A proposal for alternative scaling for the support items
Supports, as we all know, have less experience and gold than everyone else in the game, and a significant amount of the gold they do have is diverted to items that don't benefit their own champion. To make this less miserable to play, Riot gave them items specifically designed to be bad for last hitting (so most other people wouldn't build them) but quite efficient if you're not, with abilities that are useful for supports.
Basically, I propose building on this system by giving these items a form of additional power that isn't dependent on gold, instead being based on either time stacking (like RoA), use stacking (a Tear like bonus that builds every time you activate their respective unique powers), or assist stacking (supports, as a class, are designed to help teammates, thus getting assists comes naturally to them). Or a combination -- Tear has some time stacking in addition to its use stacking.
The stats they gain could be different for each item line -- maybe armor+MR for Relic (to synergize with the flat health and sustain it already has on build and cement its identity as a tank item), health+health regen for Coin (the most universal choice) and AP+mana regen for Spellthief. (Not CDR though, supports are already drowning in it.) Numbers subject to balance considerations, of course. Stacks would carry over as the item upgrades, the way Tear does.
A final form (like Muramana/Seraph's) would be cool, but not necessary -- RoA doesn't have one and it's still worth getting if you can start building it early enough; supports typically can't because of their constrained budget with other demands on it. But supports would typically be building their support item of choice from minute 1, so the item could be designed to take 30 minutes or even longer to cap out -- btw, this sort of gradual power building would also discourage midgame switches, which might or might not be a good thing depending on how you feel about the spellthief -> talisman "buildpath".
As long as vision can be bought for gold, supports especially will be under pressure not to spend their gold on their own champion. While I have in the past made more radical proposals to attack that at the root, if that's not going to happen (or not going to happen this preseason) I'd at least like to see supports have alternate ways of gaining power that aren't dependent on the gold they don't have and can't spend on themselves if they did.
Furthermore, the main ways of gaining gold in this game are kills and farm -- which supports are pretty much defined by NOT doing much of, or being all that good at. That's why supports need ways of growing by doing support things, and that probably shouldn't go primarily through gold.