User blog:Willbachbakal/(Item Concept) Retuning Zeke's Herald

has always been a problem item: back when it was still known as Stark's Fervor, it gave a massive amount of bonuses through its aura, including attack speed, health regeneration, and enemy armor reduction on top of massive life steal. It was a popular item, but only because its aura was far too powerful, and so it was nerfed over time to its current state. While currently sort of okay in niche full-AD comps, the item suffers from serious design issues: it's an item with bruiser-oriented stats but support-grade team buffing power, meaning that supports purchasing it tend to find the aura next to useless on themselves, and bruisers purchasing it get a fairly weak amount of stats. By design, it's never going to be fully useful, and consequently there's a lot of wasted power on it, exacerbated by the fact that most auras tend to be fairly diluted by nature (the aura itself also only truly works on autoattack-based AD champions, AKA marksmen).

While the most common discussion around changes to Zeke's is whether it should be made a dedicated bruiser item or a pure support item, but I think it's possible for it to be both: basically, I'm copying passive, allowing for the item to have tons of great tanky personal stats and grant the wielder a bit of extra damage, while also tying that extra damage to team play. It would change the item's niche a fair bit, making it an item for champions who want to build a tanky item and contribute more damage for their team, rather than a full-AD damage/sustain aura item, but I think it would still preserve most of the item's focus on team damage while concentrating its power.

Changes

 * New recipe: +  + 1000g.
 * Total cost increased to 2600g from 2550g.
 * Attack damage removed.
 * Life steal removed.
 * Cooldown reduction reduced to 10% from 20%.
 * Health increased to 400 from 250.
 * Now grants 50 armor.
 * Aura removed.
 * New unique active: select an allied champion to become their Herald, granting the use of the item's unique passive. Selecting a new ally puts the passive on a 30-second cooldown.
 * New unique passive: attacking the same enemy champion within 2 seconds of the selected ally deals 20(10level) additional magic damage. The effect cannot occur on the same target for 6 seconds.