Suggestions for Fixing Support Income

Now that preseason is out I feel once again that support gold generation is bottom-of-the-barrel. From my perspective I believe there are two paths to improving this. Either support items need to generate more gold or supports need to be given access to higher stat-value items.

Lets start with gold generation items. I've never had a game where has generated more than 2200g (or 2100g in the case of ). The purpose of a "gold income" item is to invest gold now in order to procure more items in the future. If these items don't ever provide a return on investment then at best they can be considered a discount item for supports. However, we run into problems when simply buffing the gold generation on these items. If too much g/10 is buffed then other lanes may start to purchase it. Even if the g/10 is put onto the unique passive then it will affect the gating of items like . The only way to prevent the early-game abuse of the component items is to buff the late-game values of the completed items. The way I see it that can be done in two ways, either their unique passive can become far more lucrative and easy to trigger or the completed item can simply refund a certain amount of its total cost.

Some thoughts on: passive

• Upon completion Spoils of War inverts the activation of its passive. When a nearby allied champion strikes a minion with a basic attack the support receives a heal and gold. This will make the passive gold generation dramatically more reliable in mid-late game when teams are moving around the map, clearing waves and keeping mobile without having to wait for your tiny little autoattack to execute a minion.
• Speaking of executes, the passive execute should be based on the percentage of minion health, not a flat amount. It should also scale higher the more complete the item is.

Some thoughts on: passive

• Probably increasing the gold/minion would be the most effective way to increase gold generation, I could see wacky things happening with the health regen if the radius of the passive were increased too much.

Some thoughts on: passive

• Either make each stack generate more gold or increase the number of available stacks, in mid-late game all of your abilities are going to be on cooldown at some point in a teamfight. It doesn't make any sense not to encourage a support to be in the thick of it throwing out auto's or using up their stacks for extra damage output.

Some thoughts on: active

• Perhaps adding a new minigame for successful usage of the actives could generate gold. If the active damages an opponent/gets a teammate within range reward with a lump sum of gold.

I can imagine that it will take a combination of some or all of these to increase the gold generation of supports without creating edge-cases of abuse. But there is also another way to even out the gold differential between supports and other lanes.

High-stat items for supports.

are items which are rarely seen in competitive play, especially on non-support champions. Interestingly enough one of the only times that is seen in competitive play is on supports when that team is ahead. I believe these items - with some minor tweaks - could be the premiere item for support roles. If these items were changed to only provide stacks on assists then that would encourage supports and possibly even support-style jungles to pick up items like these and remain competitive throughout the game. The passive achieved at max-rank is also a good opportunity to differentiate good supports and poor supports. By changing the max-rank personal buff to a team based buff we can create more opportunities to integrate previously underutilized item effects (I'm looking at you ).

TL:DR Buff the completed support items, we have plenty of levers available to add in gold without creating edge-cases. Change the snowball items to assist-only stacks with a team-based buff at 20 stacks, good supports get good items for a modest cost.