages, etc) will sit on the opposite side of a wall and kind of just kite your team backwards or deal damage from there. Well guess what? You can just W onto them for free! Chances are their front line will be trying to peel off your team, giving you the perfect opportunity to oneshot their squishy.

Naafiri doesn't really have any important combos to know, imo, but for something like that against a squishy, I generally do The Call of the Pack -> Hounds' Pursuit -> Darkin Daggers (first charge) -> Eviscerate -> Darkin Daggers (second charge), and honestly they're probably already dead by that point.📖

✍️Thanks for taking the time to use this guide, and I hope it helped you out on the rift! If you have any issues or suggestions, feel free to leave feedback and I'll address it as soon as I can. I know that it's not very aesthetically pleasing right now, I really only used code for the runes section though if it gets enough attention then I'll go back and try to pretty up some of the other sections as well. Again, this is my first guide and I just wanted to get it out there with the hope of spreading awareness of the potential of Naafiri Jungle. Good luck climbing. ✍️