The Janna Changes and Auto-based Aggression

[Edit: http://www.surrenderat20.net/2017/09/918-pbe-update.html Ardent Censor: *[New Effect] Unique passive's attack speed/on-hit bonus now also applies to the caster when used on an ally. * Well speak the devil's name I suppose. ]

Okay, I'm going to take a stab at things and give my current thoughts on changes that are happening to a character I personally dislike quite a bit.

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So Janna's current changes on the PBE are focusing on giving her a new on-hit passive that deals bonus magic damage based on a % of her bonus MS, and to be honest I think this is an interesting, if unfortunately ineffective way of dealing with her passivity. That said, I don't think it's just tied to Janna's lack of proper aggression options in her kit, but also the fact that her new passive doesn't really.....do....anything for her, and there aren't really any support options to really support that type of aggression. If these changes do anything I imagine it's going to be pushing out of the spotlight, but just cementing as your go-to shield support.

So in order for a champion like to effectively use this passive she needs to be able to get several auto-attacks on to her opponents, but at the moment there's really....no reason for this. With the hits to her shield CD as others have mentioned Janna won't be encouraged to risk trading autos consistently enough to posit her passive as a proper threat, especially since she'll be forced in early game now more than ever between mitigating damage done against herself, and against her ally....but To be honest I think this is an interesting playstyle that league doesn't offer supports much of, even if it's currently flawed.

So to get the most out of a new passive like this, we'd ideally want to be able to get something to increase our attack speed to fuel the passive, assuming we're looking at the passive itself as a form of damage rotation and isolating it from her kit. Problem is, there's no real access to that stat for a support, especially since our item slots are in pretty hot contention with each other due to some of the powerful active effects we're given in our itemization options. all have powerful primary/secondary effects that let us do our job better, but none really help us maintain aggression outside of Athene's. and to me, Janna's new passive is a potential opportunity to take a look at creating more AS focused support items. Creating powerful effects off auto-attacks honestly wouldn't be too difficult, and you can gate its power behind factors like Number of autos/CD/Active vs. Passive/etc in order to build some interesting support options that encourage more aggressive play, and potentially even open up the role and your design options to make future supports who can use those items.

So Why Attack Speed? As a stat, AS is interesting in the fact that it's only as effective as your auto-attacks are, and hence we're starting from a stat that's not only fairly generic, but doesn't innately entice damage-dealers to pick it up, at least not by itself. Looking at potential champions, we actually do have a fair number of existing supports who have some-kind of ability which encourages auto-attacks, even if it isn't something you invest in. ( ) all have abilities which encourage at least some form of auto-attacking, even if not all of them stand to truly benefit from additional AS support. The point of the matter is that we have at least some groundwork in regards to potential users for more aggressively tuned Auto-based support. It wouldn't just support current support rosters either though, as opening up AS as a stat could potentially get more off-meta picks like support more relevancy and even open up options to create AD based supports.

If supports have the option of building into supportive AS items, then we could potentially see use for an on-hit passive like new Janna's. But currently, with lack of itemization and lack of real synergy with her own kit, there's just no reason to really play that kind of game with Janna. The risks are much higher than playing Peel-bot, and she doesn't really get that much out of it. Like I said, I really like the idea of the passive itself, and I absolutely want to not be bored to tears when facing Janna down bot-lane. But currently, It's a bit too soon to throw her in that direction.

So what do you guys think? Would you like to see AS options for support build paths? What kind of champions do you think could abuse that kind of itemization the most? What kind of effects would we even give AS support items? How do they Proc? I'm really interested to hear what you guys think!