Harass is now so strong it's become useless.
I main
support, and her harass used to be one of her strongest traits (arguably even more than her zoning and shielding). As a support
, you have to balance shielding your carry, with zoning out your lane opponents, with harassing to disrupt the enemy ADC's farming (and for those sweet sweet
procs).
All that changed when patch 7.22 hit. In this new meta, with everyone's early game damage jacked way up, it only takes one good poke where I land more than just Q before the enemy ADC realizes "There's no way i'm getting my farm with this much harass" and dives in for an all in. My ADC is in the same predicament with their
. Her pokes, which were already fairly strong, now do so much damage that he (or she) simply can't farm without first killing at least one of the enemy laners. This effectively makes early aggression the only strategy, which in turn means that my sustained damage is now useless. Burst damage is all that matters. We either burst them down 3 minutes in or they burst us down 3 minutes in.
Even worse, the sudden death nature of laning post-7.22 means that buying support items is now a waste of gold. Why buy
when you'll only get one or two pokes in before the big showdown? Why waste gold on HP/MP regen heavy items like
when laning consists of non-stop death battles where those effects won't have time to be useful?
In this meta, sustaining is impossible, so building AP is far more important than building support items. The exception to this is vision, which remains important because the meta has pushed the junglers to hyper aggression as well.
Please Riot: end the sudden death meta. Nerf damage across the board. Restore farming and strategic itemization to the Rift.