User blog comment:Care Level/Fucking Sightstone, Man./@comment-1330314-20140422000422

There are a few problems with this idea. The first is that this doesn't really work with the average gold supports get in-game: typically supports receive ~12k gold over the course of the game, all of which goes towards items that fill all 6 item slots. Having the above upgrades would presume a higher level of income that would allow supports to somehow benefit from an extra slot, which usually won't happen due to them already using all of their gold. While I do think there need to be more interesting support item options out there (namely, a true AP support build path), I don't think this is the way to go.

Another problem with these upgrades is that the stats on each item don't make much sense, either building out of nothing (i.e. spontaneous mana regen on Heart of the Earth when neither nor  give that stat) or even causing the wielder to lose stats (again, losing 5 health regeneration on Heart of the Earth when compared to FotM). It also looks like you tried to homogenize the stats on every item, which reduces diversity instead of encouraging it (none of the items have clearly defined stat differences).

Possibly the biggest proble, though, is combining the ward generation of Sightstone with the actives on each item. Consider the following situations:
 * You're using your active in a teamfight. To do this, you also need to deploy a ward. In the best case, you're wasting a perfectly good ward, since the places where you need vision aren't necessarily the places where a teamfight is taking place at the moment, and in the worst case you've just removed a useful ward you've deployed somewhere else.
 * You're laying down a ward. Because of the huge amount of on-cast utility associated with each ward, you may have wasted an item active that may potentially have saved an ally or secured a kill. Again, combining both actives is wasteful. On top of this, the 5 second cooldown is a downgrade from Sightstone's lack of cooldown in between ward casts.
 * You lay down multiple wards in a teamfight. Each item active is designed to be extremely powerful, which is why the current top-tier support items have a 60 cooldown between each use. In the case of your items, this cooldown is five seconds for five casts, more than enough for any single teamfight. This is a massive increase in uptime that literally multiplies the utility any support can have, to the point where even non-supports may resort to buying these items due to the sheer utility they provide. This is seriously unbalanced, again because you're tying extremely strong item actives to ward deployment.

There are other problems, too (ward charges generating outside the shop, invisible wards applying visible debuffs to enemies, changing the way shielded enemies deal damage with Standard of the Phalanx, turning said shield into a team-wide buff and having the AP and AD of up to five teammates deal damage to any target), but the main problem lies in combining the active of Sightstone with that of the end-tier support items we have now, which have completely different functionalities and methods of use. If you want Sightstone to build into more things, perhaps you could emulate the support item trifecta by giving Sightstone three different upgrades, each tailored towards a certain role (tanky support, offensive caster support, defensive caster support).