Suggestion: Assist gold from minions to kill the "poor" support image.

I've played support for a long time. In the early days it was an easy way to level up, now it's just to get shorter queue timers. In those early days, I do admit I CSed a ton, because back then, meta shmeta. Now everyone strangles themselves on it, so if you dare to take your ADCs precious money, then you'll most likely lose just to team bickering and rage. Not only is money a resource supports don't get the luxury of using, but Riot's design for support champions leads to some of the worst scaling in the game (Thanks for the Bard and Thresh AP ratios.) as if they needed further dissuading from buying anything shiny and powerful.

Tangent: What is someone as muscular and manly as Braum doing around lower 40% of all champions for base AD, and near 55% for bonus per level?

Here's the idea: You get assist gold for champion kills, why not assist gold for minions? Suddenly you don't have to design ridiculous items or masteries to generate artificial income for the "5th leg", and you can maybe even give supports utility ratios as attempted back in... Season 3? It was ages ago, and left in the dust. Anyways, Supports now have money, and with money, comes less insta-gib' when you go to ward, less standing in a teamfight knowing the only reason you're alive is the enemy doesn't want to waste their cooldowns on you, and the main reason: more fun. It's fun to have your champion get more items, become more powerful, actually be able to fight back.

Also consider the worst scenario for a support: losing lane. You'll be levels behind on top of your roaming exp tax, and probably no champion assist income, so now you're an even easier target. It's not like the other roles, who can just "play safe and farm", and your warding objective is severely riskier now. Your situation has you left with one option: pray. Pray the areas you need to ward aren't a single-man ambush, as that's all it takes at this point for you to go down, and pray your ADC can do better in the late game with more farm. Wouldn't it be better if protecting that farming ADC somehow rewarded you, instead of the warm fuzzy that you get saying to yourself, "He's getting that farm because of me. Go team."

Naturally a big change like this would cause sweeping side-effects. Junglers might go leeching built-up top waves, or even phase out. Support champions might be shelved for high base damage mages... except that already happens. I personally would welcome a meta shift, and seeing how important is it to have a 5th member shrouded in the fog of war, I doubt the Jungle role will ever die. Ironing out the mechanics of "assist CSing" would be the tough part. I doubt the Champion assist method of seeing buffs, debuffs, heals or damage would be the right choice, and would you consider the range of the support from the killed minion, or the CSer? I vote a bit from both.

I'm also not saying Support should stop Supporting. With all that money you should be buying Locket earlier, Frozen Heart, ZZ'Rot, whatever you think helps the team more for the situation. I think somewhere early on it was just decided that Support is synonymous with "deserves no money", then throughout the seasons attempts were made to give them income... but now we have triple-Frost Queen's Claim teams. Making overly efficient items intended for the measly budget of a Support (or Jungler) is destined to backfire because if there's a way to make them useful in solo lane, then why leave it to the support?

It's no secret if you queue in the new champion select as Blank/Support or Blank/Fill, you might as well've picked Support/Fill. The only way to make support more appealing is to make it more fun, and in a game like LoL, feeling powerful is fun. Having choices is fun. Being an influence after 20 minutes is fun... and you should be, without resorting to the no-scaling supports like Bard, or Braum, and you should have build path options, made possible because you have enough gold to buy more items than a Sightstone and Boots... and most importantly, you should feel powerful as a Support--No, not just feel powerful, actually** be** powerful.

TLDR: Give Supports money in lane. Make Supports fun. Alleviate queue disparity between roles.