Ancient Coin is useless. Why? You get less gold than other 2 (and only if your adc last hit), health gained is almost equal to game deals by blue item and you don get something to protect your adc.
Most of champion who pick Coin are healer or are able to shield someone, it scales with AP too. So you should do something like: +20% shield/heal you cast on another allies or something like that.
What do you mean "only if your adc last hit"? I mean it always gives you gold from a minion killed near you. Even if a tower kills it...
Are we forgetting the mana regen? There's a reason Blitzcrank takes it - 100 mana lvl 1 Q Base mana? A whopping 267.
It's not useless at all. It's used for mana-heavy supports like Blitzcrank, Janna, Nami, etc.
because the active ms boost is useless right?
Unless you KNOW you're going to be able to out-poke the enemy lane (say, if your ADC is trist or cait and they're running graves/braum or something), it's mandatory on Soraka.
In broader terms, it's the "defensive" choice for a support: Builds into a group movement speed increase as opposed to an AoE slow, grants self-sustain as opposed to more aggressive poke, gives more healing and mana regen instead of more ability power, etc. It does have its drawbacks (punishing you heavily for being out of lane, specifically, and not granting extra healing to your carry).
I don't really think it needs sweeping changes, but if you wanted to modify it, I'd say go for something like this:
**Unique Passive - Favor: Regular minion deaths near you grant you gold equal to their value. This effect requires and consumes a charge. Regenerates one charge every 25 seconds to a maximum of 3 charges. **
I don't like the idea of giving it a healing / shielding bonus, because that would make it more mandatory for those champions than freaking DFG was to burst mages in addition to being passive. If you really wanted to, I'd make it limited - something like "once every 30s your heal or shield on an allied champion below 35% health is X% more effective" or something like that.
Upgrade it to tier 2 and it's instantly awesome.
It is terrible. The upgraded items are nice, like talisman, but the coin start is atrocious, and makes you squishy and pretty much useless. Even champs like Blitz can do better with a relic shield start. I firmly believe that if you want talisman, you are better off going relic for the early game, and then just selling relic for talisman later, and skipping crappy ancient coin. Also, I wish they would remove ancient coin off the reccommended items list for all-in supports like leona and thresh, because people who don't support much take coin, are super squishy, but go all-in anyways and get wrecked, when they could have healed/done something with a relic start.
Again, talisman is great; getting there isn't, to the point I think its better to start relic and sell it for talisman later on if you really want a talisman. Its just so easy to punish ancient coin starts because they are useless in lane. I honestly lose like 90% of the games my support goes ancient coin, and its always because they get it on leona/thresh, go all-in, and get wrecked.
I take Ancient Coin on Thresh all the time for the mana regen.
