For those still complaining about support

It isn't the gold income that's the issue. It's itemization. It fucking sucks.

Everyone's talking about "We could use more gold". Well, you can't do that because supports aren't meant to have laner items. We need more variety for different play styles within the support budget range, like I've been parroting off for forever now.

Let's take Abyssal Scepter, for example. Riot considers it a support item for some reason, akin to Frozen Heart, but no supports use it because it doesn't fit anyone's play style. Mage-style supports don't wanna be close to enemies, and tank ones don't want ap at all. So instead of just increasing ap damage on enemies near you, why not make it so that when you tag enemies with spells, follow-up attacks from allies do X% more damage onto the ones you tagged? You're still emphasizing the success of your allies. You don't need a large amount of ap on the item (it only gives like 60 atm, and Ardent gives 60 so it's not a big amount). Laners don't want an item that doesn't give them themselves more benefit. You can use it at your designated ranges. It wouldn't apply to everyone at once more than it'd apply to the amount of people you could tag. It'd be a great way to expand what a support could be used for without bleeding that power into the lanes.

Now we COULD do something like this that'd reward playing into different aspects of what a support could be, but since everyone's afraid of support-budget Death Caps, every freaking thing is shoehorned into being a defensive item. Of course the role gets boring to people when all they do is spam shields all day. The role needs fleshing out in what we're honestly allowed to be. No more of this "just build a 3.2k gold item" nonsense. Every gamer should know that good games lead you to the right answer through its design, and LoL is stating that supports are nothing but shield bots. Is being a shield bot fun to you?