A 3 season long support main's opinion on the standing of supports currently
Hello!
So there are two posts, one from Riot and one on Reddit, which have peaked my interests in regards to the support role as a whole. Here's the riot post: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/champions-skins/free-rotation/some-thoughts-support And the reddit post can't be linked due to reddit's regulations, but it is about a player to goes into draft mode matches as support, picks singed, yet plays a style of roaming counter-jungler.
The Riot post is still fairly new and has yet to be brushed on by the community of the boards and reddit, but overall it states that the goal for supports in 2017 is to make the role more desirable. How this will be accomplished is through various side goals such as increasing the gold-income for supports, adjusting certain masteries or runes to better help the needs of supports (without buffing other roles indirectly), broaden the itemization of supports even further than it currently is, and finally, make supports feel more rewarding to play as. In this post I'll be touching on each topic one by one, as well as give my own opinions on what supports need/don't need, and what can help to make the role feel desirable. A TL;DR will be at the bottom
As a bit of background, I've been playing the support role since mid season 4, back when Shyvana top was still a thing and still play the role to this day. My actual champion pool for the support role, of champions which I am comfortable and have seen success playing, includes the following:
Champions which I have attempted to play but have yet to find success on in the support role:
For rankings (if people find this important), I ended season 4 high gold, season 5 ended high plat, and season 6 ended low diamond which seems to be where I've currently plateaued.
With the extensive amount of champions I've tried in the support role, and seeing the buffs to items or kits which allowed the champions to be viable in the role, I've come to realize most of the restrictions that will allow a champion to be played as a support or not.
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Ability to run on a low gold-income This is the biggest one. Mostly because supports purposely give up farm, the most consistent form of gold-income next to time, to allow their teammates to get ahead. There are so many jungle camps and only 3 lanes, with 5 members per team, one person ideally needs to give up the gold potential. What this translates to is the champion to be able to have some form of usefulness without the requirement of bonus stats and item actives/passives. Riot has also tried to help compensate the support role by creating low cost items which offer powerful actives, yet offer next to nothing in direct combat stats that high-income roles would want.
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High early game base values on abilities with low scaling potential This one is a little tricky and has seen issues in the past. Prime examples being Lulu and Nautilus. The need for high early base values on abilities ties in to the first reason stated above. Since supports run on low gold-income as well as are not tied to a lane for farm, they have the ability to roam around the map and make high impact plays in the early game. To better enable this ability, the most effective support champions are ones who have strong early game base values on abilities so that when they are successfully used it will most likely guarantee a kill or objective. However, for balance purposes the scaling of said abilities on the champion must remain low so that they can't be taken into a solo lane and have their combination of high base and scaling values be abused. As mentioned, this was a case example with Lulu, whose scaling values were nerfed in favor of giving her a more supportive playstyle, and Nautilus, whose base values on his E and utility were nerfed to keep his lane and jungle styles viable.
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Can make up for what is lacking in a current team composition For this, it's pretty self explanatory and is true for all roles, but for the support role specifically this usually translates to utility. However there are times when a team is lacking in overall damage that some supports, cough cough EZREAL/BRAND cough cough, who can make up for a lack in damage. In most cases though, the support will utilize the utility in their kits to provide either engage tools, pick potential, tankiness, peels, or team-wide buffs. It's all dependent on what the situation calls for, but generally the more versatile a support is the safer of a pick they are, especially early in the phases of champion select.
In regards to the post by Riot, here is my current standing on support as a role, and this is a very blunt way of putting how I feel.
Supports are fine overall, but could use small improvements for enjoyment purposes. The biggest piece mentioned by Meddler which I will agree with is the need for more diverse support itemization, which has plagued the role for many years. Thankfully with the addition of the items which increase the effectiveness of heals/shields, enchantress supports now have more unique itemization as compared to engage or utility supports. However, the overall thought process behind what to build ends once you lock in a champion. This can be tackled in a few ways. Straight up increase the number of items for supports that all fill different needs and make each item more unique to a situation, nerf the oppressive items and make them more situation-specific, or create and entirely new stat-line that effects utility. Personally, the easiest of the three options would be the second one, but I would much rather see options one or three make it to live servers and I'll go into the third option in a little more detail.
