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

DawnPaladin·6/29/2014, 3:58:33 AM·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 Bowler6/29/2014, 3:44:25 PM3 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.

Lneacx6/29/2014, 4:39:24 AM2 votes

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

NinjaFifer6/29/2014, 6:15:11 AM2 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 Graff6/30/2014, 5:00:17 PM2 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 Monster6/29/2014, 12:15:54 PM1 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.

RobotRevolution6/29/2014, 4:55:54 PM1 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.