Season 13 Vigilant Wardstone Support Guide

According to Riot Games, Vigilant Wardstone is considered the multiplier item for support champions. If you are familiar with how Infinity Edge and Rabadon’s Deathcap function, this might surprise you. Or you just have never used this item, like the majority of the League of Legends player base.

What is Vigilant Wardstone (Watchful Wardstone)

So to get right down to it, Vigilant Wardstone is a legendary item in  League of Legends. The item automatically upgrades to Watchful Wardstone after completing a support quest (1000 generated gold) and reaching level 13. The item doesn’t build out of any components, and it costs 1100 gold.  For that price tag, it provides the user with 150 health points and 15 ability haste. Looking at the pure value of the stats, the item doesn’t stand out. But what lies underneath is the best League of Legends item that nobody uses.

Vigilant Wardstone passive values

This item has 3 different and unique passive abilities. And each one is more ludacris and offers more value than the previous. The first one is called Blessing of Ixtal. This passive increases the user’s bonus attack damage, bonus health, bonus ability power, and bonus ability haste by 12%. If you are wondering why Riot Games is calling Vigilant Wardstone the Deathcap of supports, you now have your answer. Every champion in the game uses and builds these stats. But support champions are designed to be the most flexible. Which means they make the most out of them in either situation. 

Every kind of support champion would make good use of this passive. Except maybe for Pyke, whose passive doesn’t allow him to build health and he scales of lethality. But imagine a support Ashe build consisting of Imperial Mandate, Lucidity Boots, Black Cleaver and Vigilant Wardstone. She builds all of the statistics Vigilant Wardstone empowers, so she gets 12% more value from her items for just 1100 gold. Even if you play Leona or Lulu, 12% more health and 12% more ability power which converts into shields is a big difference. 

Vigilant Wardstone vision control

Arcane Cache is the second passive on this item. It allows it to store up to 3 purchased Control Wards. Those are some of the most important pieces of utility for controlling vision. And if you have ever played support, you would know how hard it is to purchase item components with Control Wards in your inventory. Luckily, this item absorbs them and gives you room for one more. Without Vigilant Wardstone, you can only purchase 2 Control Wards at a time. 

But the third passive of this item goes beyond that. It’s called Behold and it increases your Stealth and Control Ward placement cap by 1. For those of you who don’t know what this means, here is the explanation. Every League of Legends player and champion can place a maximum of 3 Stealth and 1 Control ward at the same time. If you try to place a second Control Ward while your first one is still active and not cleared by the enemy, it will automatically shut down. The same goes for Stealth wards. If you have 3 active Stealth wards on the map that haven’t expired yet, placing a fourth would disable the first one you placed.  That changes with this item passive, allowing you to have 2 Control Wards and 4 Stealth Wards on the map at the same time. Going from 4 to 6 wards, is a 50% increase in vision.

Best support item in season 13 of League of Legends

So now that we know everything that Vigilant Wardstone provides us with, it’s time to see if it’s worth getting. The short answer is yes, and it’s probably the best support item in the game. Even if you build another item after your mythic and before Vigilant Wardstone, you get more value from this item. As a support , your second item should always be situational. Sometimes you might need Redemption to keep your frontline healthy. Other times you might prefer Chemtech Putrifier to negate some of the enemy’s healing. Maybe your ADC wants more protection, so you purchase Mikael’s Crucible. All of these items offer similar stats, so let’s try to do the math.

Vigilant Wardstone Gold Value

Imagine you are a level 13 Lulu. You have a completed support item named Shard of True Ice, lucidity boots, and have just completed your second item after your mythic item. Regardless if you built Shurelya’s Battlesong or Moonstone Renewer, you get pretty much the same items. If you have normal Lulu runes and you decide to build Vigilant Wardstone as your third item, this is what you get. 

Because of this, you gain: 25 Ability Power, 28 Ability Haste, 201 Health Points + 1 extra ward on the map + 1 extra control ward. This is 1.8k gold worth of stats that you just bought for only 1.1k, making the item 164% gold efficient. Crucially, you just got 28  ability haste from 1.1k gold. Anyone who plays support will know that ability haste is arguably the best stat on most supports. This stat helps you apply crowd control more, shield and heal more, and proc item passives more (Shurelyas, Moonstone, Evenshroud etc).

Why you should buy Vigilant Wardstone

With 1 Health Point being valued at 2,67 gold, you gain 536 gold worth of health. 1 point of Ability Haste valued at 27 gold, you get over 750 gold worth of Ability Haste. With 1 point of Ability Power being valued at 21,5 gold, you get 540 gold worth of Ability Power. And these are only the statistics that Lulu would mainly use. She still also gets an attack damage bonus she uses every time she auto attacks. This alone puts the gold value of the item at over 1800 gold, and that is without considering things like:

• Scaling Runes
• Drake buffs
• Orn Items
• Extra wards and vision
• Extra Item Slot
• Extra stats from purchasing a potion you can now afford, whose buffs also scale with Vigilant Wardstone

Now instead of this, imagine you decided to buy a Kindlegem. This is one of the most common building blocks for most support items and you keep your last slot for wards. You just gained: 200 HP and 10 AH for 800 gold. Kindlegem is 100% gold efficient. You will likely sit on this item for the rest of the game because support champions very rarely finish their third item. So you basically just missed out on 18 Ability Power, 23 Ability Haste, and 2 extra wards on the map because of this bad decision. And the thing is, you might not ever get the 2600 gold you need to complete your third item. The game is balanced in that way where supports cant farm effectively or generate gold as the game goes on. So making the most value out of your resources is crucial, and this guide alone can help you become a better support player in League of Legends.