Taking a Look at the New Gold Items...

...And I feel a little underwhelmed by them. Granted, they are currently in iterative processes on PBE, but their current state leaves me a little baffled by how they could change the gold generation on supports at all.

Currently, Gold Generation items built by supports provide 5 Gold every ten seconds.

As stated by Riot (I don't recall who specifically), the goal for the support item changes was to:

A) Provide more utility for supports based on what they build, and

B) Help alleviate the limited income problem.

I cannot entirely speak for goal A, but goal B already appears to be slightly accomplished by personal ward limits-- one Ruby Sightstone covers the full amount of wards any one champion can ever place on the map for Season 4. That's great, but it's still not enough, as supports are generally forced to not be last-hitting champions.

We currently have a variety of new items being tested on the PBE that allow for gold generation. Some of these build into upgraded versions with improved passive effects... But will they really fix the gold problem?

(For the simplicity of the comparison, I'll stick to the upgrades of the basic versions of the items.)

Nomad's Medallion, a PBE item that upgrades from Ancient Coin, provides 2G/10 and 4 Gold for being near a minion that you did not kill.

Frostfang (previously named "Kage's Lucky Pick"), which upgrades from Spellthief's Edge (which used to be named "Kage's Pick") provides 4G/10 and 8 gold for attacking an individual champion with abilities or attacks, and only works once every 10 seconds for each champion.

I shall begin with Nomad's Medallion. While it upgrades from an item that provides 2 gold for each minion that you did not kill, I'm not going to factor in this gold for now.

Every 30 seconds, 6 minions are spawned and walk into a lane. Every third wave, for the large majority of the game, spawns an additional Siege Minion.

Thus, every 90 seconds, 19 minions enter lane. In these 90 seconds, 18 gold has been generated by the item. Assuming the lane partner kills all minions in a wave consistently, this grants an additional 76 gold, for a total of 94 gold every 90 seconds from the item alone. This is just slightly more than 1 gold per second. So Nomad's Medallion provides 10.4G every 10 seconds.

In the same amount of time, and assuming that it is being used at every possible moment, Frostfang provides 36 gold passively and an additional (assuming that there are two enemy laners present for the entire 90 seconds) 144 gold for attacking enemy champions every 10 seconds like clockwork. That provides a total of 180 gold in 90 seconds, providing, in total, about 20G every 10 seconds.

We can compare this to the measly 45 gold generated in 90 seconds by current Season 3 Support-oriented gold generation items. (Or 90, if you have both.)

There is a clear difference. Nomad's Medallion provides about double the current value of gold from a single Philo Stone or Lucky Pick, and Frostfang provides exactly 4 times the amount.

It actually seems that, if you keep diligent and always have two opponents nearby, there's no reason to pick Nomad's Medallion over Frostfang, especially taking into account that the ability power it provides is going to be scaling into support champions' utility.

Frankly, I don't like this outcome. While I can see there is an increase in gold for the support, this does little to change that their lane partner, when last hitting perfectly, gains about 400 gold in 90 seconds. And even if there is one clear option that should be chosen for maximum gold efficiency, I feel like Nomad's Medallion is not enough to keep up with Frostfang when only one gold item can be purchased, and that they don't really change the fact that supports have such a low stream of gold.

Perhaps some of these numbers can be fine-tuned? I'm not sure what increasing some of those numbers will do to the game.

I understand that there is a fine line between "Getting gold for being active" and "Getting gold for doing nothing" (which is why Frostfang currently provides more than Nomad's Medallion). What I'm trying to get at is that perhaps the gold these items provide should still be increased slightly more, just enough to be satisfying to a player that doesn't really get to farm minions or get kills but is still incredibly important.