Poacher's Knife: An analysis

Hello summoners,

So there has been a lot of discussion about Poacher's knife lately but a lot of arguments don’t get the point of what poachers flaws actually are. Some say its bad because you tell the enemy your intentions. Some say its useless. Some would even suggest to remove it completely. When the two TLDR core problems of this item are that it falls behind in **USEFULLNES OUTSIDE THE ENEMY JUNGLE and it LACKING COUNTERJUNGLING POWER ** compared to the other jungling items.

What follows is an analysis of poachers knife flaws and suggestion to fix some of those:

Riot introduced the new Jungle Items with the intention to bring strategic diversion back to the jungle and to create more leverages to balance the game. If a jungler seeks sustain and clearspeed they should buy trailblazers. If he seeks dueling power skirmishers and stalkers blade are good choices and lately a jungler who wants to counterjungle a lot should equip himself with a poachers knife. This is a strong foundation. All suggestions to delete one item out of this equation are deleting a pillar of the new structure. This is the same reason why the argument of poachers knife telling your intentions is false. You are telling your general strategy with every jungling item.

However there is something that sets poachers knife behind all other choices. All other smites are useful throughout all phases in the game, no matter the standing. You can always need sustain, you can always need dueling power. Poachers however is only useful if you have control over the enemy jungle. Once you fall behind you are basically left with a 60s cooldown smite.

But it is not only the usefulness outside the enemy jungling, but it doesn't fulfill its job in counterjungling as well as the other smites do. First of all counterjungling is an opportunistic matter while smite has a static cooldown. How many times has happened this: You are near top lane and the enemy jungler shows bot. Perfect time to counterjungle. But damn, you just used your smite. You get no benefit from your jungle item, even though it is concepted as a counter jungling item.

The benefits you get are really* lackluster*, too. 20 gold for smiting one monster (and only if you smite it). Compare this to the gold of free mana and health pots you get from trailblazers. The tooltip is misleading, because it list all the gold you got from an enemy camp instead of the smite bonus.

Another problem of poachers is that it doesn’t help you when the enemy jungler suddenly turns up. You only get the ms boost when you smite a monster. But what happens, when the jungler outsmites you? You are stripped down all of your defenses. That’s another problem, you can be outsmited. So is poachers only role to sneak secretly into the enemy jungling, when you know you are out of harm and go out super fast? The only good thing about this item is the reduced cooldown.

Right know I believe skirmishers or stalkers are better counterjungling items than poachers. At least you can slow or duel an enemy threat when it comes to it.

So how to fix those flaws? There have been some neat ideas around. I especially like the idea of a new introduction of the conversation system. You generate stacks, killing a large monster in the enemy consumes a small amount of the stacks, while smiting it doubles the benefit. In the PBE server riot is testing out a ammo system for smite. Both ideas may fix the problem of smites static cooldown and the usefulness of poachers without smite up.

I also think that poachers knife smite should do more damage to enemy non-legendary monsters, so you actually have an advantage when the enemy jungler shows up. (Spice things up and allow legendary monsters, too) Others have mentioned to lengthen buff duration. But I think this is a too strong buff.

How do we make poachers usefull outside the enemy jungle? I don't have a good solution for this core problem. The only idea that I had was being able to smite enemies to get the ms boost. Way to strong in my opinion. So here comes the part where community discussion shall lead us to a fitting solution.