We have reached a point where ardent censer has made any non enchantress, useless.
Even 
. If your support doesnt get any value off of 
You may as well dodge.
107 Comments
RiotRiotRepertoir33 votesI think between the change to Ardent Censer in 7.19 and the upcoming Ancient Coin / Spellthief's changes in 7.20, this should begin to feel less true. Needless to say, we'll be watching it and reacting accordingly for 7.21/7.22.
We've been discussing putting up a post that details the decisions we made around Ardent Censer and the bot lane meta as the season draws to a close, so hopefully if/when that is posted, we can all have a good conversation around which decisions were and weren't correct.
Abyssphere9 votesThat sounds really interesting. I think a lot of us would love to know the philosophy behind bot lane balance in season 7, particularly if some interesting things went into deciding what to do with Censer and the like.
Spideraxe2 votesThats gonna be an interesting read, especially how things went to a 180 for marksman this season
The Yetii Rider5 votesRepetoir do you honestly think that 5 more AP is going to make a significant difference in the threat level Spellthief's poses?
To say nothing of how crappy every support's AP ratios are to make sure they don't go into mid lane.
RiotRiotRepertoir6 votesRepetoir do you honestly think that 5 more AP is going to make a significant difference in the threat level Spellthief's poses?
Really depends what makes for significance here. Most offensive AP ratios fall in the 0.4-0.6 range (this is a guess off the top of my head), so interpretation of significance then comes down to whether adding ~5-8 damage to trades will do anything. If I had to guess, that alone wouldn't be enormous, but with a reduction in mana to the coin users as well, we could see some shifts.
Khristophoros1 votesReally depends what makes for significance here. Most offensive AP ratios fall in the 0.4-0.6 range (this is a guess off the top of my head), so interpretation of significance then comes down to whether adding ~5-8 damage to trades will do anything. If I had to guess, that alone wouldn't be enormous, but with a reduction in mana to the coin users as well, we could see some shifts.
What does this have to do with Ardent Censer? You can go Spellthief's on any enchanter. People are picking them for their abuse of Ardent Censer which you can buy regardless of which gold item you have.
Daedric Etwahl2 votesYou CAN go spellthief's on any enchanter, but who besides maybe Sona would even want to?
The problem is that Coin nets you just as much if not more gold as spellthief's while doing less work, and that allows the support to just sit back and be passive until they can rush their censer.
Khristophoros2 votesCoin is not the reason people buy Ardent Censer.
Daedric Etwahl2 votesOf course it isn't, but the mad gold gen Coin provides for relatively no effort allows for a faster, safer Censer rush than Spelltheif's can give.
Modern Support5 votesThe problem doesn't really revolve around Ardent Censer anymore after the changes in 7.18.
The problem of the current meta is in Coin & Fearless (this one will be removed soon)
I'll touch a little on fearless it gives 1.5 ar & mr per level + 10% bonus on RANGED champions and melees while most masteries have a reduced effect when they grant resists for ranged champions or the MR is halved.
It was a mistake to not halve the MR this mastery simply gives too much value it overcrowded the other options after the cunning tree nerf.
When we look at the ancient coin line it provides way too much; I like the idea of nerfing the mana but that's in general not the current problem with the item.
The problems with the item are how it procs and the clarity of it.
Coin has probably the strongest quest reward in the game Emperor's Favor - Champion Takedowns grant a coin that attracts to you magnetically that grant 40g + 10% missing mana (15 min)
Removing this could bring coin back in line for solo play as games tend to drift towards high kill numbers.
This allows coin to function as a pseudo Morellonomicon for 850 gold which is not healthy balance wise in mid-late game teamfights on enchanter champions.
The problem with the nerf riot has on PBE for coin is you cannot control what type of coin drops be it gold or mana as the drops are psuedo random.
Making it feel worse to get a drop isn't a good design lever I hope riot pursues a complete coin function overhaul.
I'd like to see coin have more visual clarity on what type of coin will drop and when it will drop currently the only one that has any clarity is cannon minions.
My proposed rework for coin would have it be similar to Alistar Passive (Ideally rebalanced numbers on the drops)
After x minions die a coin will drop alternating between Yellow and Blue.
