Poacher's Dirk is Bad
Has anyone actually built this item?
I feel like it's really out of place and too weak. First, it costs 400g from a
to get just +5 AD and a small out of combat passive. If you build this early you're hurting your clear speed and early game in hopes of teching for late game.
At best it takes 3 minutes to build into
for +10 AD and lethality, that's if you're killing the enemy jungle monster on the second upon reset. More realistically if you heavy invade you'll get 1 camp stack per respawn, and with increased jungle respawn timers it's looking more like 5-6 minutes. In those 5-6 minutes you could have had a
with full combat benefits much sooner. Not only that, but you're wasting an inventory slot for that time where you can't build components to other items or even a 
If you pick it up late game when the enemy is being pushed into their base and you own their jungle, it'll still take too long to build up to become relevant when it'll complete as the game is closing out, and at that point you already have an advantage and wont need a small 350 gold gain from the item upgrading.
It's also super niche already being designed for AD assassin junglers, which already cuts the champ pool who would use it significantly. Non jungle assassins can get it too, but is a waste of time for those assassins to try to invade jungle camps when they can be roaming for champ kills and if they had this they'd have much weaker champ killing power.
Potential Fixes
- Slight price increase to maybe 950 (from 750) and give it full
stats but with the current stack & CD constraints. Having it take up an inventory slot and needing to build up for 5 minutes to transform is punishment enough - OR let it hold stacks and remove the internal cooldown so if you full clear one side of the enemy jungle, it's fully stacked, but takes a certain amount of time to upgrade to it's final form even with full stacks. Still has a timer for it to upgrade, but reduces that time. Something like: upgrades upon of 90 seconds after getting full stacks or after 3 minutes stacks can be gained with no CD.
I dont believe reducing the item charge cooldown is a good fix since it still punishes you for clearing at a pace different from the cooldown, and the jungle spawn timers are also long at 2.5 minutes.