Reviewing new Poppy

Hello, I’m Guardman. Before the rework I was a jungle Poppy main who consistently held a 60-66% winrate with Poppy last season. As a person who played a lot of pre-rework Poppy, I came into the rework with a mix of excitement and fear. Excitement at the potential and fear that Poppy was no longer the champion I loved to play. After playing as and against Poppy a bunch of times (both as jungle and top lane), I’ve decided to do a review of the new Poppy.

Abilities

Passive - Iron Ambassador: Out of the entire rework, Poppy’s new passive is my favorite part. It is an unique ability, in that it is a ranged melee attack, that helps tie the rest of Poppy’s kit together. It provides a little harass, some safety for farming, an unique niche, and a strong conditional shield.

My only issue (and it’s more of an annoyance than an actual issue) is that there is no way to reduce the cooldown of the passive, like there is for Shen’s passive for example. This isn’t so much of a problem late game when its cooldown is much lower, but early and mid game the passive’s cooldown can feel very restrictive. Which is a shame, as this passive is most important in the early and mid game, especially as a top laner who can easily be countered by lane bullies and ranged top laners. So it would be nice to have a way to play a lane that focused on the passive cooldown as a fallback pattern or even as a way to win lane.

Q - Hammer Shock: Poppy’s bread and butter skill. It does what it needs to do and does it pretty well. As for whether her old Q or this new Q is better, well they both have their merits, but in this incarnation of Poppy the new Q is probably better since the new Poppy lacks the old ultimate from where the old Q really got absurd.

My complaint about the new Q is that it only does 80% against minions, which doesn’t make sense to me. New Poppy isn’t that great of a farmer to begin with. And the damage area is so small that is can be hard to get more than 2 minions in the AOE, so it’s not like it can be used to wave clear super fast.

W - Steadfast Presence: I love the idea behind the skill, but it doesn’t live up to its ideal since so many dashes and blinks can ignore it or the enemy has multiple dashes that they can do quickly which effectively makes the dash block a minor annoyance. I see an enemy team has a Vi, Fizz, and Ezreal and my first thought is hey maybe Poppy since they are a mobile dash/blink heavy team. But then I realize that even though Poppy can’t even stop half of their dashes, and not their most important dashes at that.

And even then it is a very much reaction time skill to block oncoming dashes (i.e. dashes from champs that wouldn’t already be in your steadfast range). You need really good reaction times to block a dash, since many move so fast. The high reaction time required is something I am pretty sure I don’t physically have. And I am pretty sure most players don’t. Most of the dashes I do block are the ones I know are coming.

Like I said I love the idea, but not the execution of it. If this is really supposed to create a non dash/blink zone this idea should really be double down upon. Keep it blocking the same dashes from the outside, but once inside the zone enemies can’t dash or blink no matter what. Basically in the zone enemies have a blink/dash silence.

E - Heroic Charge: Poppy’s iconic skill. Still love it.

R - Keeper’s Verdict: I really like the ultimate. I just don’t like it on Poppy. The best example of a similar case would be Urgot with his ultimate.

This ultimate feels like it should be on a champion that is meant to protect allies and is probably a support of some type. Poppy just doesn’t have the tools outside of her ult to reliably protect an ally. Her W doesn’t stop enough, and is useless against some strong initiation abilities. Plus as I said before it is hard to use reactively. And her E while strong, requires a lot of set-up to use to full effect. It’s an ability that is much stronger as an initiative tool, taking advantage of an enemies mistake in positioning, rather than a reactive one where the enemy can and, if they understand how to play against Poppy, should position themselves in such a way that the worst that can happen is they are pushed back a little bit.

Poppy is much better when she can be on the intitive, taking advantage of an enemies momentary mistake in positioning to go in with her E and making it so an enemy can’t escape because they are already in the Steadfast zone. Outside of double tapping it to lock down an enemy like a makeshift bard ult, it doesn’t work well once you are in the middle of the enemy because it is easily interrupted. It just can’t be used to its full effect by Poppy.

And as long as Poppy has her E, which is a great dive-fighter ability, bad protection ability, she can’t be anything but a dive-fighter. And dive-fighter’s are aggressive, take the intitive, and meant to be in the middle of the enemy team. So an ult meant to be used for protecting an ally or knocking away an enemy front line is the opposite of the rest of Poppy’s kit.

Final verdict - Q and Passive are good. Minor suggestions on them, but overall in a good spot. W needs a better execution, as there are so many exceptions that for a lot of champions you would think it would be great against, but just ends up not doing much or nothing at all against them. E is still great, but the direction it pulls Poppy in (dive-fighter), is the exact opposite her ult pulls her in (support-protector). It feels like Poppy’s biggest problem is her lack of identity as her skills pull her multiple different directions.

Overall though I still do enjoy playing new Poppy.

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**Builds - **I’ve seen a lot of different Poppy builds. But they can all pretty much be dissolved into four different build-types - Tank, Juggernaut, AD Caster, and Crit.

Tank - By far the weakest of the four. Poppy becomes pretty much unkillable thanks to her W and Passive late game. But her damage falls off very hard meaning if she dives into the enemy team she isn’t much of a threat. Outside of her ult she doesn’t have the reliability to be a good protector. She just doesn’t have the tools to be a threat or draw focus as a tank. This mean she can mostly be ignored late game.

Juggernaut - Probably the best build right now. With a Juggernaut build, Poppy has enough damage to be a threat and enough tankiness to stand in the middle of a fight without dying. Unlike the AD Caster or Crit build you can’t really take over a game or snowball out of control, but it hard to just shut Juggernaut Poppy out of the game.

On a side note I don’t understand why Sterak’s Gage is a recommended item on Poppy considering she is no longer a dedicated sheen user and has no Total AD scaling. I feel like I am missing something, but no matter how I look at it seems like there are just a ton of better items for her. But this is me just ranting in a rant.

AD Caster - Probably the strongest build right now, but it comes with two caveats. If you don’t come out of the laning phase at least even it is hard to come back and you can feel the AD Caster itemization problems with this build. But the fact that flat Armor Pen scales so well with her Q more than makes up for it. And once AD Caster poppy gets rolling she is hard to stop as she can duel most champions and take out squishies in team fights while still having enough survivability to make it out.

Crit - The most feast or famine build. Saw someone play this in a game with Poppy, where you abuse Rapid Firecannon’s interaction with her Passive to give insane poke potential along with the ability to assassinate enemy squishies. I tried it out and you become a beast if you are ahead, but if you don’t snowball you are relegated to poking with your passive.