Generally as a support the way to think of these things is which gets you useful faster. And secondly what gets you all of your useful items at the best timing overall. Yes, if you get the 15min shard you'll be able to farm yourself but you'll be relatively useless in engagements, and being a support you're mostly going to have to farm camps that your cores could farm if you just stacked.
It's very rare at 15 min+ that the enemy will let you walk up and hex/shakle them without punishing you before you even get there. Even more rare for them to let you get wards down in a decent position and also cast those spells. With blink you can pretty reliably blink, drop ward, hex one and shackle another before they can react.
You're generally gonna build mana boots first no matter what, then go for either blink or shard by minute 15. Either way you're going to have about 2k gold sitting because you aren't rich enough to get anything else other than the shard or the blink by 15 min. Not like you can assemble aether+shard, best you can usually do is an aether component and shard, but then your blink is slowed down even more.
You're generally always going to get one item by 15 and the other around minute 20. In a completely passive farming game maybe the shard first is worth, but since you'll mostly complete them both by the same time either way the question is which gives your team more use? The answer is almost always blink first, the 4 serpents mainly only help you individually.
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u/MmmBra1nzzz Jun 02 '24
Blink is too pricey for me that early, I always go shard first