Amumu

Amumu is a one-button jungler, and that is a feature. Curse of the Sad Mummy stuns everything around him with no skillshot to dodge and no target to pick: press it in the right spot and your team collects a won fight. Bandage Toss, the ability that sets it up, is one of the few roots on this roster that can be fired from behind a wall and drag you straight into contact.

The downside is harsh. Without his ultimate up, Amumu is a tank walking at you with modest damage, a mana bar that empties fast and no way out. Miss the bandage and you are a bag of health standing in the enemy wave. He is a champion of timing rather than mechanics: your value lives in when you press the button, not in how fast your hands are.

Cursed Touch makes him a magic damage multiplier: every auto attack he squeezes between spells shaves the target's magic resist, and everything your mid laner throws afterwards hits harder. Despair tears a percentage of maximum health per second, which makes him vicious against teams stacking health. Tantrum eats part of the physical damage he takes and refreshes as he gets hit, so the longer a fight drags on, the better staying in it becomes.

His flaws are structural. He is one of the squishiest junglers in the game before his first items, he has no escape whatsoever, and an aggressive counter-jungle on his first clear sets him back for ten minutes. He burns an enormous amount of mana for what he provides, and without his ultimate available his presence at an objective is worth close to nothing.

You do not have a lane, you have a camp tempo. Tantrum does most of your clearing and refreshes every time you take a hit, so you chain camps without downtime as long as you are not wasting mana on the bandage. Keep it strictly for ganks: it is your only opening before the ultimate, and it only pays off when the target is already pushed under tower or stepping away from their wave.

Gank from the sides, not through the river. The bandage wins from an angle nobody is watching, and it carries you into contact, which covers for how slow you are. On lanes where your ally brings no crowd control of their own, wait for the ultimate rather than burning the ability from range. An Amumu who whiffs three bandages in a row has handed the early game to the other team.

The first spike is obvious: the ultimate. From then on, any fight you open properly is a fight your team can barely lose, and simply standing near dragon forces the enemy to spread out. Play around objectives whenever the spell is up, and flatly refuse to fight when it is not.

The second arrives with your first large resistance item paired with a source of ability power. Amumu does not need raw damage, he needs to live long enough for Despair to tick through the whole fight. Cooldown reduction is the stat that changes his game the most: it brings the ultimate back before the next skirmish, and that is the only thing that matters.

You either open the fight or you are useless. Find the angle where at least two enemies are stacked, come through a wall with Bandage Toss and fire the ultimate as you land. The classic mistake is holding out for the perfect setup: an ultimate on three targets now beats an ultimate on five that never happens because you died walking in.

Once you are inside, do not chase the carry. Sit in the middle of the pile so Despair covers the most bodies and your passive chews through the front line's magic resist. Tantrum is your survival button: hold it against physical compositions instead of spending it for chip damage. If the fight starts without you, your job becomes arriving second onto the slowed stragglers.