What's your opinion on Poacher's Knife?

KoalaDoll·4/18/2015, 11:07:29 AM·2 votes·813 views
Poacher's Knife - Cinderhulk - Items - League of Legends

Hey, first post here :)

Recently I've been thinking about Poachers Knife and I realized that I've never saw someone pick it up during the course of a game, and I wanted understand why. I went into a bot game, picked it up (to understand what it does), and thought it was really good if counter jungling is your jam. The reduced CD on smite was really neat and i could clean an entire side on the enemy jungle relatively quickly. However, I picked it up in a real game, tried to invade the top-side buff of the enemy jungle, was discovered and had to run away. Now I'm not a jungle main, by any means, and perhaps it was my mistake as I've never tried counter jungleling for real, but it got me thinking:

According to lolking, the cinderhulk enchantment on Poacher's (the most popular enchantment as of the current meta) had a pick rate of 0.17% as of april 16 (picked in 17 games out of 10,000). Comparing it to his counterparts, skirmisher's with cinderhulk, the next item with the lowest pick rate (out of the four) sits on a 2.38% as of april 16 (picked in 238 games out of 10,000).

Let's look at the stats: The item turns your smite into scavenging smite, which when smiting a large monster in the enemy jungle, the CD of smite is halved, and when the smited monster is killed, you get 20 more gold and 175% movement speed buff, decaying over 2 seconds.

Personally, I think it's just not worth it. Here's why: As i understand it, counter jungling is supposed to be a counter measure to heavy ganking junglers. You see the enemy ganking bot lane? He better say goodbye to his top side jungle! By doing so, you're preventing gold and experience from the enemy jungler, setting him behind and getting more powerful due to the bonuses your just prevented.

However, the MS buff is negligible (short duration and feels clunky IMO), and the bonus gold isn't worth it (20 bonus gold per smite lets be real here, it's not even a potion). This is even worse in high level play ground, where the enemy knows to ward his own jungle, discovering you as you come in to counter jungle and kill you.

In addition, as you wait for the enemy jungler to gank a lane, you're farming your jungle, using smite. A lot of the times you will find yourself without smite as you see the enemy jungler ganking, making it not rewarding to counter jungle him. If you don't use smite, your clears are slower, setting YOU behind the enemy jungler. Plus, I believe poacher's scale the worst into the late game compared to the other smite items. Stalker's and Skirmisher's are pretty good since you can smite champions in teamfights, and Ranger's might get you ouf of a tough spot due to the health gain.

I have no idea what can make it better, as I've stated, I tend not to counter jungle, but i think a nice change would be bringing back the free ward that was once on wriggles, letting you see incoming threats whilst being able to bring oracles as a trinket and clear enemy wards.

That's it, sorry for the long post, bad english, bad math ETC. Please let me know what you think in the comments Nunu

2 Comments

MrBuffington4/18/2015, 2:02:51 PM2 votes

There's no reason to take poachers. Pretty much any jungler who's going to be aggressively counterjungling has the tools to do so, if other junglers are going to counterjungle it's pretty much just an opportunistic thing, and they're going to take a different smite anyways.