Originally Posted by Xypherous

Luckily, in lane, there are 3 main gank paths.

12 minutes of ward coverage = 300 Gold.

Sightstone = 650 Gold.

There's a starting cost that makes this balanced - as the alternative to Sight Stone is to just buy wards with Gold.

Cost-efficiency is luckily one of the easiest statistics to tune - by raising the cost of the item (especially on small items like this) - you warp the efficiency of the item quite a bit.

Originally Posted by dsofsof

ok, did anyone see wicked on clg.eu dominate with ionic spark at mlg on Irelia?

i tried his ionic spark rush irelia build since then and am now at 68% win rate with irelia in 35+ games from 50%rate at 10 games, ranked at 1400-1500 elo... 1st day I saw the build, I played 10 games, rushed ionic spark every one and won 9 of 10. It was like wriggles on crack for irelia.

Originally Posted by Xypherous

Indeed - I thought about this pretty hard - and came out the other side with - what is the alternative? What is the set item that you must get every game?

A stack of wards that continuously consume gold every minute of the game.

You see the problem of pigeonholing supports is an odd one - mostly because supports are pigeonholed into getting zero items at the moment - due to the high price of consumables.

Originally Posted by Xypherous

AS/Armor benefits such a small subset of characters that I'm kind of hesitant on this. A truly decent AS/Armor item might necessitate the nerfs of already existing balanced characters and bind those characters to that item.

That's my main worry - as AS/Armor/Proc doesn't open up new gameplay for these characters - it just means that they just get more powerful with the item - which is an item that directly affects balance.

Unless the main focus of the item wasn't the AS/Armor part - it might be feasible to dance around the niche problem - you run into some oddities then, releasing an item with stats that people want but a playstyle that people don't necessarily want to be forced into.

Originally Posted by Xypherous

If Ghostblade was good, roughly half of the champions on that list would have a GP/5 option - minus Shen/Riven/Shyvana/Zed who have absolutely no need of it.

Let's just make Ghostblade good and then worry about the 4 outliers - none of whom are particularly weak at the moment (and barring Shen, none of whom actually want Heart of Gold to begin with.)

Originally Posted by Xypherous

Assuming you're running into a team that's purely physical damage - Thornmail/Sunfire Cape becomes the highest source of DPS for a tank. If you're a mana based tank, there's always the possibility of getting a Sheen and upgrading it to the Tank version of Sheen.