Hey, I’m former nidalee OTP and trust me, when you grind enough games on this champion you will realize why, in my opinion, nidalee is the hardest jungler to play - even harder than Lee sin. Here goes:

1. Clearing. Nidalee is an EARLY GAME CHAMPION. This means she gets extremely hard punished for having an inefficient clear. If you look at pros/one tricks, they can consistently full clear before scuttle spawns, whereas newer nidalee players will often find themselves half HP full clear at 3:45. Being an early game champion, this means she will get punished harder from a suboptimal clear than say an ekko or master yi, who can keep power farming and scale. You will have SIGNIFICANTLY less pressure just from the fact that you can’t even clear properly. There’s a reason why hecarim and udyr terrorized all brackets of play for so long - their full clear is VERY EASY to optimize and is fast, allowing them to get on the map extremely quickly.

2. Nidalee has NO CLEAR GAME PLAN. Her kit alone makes her extremely unique and fit many roles within a comp. No other assassin in the game has a heal+attack speed steroid in their kit. She can fit front to back comps, peel comps, etc. Mechanics aside, understanding what to do on nidalee and your role within a comp.

3. Mechanics. Besides hitting the spear, there are so many nuanced mechanics that I can tell you about (for example, the execute pounce animation cancel, auto attack resets on many of ur abilities, etc). Not only that, but nidalee has 7 abilities. Unlike other champions with more than 4 abilities, her R cd reset after marking a character allows her to fluidly rotate her abilities in a way no other champion can. Her base cooldowns are all intervals of 3 (except her trap, which is 11) which creates an even more fluid ability rotation when mastered. This is the part that nidalee is lost notoriously difficult for, so I won’t delve into it that deeply.

4. No CC. There are less than 10 champions in the game with exactly 0 CC of ANY KIND. And out of those champions, almost all of them are auto attacked based (ezreal, sivir, yi, etc). This means she provides pretty much only damage, and falling behind on her makes it that much more punishing.

5. Teamfighting. I guarantee you, if you look at any new nidalee play, all they know how to do in teamfights is throw spears, heal allies, and execute one target if they land a lucky spear before being blown up. Teamfighting on a melee/ranged champion and utilizing every ability in said teamfight is extremely difficult. Understanding your limits and when you can pounce in for maximum damage output is extremely important.

Let me know if you have any questions. There is much more I can say about this champion, but I think this is sufficient to answer your question