Yellow: 25 Gold or 40 gold depending on tier of item
Blue: 7.5% missing mana (10 min) or 10% missing mana (15 min) depending on tier of item
Coin would have VFX similar to Relic shield having particles float around you showing your allies and opponents when they can expect the coin drop.
Another problem with coin is the inconsistent pickup range it scales with level but this is not stated on the item it feels clunky to go from mid-late game pickup range back to early game pickup range.
I believe after 2 of the same coin proc it will drop the other type (unsure if this is true need confirmation)
As a spectator its incredibly confusing to tell which coin is which these changes should fix it.
We need more visual clarity on support gold generation items spellthief and coin have none currently.
Relic shield is the best designed support gold generation item riot have ever made it's clear when your ally or opponent has stacks you can play around when they do and when they don't.
Why do we not have spellthief VFX to show stacks also vs having to check the buff bar?
Anyway my suggestion for spellthief would be to raise the damage from 8 -> 10 on the tier 1 spellthief's to match the gold generation.
This is a minor buff but coupled with the current buff on PBE I'd be interested to see how it would go the main problem with buffing the damage is the way it procs is inconsistent across champions.
Lulu Pix Counts as a stack vs Brand DOT counting as multiple stacks maybe spellthief's wording should be changed from "your damaging attacks & abilities" to "your unique damaging attacks & abilities"
This could act as a design lever to buff it on supports that would like it while making it less oppressive on Zyra, Brand, MF, and Malz support (while these are not in the meta currently with changes to spellthiefs you have to be wary)
Spellthief's is near similar gold generation in lane but the problem comes from mid-late game where it's rare to proc it.
The item is also riskier than coin is when you are behind it becomes difficult to proc.
I made a bigger post a week back if you want to read it go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/72flny/design_thoughts_718
DeathBurst1 votesthe strongest quest reward in the game Emperor's Favor - Champion Takedowns grant a coin that attracts to you magnetically that grant 40g + 10% missing mana (15 min)
I'm 99% certain that this is true even before you complete the quest. The quest reward is the MS buff to allies walking towards you.
The problem with the nerf riot has on PBE for coin is you cannot control what type of coin drops be it gold or mana as the drops are psuedo random.
They are NOT. The first one is random, then they just alternate.
Abyssphere2 votesCoin on takedown & ally MS are both quest rewards for Coin.
Modern Support3 votesCoin does alternate I checked it when I woke up I wrote this in a hurry.
I'd still prefer this to be stated on the tooltip and shown in the buff bar what type of coin you will receive next.
The assist coin only happens after you complete the quest though which is stated in the tooltip.
DeathBurst1 votesAs you just said yourself, tooltip are not always 100% exact. I'm pretty sure the Assist Coin happen even before the end of the quest, from my in-game experience. Did you actually check that up?
Modern Support2 votesYes, I checked in practice tool you can also check if you don't believe me.
Khristophoros2 votesI think between the change to Ardent Censer in 7.19 and the upcoming Ancient Coin / Spellthief's changes in 7.20, this should begin to feel less true. Needless to say, we'll be watching it and reacting accordingly for 7.21/7.22.
We've been discussing putting up a post that details the decisions we made around Ardent Censer and the bot lane meta as the season draws to a close, so hopefully if/when that is posted, we can all have a good conversation around which decisions were and weren't correct.
It's only going to feel less true when it no longer feels overbearing to have a support giving tons of attack speed to the ADC + their self, and sometimes the whole team.
I can't really imagine how it wouldn't feel that way. Like I don't think the gold income of the items is the issue here. I used to regularly play mage supports and I didn't really care what the income was like. I actually have been using coin lately for the mana sustain and to build into the movement speed active. But ever since the raw power of Ardent became obvious I don't feel like playing mage supports anymore. Again, it has literally nothing to do with gold income. I never had any issues getting enough items on a mage support in the first place. It's completely because of how powerful Ardent seems to be.
Linna Excel3 votesRight now if you look at all the champs that are still strong as supports, just about all of them are ardent censor users. In fact in terms of win rate, 3 ardent censor users are in the top 6. I don't want to see Soraka/Sona nerfed just because ardent is still out of line.
