Jungle monsters respawn time was increased to 2:30minutes(not counting red and blue) and they still have catch up exp too. Jungle was a skill role where pathing and ganking were done based on their knowledge and skill. Right now junglers can farm so easily and gank without having to care about their pathing when the respawn time is so high.
The fact that the jungle should have impact and the fact that the jungle is a role that everyone can play if they understand that they need to gank are different things which unfortunately jungle is easy as fuck atm.
I don't think towers being weak are the main issue with top laner's roam opportunities.
This is not only about top lane. Mid laners have the same problem and shiptur and scarra said exact same thing.
Towers are paper and they fall to easy reducing solo laners ability to roam. I can lose my tower just from one tp and it doesn't matter where I left my wave.
Supports have to have cheaper item
Supports are really strong too. They get a lot of gold doing nothing and their items are cheap too. Right now they get the items so much faster than they ever did. How can you beat that when an adc has so much protection.
Absolutely incorrect
There are some problems top, mostly because the poke meta that we have right now and top laners are generaly weaker to poke than the other laners, but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that bot lane will come top and take a tower then go mid and do the same thing. At that point adc will take over the game and they will scale faster than a top laner.
Curently top lane meta is formed from champions that can scale really fast and they still have a low impact too. Not all top laners are weak because some can use some of the runes correctly, even if is just a band aid.
splitpushing being as accessible as it is now
Wrong. Splipushing is dead and only Camille can do that atm, but only because she melts towers faster than anyone else by a large margin. She is more mobile than everyone else too. The rest are weak at that and the game revolves around team fighting, not splipushing. TP has also a long cd and is hard to splipush when that is down. Funny thing is that most top laners have the ability to splipush and even tanks were given the possibility with that rune(i don't remember the name), but the game is all about team fights and adc.
Top lane's impact isn't protecting or feeding the carry gold
I can't reach the enemy adc or other squishy target(zhonya can fuck us hard), I can only stay as a front line and they are the ones that takes the majority of towers while the top laner sits on the side when the adc takes all the t1.
that and considering the top mains that made it to challenger quickly and with good winrates
Lets see. There is that guy in na with akali who is high in challenger and the majority of the dudes that are in challenger are there because they play GP/Gnar/Camille/Vlad/Jayce. There is little variety right now than in previous years that is pathetic.
There are some that reach challenger, but those are Riven mains who still play some of the strongest champions and know all Riven tricks. Jax is another, but not so much from here. Riven and Jax are a bit strong too(they are tier 2 tho). Tanks are out, most bruisers are out too.
In the previous years we had a lot more variety, the balance in top lane was more equal. We have all type of metas, but every time we could have played Irelia or Kled with no problems. Skill was all we need. The current meta is affecting so many top laners that is not even funny when we are being ignored so much.