This week we are looking at the Punisher on Infernal Shrines and how you can bait it onto an adjacent lane to possibly prevent a core ending push. Most people are aware of the trick where you bait the Punisher over keep/fort gates to get every structure to attack it and burn it down faster, but this trick is slightly more advanced than that.
This trick can be used in the special situation where your team is defending a late game punisher that has already gone through keep gates and is threatening a core ending push. If you bait the Punisher to jump to an adjacent lane, you can alter its pathing such that it will attack a second keep instead of going for core. The exact circumstances where the Punisher’s pathing will switch is complicated but the basics are that after jumping, the Punisher will prioritize hitting minions, and then structures. Whether the punisher returns to hit the structures in its original lane or stays in its new lane is slightly hard to determine, but the Punisher AI likely looks at things like proximity to structures along with structure health and nearby enemies. Nevertheless, it is still useful to bring the Punisher to an adjacent lane so that the adjacent keep can help burn the Punisher down.