Support Improvements Should Include Gold Management

I think it's pretty obvious from around the forums that the role of support could be improved by allowing support players to generate more gold. New itemization, masteries that directly benefit (and are tailored towards) supports, and a few other things have been suggested. But what will those new ideas include? What if instead of simply giving support players more gold throughout the game, these new items and masteries began implementing a whole new system of SHARING gold or generating extra gold for the team? , for example, provides more gold for the team overall, but also adds an entirely novel strategy - make sure your support kills the cannons for maximized gold.

Junglers have two distinctly different starting items ( and ), which are eventually built together into smite items ( ). Supports have THREE different starting items ( ) but they are never combined, and only build into ward items ( ) or actives ( ) - but never both. Honestly this itemization seems fairly lazy and promotes the feeling that support players are only good for map awareness/vision - especially if they're expected to use their meager gold gains as a means for vision rather than improving their usefulness in fights. (Tangent rant: just make control wards stack in twos or give a faster cooldown for trinket wards, I'm so tired of being griefed for not immediately building a sightstone or for getting caught out while trying to get vision - vision should be EVERYONE's responsibility, not an extra thing thrown onto support players because every other role has "something better to do")

I propose a complete overhaul of support itemization, much like what we've seen happen for junglers in the previous season.

Some of my ideas

• Combinations of support items. For example, build and together for an item that provides passive gold for death of minions, AND shared gold on minion execution. This item specifically could bring the idea of supports getting cannon minions into the meta as more support champions would build shields (because we can otherwise only have one gold item), which could provide interesting new challenges for support and ADC players alike.

• New support gold itemization

  1. A gold generator that has an "energized" passive which stacks gold, and an active to grant a teammate (or self) said gold.
  2. A "reverse Spellthief" which would grant gold not upon damaging an enemy, but upon healing/shielding an ally. This item would also promote gold sharing as it could possibly grant gold to allies.

3. An item to provide extra gold for champion kills/assists (possibly even stealing gold from slain enemies, though I could see this being problematic if it became an early game meta item for skilled mains, or summoners playing against unskilled mains). This item would probably also benefit junglers, encouraging ganks and making them more potent.
4. A sort of that would bind to an ally and grant a certain percentage of gold gained to target ally.

• New support gold masteries

1. Piggybacking off of the altered idea, masteries granting nearby (or possibly all) allies a percentage of gold gained. This would be especially potent as a support player would actually have a degree of control over how much gold is shared by investing 1-5 mastery points in the node.
2. Straight up, percentage gold gained increased.
3. BUFF. BANDIT. It's currently sitting between Greenfather's and Dangerous Game, both of which are just flat out more useful than the 300-800 gold gained over the course of a game. Many support champions benefit HUGELY from hiding in bushes during laning, making Greenfather's much more useful, and the ones who don't will find Dangerous Game to be a no-brainer since it can provide a huge amount of sustain during team-fights. Bandit is just not worth taking at the moment. At least move it elsewhere in the mastery trees if you won't make it stronger.
4. Items in shop are a percentage cheaper. Could shake things up for mastery builds from all roles, but if it's a little too powerful then put it farther down in skill tree so summoners make a greater sacrifice to acquire it.

Most importantly, this will encourage more communication between the support player and their teammates, and will (hopefully) give summoners a greater sense of respect and thankfulness for their support outside of seeing more complex statistics about healing/shielding/warding done in graphs/grids after a game.

That's it for now, if I think of anything else I'll be sure to add it! Please comment any ideas YOU may have! I truly hope this doesn't get buried in forums, as I feel that these ideas could hugely raise the skill-cap to playing the support role - without outright making the role harder to play. Summoners who main the support role will have many things to practice and improve upon, and these implementations would help to set apart the good from the... less experienced.

See you on the Rift!

• Mertinkle