Pink/Vision Wards -1000 sight radius
-Last for 3 minutes

When should I buy pink wards over green wards?

Are they worth the cost?

In short, yes. The longer answer has a little logic to it so bear with me here. Essentially buying 1 ward is equivalent to 3 minions in terms of gold. Now wards placed correctly can save your life from ganks. While some may argue that buying these slows down your ability to build items, think of it this way; If I buy this ward I can see their jungler heading to my lane and back off accordingly, he goes back to jungling and I stay here and farm more minions. If you didn't place that ward you would have died, giving your enemy 300gold and you gaining less cs and experience being away from your lane. Because that ward payed for itself, it is always good to purchase atleast 1 when you go back to shop. Now if buying a pink ward to counter your enemies vision you spend slightly more but usually get back 25g in the process, so you are essentially paying 25g to make sure your enemy has no vision in that area. Pretty worth it to me.

Even if I don't kill an enemy ward with them?

In this scenario you won't be gaining back the 25g, and while it is still good to make sure your enemy has no vision where you chose to place it, he didn't have a ward there in the first place.You kinda used 50g here for a less radius green ward. It is mostly up to your personal decision and game scenario (is there a jungle twitch where it can still be extremely useful?) of whether that 50g was wasted or not.

Why not get Oracle's instead?

5% Vision Mastery

While some argue this is a waste and your mastery points are better spent elsewhere, I have always thought it to be extremely strong if used to your advantage.

While only adding 55 and 50 radius to the vision range of green and pink wards respectively, on the battlefield that can mean the difference between an enemy slipping past your ward skirting along the edge, or catching him in his tracks.

This first picture is without the 5% bonus, while it is a bit hard to see(the best I could do sorry) blue buff entrance ramp is not seen, as a point of reference, the rock at the very top on the ramp cannot be seen at all here.

This angle is a bit better, we can see that the rock is now visible. Your vision actually extends slightly further then the fog of war shows, if a characters model hit the edge of your vision range you can fully see them moving. This means if someone is walking down that ramp we will most likely catch glimpse of them, while previously we were unable to.

Note: in the first picture without the vision mastery you cannot see into dragon nor its entrance hardly at all. While the picture with the 5% mastery covers the majority of the entrance and with the model hitting the edge we can effectively see when the enemy goes for dragon while still maintaining vision in the tri-bush, lower river, and blue buff ramp areas.

-The mastery also does not affect Wriggle's wards.

Clairvoyance

This is a summoner spell that has seen a lot of use in the past and not as much recently. While it has no listed vision it seems to be slightly smaller in size then a ward, possibly around 900 range. It however get's its strength from the user, an experienced player can CV near an overextended lane revelaing a gank attempt before it goes bad, or gain vision on baron for your team to initiate and steal it. Clairvoyance has a lot of uses and can go from being used mindlessly on cooldown to an amazing on demand ward for a few seconds, usable from anywhere on the map(permitting you are alive) that your enemies cannot destroy to break your vision, and does not need to be placed inside brush to reveal them. The spell can be used to great effect or little effect, it is slightly risky if your team cannot make use of it to gain advantages as you are costing your team a potentially different and possibly more useful summoner spell.

Conclusion

Vision is extremely strong, allowing your team to see what your enemy is doing in a given area for any period of time is strong, denying them the ability to see what you are doing is even better. Oracles is a tough sell for me for two main reasons; It is mostly only purchased on Supports and Junglers, the 2 lower gold income champions, who will never make their money back. And while these 2 characters are roaming around the most and placing more wards then everyone else, the support is also extremely squishy and easy to kill if caught. Acompanying your support can lead to both of you getting caught and possibly dieing, or missing farm and xp in lane etc. This is not as much of a problem for the jungler who is usually much more durable. CV while somewhat out of favor right now might see the spotlight again in the future, it has a good risk reward factor to it that can change games, for better or for worse. For most laners getting a ward or two every time you go back to shop should be sufficient to cover your lane decently. This isn't to say you still won't get surprised or killed, because it will happen. but buying 3 and 4 wards to make sure they aren't in any bush remotely near you isn't necessary and will starve you on gold for items, there is such a thing as buying too many wards. Pink wards are more expensive and unless the enemy has warded a particularly important area such as dragon or baron it's likely not worth it using more gold to make sure your lane bush isnt warded. If you see one of these wards go down type the time it will be down in chat (3 minutes is pretty easy) and a general location of where it is for your team, such as tri bush,and maybe a ping. Vision is not an expensive resource to acquire, it is actually fairly cheap for the benefits. what is costly however, is not having enough of it, and costing you valuable objectives, and possibly the game.

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