Poacher's Knife Rework
we all know this NEEDS to happen... so here is my idea for a fix. The way I see it (and I'm really no authority on jungle) the issue with poacher's is that you get no combat stats for raiding the enemy jungle. If the enemy has either of the other two combat stat Jung items they have a duel advantage and the Rangers makes their clear faster and counter jungle more difficult. I would propose two possible solutions that would be Added to the current white smite:
-
Poacher's gives a passive on hit dot (similar to red smite) that scales with number of camps stolen, or it could be the damage reduction half. Also scaling with camps stolen.
-
(My favorite) every time you smite an enemy camp you get a diluted version of its buff that scales over time . For damaging buffs this is straightforward. For the utility buffs you could have a percent chance for the buff's effect (e.g. Raptor's buff on poacher's smite would be like every time you're spotted by a ward you have a X% chance to be notified and/ or reveal the ward for a second... You could take the ward later with a sweepers or just avoid it.) the poacher's smite would record how many times the player has taken each buff, and switch to the corresponding buff and stack each time a new enemy camp is stolen. (Depending on gamplay preference you could require the player to smite enemy camps to change buffs or you could smite you're own (this would gain no stacks or extra gold but allow buff change)) This kind of smite works thematically because just as poacher's get gold they also get trophies etc. Each stack of a buff would be like the poacher collecting trophies of each camp and seems like a fun gameplay concept.