New idea to make the support role much more appealing
I feel that people shy away from the support role for many reasons.
- Doesn't make many shot calls. Generally has to stick with teammates and only gets what objectives they try to get, and with the squishy supports, what enemies to go after as well.
- Unimpactfull. That's right, when you're that 5 levels too low Nami or Sona that does pitiful damage and speeds up allies by some pitiful amount, and also has an ultimate you can even safely get close enough to enemies to make much use of, it feels too hard to impact the game in any significant manner and it feels like the other players decide just about everything.
- Overall weaker/lower level/less gold than the rest of the team.
So, combining all of these, it seems that there is a solution that would fix them all, but it would be a rather significant change that many might not like, but I think it would make the game a lot better.
What if you couldn't buy a Frostfang? No, I don't mean to remove it, either. What if, there were actually some objective you had to complete in order to get a Frostfang? Say that it was to get at least 600 gold using your spellthief's. Then you'd just get Frostfang automatically and for free. And it otherwise couldn't be upgraded. You might say this is ridiculous, but hear me out. It would give support players an actual objective. And upon completing it, would actually yield a reward. And it's one that they earned. All the current objectives are just ones that the rest of the team earns, and it feels like the support doesn't have enough of an impact on. Not only that, it would allow for really good players that can sneak in tons of trades in lane that they are really good at winning every last one of a way to actually get more than just one or two extra health pots by the enemy team used out of it. And then, this could be taken even further to say that your Frostfang could upgrade to Frost Queen's automatically when you got to something like 1200 gold earned with it. This way, supports would be much more on par with the power level of the other champions (if they're good) since they would have a lot more effective gold than they currently do. And then a good support would have much more of an ability to win or lose the game for the team, rather than oftentimes feeling too irrelevant.
This would present a few flaws, such as the gold income items having to be of a similar difficulty to rank up, but that wouldn't be much trouble to get at least close. Also they'd have to be hard enough so as to not get upgraded by AP mids, but seeing how they currently work that likely wouldn't be a problem, unless you're a horrible mid player that would earn 600 gold worth of missed minions with your coin or something.
Also Ruby Sightstone needs a big buff as it's currently not worth buying if there's literally anything else you can still buy. And the eye items need a buff, too, possibly given them the old inspiration mastery so that those that fall too far behind in experience can at least still remain somewhat relevant.
Spider Goddess