Preseason Impressions: Support Items

The first wave of preseason changes has hit the PBE. It's fairly incomplete, there's a handful of blatant bugs and issues, but thankfully the new support items are in and functional.

I'm not going post the stats of the items here, but you can find them at surrender@20. Just search for "philosopher" and you'll skip down to the relevant section of their mega post.

Here's a quick fact round-up before I dig into some analysis:

• You can only have one of the three support items (they're also exclusive with Avarice Blade and jungle items).
• All three have a mini version costing 365g that's half as effective that upgrades into the full version.
• The final upgrades (e.g. Shurelia's, Shard of True Ice, Martyr's Call) keep the gold generation passives.

To begin, here's a quick comparison of the maximum gold generation each item provides.

• Philosopher's Stone: 10.4 gp10
• Kage's Lucky Pick: 20 gp10
• Reaper's Emblem: 13.3 gp10

These calculations are for ideal scenarios, and this is important. All Philosopher's Stone has to do for its ideal scenario is stay in lane (although I didn't count Z. However, Kage's Lucky Pick's ideal scenario requires you to harass two targets every 10 seconds exactly. It's fairly obvious that won't happen often. Your opponents are not going to open themselves up for harass at exact 10 second intervals, if they're even in lane at the same time you are. Reaper's Emblem requires that you're in lane and can safely Execute minions, otherwise it has no gp10 generation at all.

Kage's Lucky pick is thus the most iffy of all three items. To match Philosopher's Stone you need to be landing 5 valid harass hits every minute. That's a little dicey, and if you fall behind (or even if you get too far ahead) you won't have the opportunities you need to make that quota. Shard of True Ice, despite its changes, is still somewhat questionable in usefulness.

Philosopher's Stone is obviously the safest option, so long as you aren't losing the lane so horribly you can't even get near minions. Of the items it's got the most solid performance throughout the game, generating gold in siege scenarios just as well as in laning scenarios. It also builds into Shurelia's, which is still a reasonably useful item.

Reaper's Emblem is unique in that its functionality doesn't preclude last-hitting. You can last hit all day while waiting for your next charge, and as long as you're using charges on melee minions you're still generating 10 gp10. For this reason I suspect we may seem some interesting duo setups involving one or more of these. Most importantly, it upgrades into Martyr's Call.

Martyr's Call is, in fact, probably overpowered at present. If it was merely a shield it might be roughly equivalent to the others, but the shield can be self-cast and works like a Zilean bomb. Breaking the shield doesn't stop the damage from occurring four seconds later, and the damage is AoE. The power this can represent in both skirmishes and teamfights is huge.

I don't know if it will bring about the return of double-bruiser lanes or bruiser-support lanes, but in any matchup I can get away with it I'm planning on grabbing Reaper's Emblem (which incidentally also scales as minion values go up).

That's it for the support item review. There's a lot more preseason stuff coming, but with the jungle changes incomplete and some trinkets outright not working, it'll have to wait for a later date.