[Patch 3.11] General Discussion - Page 95

* What do you think are the problems with support income?
Realistically, there are two problems here and they are playing off of each other.

A - Supports don't make enough gold to reasonably acquire the current support items (Things like Shurelya, Ohmwrecker, Banner of Command, etc.)

B - The support items cost too much to buy with the gold supports are getting.

My point here is that there's two ways to look at this problem. Either supports aren't getting enough gold, or support items are not balanced to be cost efficient for a supports budget.

If the solution is to increase the amount of gold supports are getting, I feel like this comes with a number of problematic issues.
1 - New sources of gold for Supports need to not be accessible to other roles.
2 - If Supports have more gold, they may be incentivized to buy deathcaps and other selfish items, and forego support itemization entirely. That might be desirable, but I'm going to assume that it's not.
3 - If support itemization is cost effective enough that the Support wants it over our example Deathcap, then why don't solo laners and junglers want this item too? Old Locket and Bulwark are perfect examples of this problem at work.
4 - Since currently a champion is seen viable as support because their abilities are strong with no items, if you increase the amount of gold supports get, you run the risk of other champions becoming viable supports and current supports becoming unviable altogether, which could have a huge range of completely unpredictable champion balance implications.

These issues may be solvable with very careful balancing and I'm interested in seeing what you guys come up with, but I think you could also look at the support itemization problem another way.

If support gold gain were kept roughly the same, but the support items were rebalanced to be cheaper (completed item in a price range of 1500-2000 gold, lets say), very cost efficient but with poor slot efficiency, I feel like this solves some of our problems.
1 - Supports don't have new gold sources so there's no potential for laners to abuse this.
2 - Supports won't be buying selfish items because their gold income remains the same. Instead there are new fun items for them to be buying in a reasonable price range.
3 - Because these items are not 3k gold highly slot efficient pieces, laners will be discouraged from buying them. Low sell costs could further discourage laners from picking them up only to discard them later if it became a problem.



* If we were to give more gold to supports, in what kind of situations would you expect to be getting more gold?
I think, if we do want to slightly increase support income, there are two very easy small things that can be done.

1 - Rebalance GP10 Seals so they compete better with Armor Seals in comparison to GP10 vs Armor Quints. Alternatively, change them from GP10 Seals to GP10 Marks, so that they don't compete with armor, which is an extremely valuable early game support statistic.

2 - Increase the gold gained for killing pink wards. I really liked the idea of upping ward kills to 30 gold and splitting it between the person granting vision and the person killing it. I think it would be neat for different wards to give different amounts of gold again with that system. 10-20 gold total for Explorer wards, 30 total for Sight wards, 50 total for Vision wards. Making them 30 and 50 actually makes killing the ward worth the same percent of that wards cost for both Sight and Vision wards.

Currently since Vision wards give the same amount of gold as Sight Wards, they provide more vision benefit to the placer, the chance of recouping money through destroying enemy wards, without any increased risk if the ward is destroyed. Increasing the amount of killing a Vision Ward to 50 solves this, while decreasing the amount for an Explorer Ward allows you to play a little game with the enemy support where you drop the Explorer Ward to try to get the enemy support to pink it and kill it for almost no gold gain.



* How do we get other players to recognize the power of wards and the vision they provide?
I don't think the problem here is that players don't recognize that wards are powerful. People recognize that wards are powerful. The problem is more that the way the game is played currently incentivizes the team to place most of the warding burden on the support.

To start off with, a team doesn't need an infinite number of wards on the map. You only need so many in key positions, although the higher the skill level of the game the more important they probably are and the more you need.

Then secondly, supports currently do not have much else to buy with their gold. They don't get enough gold to buy big items in timings that are relevant. This is part of why GP10 Seals have gone out of style and GP10 items are a smaller deal than they were in season 2. Supports can't get enough gold to buy big items and if they are only buying wards they don't need GP10.

If there were cost efficient items for the support to be buying, and these items were useful enough that the team wanted the support to have them, then it would be natural for the warding burden to be split up somewhat so that supports could spend their gold on these items. By simply increasing the amount of gold supports have without dealing with the itemization problem, you run the risk of supports just buying even more wards, making vision even easier to obtain and exacerbating the vision problem that you've stated the game already has.



* Are all wards too powerful? Are just pink wards too powerful?
I don't think wards are too powerful at all. I think other itemization choices for supports are not powerful enough. If supports had reasons to start the game with an item, they wouldn't be starting with 5 wards. I'm not sure how you solve this all wards opening problem without screwing with items that other laners might want to buy though, so I'll leave that one to the experts. You could just limit a stack of wards to 3 maximum I suppose, like you did with potions. That would force supports into faerie charm / rejuv bead openings, and force teams to split up who has the wards if they want to litter the entire map with them like you see in pro games sometimes.



