Guide to getting your freelo on as a Support in Bronze and Silver

"You can't get out of low Elo maining support" is a dirty lie. In this easy step by step guide I will tell you how to make support the most consistently winning-est role. Maybe a very high Elo player will have an easier time with a mid, top or jungle pick but let's be honest if you're stuck in silver and bronze, and you're really better than the rest, you deserve Gold, if you're not just delusional, not plat+. You aren't getting 10 kills every lane phase because you're playing consistently against top mid and jungle mains. And therein lies the secret:

Almost nobody mains support. Nearly HALF of all games I play I look at someone's OP.gg pre match and see champs who aren't supports making up their top 3 played champs. While there may be 1 out of every 20 games you could've hard carried as a mid, it waaaay cancels out with the 1 of 2 where you can get a huge unfair advantage being a support that knows their shit. So how do we do?

Step 1: choose your character.

Don't play Morgana or Braum, they're permabanned. You're gonna be banning them if you can because they're the default comfort picks for non support mains and they're easy and OP enough that it's possible to lose against a bad player playing them if they manage to pick them before you. Also don't go with Janna, Sona, or Soraka-too teammate dependent. There's no consistency in low Elo. I don't recommend Nami either but she's more doable. Taric has almost no skillcap so give him a miss too, it really doesn't matter how good you are at Taric, he's just Taric.

My recommendations: Thresh, Blitz and Leona are the noob rushers of low Elo, but Lulu, Nami, Zyra, Annie and Karma can also be effective if you know your stuff. Pick one. Counters really aren't meaningful in support unless it's Morg and as we said, permabanned. Pick one up and play 20 normals games with them. Live and breathe their mechanics.

Step 2: Set the Stage for Success

You can't control your teammates. But I can promise this: you can keep any botlane from feeding as a skilled support, and you can snowball any feeding enemy lane. That's the aim if this guide: safe consistent play by you and capitalize on any mistakes the enemy makes.

Start with either spellthief or Targon, potion, and ward every time. Talisman line is usually too passive to work well. Head to lane and do everything you can to keep the enemy support and carry from effectively shoving level 1. Use tactics like the level 1 flay the minion wave and an enemy champ+flay passive auto as Thresh, or Q through the wave as Lulu. Get to level 2 first period.

Once you're two, all in as hard as you can without taking tower shots. You should be able to either get a kill or zone from a full wave of CS. Once that's done, set up your ward to watch for the enemy jungler. If you zone the enemy out of a creep wave then draw the enemy jungler into a failed gank, you've basically just passively won the lane

Step 3: Capitalize on successes

The equipment of a successful support is tier 2 gold item, sightstone, red trink, boots. You're gonna want them in that order unless you're winning really hard like a level 2 double kill and 16cs then rush sightstone to get dragon control.

Your objective now: kill one or more enemy champs, then shove and kill tower. After tower get dragon. If you seize those two objectives right there you will win ~65% of games. That's the consistency part.

So in summary:

Choose a champ for success, hit the lane hard level 2, take bot tower and dragon. Collect sweet sweet support main freelo