Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-6016076-20140625164717/@comment-1330314-20140629005933

I actually think is one of the supports with the healthiest gameplay mid-lane: her Q either takes time to charge or is relatively short-ranged, her point-and-click slow also requires her to get up close due to its short range and her shield doesn't give her overwhelming burst or harras (even though it makes for good trading power). was actually intended to be a dual mid lane mage and bot lane support from the start, but has huge design flaws that make him unhealthy in both lanes, as well as generally sub-par. Old falls into the same boat as Zil, new Karma is actually quite healthy in lane, even though she can be super-annoying against melee champions. I think that if there's a problem with supports playing mid lane, it's because of counterplay issues inherent to their kits, and not due to their potential to overscale on utility or damage. If you had a with even better damage/utility scalings but a healthy solo lane playstyle, she'd be fine as a top/mid laner as well as a support. This applies to every other support, too: champions like and  are getting slated for reworks because their kits were completely distorted around duo lane play, to the detriment of the champions themselves and the healthiness of their playstyles. I think supports deserve to turn into powerhouses late game, under the proviso that they themselves provide genuinely healthy gameplay, and they don't have to be viable solo laners to achieve that.

I also disagree with the issue of mages taking over supports: while it was a fad early on in Season 4, it quickly calmed down as people realized supports genuinely performed extremely well on their own. While creating an AP itemization path for mages would make them more popular, I don't think it would make them more popular than supports. The issue here is basically one of scaling: mages have no scaling to their utility, but are completely focused on damage. Supports, on the other hand, scale less well with damage but can increase their innate utility. A mage with AP would basically just become a mage, but a support with AP would still remain a support, only one with far stronger abilities. I don't think that having mid-range AP items would be harmful to supports, since there isn't really a mark that they need to hit for their utility to become relevant, rather, it would work more like a gradient (a support with 0 AP isn't going to fail because they don't have enough utility to secure/prevent a kill, but a support with 400 AP is going to bring much stronger abilities to the table). I also don't think giving bot lane mages easier access to AP would necessarily be a bad thing: if you want a lane focused on damage and CC rather than, say, utility, defenses or sustain, then that should be up to you, and that would be a perfectly valid choice (the item line was designed specifically for magey supports).

On the issue of tanky junglers: isn't really a good example for scaling utility, since he has no scalings to his utility. Most of his crowd control is hard CC, which you absolutely do not want to give a scaling to (it would create edge cases where your stun/root/etc. could become either really insignificant due to the lack of stat investment or really irritatingly long if you fully invest in whichever resource makes it scale), and his shield scales with health, so he does already scale as he builds tanky. If you want his damage to scale as he builds tanky, give him bonus health-to-damage ratios (which he does not need, considering he's already one of the tankiest, CC-heavy champions out there). If you're talking about his clear time, I think the new should help.

In general, I don't think it's a good idea to change itemization just because you want to encourage some special cases, such as Naut dealing more damage. He's not meant to deal damage, and I don't think it would be healthy for him to actually spec into damage without heavy tradeoffs to his tankiness. The best solution here would be to take a look at the champion himself: if you want his damage to scale as he builds tanky, give him a tankiness-to-damage scaling. If you want AP Nautilus to be more viable, buff his AP ratios. If you just want Naut to deal more damage, buff his bases. It's only when an entire class of champions suffers from a common problems (in this case, tanky junglers) that you should look into itemization for a potential solution, let alone create an entirely new stat.

Looking at the two kits you took ( and ), there's heavy overlap between certain stats. Building Spirit on Nautilus gives more damage on his W and E, which you could just as easily do by either buffing his base damage increase per rank or increasing his W and E AP ratios. The question here is: why would Naut invest specifically in Spirit? Sure, he gets a faster clear time, but it doesn't play to his strengths (tanky CC), nor does it bring anything he can't do with AP if he so decides. Why would Naut go for a Spirit item rather than an AP item? Similarly, the Spirit ratios you've added on Lulu overlap so closely that the better solution would be to just change Lulu's AP ratios to match your Spirit ratios, giving her less damage but more utility.

The TL;DR here is basically that Spirit doesn't really do anything that other stats don't do already (it boosts damage and utility on some champions, which is already ability power's job), and that having it in-game would require creating an entirely new class of items, and then adapting said items to every champion and vice versa. If Naut had better AP ratios to his W and E, or if Lulu had AP ratios equivalent to the Spirit ratios you'd gave her, you'd achieve pretty much the same effect.