Having fun as support is possible

Hey everyone,

So I wanted to talk about the support role because it seems that very little amounts of people enjoy it (one of the reasons why you get 50% faster queue times as support).

Personally I think that people don't pick the role for two main reasons:

• They want to have fun: only playing Janna is most likely freelo but probably also ResidentSleeper at a certain point.
• They want to be impactful: playing any other role will usually get you more cs/gold thus more power and the chance to outplay your opponents.

I'm a support main, I always try to look for new things just to make the role as fun as other roles and I try to do things that makes me more impactful than my team would usually expect.

When you think about support champions most people will probably mention Janna or Thresh, but there's more champions to play. Giving an extreme example, support Miss Fortune. Obviously Miss Fortune's main role is adc but if you adapt a champions playstyle you can make it shine, just like ROX Tigers GorillA did in worlds semi's against SKT. Clearly it was a counterpicked into Zyra and because he adjusted the playstyle (maxing E for example) he managed to make it work pretty well. So for you Maokai/Malphite top laner mains, Orianna/Zilean/Brand mid laner mains or heck, even Zac jungler mains, try queueing up with your favourite champion and see what you can do in bot lane as support!

If you adapt your champions playstyle, lvling up the right skills in the right order and buy the right items you can make so many champions work as support, and for example a Maokai is much scarier in a 2v2 scenario than it is in a 1v1 top lane, same goes for Orianna if you manage to get two people with your ult.

As for your duty you always should get one of the Eye's sightstone upgrade items because it's your main thing to do as support.

• Warding: setting your team up for sieging turrets/taking objectives.
• Denying vision: camp bushes with your team and pick off people wandering by themselves.

Additonal things supports do. Depending on what champion you're playing you itemize in a way your champion benefits most of it. So if you're playing Maokai support, you'll be your teams engage and tank, build tanky items, be the frontline and protect your team. If you're playing Soraka, you don't build tank items, don't engage and mainly focus on your positioning, healing your team and CC enemies.

So how do you impact your games as much as other roles? There's two answers to this.

• Experience: when you play, say 5 games of Orianna you'll probably do very good (especially if you're maining her mid lane), your enemies adc/support have most likely never played against Orianna (laning phase) and will disrespect your abilities and experience which can result into easy 2 man ults and wins.
• Expectations: itemization can impact games so much and is very underrated, last week I played Master Yi in ARAM, since we had no tank on the team I decided to full on build tank on him (Locket, Spirit Visage, Merc Treads, Hexdrinker - their team was AP heavy) with great results (6/4/20) as the enemy team was constantly focusing me while my team was murdering all of them.

Long story short, if you've never tried playing support because you think it's boring or you can't do much, try and pick one of your favourite champions, adapt your playstyle a bit, buy one of the Eye sightstone upgrades and build as spicy as you want, as long as you're focusing on making it work, it'll work and it'll be fun ;)

I hope I've inspired some people to try out the support role, have fun with their favourite champions in a different lane and are willing to make it work.

Take care <3