Relic Shield and Skill Level - a disparity

Something that irks me about Gold Generator items, is that they tend to lead to "Midgame Broke" once the laning phase ends.

This is really common in the LOWER tiers of play - Bronze to early Gold.

For Coin and its relatives, this is less of a problem, you tend to be able to hang out on a wave and try to Last Hit, and if/when you fail, well, you're still getting SOME gold.

But many fights in the midgame tend to be quite divey in these lower brackets, with little restraint shown. Players want to have fun and get desperate. There's not much opportunity for a support to safely harass an enemy team, so spellthief produces a bit less gold, but its fully-grown active is so excellent that it doesn't hurt very much.

The item that suffers the most is definitely Relic Shield, and its counterparts. The odds of you getting to Proc a Relic Shield are already kinda low in the early brackets. It's 50/50 to hope your ADC will leave you the siege minion even if they say they will. In the hype of some pushdown, it can get forgotten. But once you're offlane, things turn really ugly. The item's gold generation and benefits plummet, hard. Nobody even leaves any minions for the Support to hit, and it doesn't matter how many little shiny orbs are floating around you.

At higher levels of skill it is less of a problem, people will let you have some of that gold. But certainly not in the lower sets - if an average team sees a Taric walking up to a minion, they will scramble to kill it first regardless of who they are or what position they play.

This strongly demotes Melee Supports, because they don't get full benefit of a Gold item unless they choose to take Coin. Especially in the case of those tanky-types who fall a bit behind, coming back can be really tough. You can't farm, you can't get up front and earn assists... Taric can heal to get a pass, but for an environment trying to encourage alternate roles, it doesn't work.

I chalk up Relic Shield, as the main reason Support Mordekaiser never really went anywhere when his absurd power spike was removed. When we look at our currently functioning Melee Supports, we see Taric with a ranged stun and heal, Blitz and Thresh with their pulls to punish mistakes (common occurrence in low skill games) and Alistar, who can functionally tank with almost no gold thanks to his Ultimate and Combo. And all of them, have the high potential to become broke in midgame and significantly less important at the end. My most successful games on Taric almost always involve taking Coin first, not Relic Shield.

If you want to promote Supporting Diversity, you need to up your Support Item game, and I think Relic Shield is the place to start.