User blog comment:Emptylord/Class Reworks - Itemization Follow-up/@comment-5035765-20160512211319/@comment-1330314-20160515210222

Okay, but the problem right now is that you're taking your own concerns, which may or may not be validated in-game (e.g. "I fear the above change might make mages better at supporting than supports") and voicing it as a prediction (i.e. "This will kill the support role"), even though you have no real means of verifying that. Maybe the above change might make mages too strong in bot lane, but then again, that exact same concern came up in Season 4, for very similar reasons ("mages scale harder with raw AP, they'll kick supports out with their raw damage"), and turned out to be wrong. I agree that a mage should not provide as much utility as a utility-focused support, but the above Ardent Censer's original heal was inferior to a rank 4 charge of (minus the bonus health scaling, too), and so was unlikely to do that. It's also worth mentioning that "pure" supports would be able to get this item as well, and on just as much gold as a bot lane mage (for both this item and the AP they'd need to make it scale later), so it's not like they're being locked out of utility oriented purely towards mages. If anything, the abundance of CDR for supports means they'd be able to cast the effect more frequently than their mage counterparts, who wouldn't be able to get as much raw AP with the same build.

The point I'm trying to make about WotA and Gunblade is that calling the above a WotA clone on the sole basis of stats make little sense, because those two spell vamp items already had very similar stats (AP and spell vamp) and niches (AP sustain). While healing is always tricky to get right, the above healing has the advantage of being universal across all AP champions (i.e. you heal for the same amount no matter what your kit does), a major advantage over "old" spell vamp. There is no point to invoking potential coding issues, first off because it is highly unlikely you know anything about League's own code, but also because code can be rewritten and fixed. The above Gunblade also clearly specifies the cap applies to its own healing, not healing from abilities.