So if Tracker's Knife was removed for being mandatory in Pro Play...

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I didn't say it isn't having a significant effect. I said it hasn't proven to be mandatory.

Banner is an effect that helps teams secure a win. It would make sense that the winning team would be more likely to have one, because the team that is ahead is more likely to get baron, and banner is better with baron. There isn't reason that didn't exist in 8.3 that exists in 8.4 to pick Banner as a team that can't get Baron.

Even if it is determined banner is an unhealthy item for long term in the game I think its important for players understand how banner has evolved and understand how banner really works. Banner if currently being used for a high chance win win situation for the team that gets baron. If one team gets ahead, or believe they can secure baron by superior objective control or mid game teamfighting, they will get banner. However if a team was planning on it but didnt get a lead, sometimes they will just sit on aegis and build a more teamfight item to boost the odds of actually getting baron. Some teams were able to get baron and break base regardless of banner, and sometimes banner had a meaningful impact on its own in the game. While early regions went banner crazy, eventually players realized the minion dematerializer can just delete banner minions and a really strange game was being played during siege not really seen before. This lead to things like back and forth barons or multiple barons needed to be obtained for teams because either their strat got countered, their strat was too narrowminded, or they were playing a relatively similar game to what was happening before. This shows adaptation and brings to question the true impact of banner. At the end of the day, banner isn't an effective strategy in most elos because it requires coordination, one of the strongest power swings in the game, and the ability to execute the push with it. What is way more important is if it is decided as a low interaction, unhealthy, and unfun strategy and way to play league of legends at the top side, and if that is the case is the item need of adjustments, rework, removal etc. I hope people appreciate how much effort is put into understanding and comprehending the change and I wish the best for the balance team! <3 Love these posts keep it up!

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Agreed. But sometimes it can feel like there's no good reason to fight until Baron's up, and since it doesn't spawn for twenty minutes, that can feel like too much downtime.

please dont tell me that the next step for proplayers is going to be to make baron spawn at 10 min

I mean, I feel like that's a result of the disparity in reward between kills, towers and baron. Baron's value is so out of line with almost every other objective in the game, it makes perfect sense for it to be a major contest.

I think Bannon minions are just symptomatic of this, in that they are getting max value out of an already extremely valuable objective. I can think of a couple ways to stop that:

A) Making Rift Herald maybe respawn, or stay spawned later, and pushing Baron to be the late-game closer it is maybe intended to be. Or B) you need to nerf some other aspect of its reward or it will be so hotly contested it will warp the rest of play around the 20 min mark like we're seeing. Or C) make Baron at 20 min statistically difficult to defeat, so that it's a bigger risk to fight it if you know it can be contested, i.e. if you start it and they contest you'll be at a large disadvantage.

If it's meant to help early teams ahead by midgame to close out, then it's as it should be. I think the increased pressure for baron fights is good for the game, as it prevents turtling, and also means that the incentive to get baron is at or close to the right place.

Cosmic Insight had it before, and not significantly much. Ingenious Hunter has a more valuable level of it, but item CDR is at the strongest when you stacked up to the max because it stacked additively. You could get 61% item CDR stacking all the item CDR sources, and it actually was insanely overpowered if you could use it well. AP support? Constant barrage of spooky ghost for catches and just safe map travel. Enchanter support? Could use Redemption as a casual tool, not a major ult level CD, and may as well just call the Talisman active Sona's E. Because it had nearly the same value with its lower than 20 second cooldown. Tank? Get that Righteous Glory down to a 35 second CD. Because you really need to have that level of initiation on Alistar every 35 seconds where you can just RG up to them, Q them with the RG slow, then get behind them and kick em back into the team. Let alone the triple ZZ'rot cheese where you could get 3 of them out at once, or drop a banner 2 times over the span of 2.5 minion waves spawning to really make a wave slowpush in your favor.

If you were running double item CDR runes, Ruby was worth an effective +33% more CDR, not 20%, because of how insane CDR starts to scale once you get over certain values (Every point of further CDR being worth more than the last on an exponential curve. For example, the value of CDR from 0-10% CDR is less than 2/3rds of the value of the CDR going from 30-40%).