Befor we can solve the Support role, let us ask: "What is the support role"?

With the whole issue of the support role being undesirable and having few people actually enjoy it, ive been taking a lot of time studying it even more in depth than ever. Often i will hear people say X is good as support for Y reason or Why is X okay to play as Support but playing Z as ADC is considered trolling. But I digress, the point of the matter is, to first solve any issue with have with the role, it is important for us to properly understand it and why ti exists in the first place.

Now if I asked any of you, "why do we even have a support role", most would likely answer with something like "to protect the Botlaner" or "get the Botlaner fed/ahead", but that isn't exactly the case. Like all roles, the Support roles existence comes down to a simple numbers came. Its all optimization. As you all know, Summoners Rift consists of 3 lanes, Top, Mid, Bot and the jungle and rivers in between it. Minions walk down these lanes and push towards enemy towers, and monsters inhabit the jungle.

Minions and monsters both provide gold and exp. However, there are 5 players per team and only 3 lanes.

Quite simply, it is more optimal to have solo laners on every lane than having 2 duo lanes and 1 solo lane, because the sololaners get to benefit from the full gold and EXP of the lanes. Jungling then came about to free up one lane to be solo, and by having 1 person utilize and maximize the EXP and income from the jungle at all stages of the game and because Smite became instrumental in doing so, objective control came hand in hand with this.

This leaves the last 5th player tho. The last fist player was then put bot lane with a ranged marksman (who are basically necessary to have on your team) because Marksman who deal damage primarily through auto attacks were less dependent on EXP, while the with player would simply stay in the lane with then, while the marksman would benefit fully from the lane gold. By having the marksman bot, it made it easier for junglers to secure dragons.

This ofc meant that the fifth player inherently was left at a gold disadvantage throughout the game. This is what became the support role.

If you aren't catching on yet, simply put, the support roles job and existence is not to "protect" a teammate necessarily, nor is it to snowball a lane.

**The Supports roles' exists with the simple goal of being the most useful with the least amount of gold as possible. ** It isn't to protect people or even necessarily to ward specifically, but simply to still contribute while on a budget.

Naturally, champions that functioned more potently with an ally became the go-to champions for this role, as they can be useful without money and champions that are not traditionally support oriented became popular go-to choices in the role for whatever utility or power they provided with low income needed.

is perhaps the most famous for this, being originally a toplane fighter, is now more popularly seen as a Support, to the point where Riot themselves see him as a support moreso than anythign else, the reason being that his Grab is useful no matter how much gold he has or doesn't have. And this has remained the constant with non traditional pics for the support role.

is now a prime example, as she has powerful CC and poke even with little gold, also having great objective seizing power botlane as his ultimate which is useful at all points in the game regardless of him being behind or ahead. as well, with his powerful %HP damage and early game poke, , a midlaner being played botlane because her CC and SpellShield provide powerful utility regardless of her income.

This is also why scaling champions don't do so well as supports because they need gold to be powerful..in the role that gives almost no gold.

With this in mind, we reach a forgone conclusion.

**The support role is undesirable because it is inherently made out of the necessity to give one player the short end of the stick. **

---

it doesn't end there tho, as Riot is more than aware of this issue and has been for a while now.

Thing thing about the support role is that, especially in season n and prior, this issue was compounded by making supports relegated to doing all the important things no one wanted to do such as warding and securing vision, the reasoning being that obviously, the support should theoretically be capable of functioning without items, and they don't make enough money to by powerful items at a reasonable pace as is, so funneling the teams entire warding budget onto them , since wards were too cumbersome to get on every other position, but just cheap enough for the support to be able to foot the entire bill on what limited budget they had, and thus is was more gold efficient to have them buy all the vision with their entire budget than it was for them to buy actual items and spread that vision budget to the entire team.

To mitigate this and maximize efficiency even more, became not only the go -to item for supports but the mandatory first buy along with the OG philosopher's Stone, as it made what little budget you had for wards THAT much more manageable.

Riot ofc, aren't stupid. They noticed this and aimed to rectify this by doing 3 things.

