A Simple Fix to the Support Item/Quest Problem

Just attach the quest rewards to the tier 3 items instead of the tier 2 ones. It's as simple as that.

It's pretty obvious that are all being removed because Riot doesn't know how to stop lanes other than support from abusing gold items and their quest rewards; the gold cost or the slot delegated to sightstone has only ever been a problem for whiny midlaners/junglers that get autofilled to support, and the majority of support mains have been very vocal about this since these proposed changes.

Another thing many support players dislike is being unable to buy whatsoever, having it tied solely to a quest reward, instead of having the possibility to choose one or the other. This means that not only are both botlanes locked out of getting a sightstone when they choose to, but also that the losing botlane is likely going to be denied bonus vision for longer than their opponents, which will more often that not make snowballing even worse than it already is;

So I say to keep sightstone and the gold items how they are for now (poaching solely for the gold income of these items may need to be addressed at some point, but it doesn't seem too crazy right now), and just move the quest completion bonuses of gold items up to tier 3.

Sure, champions like AP junglers may still take , but cases like that can be nerfed if they get out of hand (while buffing some underutilized support items to compensate, for example)

But for supports, the quests Riot introduced a while back have been incredibly fun while making the role feel more unique, especially the movespeed from , and losing these great rewards because other lanes are abusing their items just doesn't seem fair.

Maybe this whole change is getting blown out of proportion due to Riot's vagueness (Anyone remember the outrage when plants were announced because of the confusing way they were were described? They originally made it seem like any plant could spawn anywhere in the jungle, randomly, with no preset locations or spawn times.) Maybe these changes will be a good thing, so long as , , and hopefully have their effects brought back with different items.

But even then, losing the quest movespeed, losing its quest rally and extra gold from takedowns, and losing its pseudo- passive would really hurt these items and the useful effects they provided to supports. Quests were universally praised by supports everywhere, and they're just getting removed altogether due to poaching by other lanes, which is a real shame. [cass-cry]

One alternative change Riot could add to mitigate this that I've seen a few people bring up would be to have the gold items have two quests, one for the sightstone active, and a second one afterwards for their old quest rewards, with the active effects simply placed onto new items. However, the gold items would have to either be weak to compensate for this, or more expensive than planned, which would kinda defeat the entire "purpose" of these changes; the "purpose" being for supports to have more gold to spend on what they want and to have more freedom in their builds. (and this would basically mean ADCs poaching lose nothing from these changes and gain a free sightstone, which would somehow be even less healthy for the game unless, again, the current quest bonus was tied to the tier 3 items only, and the prices and stats of those items were adjusted to reflect that.) But this change would essentially make the gold items the same as ,, are now, while just removing the option to upgrade your tier 2 gold items into ,, or respectively and making them separate items instead, so it really wouldn't make that much sense, considering many supports would just build those items anyway, and that's two item slots taken up, just like it is now.

(or maybe that would make sense, since other lanes could take advantage of things like FQC and Talisman without having unhealthy gold generation, while supports would still be able to keep their quest bonus and build both items if they wanted to; food for thought. People would still probably not like sightstone being tied to a quest, though. And the current quest would probably have to be something like 1k gold to compensate for having the sightstone quest. Aaand other lanes would probably still take the tier 1/2 items for Bandit and the extra gold generation, which means we would not only still have that problem, but those laners would also get a free sightstone, which I guess is already a problem that will happen with the new system, unless they attach the sightstone active to the tier 3 item only, or they take Bandit off of the items because it's allowing solo laners to complete the quests easily because the gold it generates isn't tied to any specific requirements. Maybe they'll make a new rune/tree with Bandit.) But I digress.

Losing also hurts a lot; I don't know if I can go back to having a 90 second cooldown (or I guess Twin Shadows, if it still had the same cooldown) without Ingenious Hunter, and things like having super low cooldown and being abused is balanced out by the fact that you need to sacrifice inventory slots to pull this cheese off, giving up impactful items like , , or for supports, or major tank/damage items for other lanes.

Now, if you want active item CDR as a support, you're pigeonholed into running Domination primary/secondary (which many people did anyway, but now it's mandatory), which seems like a contradiction to Riot's "freedom of choice, there isn't one optimal rune page" model they were going for with the new rule/mastery rework.

Anyway, back to the support quests being attached to the tier 3 items. The major problem this would fix is being built on ADCs, paired with possible overheal nerfs, if necessary. This could also fix some junglers like building just for the quest passive (not that I think she's broken, just as an example) without hurting junglers like and that build the whole because it benefits them (Which again, could be fixed if Twin Shadows comes back, but losing the movespeed from the quest would still really hurt)

(As a sidenote, I do admit the bonus gold you get can be a little dumb at times, maybe nerfing it so that you only recharge gold-proc stacks while within X range of an ally or something, but I don't know how to balance that, nor do I claim to)

Yeah, supports not having access to quest rewards without having tier 3 gold items would be a little annoying, but it's a much better alternative than losing these quest rewards altogether because of some bad apples (I'm looking at you, , not that you're the only offender, just arguably the biggest one)

Anyway, this was just some mediocre D5 main (hype for the skin btw, even though I had just enough BE for urfwick) that generally plays supports like as an off-role giving his two cents on a hot issue.

TL:DR I wouldn't say these changes are inherently bad, and people may warm up to them as time goes on and more is revealed (like with jungle plants), but as it stands currently with the information we have, both removing the old support quests and making quest-exclusive instead of purchasable both seem like poor changes that will cause a lot of unrest within the community.

RIP Ruby Sightstone's active item CDR and the gold items' amazing quest rewards if these changes go through [zombie-nunu-bummed]

sidenote: sorry this turned into an rant without a clear focus, I've been here writing this for about 3 hours apologies if anything is inconsistent