The only other thing I can think of being the problem is that ADCs themselves are so broken 
that the passive supports that keep them alive if they mess up are just feed ADC's OPness.
LethalTempo Jhin2 votesHave a great story from 7.19.
I was watching a 
OTP Ikeepittaco 2 days ago. He doesn't even play Jhin ADC because of how garbage it is. He is basically one-tricking Jhin mid right now for that reason.
But he played ADC Jhin once in a D5-D4 game. 
with 
against 
with 
and FERVOR OF BATTLE in their botlane.
The Jhin was losing trades against the Kog'Maw from LEVEL 2 without any real Soraka influence. He got obliterated at level 7 (when Kog'Maw had 
) after backing.
Like honestly. Why should a defensive, superscaling lane win early game trades??? WHAT IS THAT BS???
Oh, and, Jhin got towerdove by said Kog'maw at 16 minutes. What a great balance.
Botlane this season was a mess. From utility meta to lethality meta to BoRK meta to Ardent meta. There were like 2 patches when you could play basically any ADC and you would have a win condition (except 
). Around patch 7.12 and 7.13.
Tristana is oppressive for 2 months because of her insane safety, scaling and all-in, she got barely touched. Twitch to this day wasn't nerfed after being a soloQ terror for 5 months. Playing anything like 
is a joke because interactive champions like 
just laugh at their poke.
Not to mention, Coin gives so much extra gold it's not even funny. If you remove the stats and only leave the gp10 and coin drops, people would still buy it.
Using Censer (ignoring the shield/heal that is used) in total gives 4K GOLD OF STATS (from Censer stats and its passives), AT LEVEL 7.???
Starcraft243ver6 votesJhin is supposed to lose against long range AS based champions.
LethalTempo Jhin2 votesSo Jhin is supposed to lose lane to hypercarries? Great.
Starcraft243ver7 votesTo lose duels i meant. Jhin provides a lot of utility from 8000 miles away. So he has to be bad at close range.
Abyssphere4 votesJhin is a caster. He's supposed to kill people by using his abilities well. Kog'Maw literally just auto-attacks. You should absolutely lose a straight up auto-attack duel to a Kog throughout the game as Jhin, because you're playing into his strengths and ignoring your own. Losing that fight and crying about it shows that you have no understanding of your champion whatsoever.
SciFi Scrivener4 votesBot lane meta is just fine. Once you removed the healing from Ardent Censer, life is fine in the duo lane. ADCs should be the damage dealers mid to late game, and their support should stick by their side for a good portion of the game. That is what makes the duo work so well. Other lanes should fear the duo when they roam or swap lanes.
Keep up the good work, Riot!!
PB4UAME3 votesYeah fuck 60% of the players, and keep the support as the ADC's bitch, tethered to them on a dog leash the whole fucking game, so yeah, really fuck 80% of the team. Only ADCs should matter, and be impactful. In fact, they shouldn't just have the highest form of damage that requires literally no skill, cannot be missed, and takes no resources to use, while also being the best form of damage against every type of objective, be it towers, epic monsters, inhibitors, other champions, or the nexus itself, ADCs will kill everything quicker than any other class, so let's just make them the only ones worth playing, and the other 8 people trying to play the game can go fuck themselves.
chipndip12 votesWhy do you keep nerfing the mana from coin and not the gold gen from coin? The big issue is that these supports just scale into full build faster than before while playing the safest and easiest option for gold gen.
I don't understand why you guys are so opposed to doing something about coin's overall gold gen. Like...getting free 40+ coins on take downs. It already gets more gold, why slap on even more free gold? Isn't this the type of snowball mechanic that caused us to change the original dragon? Maybe there'd be another type of reward on take downs for the item if it honestly needs that type of thing?
Fairyfleur18 votesIt's not like these non enchanters have pretty good stats or anything.
https://i.gyazo.com/e1fdd46d8c646274c6947d168140dce7.png 50% winrate with 15% pickrate along with a #1 banrate.
https://i.gyazo.com/a632277f2bc5c1b25295d686f689f8b1.png 52% winrate with a 10% pickrate
https://i.gyazo.com/d5cbc94fe32c9c4ffcc9fe9d45bf1e60.png 48% winrate, but has the highest pickrate of all supports in plat+ Korean soloQ; 25%.
