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A possible solution how to make support a more desirable and enjoyable role

Niaphim·2/25/2016, 10:05:50 PM·2 votes·305 views

We all know how "popular" the role of support is right now. Have a support or fill as your primary or secondary role? You instantly get support regardless of what your primary/other role is (probably you have more chances in Master-Challenger, but it's about 1% of League players).

I've been playing support since season 3 in at least 50% of my games (kind of means that I main support). But lately I found that I just pick Lux whenever I get the support role because I don't enjoy traditional supports anymore. And it's not because I don't like champions. So I tried to understand what happened and here is what I've come up with.

  • Supports share their lane with the adc and you give up on almost all gold in that lane. In season 4 Riot introduced a band-aid solution by adding support items with passive gold income: item 3069 item 3401 item 3092 They got nerfed later because of various reasons.
  • You are expected to buy sightstone and to ward the entire map (not so much from gold and above, but below you are the one to be blamed for the lack of vision). Season 6 made it worse with decreased lifetime of wards and less charges in all versions of sightstone (4->3 for item 2049 , 5-4 for item 2045 item 2303 item 2302 item 2301
  • And finally, if you are playing a legit support and not abusing the strongest mage and building full damage, you rely on your team and focus on peeling and saving them. While the gameplay is more or less interactive, it is usually quite binary, like playing Sona (disclaimer: i love Sona wholeheartedly, I played her much in S3-4 but today she is just a cheesy Q oneshotter mostly. Anyway, I'm referring to her general gameplay.) You slow enemies if you are AP item 3092 , you shield your adc item 3401 or your team item 3190 . item 3110 is frequently built on tanky supports and it just gives a passive. item 3050 has an interesting concept that if you synergize with your adc and time your engages you increase combat stats of both. Then season 6 made reaching 100% crit extremely easy for ADCs so this item became so much less effective.

What can be done to balance the role? Plain and straight buffing won't work, because if a role with less gold income gets cheap items with strong stats, these items will be abused by solo laners. Buffing support champions' scaling won't work either, because this will just shift them to solo lanes. The issue is the different gold income.

What can possibly be looked at is the concept of global utility items, good examples of which are item 3056 ,item 3060 and item 3512 . What if the support role was adjusted to influence the strategic play? Change the above mentioned items, add some new, make all of them not attractive for solo laners and junglers by low stats and/or, for example, a (reworked) sightstone requirement. Supports will roam, set up minion waves, buff ally minions, debuff enemy minions, buff jungle camps to give more gold, set jungle patrols, temporarily buff towers, disable enemy's towers, boost team's combat capabilities in a more significant way at the cost of own raw stats. Those are just few particular ideas, they can be good or bad, definitely something to be discussed.

What do you think? Is it a suitable direction for a supports rework?

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