Currently, the stat which effects most utility in the game is ability power. This has caused many issues since ability power can affect both utility (such as heals and shields) and damage, it allows for insane snowball potential or an overpowered state in certain mages, as well as a massive restriction of power in plenty of utility supports. What I'm proposing is to introduce an entire new stat line, which items, that will either replace or compliment ability power in strengthening utility abilities but NOT damage abilities. An example of this would be Janna. This new stat, let's call Mind for now, would add to the power of her slow on W, shield and AD from E, and heal from R, but would not add any damage to her Q or W. However, this would only effect champions which currently have scaling on their utility, and could be offered on a variety of items to fit different needs but not be overbearing when stacked together since it would be balanced for each individual champion based on their scaling.
On the topic of gold-income from supports, I personally think it is fine at the moment and Riot has done a great job of reducing the cost of support items to compensate the issue. Same goes for level differential, but this is mostly because I don't see a way for supports to gain experience at an equal rate without making someone else broken in the process.
For masteries, I'd like to see a complete overhaul of Windspeaker's Blessing and Bond of Stone. Each of these keystone masteries offer something which is mirrored in a better version in current support items, especially bond of stone when compared to the new Knight's Vow. I'm no game design expert so take my ideas for replacement with a grain of salt (which I know the NA region has plenty of salt to offer).
To replace Windspeaker's Blessing, I really like the idea of Ally Utility adding something extra to the person affected, but in its current for Windspeaker's is quite bland and uninteractive. It's also either too strong on some champions which requires nerfs to the mastery, or is garbage yet the only good option on other supports. It should still be something that adheres to enchantresses, but I think it would be best to focus on making the receiver of buffs gain an extra benefit.
>Windspeaker's Blessing: Heals and shields while in champion combat will buff the user and target with this effect for 4 seconds. If the champion with the buff attacks an enemy champion, they will be healed for 4% of their maximum health and gain a burst of 20% movement speed for 1 seconds. Windspeaker's Blessing has a 4 second cooldown when used on the same target.
The idea of this is to increase healing in combat but not spam healing out of combat, so that it isn't so oppressive in siege comps and laning phase, and the cooldown will prevent people stacking enchantresses from being too powerful, unless they can beautifully coordinate using spells right at the end of each cooldown. Also, making the bonus heal based on the targets maximum health rather than directly increasing the heal by a percentage amount makes it far more interactive when deciding the value of who to use it on, as well as decreasing the chances of seeing one champion be far stronger compared to others from this mastery. All the numbers are very rough and are obviously subject to change.
Now for Bond of Stone, which is seen as the common mastery for tanky peel support that stick by the carries, which at this point is Braum/Maokai and that's about it because all the other tank support moved over to the Strength of the Colossus hype, it's meant to be a "stay by me and you will be safer" mastery. The issue is, this mastery has now been overshadowed by a more useful mastery, as well as a new item. Sadly, I don't see a way to encapsulate the idea of Bond of Stone in a new way without it being something to stack along with Knight's Vow which will make them overpowered together but weak alone. Instead, I'd rather see a new concept be tackled for supports with the mastery slot. And this concept being clutch save moments.
>Martyr's Grace: When a nearby ally reaches critical health (20%), their champion model will glow and champion portrait will flash red. Left click on the model or portait of your target to sacrifice 10% maximum health and shield the target for 20% of your maximum health for 5 seconds. Half of the shield's value left after the duration returns back and heals the original user. (20 second cooldown).
Again, numbers are rough at the moment, but the idea is to sacrifice a bit of your health in key moments in order to save an ally when they are low, with the health sacrificed being returned if it wasn't needed such as a misclick.
Quick touch on Runes, I will not be mentioning those since Riot is planning to rework the Rune System sometime in the future and I have no idea how it will work later on.
