support balance issues
so i was wonder what kindof plans riot has to balance support
historically support balance has been a non-stop issue as at times they become so over powered they start showing up in other roles or some champs are perma-picked/banned. this is usually caused by them having poor scaling or early game stats but any buffs riot make on the role even when its small end up making some powerful lane bullies that shut every other champ out even in solo roles (example lulu being top or mid) then riot has to nerf the champ that may or may not have benn balanced for support into a state of them performing far below average in the role they were intended.
when they added support items it helped a lot but now other roles will start picking up these items when they get even the slightest buffs. so in-order to stop this from happening on most non-support champs they have to move stats to the actives and such which then makes support to strong again so then they have to nerf either the champs abusing the items or nerf the item all together.
the last problem the support role is its a duo lane and the only one that they can go to. (excluding weird strats or roles specific champs like ivern). because of this duality of their main role they are extra hard to balance if u Nerf the ADC the supports my become to strong and with one small lead my cause the enemy to be unable to farm and get exp. these are usually utility supports, much like sona, lulu, nami, Janna and soraka have become like this after many of the changes listed above.
i think riot should give champs designed for support their own stat.
for example remove heal/shield power off the items and make something new that's similar to AP but has a scaling factor unique to each champ.
lets call it spirit for now and make it scale similar to the old heal/shield but have each champ scale diffent with it for example
janna shield has a 20% ap and 100% spirit but lulu has a shield that has a 20% ap ratio but a 120% spirit
they can even keep the items the same just change the H/S% to spirit so if it gets 10%H/S then it will read 10 SP each SP(SPIRIT POINT) will be = to 1% H/S so janna will get 10%H/S and lulu would get 12% H/S u can even do this for none healing/shielding abilities. like instead of the ap ration on namis passive u can change it to spirit. the best part is they can start this change by doing a direct conversion to spirit under the hood w/o actually changeing any actuall stats and then make changes to individual champs so as to not change the strength of the entire role. this would also protect special strats like a brusier or machine gun lulu since the wont have to change base values or the other scaling ratios as often
i would like to see if riot could respond to this on if they have thought of or are trying something like this right now.
(DISCLAIMER): there are are most definitely type-o's in this comment i just typed this up before work and didn't have time to fix it. I will try to answer questions when i have time.