Ardent Censer is a strong item right now, but it isn't game-breaking to the point where everyone who doesn't use it is trash. Cut it out.
HaIlMonitor2 votesThresh only has a 46.7% in NA with D+. Is there any reason you are using stats from another meta?
Also in NA the winrate on supports goes 
in that order for top 5 winrates. The top 10 win-rate and play-rate of ardent is pretty wonky towards ardent users.
Fairyfleur5 votesI realize that enchanters are strong right now; my point is that non-enchanters aren't 'useless' like OP claims. These champions have high playrates while also having pretty stable winrates.
Also, I listed a 48% WR for Thresh, and yours is only .4% less; what do you mean by 'from another meta'?
HaIlMonitor2 votesI mixed up the 6 and 7. Also different regions have different meta's like in KR right now Kartus top has a massive 58% winrate in D+, here Karthus barely has a 50% winrate.
Provengreil2 voteswell lets not overlook that despite everything else in play, thresh and leona are just fun as hell to play.
DracosKasu2 votesYou also need to look at the banrate of each champion. Janna and Lulu are at high ban rate which result to character like Leona and Blizz to generally fight against each other more then Janna/Lulu vs Leona/Blitz.
You cant really say that X is fine when most of the time they doesnt really fight vs Y.
LadyRenly17 votesyet any enchanter that gets hooked by thresh is guaranteed to die level 6
Fairyfleur2 votespretty much
yoshi279017 votesR.I.P. 
& 
Papa Andrei7 voteschecks last 10 ranked games with Leona definitely useless!!
Firethorn13 votesI mean my last 3 games as a support in plat-diamond have been without ardent and we won pretty hard. (2/3 of them were against a support with ardent). Might be a bit powerful still, but you can still definitely win games without it.
SadKill3 votesIt's not as dumb is it was in 7.18 and I would wager more than half of the people using it now are just following the worlds meta even though it's a patch behind.
Lost R12 votesSpeaking as the Last Support, you are dead wrong, a liar, and you are inflexible and uncreative. The non-enchanters are still just as perfectly viable; most people who support these days are conscripted Yasuo mains who can't actually play the role, and everyone is so obsessed with the Ardent Censer they can't see the forest through the Ardent Censer. They can't even spell Censer right.
TheConn4 votesokay, then why is it ardent's meta at worlds?
EndlessSorcerer53 votesWorlds is being played on the patch before Ardent Censer was nerfed/altered.
I'm not going to say it is (or isn't) a problem in the current patch; just that the pros aren't playing on the current patch.
Kaeblen4 votesconscripted Yasuo mains
[sg-lulu]
TonyTonyMordecai3 votesThey found us out [sg-ahri-1]
xelaker7 votesI got to gold this year with a large variety of supps
Ben Sharpio1 votesgold isnt an accomplishment anymore. It lost its value.
SadKill4 votesThere are more than 60% of the community that would probably be happy to be able to get to gold if they could. Just because it's not much of an accomplishment for you anymore doesn't mean a whole lot of other people struggle to even achieve that.
Magi Mayvin6 votes[{quoted}](name=Bish im saucin,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=7fJBGRE7,comment-id=,timestamp=2017-10-08T15:00:11.198+0000)
Even
Thresh is actually one of the few non enchanters that are still a great support.
Hovering Hentai5 votesI made this point to my friend and to prove me wrong he took Taric without buying Censer with me playing Ezreal.
We won both the lane and the game
We then did a follow up game with censer, won lane and almost lost game, thankfully he was able to ult us through Yi's damage.
Censer is definitely out of control but not having it isn't the instant loss people think it is
PePsiLemoNN5 votesI hate but I don't mind that isn't meta for once ;)
sky blower4 votesDude the last change to before 7.17 nerf was back in 7.2 and no one was complaining about it. Now people are complaining that non-enchanters can't compete with enchanters because of ? Seriously?
NotCounter4 voteshard engage supports will never be useless if executed well
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