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Poacher's Knife Improvement Idea

Jackofheartz·11/25/2014, 11:20:48 AM·1 votes·939 views

After playing with the Poacher's Knife and reading threads about it, I've noticed several issues with this item.

  1. Scavenging Smite has the least utility of the Smites.
  2. Using Scavenging Smite in your own jungle is weak.
  3. Gives a big head's up to the enemy of your strategy.
  4. The rewards do not outweigh the risk.

The Ranger's Trailblazer outperforms Poacher's Knife in just about every way, including stealing monsters in the enemy's jungle. Blasting smite allows for such a quick clear that you can get in and out easily, which is pretty big deal when in enemy territory. The risk of going into the enemy jungle, especially with the enemy KNOWING you're planning to be there is too great for an extra 20 gold per camp.

Current: Upgrades Smite to Scavenging Smite. If Scavenging Smite is used in conjunction with killing a large monster in the enemy's jungle, the cooldown is reduced by 30 seconds, you gain 20 bonus gold and 175% bonus movement speed that decays over 2 seconds.

New: Upgrades Smite to Scavenging Smite. Smite deals an extra 25% damage to large monsters and if it kills a large monster grants 175% bonus movement speed for 2 seconds. If Scavenging Smite is used in conjunction with killing a large monster in the enemy's jungle, the cooldown is reduced by 30 seconds, you gain 20 + (5 x level) bonus gold.

Having Scavenging Smite deal extra damage to large monsters will help bring up the power to be in line with Blasting smite, and having the movement speed adds extra utility even in your own jungle. Having gold rewards scale with level will give more incentive to keep using this item even later in the game.

3 Comments

ˆˆºº11/25/2014, 11:29:05 AM1 votes

The gold bonus you specified will never work as it will greatly impact a losing team in that you can effortlessly clear their jungle for +110 bonus gold at times. Further, this doesn't change the fact that Poacher's is so incredibly weak early.

The true weakness in Poacher's knife lies in the fact that it's an early purchase and when it's early you can't count on enemy camps being up and underguarded. So until your jungler stops farming (say level 6) you are at a huge farming disadvantage. If Poacher's were to keep it's current settings while removing 10seconds from the smite cooldown, I feel like it would be a viable but not OP option.

Gray Fanchon12/1/2014, 10:59:10 AM1 votes

I don't know if I like the smite dealing more damage - that would make duels over Dragon or Baron a bit unfair - though, that could also be a reason to take Poacher's specifically. That would definitely give it more potency with regards to objective control.

I like the idea of the scaling gold, though. Honestly, it might just be that I'm not counterjungling enough but the gold you end up getting ends up barely covering wards, really. I can kind of see this being horrifying if a jungler is already ahead or even snowballing, as it ensures them still more gold, but again, maybe that's balanced by the lack of combat utility.

Another way you could add more gold to Poacher's - bring back the Conversion mechanic from the Spirit items, only triggering when killing enemy jungle monsters you've smited. It'd add incentive to counterjungle and keep counter-jungling, and still allow the user to get enough gold to make it worthwhile to invade even if they could only manage to get one camp a run.