Maybe it should be ramped up a LITTLE more but i just made over 1k gold with it in a game with sejuani. If you only counter jungle when you KNOW the enemy isn't going to be there (he ganks bot lane and you are top) then you can make it very useful. you can basically use it twice while in the enemy jungle.\
I also built sight stone so could invade more and my team wouldn't get ganked cuz they always know where he is.
Hinro Honato1 votesPoachers could be a great smite but honestly there is no reason to take it over trailblazer. At least there wasn't. With the trailblazer nerf poachers can be a bit better. Poachers is the one I was looking forward to most and on paper it is great but honestly With the camp respawn timers on the small camps being nerfed it's just not even remotely useful if the enemy is farming their jungle.
With the possible changes to smite coming and it being able to store up two charges poachers could very well become incredibly good but right now I just don't see it.
MattAkhavan1 votesyeah it would also be very useful if it worked on monsters in the river. it would make it a real buy at that point.
Hinro Honato1 votesFor a while I thought it did on the day of release but I was simply stupid. It was a sad day.
xJLx MCHammer1 votesIt's bad for 2 reason
-It doesn't grant the smite passive bonus Gold or Speed unless your smite is what killed the monster. This mean you can't run in and use smite at the beginning or half way. You have to actually kill it. While it might sound like nothing, it's very big. here is an example
If you smite the Big Frog at red side first, then kill it, this should take 5-10 seconds depending on what champion you are and at what time the game is. By now, the smite cooldown is ~20 second (it's 30 when passive procs). There is a small window where you can go kill the wolves and still proc the the smite for a killing blow
The same applies for the red side. You can gill the golems by starting red. it takes 5 ish second to run to chickens. That's roughly 10 seconds window for CD on smite. When you counter jungling that 10-15 second difference is huge. It's huge because farming your own jungle nets you nothing
Scotch N Bourbon1 votesI feel poacher's would be good if you could smite at any moment, you want, but there would be a buff timer on the monster you smited, if killed before the timer runs out you get the gold AND movement speed after. I feel like this mechanically would work better since you are able to combo your own abilities and smite together for the kill AND you get the smite buff for the mob upon start of camp. At first thought, I thought that the poaching knife would also do more damage to enemy monsters since that is its purpose, to poach so it would have a buff to enable that to happen. At this very moment, I can only see the Poaching knife working really well with a sightstone/lots of wards. If you know where the enemy jungler is you can farm their jungle safely, but the sightstone is a nice 800 gold investment you need to spend early since the gold difference really makes a difference early / mid game on who can farm their first big item / enchantment first. my own two cents
Long Dong Wukong1 votesNah dog, it's really bad.
Deciding that you're going to counter jungle some one ahead of time before you know if you can and then announcing to the entire other team that you're going to is trash.
And your reward? 20 gold.