ALOT of analysis toward making support role more fun

Ill get right to it; make support item active abilities really good and fun to use. Just like junglers get their own jungle items that are pretty sweet and ONLY they can build, give supports that same opportunity. So instead of upgrading my support item to be able to shield one person for a little bit (face of the mountain) let me shield my whole team for a little bit (locket of the iron solari) or one person for a lot or let me remove cc from that one ally (Mikails). Instead of being able to speed up my team a little bit to do a tower dive (talisman of Ascension), let me turn the tower off for a few seconds (homwrecker). I think these support items could even remain cheap in gold cost because they are strictly utilitarian and don't bring nearly as many raw stats to the champion as other items that provide damage or tank stats. In some cases, like mikails, supports are already the only role to buy this item anyway, so I don't believe it would be too radical to make it a support-exclusive item.

I guess I'm writing this because I recently got a craving to play support so I did and after one of my games I noticed an emblem next to the "Queue up" button that reads "You're guaranteed one of your selected roles this game because you recently filled or played support." I got a pit in my stomach. Why is playing support considered an act of charity that should be rewarded by not having to play support again? It really is because support isn't very fun but I don't think it needs to be this way. Let's take a look at the essence of the support role.

Possibly the most core mechanic in League of Legends is farming. Farming is the primary means players gain gold and experience to purchase items and level up one's champion to become more powerful and therefore more able to dispatch foes and conquer objectives in the ultimate goal of destroying the enemy nexus or demoralizing your enemy into cowardly surrender. There are four steady supplies of NPCs on Summoners Rift; one for each lane and a fourth supply of NPCs in the jungle. In the current META, that means one player for each of the four sources of NPCs and the fifth player is the support. The support shares one of these sources of gold and experience with one other player, most commonly the ADC, but the ADC hogs most of the gold, for good reason.

The reason I explain this is because this is the origin of most or all of the problems of the support role. One of the most enjoyable mechanics of this game is accumulating gold and experience and observing how your champion changes and grows from the effects of every single level-up and item purchase and we have just established that the very origin of the support role is, what we might call, to be in a state of malnourishment. Less gold and experience means less leveling up and less purchases which means less interesting changes and less growth and therefore less influence over the outcome of the game than all the other roles.

I believe, however, that this is a great opportunity for some great design. Team compositions can get to be pretty complicated and I'm not going to claim to know everything about it but ultimately every team needs only two things; to be able to deal damage and to take damage. Note that utility is not one of those things; utility by itself will never win a game. But, if used in harmony or coordination with damage and tank characteristics of his/her allies than utility could amplify their effectiveness dramatically, which is the dream of being a support. And so is it unreasonable to say that perhaps if the utilitarian mechanics of the game were tuned, say, WAY up, would it actually be overwhelming? And, since utility is not a necessary winning condition, like tank and damage are, could we regard it as a less valuable characteristic in items and therefore be able to keep the cost of these items very low?

And you may ask, if the items are too cheap relative to their effectiveness than non-supports will start buying them. I think the primary thing regulating this would be item slot efficiency. A damage dealer may opt-in to buying a cheap utilitarian item for the sweet active but later on in the game when they have filled their item slots they may end up selling that utilitarian item to get an item that will give them more stats that will allow them to do more damage.

In conclusion to this point, I would like to see some really fun and powerful mechanics that deal absolutely zero damage on their own but are fun to use and help your teammates. I want to see riot really go crazy with this idea.

I'm going to touch upon something totally different here; warding. We having already established that playing support means less gold and experience which means less purchases and levels which is less decisions. Now add onto this experience, which is already numbing to many players, this behavior called warding which all supports NEED to do which means another decision taken away from them. In order to ward, the support MUST purchase a sightstone which is another decision taken away from them, and since the support is already most starved of gold, this forced purchase is even more painful. And now lets look at the functionality of the sightstone.

First I will state the basic characteristics of the item: The sightstone holds three stealth wards. The life span of these wards is three minutes. The casting range of the wards is about 600 units. The sightstone can only be refilled with wards by visiting the fountain. Each champion can have a maximum of three stealth wards on the map at one time. The only stats it gives is 150 flat health.

Now I will describe the behavior that accompanies this item in order to ward most effectively: The player must travel near the location they would like to ward and place the wards. Since these wards expire in three minutes, the player is encouraged to replace these wards before they expire; replacing the wards before the previous wards expire also allows the player to use the vision from the old wards to safely travel to where he/she will place the new wards. To get more wards the player must return to base and then travel to where he/she wishes to place the wards and then travel back to lane. Because there is so much traveling involved with this process, purchasing boots is the next logical purchase to reduce the amount of time spent traveling to the warding locations, fountain and back to lane.

Now I will describe some issues I see with this behavior and the item itself: Requiring so much traveling indirectly encourages supports to need to buy boots early on, which feels like another penny-pinching purchase they are forced to make. This also begs the question, if so much traveling is associated with the item sighstone, why doesn't the item itself give movement speed? perhaps instead of flat health? And if the item encourages returning to base every few minutes, which regenerates health and mana very rapidly, then why do the vast majority of items that are bought by supports give tremendous amounts of health and mana regeneration? It would seem there are some discrepencies in this functionality. I would suggest either keep all these items the same but let the wards of sighstone regenerate charges or keep sightstone the same but reallocate the power of these support items to be less focused on health and mana regen, which may be a stat they do not need since they are returning to base so often.

Thank you for reading if you have gone this far. Please share what you think in a logical manner. I may add more onto this as time goes on. Thank you.