@Riot: Buff Poacher's Dirk

I think 20+ seconds is mandatory because if Lee Sin or someone kills me at my 2nd red with a poachers dirk he can pretty much take all 3 camps for free and gain basically 1000 gold off of 1 kill (300 for me, 400 from dirk upgrading, and ~300 from the camps total). That's a LOT of money.

most rengars (me personally too) don't bother too much with lethality, more along the lines of bc, dd, ie, stuff like that

warning, fair amount of bias since I main BRUiSER rengar not full ad

Ocasionally

I've been experimenting with Duskblade and Ghostblade on for better burst and chasing, respectively. Haven't really been able to see if it's worth it or not since all my games have snowballed before I finished them (serious case of firstworldproblems).

pretty much any AD jungler can build lethality items. Esp. Youmuu's which is such a versatile item.

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The passive doesn't go on cooldown until after you have farmed your first stack, and once you have the 3rd, you have your serrated dirk. So it would only go on cooldown two times. And two or so minutes isn't really that long if you are getting 350 gold worth of stats out of the deal. (Calculated 1100 for serrated dirk - 750 for poachers)

The funny thing is though, you seem to describe the item as a snowball item. Yet the cooldown essentially prevents the you from making home in their Jungler. (Which is kinda anti snowball)

Lastly, Poacher's dirk really is meant to be a niche item. The problem with the old Poacher's knife was, you told everyone and their mother that your plan was to counter jungle, they would move to counter your strat, (if they were smart) and you would be left with nothing cause that was all the item was good for.

Poacher's dirk, fixes part of the problem in the sense that it's a temporary item, and you won't be locked out completely if you couldn't counter jungle. However, it shouldn't be balanced as a core item, especially as it's mainly an Assassin item. If it was, basically all AD assassin Junglers, would be counter jungling as a core strat, and the enemy (Should) move to counter that. Leading to the same problem that Poacher's knife had.

Also like you said, you could get Serrated dirk by poaching 3 camps in of it self. So the actually affects of poacher's dirk don't even need to be that amassing, as Counter jungling is rewarding in of itself, it simply acts as icing on the cake.

You have to go into the enemy jungle and counterjungle them THREE SEPARATE times. I think the item in and of itself tells them you're going to do it THREE times. Sure they might not notice the first, but then they'll still know you're gonna try two more times. Having to go into the enemy jungle to steal a camp on 3 separate occasions is basically making a home in the enemy jungle in my book, because it's pretty risky to do it twice, let alone three times early on(which if you're gonna buy this item you need to do it earlyish because otherwise you're not gonna get the use out of it, unless your game is 40 minutes long and you're fed). Especially with the way every single camp seems to take much longer to clear except maybe Gromp and wolves. I'd rather go in and take 3 camps at once and just buy the serrated dirk while the enemy jungler is off somewhere. Also, in no way did I say it was a snowball item. I said at the moment it feels like the only way you'd want to buy it is if you were ALREADY fed out your ass and just wanted a cheaper dirk just to buy something. That'd mean you already snowballed before buying it, so how did I say it was a snowball item? At the moment the only reason I'd buy this item is if I had most of my lethality already and didn't have enough for a serrated dirk or anything else useful, but did have enough for the poachers. If it's meant to be a niche item, currently the niche isn't wide enough to have an item made for it. Pretty sure that's why they've deleted several items in the past, or reworked them.