Riot discusses LoL Season 4 Support changes

Following on from its recent post about changes to vision items and map control in League of Legends season 4 and its preseason, Riot has posted up another break down of changes it's going to be making to the game, this time affecting supports and the items they usually take, hopefully making them more exciting to play and letting them have more of a combat impact later in the game.

The blog post begins by discussing the problems with the meta at the moment, with supports handling most (if not all) of the warding responsibilities, whilst generating the least amount of gold, having the least ability to defend themselves and that warding often takes them away from the champion they're supposed to be protecting.

“I approve.”

To address these issues, Riot is introducing a handful of changes that could have a real impact on the way supports play and the roles they occupy. These are as follows:

• Increasing the gold income for players who don't last hit
• Introducing bonus XP in jungle and lane for players who fall significantly behind their teammates
• Capping possible expenditures on wards per player
• Giving players access to free vision items, known as Trinkets.

Supports will also be able to gain extra income from new masteries that reward players in shared lanes and increased assist rewards. Assists will now snowball, so the more assists you get, the more gold you'll get from that. There will also be tweaks to existing items, that should make a big difference.

• Philosopher's Stone grants gold every 10 seconds. When a nearby ally kills a minion, you earn gold.
• Executioner's Emblem executes minions below 200 health and grants gold to both you and the nearest ally when you last hit. Your ally gains a small gold bonus on top of this. This effect can happen up to twice a minute.
• Spellthief's Blade makes it so that your spells and basic attacks against enemy champions grant you gold. It cannot affect the same target more than once every 10 seconds and last hitting an enemy disables this effect for 10 seconds.

To prevent this extra gold from making champions designed to offer more crowd control than damage too powerful late game, certain dedicated supports may have their passives scale with AP to allow them to offer more utility instead of making them big damage dealers.

KitGuru Says: As someone who dips in and out of support play, I'm down for changes like this. Should make the late game a bit more interesting. What about you guys though, what do you think?

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