Zeke's Harbringer (Review after 60+ Games)
I've played 60+ games with Zeke's Harbringer and I would like to summarize my experience with the item.
- Patch 5.14
I played 40 games with Zeke's Harbringer on 5.14. The item was very flexible on this patch. It was useful for taking objectives like Dragon and Baron, which easily provided enough stacks to ignite the passive. It was also useful for team fights. The basic idea of the item in teamfights was that it was a reward for peeling for your ADC. If you, as a support, could peel for the ADC for 5-10 seconds then you were rewarded with 6 seconds of a powerspike. If the ADC had to kite back too much, you missed the powerspike. However, once the 6 seconds was over, if you could extend the fight for another 5-10 seconds, you got a second powerspike and a chance to clean up the fight.
- Patch 5.15
I've played 20+ Zeke's Harbringer games on Patch 5.15. The item is not particularly flexible on this patch. It is still good - probably better - for taking Dragons and Barons since you get to use 1 full rotation of the passive. However, it has become a much harder item to use otherwise. If you leave your ADC while he is farming then you lose the stacks and they are hard to charge back up. If you stay beside your ADC, he will often trigger the passive on lane minions or jungle monsters and it will be unavailable for a teamfight. If you have a team fight, you can still charge up the passive, but it often I find the fight breaks up before I get the first rotation of the passive off or, worse, I the ADC dies before it has a chance to charge up.
TL;DR I think the item was better on Patch 5.14 than it is on 5.15. The item was more flexible and seemed to correspond more to the play-pattern of a peel support. It rewarded surviving the initial dive on the ADC and then rewarded keeping the ADC in the fight for an extended period of time. Now, it rewards careful initiates but is much more frustrating to manage. On both patches, it is useful for players that like to focus on the neutral objectives.