Support idea; Sacrifice and Warding

So we all accept that the Support role is suffering from a lack of power/influence in-game, as well as reduced experience and gold making the role feel less impactful as the game progresses. In turn, this is having an impact on player perception and willingness to play the role.

My suggestion for helping to alleviate this is to go down what has shown to be a quite successful design tool; the Smite/Jungle Item combo. By tying a summoner spell to an item slot, and making that spell very specific to the role they fill can make the role more successful.

By introducing a new summoner spell that would only appeal to supports, and tying it to their support item, you can focus more power towards the supports role, while minimising the risk of that power leaking into other lanes. Below is my suggestion of an example of how this could work;

Item Removed: Knights Vow (removed or adjusted to a different passive as it’s been stolen)

Summoner Spell: Sacrifice - Sacrifice 10% of your total HP. Target/Nearest ally gains 10% of their total HP as a shield. after 5 seconds, shield converts to HP and you regain 10% of your total HP. Cannot overheal.

Relic Shield modifier - Transfer 10% of your total health to target as a shield; for 5 seconds, heal for 50% damage done by ally, and take 50% of damage taken by your ally as true damage in their stead.

Spellthief’s Edge additional effect - Target ally takes 40% less damage from the last Champion they damaged for 3 seconds, and applies a 1 second slow with all damage done.

Gold Coin additional effect - Sacrifice cost is halved, and both players receive bonus MS towards allied towers.

Sacrifice provides no additional benefit to the caster; they put themselves at a health disadvantage in return for protecting an ally. Possessing a support item modifies the spell to provide greater benefits to the target ally, and minimal benefit to the caster, while also greatly augmenting the utility that the caster provides their carry, using familiar effects that players are already familiar with.

A secondary benefit to this also goes to ADCs; with the additional benefits gained from Sacrifice, Heal becomes less of a necessity for ADCs and could prompt more variety in their summoner spells; Heal efficacy wouldn’t be affected by the Sacrifice shield or heal, so it would still be viable, but it becomes less crucial when the support can provide some of that effect.

By tying support items to taking Sacrifice, you admittedly would reduce the presence of Ignite being taken by supports, but you also open up the ability to give additional beneficial effects to support items that might be overpowered in other positions; additional exp gain for being near allies, or roaming, or even flat gold regen increases to the items.

Warding The second major issue that Supports face is the gold drain caused by warding. While much less of an issue than it used to be, red wards are still a support priority, and something that puts a consistent drain on already lower gold resources. My solution to this would be a trinket that is tied to Sacrifice, on a similar cooldown to an upgraded red trinket. This trinket would either directly place red wards, or, to keep things interesting, modify an existing ward into a red ward, that doesn’t apply to the red ward limit. Modifying your own ward would use your red trinket slot, but modifying an ally's would use the ward slot it already does (i.e. if that ally placed 3 more wards the red would disappear, but placing a red wouldn't remove it).

This would allow supports to place, on a strict cooldown, multiple red wards, by modifying either a ward they’ve placed, or one an ally has already used, for greater vision control. The Sacrifice limit would also prevent more than 1 being on a team at a time, limiting the spread of the additional red wards.

So that’s it. These are my suggestions for some minor changes that could help to better focus the Support role onto a strong utility providing force, while opening up levers for better match influence through the game by giving a support-locked item that can give them a small boost to keep up with their team.