User blog comment:Lukeatlook/Pyro's Item Overhaul 8 - The Support Project/@comment-24871065-20141223104022/@comment-24871065-20141223134508

Well, yea. But as soon as the laning phase is over and it's just teamfights all over, the only real value you have on a sightstone is the HP. And then is only valuable if you actually intend to get hit, and even then it's far less usefull than say a Randuins, Sunfire or Spirit Visage. If you are playing Sona for instance, that HP is something I would gladly trade for AP as that would quite quickly compensate that through heals instead.

I get the value of the wards, but as the game moves on I just don't see the sightstone as being even remotely usefull. Especially not with an upgraded trinket ward. And it's easier to advance your build while buying a ward or 2 every now and then with spare change instead of putting out a bunch of money at once for something that I will inevitably sell not long after. A sightstone just sacrifices too much in terms of survivability for me. Of course, that could be due to the way I play support as well. I build either full tank or full AP, because a full AP sona or Soraka will put out heals that can keep you floating. And in team fights, a Soraka that heals all team for 700 (I've actually gotten it higher) hp each, is a bit of a game breaker.

As is probably obvious, my philosophy regarding supports IS indeedn unorthodox, but the way I see it a support needs to stay alive and actually do some difference in the battle and not just die for the good of the adc. A full support build soraka or sona has heals which heal barely enough to negate a single auto-attack from the enemy adc, while a full AP Soraka or Sona will heal for at least 3 times that. The same thing goes for support tanks. A pure support build, as recommended, will give you a sub-par survivability and thereby hurt your team more than it does good. I would argue that a full tank build Braum is superior to the support build path as his ability to stay alive is increased by leagues. This will ease the process of punishing your opponents, as well as reduce the likelyhood of having to sacrifice yourself in order to save your adc and in the process thereby feed the enemy adc. I feel that support items are not ideal for bringing out the full potential of the team. And with the skill sets of my main supports, building a highly tanky or healy support with lots of Armor, MR and HP (Or AP and CDR in case of spell casters) is relatively safe as your damage-output is still as low (or in some cases lower) than with the standard support build. Of course, with Sona and Soraka, some skills require extra care and the occasional KS due to Sonas Q can occur. But other than that, I have a hard times seeing the pros of building a pure support path build.