Boards›Gameplay

[DISCUSS] Poacher's Knife and re-introduction to counter-jungling

Khell DarkWolf·3/19/2015, 11:39:46 PM·1 votes·962 views

Hey Riot and community,

I wanted to bring up counter-jungling and the state of Poacher's Knife as the core focus of this topic.

I love jungling and the chess like strategic thinking it requires and puts you in, trying to create moves and think ahead of the opponent.

It is no secret that Poacher's Knife is the least popular jungle item this season, namely because of how underwhelming and situational it is.

After playing around with it for a long while now, I wanted to suggest something for it.

Currently, the stats for Poacher's Knife are:

item 3711 Stats +30 Gold on Large Monster Kill

Passive Unique: Upgrades Smite to Scavenging Smite. If Scavenging Smite is used on a large monster in the enemy's jungle, the recharge timer is halved. Upon killing the affected monster, you gain 20 bonus gold and 175% bonus movement speed that decays over 2 seconds.

Unique - Jungler: Deals 45 magic damage to monsters on hit over 2 seconds and gain 10 Health Regen and 5 Mana Regen per second in combat with monsters

A couple of scenarios popped up when using this item:

Scenario One:

  • I would try to counter-jungle like normal textbook, taking all of the enemy jungle camp* but leaving one monster *behind to delay the spawn
  • Enemy jungler would discover what I have done and has him and his team proceed to begin warding their jungle to prevent me from doing it again
  • Enemy jungler would proceed to start invading into my jungle to do the same thing to me more often then I might because it is taking me more time to walk into his
  • The direction of where I counter-jungle varies depending on the map but isn't consistent jungle invading because often I find that the camp is cleared by the enemy to reset it or the camp is still the same state as I left it (wasting my time to come by) when I first counter-jungled only to discover the enemy jungler went to the opposite end of the map and did it to me which = they actually gained more gold + exp from clearing

Scenario Two:

  • I would counter-jungle, but this time I would take ALL OF that enemy jungle camp's creeps, thus getting it to start its respawn as soon as possible and visual notification on my mini-map (the blank or monster icon) indicating if the camp is still there or has been cleared.
  • Proceed to continue hug one entire side of the jungle map (i.e. Blue side west jungle into Red Side north jungle) and ignore my other half (i.e. Blue side south jungle into Red side east jungle) so I can farm and clear jungle camps on constant respawn speed
  • When the enemy jungler keeps to a strict jungle route, they may stumble and discover the camps "missing" and then proceed to try counter-jungling or gank more often along with warding that side of the jungle
  • Encounters with the enemy jungler are more prevalent
  • When the enemy jungler catches on, they either stick to that same side of the map along with you or ignore you and do the same thing you're doing

So with scenario one what I found was:

  • Counter-jungling and leaving one monster behind results an *inconsistent *amount of delay against the enemy jungler in trying to set them back because you have no knowledge of when they cleared that camp which can result in you wasting time traveling from your side to theirs if they ignore their jungle since they can catch up in gold and exp by doing it to you in the opposite end of the jungle.
  • Areas counter-jungled become new hot spots for being warded against you (granted)
  • Enemies start to become more responsive and aggressive
  • I Spent more time trying to gank instead of counter-jungling if found that the enemy jungle camps aren't cleared
  • More counter-ganks occurred when the enemy jungler counter-counter-jungled me when I tried to gank
  • Overall if I came across a cleared camp or a camp that was blatantly ignored, since I wasted my time checking I had a net loss of gold gains

In Scenario Two:

  • Since I completely cleared camps both in mine and the enemy jungle (usually one half of the map side as explained in the example), I had knowledge of when they spawned thus to coordinate when to come back and check to see if enemy jungler is wasting his time trying to farm or catch him out to kill him.
  • I spent more time farming because I knew when spawns were coming up but neglected ganks/counter-ganks which could put my teammates in a bad spot
  • Areas counter-jungled start to be warded more often (again granted of course)
  • Enemy jungler began to gank alot more often
  • Enemy jungler would press for more objectives and poke his nose in your jungle
  • Since I was farming more, with the knowledge of the camp respawns I had overall higher net gold gain

There was also another big thing that I left out that was consistent in both scenarios:

Everytime I smited the enemy jungle camp's big monster, I cleared the bigger monster faster then the smaller creeps to the point of where I either had to:

  • Ditch the rest of the camp to make full use of the movement speed buff to go to the next enemy camp or run away
  • Clear the rest of the camp and waste the movement speed buff
  • Clear the smaller camp's creeps before the big one and THEN smite it
  • No matter which way you did it, smite re-use cooldown (2 charges, use one and goes on 15 sec cooldown) would not be up quick enough for me to use it on the next camp as I cleared faster with abilities and autoattacks

So I think what needs to be done here to improve Poacher's Knife is:

  • With the enemy jungle smite cooldown reduce for gaining a charge by half, include a smite usage reduction by half as well
  • Incorporate a type of vision tool that only applies to you as the jungler, so the team doesn't piggy back on free info but has to rely on you for relaying that information. But the vision tool has to be ambiguous enough that it isn't actually green/pink ward type of vision

So my suggestion, allow poacher's knife to retain its cooldown gaining charges by half when smiting enemy big monsters but include the same thing to re-using smite again so it can up quicker when moving to the next enemy jungle camp.

