[Game Design] A comprensive iteration on Poacher's Knife

I iterated a change for the Poacher' s Knife, since he has seen such a low use. I will go in depth about what bought me to think and share this, and if you are not intrested in that here is the TL;DR of what i had in mind

Price unchanged, tree unchanged Vengeful Smite: When using smite on a jungle monster it marks him. When the marked monster respawns after being killed under the effect of the mark or when the monster goes out of combat while marked it gets stronger, grants additional experience and bounty if killed by a party member of the smiter and is immune to enemy smite. This effect can stack, only increasing the experience gain ( facoltative).

The actual scavenging smite is not weak at all - however draws a predictable play pattern for the enemy, forces the player to be in dangerous scenarios when he can not afford that and scales really really badly into lategame. This proposal works into the same field - modulating the power growth curve, either of the player/allies or of the enemy by making his camps stronger and harder to put down and denying smite boons.

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How this all started

Few days ago i started watching the DotA2 championship records, just for fun and curiosity. I am no dota player, but it always got my intrest design-wise, since it' s my hobby to meddle with game design under many aspects ( no pun intended @meddler ). Among all the mechanics there is one in particular that got my attenction: jungle camp pulling and stacking. In dota the camps do not reset after a fixed time after they are cleared, but check every x:00 minute of the game and if the camp is empty is refilled; this is used so a player can pull aggro from the monsters, take them away from camp and let it refill without actually clearing it, stacking numerous monsters in the same place. This left me with a bad taste in mouth actually, for various reasons, but i saw a value behind it: by saving time by doing a camp stacked you can spend more time ganking, or you can level up your roamer support that is behind in levels in a short amount of time. Now i don' t know the reality of pug play in dota and i am afraid i have no time to discover it ( so please, if any dota2 player here has a mean to bullshit me please do so and prove me wrong) , but this left me impressed enough, and then i started thinking how a lesson like this could be implemented in LoL in order to have a broader champ select for jungling and allow roamers to be a thing and enhance the depth of the game overall without adding much funky things. Obviously copypasting is sensless - it needed to be undnerstood, reformulated and reintegrated in the game system. Plus making it standard for the base game would break his balance, so it needed to be softer and added elegantly to the game, without breaking its natural flow. Then, i tought about a poster time ago ( don' t remember the name, sorry ) that proposed a change for scavenger smite that, after killing an enemy smited monster, made it more aggressive and less bountiful for the enemy.

And then i mixed up things: why not change the poacher so it can be useful both in aggressive and passive scenarios, while still keeping its niche ( that is modulating power levels, like increasing one and/or damage the other )? Obviously this would not create a scenario like dota, and i am fine for that because i would not like to be completely the same, at all! But could be a new strategic lever, adding new depth of the jungle management. With this change you could focus on distrupting the enemy resources or increase yours, making it way more versatile and less predictable, and the enemy in other hand by seeing the item you got understands that you want to start this kind of tactic... without however knowing what; this can start a seek and destroy minigame, where the enemy tried to intercept the enemy jungler or tries to identify the camp that grants more benefit and destroy it.

This could probably open scenarios where supports might find useful to pick smite, not for clearing the jungle but for distrupting the enemy one or norturing the allied one ( plus neutral camp control), keeping them true to the wills of LoL about smite being a primary tool for jungling and not for laning.

Well, this is all. I also want to add that i am a nobody design wise, just a random dude that got this stuff in mind and wanted to share it. Thanks for reading!