Actually, Riot might be on to something...
Quote: "Something we're interested in exploring at some point though is giving alternate forms of power, rather than increased gold (other ways to earn specific stats or unique items?). "
Why not create more "transforming" items? Or rather, why not make it so that support items (or at least some) can be stronger, but only through doing "support-like" things? Like, say, eh, Athene's, right? Fill the cup with damage dealing, then heal/shield someone, right? Currently, no one buys Athene's because it's garbage. No one builds damage to make the gimmick work and it's much more efficient to just rush Locket/Redemption. What if Athene's had a more potent, powerful form that could only be reached by buying the initial item, then repeatedly using the passive? You can't abuse it as an ordinary mid laner because you wouldn't even have shields/heals to begin with, and it encourages building it early so you can work towards finishing it within the match time. What if we had a few support items that became stronger by playing into them, rather than just being strong through gold?
and do well with it and get a lot of benefit from it 
and to a lesser extent 
. I know some people might bring up 
since she definitely does enough damage to get the full effect out of it but she also is kind of forced to spam her spells (including her heal) to reach that damage quickly so it's not as easy to build it up though that is my personal opinion on it but I can still see why people would build it on her.