Add a function to the smite that when smiting "that" camp it places a type of tag on it. Only visible to you (the jungler), on your min-map it shows the monster icons of information but the moment it is cleared by you or the enemy. You're given notification of it being cleared so you can properly setup when to go back and continue.

And then change Scuttle Crabs to function as enemy jungle camps for the movement speed buff effect to be used. Dragon and Baron don't need this as it will be ridiculous to be smiting major objectives as a means of drive-by.

New Poacher's Knife would look like this:

item 3711 Poacher's Knife: Stats: +30 Gold on Large Monster Kill

Passive Unique: Upgrades Smite to Scavenging Smite. If Scavenging Smite is used on a large monster in the enemy's jungle, the recharge timer and usage timer is halved and places a poacher's tag on that camp. Upon killing the affected monster, you gain 20 bonus gold and 175% bonus movement speed that decays over 2 seconds. While a camp is tagged with Poacher's tag, when that camp is completely cleared of monsters you're given a visual update of it being cleared on the minimap and can see it's next respawn. Poacher's tag minimap effect is only visible to the user that smited.

Unique - Jungler: Deals 45 magic damage to monsters on hit over 2 seconds and gain 10 Health Regen and 5 Mana Regen per second in combat with monsters.

I think the way poacher's tag could work is alot better then giving a free ward-esque totem on that camp that was smited because an actual ward telegraphs alot more information then a mini-map notification.

A Ward would tell you:

  • Information on what level champion walked by
  • Information update on items/wards on the champion that walked passed it
  • Who came by, whose coming to roam, who cleared the jungle camp to reset respawns if needed

The mini-map tag would tell you:

  • Only that someone cleared it and not by who unless you can properly guess which missing champion player did it

Thoughts?

5 Comments

Very Hard Engage3/20/2015, 12:03:41 AM2 votes

poachers knife would be better if it delayed enemy camp respawns

DrCyanide3/20/2015, 12:37:17 AM2 votes

I think the vision solution is to have monsters in the enemy jungle give vision when they respawn. Maybe this is capped to a certain time, maybe it's not, but it provides something more interesting than another ward.

The5lacker3/20/2015, 12:04:06 AM1 votes

Visual information should always be shared between all teammates at all times unless that information is only relevant to that teammate (Bard's Chimes, Zyra's plant attack range, Cho's kill range indicator, etc.) Considering there's never a time where enemy position is irrelevant to your teammates...yeah no. This is a needlessly complex solution to a problem with an easy solution: Making an item only good at once role that is already significantly more situational than anything else is a bad idea and simply cannot work. Farming/Ganking/Counterjungling is a rock/paper/scissors arrangement no matter how much Riot wants it to be due to the simple fact that counterjungling is just high-risk farming for the purpose of putting enemies behind. Making an item that only does that is like making an item that only does tower diving, and we know how well that turned out.

item 3070 item 3056 item 3070

Now, what could be done is an item that implicitly supports counterjungling without outright requiring it. For example: Unique Passive - Upgrades Smite to Scavenging Smite, which marks the targeted Monster, dealing additional damage equal to Smite's damage over 10 seconds to that Monster. This damage can't kill the Monster. If the Monster is killed, grants a 100% Movement Speed boost that decays over 3 seconds and restores 10% of the champion's missing Health and Mana over 5 seconds.

See, this is an ability that implicitly supports counterjungling. By focusing damage on a single target, it rewards quickly taking out a large monster and getting the hell outta dodge, without resulting in it being excessive against Epic monsters like Baron and Dragon as using it for the DoT prevents it from being used to countering attempted steals. The MS and Regen help reduce risk while still allowing it to be a relevant choice over Blasting Smite for the champion's own Jungle.

Of course, personally, I think Smite has basically proven itself to be more of a balancing hindrance than anything else. I mean, think about it. Why are the other Smite variants popular? Their either other Summoner Spell emulators (Chilling Smite was Exhaust, now Exhaust + Ghost, Challenging Smite was an abusable Ignite until they made it less abusable.) or ludicrously useful (AoE damage, AoE monster stun, AND a Heal? Sign me up.) If we got rid of Smite and Runes and actually rebalanced the jungle without these ancient, vestigial chunks of the game, we'd probably make jungling far more skill focused and less "ERMERGER GOTTA SMITE BARON!"