1. Make supports feel like every other role where you scale and get items and feel legitimate power spikes, mostly by giving them scaling utility.
2. Alleviate them of the lone burden of vision control and warding.
3. Give supports an influx of funds to buy said items with.

While these decisions were all in good faith and actually did a lot of good , they contributed to a lot more issues with the role and i can't help but feel (even tho i love the changes) that they were rather misguided.

First off is the glaring issue with number 1 To properly balance these champions around scaling utility, these champs ofc had to have their base kits weakened to justify making them stronger later in the game. They became stronger than they were originally with items, but they pay for ti with weaker early games.

The main issue with this is that it kinda misses the point of the support role in the first place as we just established; "to be as useful as possible with limited gold".

By weakening their bases in favor of scaling, which while thematically appropriate and made playing support incredibly fun once you got items, it came at the cost of making them desirable in the very role they were meant for in favor of other champions. A champion that doesn't need gold to be effective will always be more effective in this scenario than a champ who does, and they effectively made supports less effective for their role by doing so. This alone with Number 3 made it to where Supports were being phased out by mages left and right as not only were supports less suited to do their job compared to other champs now, but these other champs were proving to be just as if not more effective in the support role with the free influx of gold from the new GP/5 items, to where it made you question why you would even lane when you get free welfare checks that give you just as much gold or more without having to last hit or get kills.

might be powerful once she gets , but is powerful without one, and then becomes even more powerful once she does.

Point 2 however is more perplexing, as while it was mostly a complete success, Riot has the perplexing idea of leaving in the game, which with the limited Wards per player in affect, only made vision even more the Supports job and made straight mandatory as opposed to just being a wise investment that you'd be dumb not to take, as they are the only consistent and potent form of vision left in the game as trinkets don't last as long and can't be placed as often, or in the case of Pink Wards, became visible and were limited to 1, thus more vulnerable to being taken out.

The reason for this is clearly to gate the bulk of vision behind one individual as a sort of wedge in the cogs of the vision game to artificially "balance" it, but it is done in a very lazy way to be honest. Not only is it simply poor game design to have an item that is basically obligated to have in every game (something Riot has literally removed entire items because of) but it is even dumber to have both it be the duty of the class you specifically tried to alleviate of the main responsibility of warding in favor of makign it a team effort, as well as the one most vulnerable to falling behind on level and dying when out alone since they can't properly fight and defend themselves.

But I digress.

---

So you must be asking, "what do?" I am not the type to point out things without trying to give some constructive feedback but it isn't an easy conundrum to solve.

1. The first thing I would do personally is to remove Sightstone entirely or remork it directly into the trinket system. I would prefer the latter, but Riot might not as it would require them to work over the vision game all over again for the second time, which i don't think they have the patience for, but reworking Sightstone directly into the trinket system seems like a lazy way to do so, and it also locks you out of clearing vision as a support. it also, doesn't solve the roaming and EXP loss issues that don't complement a supports restrictions and playstyle.

2. Either have a partial revert on support scaling and have them scale with a different stat (Mana Regen would be a good option) By doing this, Supports will be less weak innately, while still having scalings so they scale into the game, even if that scaling is less meaningful. This is okay because as it is, Supports can't even take full advantage of their scaling since they don't have access to high amounts of gold anymore after Riot nerf'd the GP/5s for the previously mentioned reasons.

3. Give supports more in-kit ways of scaling. Riot must be aware of these things as they released champions like and , support champions that scale via mechanics in their kit, (souls and chimes). This makes them appealing in the support role both due to the consistency of their kits but also because it optimizes them for the role where you get the least amount of income, while still letting them scale and promoting and rewarding them for being effective.

Adding similar elements to old supports would go a long way in helping them keep their footing in their role while still allowing them to scale, and without needing to give them obscene amounts of free cash.

Ex: What if Pix got upgraded every time Lulu could get pi'x harass off. She could get like 0.5 AP and Mana regen per pix Bolt or something, and get a slow once she reached a certain umber or it or something. Just a thought.

Nami could like 0.5AP and Mana regen and her passive becomes more potent each time a spell affects both an ally and an enemy successfully.

etc etc. Just some random thoughts or ideas.

This gives them a clear goal and a more powerful sense of independence that they don't currently have.