Petition to Fix Mastery System for Supports!
So I've noticed pretty regularly (especially on Aphro's stream) that it seems VERY difficult to get above an S- on support. I've experienced it myself where the system seems to be fine as long as you don't die more than once - but as a support because you very rarely get more than a couple kills in the early game, you end up being "negative" and getting a lower ranker as a result if you don't avoid dying almost completely. At first it just kinda pissed me off (especially in RGM queues, where it seems like if you have more than 4 or 5 deaths you get a C or B regardless of how many assists you have), but I was trying to think of a way to calculate something that would give mastery to supports.
So why not include healing done (from champion damage) and shields that were actually used by players? This way you couldn't just mash heal on the jungler to increase your mastery, but healing from champion damage would actually count for something. The numbers could be tuned in such a way that a support that spends the majority of fights dead very early on might have a hard time accomplishing an S ranking, but a support who consistently survives fights and outputs healing/shielding could more easily get some recognition. This would at least help the "mage" support or the more traditional supports like Sona, Janna, Soraka, etc in achieving higher rates of mastery, while still rewarding them for a gameplay specific support mechanic.
For tanks I don't know quite how you could factor it in - but perhaps damage from champions vs deaths? For example, if a tank is soaking a ton of damage and surviving teamfights, that shows strong decision making and positioning for engages - trademarks of a good tank. Or you could track the amount of CC that's applied by the tank. I think in this way we could perhaps make it easier for champions who don't primarily deal damage to reach higher rankings, since the system definitely seems to favor high kill counts over a metric that might actually be meaningful for a tank/support.
I of course don't know the specifics of implementing all of this, but it seems like something that's within the constraints of the system to track things like CC applied, and we already track shielding/healing done I do believe (or at least healing done). The only meaningful change to that would be specifically healing vs champion damage taken - if a support has numbers above damage dealt to the target by champions, it's likely that they were healed through creep damage or monster damage, which could potentially be a method of abuse depending on the tuning of the numbers. I don't want it to be ezpz to get S ranks, but I want it to feel more meaningful when I feel like I contributed very heavily to a team win and get a score like a B+, it feelsbadman.
tl;dr: champion mastery should track more metrics that have specifically to do with supports and tanks, and the system should be tuned so that straight kill count/creep score don't as heavily determine the ranking for those roles of characters, to make skill expression and mastery more meaningful for mains of those roles.