Why don't people smite the red buff?
When watching jungle guides on YouTube, people who start off with Krugs never seem to get the red buff smite bonus. Almost all of them do this.
- Krugs, use smite
- Red buff
- Raptors, use smite
It makes more sense, to me, to do this
- Krugs, use smite
- Raptors
- Red Buff, use smite
This way you don't rely so much on your pots because you smited back essentially two pots worth of hp.
Is there a reason for not doing this?
The reason is krugs give a bonus stun on every 5 attacks when you smite it. Raptors will also give a buff after you smite it allowing you to see wards that see you, a temporarily oracles.
If you smite red you get a small health bonus from it. The raptor bonus has way more potential to help when you gank a lane to see if there is any wards you are seen by when heading towards a lane.
The krugs bonus helps you take even less damage every time you proc the stun way better then a one time health bonus.
It's faster to walk from Krugs, to Red, to Raptor than to go from Krugs to Raptor to Red.
Additionally, the restored health from smiting Red buff will most likely only provide much of a benefit in the event of a close fight; while with ward knowledge/clearing from Raptor camp, you can make an ambush more likely to succeed, or fail quickly so that you can return to clearing.
You don't use smite on red buff in general because most of the viable junglers (not speaking about meta) can easily survive the first jungle route. Even with tank junglers and slow jungle clear you will not die as long as you kite the buffs a little bit and play with good runes (depending on your champion).
It also depends on your current division. If you are playing in low-elo like bronze to low gold you can use smite for the red buff to restore hp because you don't necessarily need the buff of the raptors which reveals stealth wards, since players dont often place deep wards early and even if they do, their map awareness is usually not too good.
I would still advice to smite the krugs. You will probably save more health points because of the stun than you would restore by smiting red.
Additionally I would not recommend to clear the raptors camp when playing as an assassin in the jungle since they hurt a lot and you can gank in the 3rd minute.
If you are low on hp after your first jungle route it always helps to kill the scuddler crab. It gives you a lot of health when killing it and you won't take any damage from it.
PS: Hard CC reduces the scuddler crabs armor and magic resistance from 60 to 10 which makes it a lot easier to kill it fast.