[11.15] RTO's Challenger Poppy Top Lane Guide (2024)

Poppy isn't the best at dueling, nor is she the strongest lane bully, but she can do both well. During laning phase you generally want to be focusing on CS, and trading when your Grasp of the Undying is up. Your first item, Bami's Cinder, can charge Grasp of the Undying without wasting Iron Ambassador's proc, or using mana on your Hammer Shock.
With Conqueror and Ignite, you want to be playing as aggressive as possible, taking takes with your Hammer Shock and autoing your opponent when you have stacked Conqueror. You're taking this keystone against weak matchups, you want to punish them, and snowball yourself, ignoring CS and killing your laner consistently.

Your general aim of playing Poppy early game is to get the first turret kill, along with turret plating for that extra gold and map pressure. If you're taking the first turret kill, you have a lot of map pressure available to you, allowing you to Teleport for ganks or counter ganks, or run around the map and Teleport back top when the enemy starts to siege your tower.
While you're aiming for the turret, make sure to ward your river, jungle and the enemies jungle as much as possible, you don't want to get ganked and snowball the enemy team.

At level 6, you can disengage unwanted fights with Keeper's Verdict, pushing the enemies away back towards their base, helping you escape, or you can use it to knock up an enemy and combo, if you're making the effort to try and kill them.

Once you're 6+, you can focus on pushing the wave into the enemy tower and trying to take some early plates with Demolish - if you chose to take this rune.
Help out your jungler if he comes to take Rift Herald, and secure first blood tower for your team. At this point you can potentially invade the enemies jungle, taking away vital XP, gold and their blue buff, if you're on red side.

Outside of laning phase, you have the option to group with your team and take objectives, or split push. If your team has a strong team fight, you can group with them, invading the enemy jungle, forcing fights over objectives, or pushing lanes.

The ideal times to split push are as follows -

If Baron Nashor is alive and your Teleport is available, you can split push bot lane.
If Baron Nashor is alive and your Teleport is down, you will be split pushing top lane.

If Baron Nashor is dead, and your Teleport is down, you will split push bot lane, especially if a dragon will be spawning.
If Baron Nashor is dead, and your Teleport is available, you can split push top lane.

You want to split push the lane opposite to the most important, neutral objective, if your Teleport is available. This way, you can take the majority of pressure off the objective, as the enemies will not be able to answer you solo, and they give up the objective to your team. If you know the enemies will be collapsing on you soon, you will want to spam ping your team to complete the objective as quickly as possible. If the enemies collapse on your team, you can Teleport to them to quickly reach the fight, or chunk down the enemies defenses.
Make sure you have good vision around you, so you can see enemies coming from fog of war, which you can either back off, or choose to take the fight, potentially securing a 1v2 or using Keeper's Verdict to push them back, wasting their time and allowing you to escape.

If you're in the middle of a fight, you want to be looking for enemy missteps, Flash Heroic Charge into terrain to stun them and burst them down, or push them into your team. You want to be peeling for your team, pushing away any engage and denying the enemies backline any pressure. You can use Keeper's Verdict to completely negate an engage such as a Fiddlesticks ultimate. You can flank opponents, and Heroic Charge them into your team, or stunning them against a wall if they're a high damage threat such as an enemy Vayne. Be careful if the enemy team have a Lulu, she will Whimsy you, completely negating any of your damage and essentially rendering you useless - being potentially dangerous if you have just used Heroic Charge into the enemy team. The same goes for any very hard CC such as Morgana's Dark Binding or Malzahar's Nether Grasp.