* A rant about support items, just for Xelnath
These are basically the issues I see with the current support items. I'll even list what I think of as support items:
Shard of True Ice
Shurelya's Reverie
Banner of Command
Ohmwrecker
Locket of the Iron Solari
Eleisa's Miracle
Twin Shadows
Will of the Ancients
Zeke's Herald
Mikael's Crucible


For starters, most of these items have a lot of regen on them. Regen is only particularly useful to a support during the laning phase. While the support stays in lane for extended periods of time and wants some regen there, once they leave lane and begin doing their roaming/warding duties, they find themselves going back to base a lot, harassing much less, and don't have as much use for regen anymore.

Items like Shurelya's Reverie, Mikael's Crucible and Ohmwrecker are good examples of this problem. While the regen on Philosophers Stone is pretty nice, you're not going to be finishing Shurelya/Ohmwrecker till after laning is over, and by then you don't want the increased regen these items provide, which makes them not look cost efficient to the support.

Shurelya and Ohmwrecker could both be made more desirable by simply not letting them give more regen than Philo Stone, and cutting the price appropriately. Supports like the HP on these items, they like the actives, it's the pricepoint that's killing them. Mikael's could go the same route by just giving less stats and costing less. The Mikael's active is awesome, but it costs too much.

Banner of Command again has a cool active, but gives stats in a questionable way. If Aegis doesn't give any more armor than the base Emblem of Valor now, why does Banner of Command need to? Can't it drop down to 20 armor and cost less? An additional problem I have with Banner of Command is that the health regen from its Valor passive and the health regen from the Aegis Valor passive don't stack (as far as I know). Since Aegis is in general considered the better buy I feel, once an Aegis is on the team Banner of Command is less cost efficient because the health regen passive no longer applies. Would it be such a broken thing if these health regen passives stacked? If it was, couldn't you drop them both from 10 to 7 and make the items a little bit cheaper?

Will of the Ancients used to have a place in the game, but has fallen on hard times. Spirit of the Spectral Wraith is simply more efficient and a better buy if you're looking at selfish stats, and Will of the Ancients is too expensive to get on a support budget. Couldn't you drop WotA from 50+30 AP to 35+30 AP, drop the spellvamp aura from 20% to 15%, and cut the price down to a point where supports might be able to buy it? Vladimir and Akali already have Spectral Wraith, they don't need this thing anymore, so it doesn't need to be a 2500g slot efficient item.

Does Twin Shadows really need to give 40 AP and 40 MR? What if it dropped to 25 MR, 35 AP, and cost a lot less? It really does have a cool active but it costs too much for supports to buy and is too weak as an end-game item for laners to buy.

Zeke's Herald is also awkward because of the stats on it. 20% CDR on this item is excessive. Assuming as a support that I get 5-10% CDR from my masteries, if I also get 20% from Zeke's Herald this really limits how efficient my other item choices are, since Shurelya, Banner of Command, Locket, and potentially my boots all also give CDR. If I get Zeke's I can go over the CDR cap very easily. Couldn't we drop this item to 10% CDR, maybe drop it to 200 HP, and also cut the price?

Shard of True Ice I think actually has a different problem. I rather like the stats on it and the pricepoint is reasonable, it's the active that is awkward and hard to use here. If we cut the GP10 off of this item like with the other ending support items, could we make the active better? Instead of forcing it to be cast on an ally, could it be cast as a ground effect or on an enemy champion? Perhaps casting it on an ally or on the ground gives an AoE, but targeting an enemy champion with it makes it a single target effect? I think if the active on this item were more useful supports would be buying it with the current stats / pricepoint.

Aegis/Locket I think is in a pretty great spot, but has this peculiar problem currently where too much of what makes the item good is in the jump from Aegis to Locket. Completing Aegis gives you 20 HP, 3 more HP regen, and turns the MR into an MR aura, for 375 gold. For 600 gold turning it into a Locket gives you an extra 100 HP, 10% CDR, and the shield active. This is a big jump for only 600 gold. If the HP regen aura was dropped from 10 to 7 and made stackable with Banner of Command, couldn't you adjust it so maybe the upgrade to Aegis only cost something like 250, and the jump from Aegis to Locket was 700 instead of 600?

Finally, Eleisa's Miracle is just awkward and I think probably needs to be changed altogether. My personal preference would be to take Clairvoyance off as a summoner and put it on Eleisa's Miracle as an active, similarly to what you did with Promote and Banner of Command, but that's just my suggestion.


tl;dr
If you increase the amount of gold supports will get, they'll just buy non-support items and more wards.

In order to get them to buy support items, the better strategy is to keep the current gold income, and change the current support items to be cheap, cost efficient, and slot inefficient.

Thanks for letting me rant about this. You guys are great.