Making Support/Jungle Popular

What do the two least popular roles in the game have in common (I'll let you think about this while you wait 20 minutes in team builder for a jungle/support, and 30 ADC's join and leave)? You got it! They both have items that make them "special" by allowing them to generate gold in exchange for items with more meaningful stats. Here is the solution I propose:

Step 1) Remove Gold Generating Items I honestly think a big reason why many people do not like playing the jungle/support role is that they hate having to buy gold generating items in order to become useful. I'd much rather feel relevant from the start by being allowed to work on a BOTRK or a Liandry's so that I could harass harder and be stronger in early game skirmishes. I think this idea can also be applied to SS, and I'd honestly love to see that item removed from the game and replaced with the new trinket upgrade system to alleviate the necessity of having a support as the sole warder. Right now as a support you have to drop your early gold (of which you are already short compared to other lanes) on a gold generating item that is cost inefficient and buy a SS before you can start to work on the fun stuff. This is also around the time people are upgrading boots so you better spend what little gold you have generated on those as well to keep up. What does that leave you with? Depending on which gold generating item you picked you might have 50 bonus AP and 180 HP, and the team fights are probably just starting to break out. No wonder people dislike playing this role. This doesn't mean you have to remove "support" type items completely, it just means that you should remove the gold generating aspect and buff the item to have the stats that it deserves. Frost Queen's Claim, for example, has an awesome active that allows supports to help their team make picks, but the stats are 91% cost efficient. Keep the item the same minus those changes and buff the stats to be similar to other lane items, like adding more ability power, and you'll have people that still buy it, but not because they have to for gold generation. This is just one example, but the same logic can be applied to the Jungle role. If you remove the need to buy jungle specific items that require you to drop 2200 gold to farm the jungle efficiently, then the role would be more fun for many people. So if gold generation from items is out of the question and early jungle sustain is a lot more difficult, then how do we make gold and survive?

Step 2) Overhaul Masteries Right now the masteries section feels, well, almost pointless. It's broken down into offense, defense, and utility, all of which offer such small bonuses that you can honestly just put points into any random thing and I'd bet you that your win ratio would hardly change at all. My suggestion is that masteries be broken down into the roles that currently exist in the game with the addition of jungle. So the masteries section would be Marksmen, Mage, Tank, Support, Jungle. The specific masteries could then offer significant advantage to playing your role well. For example, you could take the gold generating passive from Frost Queen's Claim (UNIQUE - TRIBUTE: Your next damaging ability or autoattack against a champion or structure will deal 15 additional damage and grant 10 gold. You generate one charge of Tribute every 10 seconds, storing up to 3. Killing a minion disables this passive for 12 seconds) and make it a support mastery. This way players would still be rewarded for picking good support champs and playing their role. You can also add other masteries, for example, you could give supports reduced gold for landing the killing blow on a champion but bonus gold for assists on enemy deaths. The point is to make masteries into something that allows people to specialize in their role in a meaningful way, and removes the need to buy special items. Since I gave examples for support masteries, I'll give a couple for the jungle. The current upgraded machete gives strong sustain in the jungle that a lot of champions need early on to farm. You can probably see where this is going... Turn that into a mastery! Also, extra gold for killing large monsters? Also, a perfect idea for a mastery! If you like the upgraded smites, you can actually turn them into individual masteries where you have to choose one path (just like the branching tree system you see in many games). I think the point I'm getting at, is that masteries can be used to reward players for playing their role well, and they can have a much more meaningful feeling in the game.

Let me know your thoughts!