Zeke's Harbinger would thrive in the Mage Support meta if it were reworked to be user-friendly.

People often complain about Mage supports such as because once you reach mid- to late-game they just become another solo AP carry.

But what if was usable item? It's an offensive Knight's Vow that provides your APC support +20% AP (which stacks with Rabadon's Deathcap) and your ADC +50% critical strike chance for 8 seconds when you engage an enemy with max charge. It seems like these bonuses would make it a must-buy for an AP-focused support, and your ADC wouldn't complain because someone has their back once late game rolls out.

The problem is that Zeke's Harbinger is outdated, which means that it has a lot of unintuitive design flaws that are holding it back from shining in the Mage Support meta and making APC supports more than vision machines that deal damage.

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The first of these design problems is that the charge system is far from user-friendly and involves an excessive amount of unnecessary timing elements. The biggest culprit for this is that you can't hold on to max charge for longer than 5 seconds, which means if you're clearing minion waves during the calm before the storm of an eminent team fight, you can miss your opportunity for your power bonus if the fight doesn't break out right when you hit max charge.

It's just so far away from how other charge-based items work; it builds up charge passively (which is bad when you can only hold max charge for a moment before it goes back to zero), it doesn't build charge with movement (something that gives you a way to manage charge when there is nothing to attack), and like I explained above, there is a non-intuitive timing challenge minigame thrown in because your charges are going to come and go on their own and you have to make the stars align to get the bonus stats when they're needed.

Changing Zeke's Harbinger so that it users can hold on to max charge would make its stat bonuses a lot more appealing. I can see APC supports selfishly building Harbinger for the 20% AP steroid, which lures them into staying near the ADC and co-op building and utilizing the max charge bonuses. Changing the way it gathers charge to be more consistent with Statikk Shiv and Rapid Firecannon would also be a nice quality of life change.

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The other issue is that Zeke's Harbinger's secondary bonus to the ADC (which provides flat 50% critical strike chance) appeals to crit-reliant ADCs, problem being that standard crit builds ( or and + ) give the ADC 70-80% critical strike chance already, so half of the item's bonus is simply lost (you can't have 130% critical strike chance). Since 50% critical strike chance is such a large bonus for a stat that has a hard ceiling, Harbinger would need an updated way of handling the ADC's max charge bonus.

Option 1: Cause bonus critical strike chance that exceeds 100% to overflow as bonus critical strike damage. If your ADC has 70% critical strike chance and Harbinger activates with its flat +50% bonus, the ADC would gain 30% to reach 100% critical strike chance and also gain an additional 20% critical strike damage. This means that Harbinger's max charge bonus provides both the support and the carry with a stat bonus that only one other item gives them: The support gets a small-scale and the ADC gets a mini .

Option 2: Change the bonus critical strike chance to bonus attack speed. It's harder to max attack speed than it is to max critical strike chance. No big paragraph to explain this one.

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With the upcoming buffs for crit-based ADCs and the existing Mage Support meta, I feel like Zeke's Harbinger has a strong place in the game that it simply isn't fulfilling in its current iteration. I would love to see Zeke's modernized to function well in modern gameplay, which would expand on the barren AP Mage Support itemization scene and encourage AP Mage supports to work with the ADC beyond earlygame.

I hope I didn't scare you away with the big post!

Thank you very much if you read the whole thing!