Finally from the Riot post, there was the topic of making support feel more rewarding and impactful outside of shorter queue times. And I'll agree that it's hard to find recognition in most games as a support. This is mostly because of there being no big flashy moments for what supports go for. Carries have their KDAs, damage dealt, and pentakills. Splitpushers have their towers destroyed and can be seen forcing the enemies to stop them. Tanks have their farm, damage taken, and KDAs. Supports have wards placed/destroyed and assists. Which frankly, are not stats that people will look at to say "wow, great job" that often.
From what I can tell off the post, it looks like Meddler mentioned giving supports and tanks their own versions of "killing sprees" to make other teammates be able to recognize the contributions better. Which I absolutely love this idea. I'm not too sure how they plan to implement this but I look forward to it greatly.
And now on to the topic of the Singed Support post from Reddit. As a bit of background, the post talks about a player with over 2 million mastery points and Singed and refuses to play any other champion. In his games, he's been queueing as support and playing singed in the role. By the terms of service this would be fine under normal circumstances. However, he is ignoring his allies and actively creating a negative environment in the game by neglecting the fundamental aspects which define a support.
A generic definition of support is the role which makes up for the lacking parts of a team while being on a low gold and experience income. This Singed player would run smite and take camps from his own designated jungler, inciting toxicity, and would avoid the bottom lane altogether not assisting his team in the slightest. Yes, he did reach plat meaning he knows what he's doing. But at the same time, he is still creating a toxic environment for his teammates which is ban worthy.
But this brings up an interesting topic of discussion, why exactly do supports get viewed as the role which babysits the adc? The answer is simple but complex. In reality, the support babysits the entire team, not just the adc. As the title states, you support your team in whatever way necessary to win the game. As it stands, however, the adc role is the most essential in objective taking so they are the most valuable one to protect. But this is not the case for all matches. As can be seen in many streams and from many popular players, they will all agree that in some games if your adc is not doing his/her job then you assist the next most valuable teammate which will typically be mid, then jungle, then top. But depending on the meta, it will differ (carry top laners for instance). Take for example the early game, plenty of higher elo supports will roam VERY heavily in the early stages of the game to try and snowball each lane individually, thus "supporting" the entire team, but as the game progresses they move to support the people who need it most.
Even in the LCS you see this. All throughout Season 5 most supports would invade the enemy jungle and mess with them in order to slow down clear and potentially steal some camps and experience, since at the time junglers were so impactful they were seen as a priority to hinder. In the last season of LCS, it was viewed that adc/mid were the most valuable roles at the time and so the support would transition between helping the two lanes throughout the early game as needed. With the next season seeming to start on a tank/engage meta, I'm expecting supports to be heavily in favor of those that can disengage large fights such as Janna, Nami, Bard, and Morgana to counteract the upcoming meta.
In general, I'd like to see Riot work on removing the stigma that support is attached to an adc and rather the support helps the whole team. In the current champion select and in all formats that show the general location of each role, and in each format the support is put directly next to the adc's position. I'm going to petition for the support icon to be moved elsewhere, such as river or jungle, to signify they should not be tied to the bottom lane. In higher tier play you consistently see the stronger supports focus on the team as a whole rather than one person, and how we portray the role should represent that as well.
TL;DR
Gold income is fine with supports, same with experience gain. It's how the system should be and frankly there's no reasonable way to give supports extra gold/experience without breaking other champions/roles. Windspeaker's Blessing and Bond of Stone should be reworked to new masteries that offer something more interactive rather than stat sticks that already exist on items. We'll see what happens with runes when Riot announces the rune system overhaul later on (unless it's dropped). A new stat-line and items should be introduced to replace ability power on the scaling part of utility spells, that way both utility and damage abilities can be balanced accordingly. Finally, the stigma that supports are tied to bot lane specifically rather than the team as a whole should be removed since higher tier play even shows that more roaming on supports is key to building early leads.
