Sure, I can brainstorm more things, but a lot of the time things just come to me in the middle of the night. One such idea I had was (trimmed for readability):
Ardent Censer (2400g)
UNIQUE PASSIVE: Heals and shields cause your allies to deal bonus damage on hit.
Gain 5% of the premitigation damage (increased to 20% against champions) dealt this way as Blood Charges, up to 50 - 100 (based on level)....
UNIQUE ACTIVE – ASH SENTRY: Consumes 50 Blood Charges to place a visible Ghost Ward that reveals the surrounding area for 150 seconds. If this ward is destroyed by an enemy champion, a spirit will linger for 4 seconds, chasing the closest enemy champion in range for a short duration (120 second cooldown).
This kind of item would make the item limited to champions who can lane with another champion and has a heal or shield. AKA supports. It would encourage fighting and the ward it provides would have ample counterplay (visible) and utility (vision, chases upon death).
The main problem I run into though is trying to find reasons to justify my ideas. The first step is setting up a framework by which you want the system to work. The second is running current ideas and your idea through the system to see how well they compare. The third is to really weigh the costs and benefits of such a change and to see if it is worth the time investment and crowd appeasement to usher in the changes. For me, the system would look something like:
- Wards should provide the means by which players make informed decisions
- Wards should naturally provide more benefit for teams that are struggling, as snowballing teams have more vision control and have less need to make informed decisions due to stat check advantages.
- Wards should have a balance between utility and interactivity/counterplay
- The cost of Vision Denial should be along the lines of contestibility, time investment, or significant vision trade off, not gold advantage.
- Vision tools should have clear advantages/weaknesses and clear purposes in mind at the time of purchase.
- There should be a limited number of vision tools available, as to avoid overwhelming the player base, especially new players
So on and so forth.... I'm not really sure if that is the kind of answer you were looking for, but hopefully you got where I was coming from.
