my thoughts on improving "skill expression" in support role

I think one of the reason that people don’t like to play support is that when an enchanter shield & heal the right target & right timing, he gets no reward in terms of gold until his allies make a kill. Yes his ally may not be killed because of his shield / heal, but he gains nothing in return in terms of gold, so the support player feels like “i did the right thing, but that doesn’t mean anything for myself”. i say this is “skill not being expressed” in terms of gold.

As supports are normally unable to earn gold in terms of cs (relic shield users can have some, but it has a long cd & restricted to execute it when u have an ally nearby, & he has to risk himself in a position closer to enemy if u r melee), so the only ways to earn gold are from support income kit, kills or assists in fights (kills would not happen if enemy is scattered away from u, & in most cases supports are not suppose to win 1v1), killing wards (sweeper has long cd), or killing towers (but u don’t have chance to kill tower when u are the losing team, & the global tower kill gold is less now). so with the removal of bandit mastery starting from this season, the economy of supp role go down a lot. Support role usually roams 2nd most in the team, so they have less chance to earn lane coin & proc relic, & when u have less chance to see your enemy, there is no chance u could proc spellthief.

So there are lots of games that supports are 2k - 5k gold behind every other roles in a 30 minute game. I think this surely frustrate the players who play support. I think riot certainly notice this issue (they have mentioned about it in the passages in like surrender at 20 post), but they seem not to figure out a way to fix it.

I think the gold difference should be decreased to attract players to play support role, & to make a better balance of the game. I think it’s good to re-introduce bandit, but making some adjustment. The bandit passive goes to the support gold item (ancient coin, spellthief, relic shield, so spellthief can earn more than how much it earn now, i think tweating the gold value would fix the balancing problem). Point & click abilities gold should be massively go down (looking at the problem created by gangplank Q), aoe, dot abilities should also go down a bit, but hitting multiple enemy champions with one ability can earn more (landing a 5-man shockwave should be rewarded more gold than 1-man shockwave, but landing a 5-man shockwave doesn’t mean it earns 5 X bandit amount of gold, any extra champion hit would earn less than the first one).

Then nerf down the poke support champions by a bit, because they can proc bandit easier than others.

Moreover, if you use shield (& heal a short amount of time after ally taking dmg?) & successfully block dmg (including increase resistance from braum W, block projectile from braum E, & using tahm W on a cc’ed ally), u earn gold for that. Thus it gives incentive to the player who use a defensive ability successfully. Heal should have reduced gold amount earned than shield because u can do it in a less precise timing. But this only applies to the ones who take support income item, so it would not be abused by tahm top, etc.

Then, increase the gold amount of support item by a bit, & maybe give a little bit more stat to those item. So it gives incentive to earn more gold, & make support player to feel the difference of “outplaying” the enemy support by rewarding them. Maybe nerf the base ability value a bit to all supports, & give them more ap ratio, or in any form of enhancing ability value based on the items u got. This will make supports a bit more item reliant. I think this will encourage “better support wins”.

Plus, to avoid support items being abused by other roles (e.g. trundle jg rush zeke, knight’s vow...), either 1. restrict these items can be brought by the ones who have support income item only; or 2. reduce to raw stat of the items to be 70% gold efficient, instead of 95% gold efficient, or make 25% of gold efficiency in health or mana regen category. Usually regen stat are pretty bad stat, especially in the late game where regen basically doesn’t matter.