User blog comment:BorosPaladin/In Support of Support/@comment-216.58.59.39-20121025004338

Leona, and to some extent Taric, is what I like to call a 'snowball support'. They need assists to do much, because they need to be in the middle of the enemy team. If they don't have some gold for tanky items, they will have very little defence at all (and no, their in-built defence from their Ws are nice, but don't count for much). In the end, you're gonna need at least a Merc's Treads, Aegis, and [probably] a Randuin's or a Frozen Heart. If you don't get assists in lane, you're gonna be pretty useless late game (Taric not as much because he has his armour aura and awesome buff ulti, but Leona is a perfect example of this), whereas somebody like Sona or Soraka, if they don't get assists in lane it hardly matters. Most tanky supports (except Ali [lol press R you can never kill me]) are like this, since they need gold from assists to get tanky, and the gold from gp10 items just isn't enough.

To compensate I guess, they have kits that can easily set up kills in lane, but it sorta depends on the adc as well, because if they don't respond right to your cc, then you cannot set up kills and get gold. Don't get me wrong, I love Taric, he's my main support champ, but just keep that in mind when you aren't doing well: like all snowball champions, if you don't manage to snowball, you are pretty useless.