Reign of Gaming

They could make the Sightstone a bit cheaper if you have a certain Mastery point spend, in the utility tree, somewhere on the level of Cookie/free ward. 

Interesting article...

Its like trying to look at the silver lining only to find out that while the cloud my have dark patches, the whole of it is made of freaking silver!

Good article.

I like your analysis very much. It makes a lot of sense to me. (N.B : This change is making taric even stronger than he already was in the new meta, new soloQ support beast is here)

That being said, I actualy think SS is gonna be bought even more on junglers now. Because jungle suffers pretty much the same curse as support, gold starvation. So now it is so much better in terms or build path to get that early ruby and convert it to SS whenever you get a gold rush from a successful gank or drake or smthg. I admit we might get it later than before but still very much worth the buy in my opinion.

Good point and I suppose that will hoold true most of the time in soloQ.

Now look at it this way, if you happen to play as a team, if your jungler get a SS around the 15min + he might have wriggles. He is not loosing too much on tank stats thanks to the good health provided and now he can spend 3 wards non stop. Idealy 2 wards top side river and one aggressive jungle ward. Added to the 2 wards bot from support you almost achieve total map control or at very least a great defensive vision for all 3 lanes. This should achieved around the end of laning pahse so you can spot the enemy team trying an agressive gang up gank on one of your lanes to kill a turret before siegeing starts.
That is one possible benefit of it, but the main benefit in my opinion is to totaly relieve your support from buying any green wards (pink are really stong now so they won't be a way around them). This way he can invest more in those pinks/oracles/support items.
From this point on I think it would be just too much beneficial for your team to have 2 ppl with good roaming capabilities being able to ward strategic points at any moment. With 5 wards you can pretty much cover all enemy roaming (not counting pink wards war) and you can achieve this by sacrificing only a couple hundred golds on your jungler.

What Emerald said. As both a tool for surviving burst and a gold-saving/vision, sightstone becomes the core and the gp10's are the luxury items. Though sightstone is similar in concept with it's investment potential, I would (almost) compare it to old Heart of Gold. Which makes sense since that's basically what it replaced.

Some quick lazy math - assuming pretty optimized utilization of the sightstone alone, that amounts to around 300g every six minutes or so (plopping down a pair of wards, then doing so again as that pair expire), and keeping that 5th ward in reserve to advance vision, ward around an enemy vision ward, or gain vision in a fight).  Assuming the somewhat low-ball estimate of 75g per ward (I feel that the real value of the ward is closer to 100g, which is simply to approximate becuaue of the 25g for killing one off), that still amounts to a GP10 equivalent of just over 8 GP10.  Since the health/gold cost tradeoff is so close to even with both, the sightstones are still the most gold efficient items in the game after the 5th use.  
   This nerf didn't really change any of that, and actually made them more attractive items for junglers (Mundo, Lee Sin, Maokai, Shen, and even Amumu or Olaf) because the item no longer carries as much of an opportunity cost in stats per item slot.  I have played plenty of games from the jungle where I've gotten stomped early, and then used Wriggles/SS to become a ward-bot and turned the game around through vision alone.  For Lee Sin the sightstone used to be a pretty broken item, and this only makes it more so.  I win with LeeSin this way, despite being pretty mechanically bad at Lee Sin.
   It is still the best scaling support item throughout the game, my only real issue is that it disproportionately benefits utility tank supports who thrive on early survivability to make plays, while ranged supports who benefit a lot from modest amounts of ability power are essentially delayed that much farther in getting items that permit them to be a threat outside of CC, Vision, and the odd AA.  I didn't state that very clearly but that's basically the gist of my complaint with that - if one finds themselves trapped in a lane with a really bad AD carry, the overall added cost of the sightstone postpones the building of Kage's and/or Chalice that would enable a squishy support like Lux or Zyra to rectify a lost lane, whereas it's an improvement for a tanky support like Leona or Taric who really needs only those statistics to be relevant.

Didn't the cost of Ruby Sightstone change as well?

• Total cost increased to 1550 from 1300.
• Health increased to 360 from 300.
• Gold reward for Ruby Sightstone wards increased to 25 from 10.

Does that change the analysis at all?  I'm always wondering if little details like this matter.  You never know which number might take it from ok, to oh damn.

Well because sightstone's cost increase, then of course the overall cost increased. But he said that the upgrade to ruby sightstone (which is still 600) has not changed, so analyzing ruby sightstone isn't that significant.

To address your fourth point, I very often came back with 700-1000+ gold on my first trip to the shop. I usually start Charm, 4 wards, and a health pot, additionally a biscuit and a 60 sec ward. That setup was easily more sustain than I needed and my wards could at least last till 7-8 minutes in, placing two at a time. So, I didn't think that was much of an issue.

Although, I do agree with you still that's it's for the better and that's just because it costs more doesn't mean it's a nerf. However, I also think that it as it makes it easier to obtain for supports, same for junglers. They might just build it a bit later.