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Earning money with Face of the Mountain becomes extremely difficult during late game

DawnPaladin··5 votes·1,918 views

During the laning phase, Relic Shield and Targon's Brace are a joy to use. Smack a minion, earn some money, heal yourself and your laning buddy. The floating charges around you are a fun little resource to manage--should I spend my charges now, while we have our opponents on the defensive, or hold out for a siege minion later?

But during late game, spending those charges becomes hugely frustrating. No longer can you easily finish the minions your carry has started. Now your carry is a minion-killing monster, chewing through creeps like a harvesting machine going through a cornfield. Executing minions that your ADC has wounded becomes nearly impossible, because they can drop a minion from 100 to 0 before your autoattack even lands. And the damnedest thing is you made them this way. The better job you do as a support, the more ferociously they'll be able to CS, and the harder it will be for you to get any gold out of Face of the Mountain. So the four Orbs of Shame will float around you until the Nexus explodes, taunting you with visions of gold that you can't have.

Lots of people will probably say "Just sell the item when you can't CS anymore." But for all its problems, I like Face of the Mountain. I like its stats, I like its flavor, and late game, when you have loads of health, is when its active is at its most powerful. I just don't like begging my ADC to leave the cannon minion for me so I can beat on it for 10 seconds while he stands there awkwardly waiting for my item to do its job.

Surely it wouldn't upset game balance to raise the execute threshold on Face of the Mountain so that supports can spend their orbs late game?

14 Comments

Awesome Bowler3 votes

As a support I have had experience with this particular item. I love the item but I do agree that later in the game, especially during team fight phase or sieging phase, this item does squat compared to the coin and the shard. I think at the final phase we should get some passive gold, and to insure the passive gold does not hit early, increase the final construction price. Just like they did with the crucible, increase the price of face of the mountain by a bit and add passive gold.

I also believe there is a lack of tier three items for supports. On good games when I hit 10k gold, I have nothing else to buy. Some new items would be nice.

NinjaFifer2 votes

An argument posted a while back described how supports and other champs value their items.

There are three definitions of efficiency in this game: Gold efficiency, slot efficiency, and build efficiency. High gold efficiency gives more bang for your buck, slot efficiency gives your final build more power than others, and high build efficiency makes it so you always have something to build towards your intended item.

Supports place a higher value on gold efficiency and build efficiency than other classes, since they have less gold to spend, and often have less gold going back to base. Everyone else places priority on slot efficiency, since they've got more gold to pump into the items for late game. That's why so many support items only go up to 2200 gold or so. You'll fill up your build faster per amount of money gained, but, since you don't get as much money, you shouldn't be filling up your build faster per unit of time.

Awesome Bowler1 votes

I do recognize your point. But for aura champs such as Sona, and healing champs such as Nami, it is real easy to get more money per assist than a support such as zilean where I typically get only 75 gold compared to other champs where I get 135+. This calls for a discrepancy in the amount of gold each support receives resulting in some champs like taric getting a full build earlier. Coming back to the point that there are not enough 3rd tier items to buy.

NinjaFifer2 votes

Fair enough, but I think that your argument lends itself to a push to normalize the ease of gold gain through natural game mechanics (assists, specifically, and how easy it is to get for each support) instead of a push for 3k gold support items. These items are specifically kept in the 2k range for balance purposes.

Edit: I would also like to point out that the gold per assist is the same no matter who you play, and is only variable based on how much was earned from their death. If they've died more times than they've gotten kills, they're worth less. Still, your point is the same, Aura champs do get more assists overall, because of how the assist system works.

Awesome Bowler1 votes

now that i think about, it is more about the gold gain. I posted a discussion a time ago that talked about how sona got more gold than zilean or taric just because of the aura she puts off.

Lneacx2 votes

What stat should the execute damage on FotM scale off of? HP? Resistances? Levels?

NinjaFifer2 votes

FotM is already an acronym: Flavor of the Month, most often used in reference to whichever champion is overpowered this month. Don't be needlessly confusing.

DawnPaladin1 votes

How about minion levels, or minion HP? Executing a minion because you got its health bar down to a certain point makes more sense to me than the current calculation.

Lneacx1 votes

Let's say that we set this % HP at, I dunno, 35%. For a melee, caster, or even a cannon minion, 35% hp is pathetically low, to the point that it can't feel good to execute at all. But that same 35% hp execute becomes completely broken against a Super Minion. Point being, if you want a static %hp execute, then it'll either be absolutely pathetic against normal creeps or overpowered against supers.

You could do something like 50% vs normal creeps and 20% vs supers. Since the normal/super disparity is gone, the fact that minion HP scales linearly with time makes this scaling option pretty appealing. Minion level also scales linearly with time, so that could also work. But here's another question to ask: FotM scales off of your champion AD, which scales off of your level, which scales (indirectly) off of time. What do any of these changes do that the current scaling can't?

DawnPaladin2 votes

That's a good point. Maybe just increasing the AD ratio of the execute threshold would make harvesting minions less frustrating.

NinjaFifer2 votes

Two things. I'd like to point out that Face doesn't require an auto attack to finish off the minion to get the gold shared. The execute only procs on autos, yes, but the gold share happens regardless of how you get the CS (now go play Veigar support, let me know how it goes). You can use some abilities to get the 8 cs per minute. Two: unfortunately, it works just fine when players communicate well. Hence, when you get to higher elo's, this stops becoming a problem, meaning Riot won't balance it this way. It's pretty much an item that says "play the game better to utilize me."

Hyrum Graff2 votes

I think making the threshold scale with level, would be a good idea.

edit: better idea: make it scale with minion level/stats.

Angry Monster1 votes

I do not upgrade to face of the mountain(most of the time). I tend to only go to tier 2 and then build some other items while still in lane phase. When moving in the team fight phase i move into ancient coin.

RobotRevolution1 votes

A possible fix for this (I have this same problem with the item and it's very annoying): "After executing XX minions, Face of the Mountain gains, 'FOTM now executes minions below XXX health.'" Just raise it up after a certain while to make using orbs easier in late game.

A better solution would be to add a range and something about how whenever a minions dies in range of FOTM, FOTM triggers. Often I can't even get to the minion before someone else has one-shot it despite my pleas.

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