S9 From a Support main´s perspective

Wall of text, not an english native.

So, season 9 is finally over. It is also the season, where I managed to reach Plat for the first time (Yay, me!)

We saw Yuumi, Pyke and now Senna rolling up, and their impact at the botlane.

For me, a lot of times I associated the support role with one particular theme: Helplessness. This has several reasons:

Something, what was already around longer, but was badly shown this season. The ward-"miniquest".
For me, who is particulary interested in warding (naturally), there were several times situations, where I could not properly fulfill a large part of my job, because my wards are locked behind a "paywall". (Like not a paywall in the classical sense, but I think you know where I'm coming from.)

Im talking about situations, like not having wards in min 14, because you were hardstomped, or got Jungler attention. (More about that later). This, and the blatant advantage of the Ancient coin, which provided you with wards in minute 7-8 when having a good laning phase, or just 2-3 minutes earlier, in comparison to the other two items.

While Spellthiefs can sometimes step up against that (actually promoting aggressive gameplay, which is what Riot was going for, I think), the was completely and utterly outpowered, not only for stat reasons (+the weirdly ineffective heal), but for actual "gameplay" reasons. I saw myself picking it very seldom, and encountered it almost never.

To actually gain wards with this item early, you have to get every cannon minion, and often find yourself at the recieving end of harsh punishment for that, if your opponents know, what they are doing. Or your ADC blatantly denies it for you, even if you announce, that you are going for it.

Because of this, champions like , or , who typically use this Item, were having a bad time, or picked in order to compete.

Riot is adressing this next season by removing the coin (or its quest, to be exact), but I'm still curious, if Targons will be able to compete against Spellthief, which is currently much stronger in this aspect.

The warding quest has also one gamechanging aspect which, I think, mostly midlaners noticed. It actively discurages roaming, or deepwarding. Or at least limits the timewindow, which you have for it. The Support Items a generally designed for a "sticking with your buddy" gameplay. And while the charging system, which and use, is able to create a time window for leaving your ADC, you still want to use the stacks as fast a possible, in order to gain your wards early. Ideally you want them depleted at all times.

This is expecially punishing for users, which ironically are typically roamheavy supports.

Now, you may ask, why I'm preaching about getting your wards early so much. I'm sure, you dont need the concept of vision control explained, and why not having it is so dangerous. And not having it, while your enemy has it, is desasterious. Especially, when we are in a meta, where the game is often decided before the 15 minute mark, and so much team power is concentrated at the bot-side of the map.

The second issue, I want to adress is, that junglers have too much power over the botlane. This is because of turretplates, which mitigate the incomeloss they would have , if they would properly farm, and not camp a lane all the time (mostly the botlane, because of biggest impact). Not to speak about catchup-xp, which is distributed fairly graciously by Riot, for some reason.

An early doublekill in the botlane sets the outcome of the game in 30-40 % of all cases, even in lower elos. This is very concerning, in my humble opinion.

This is something about the bad snowball tendency, which has established itself. But this is already adressed at other places. You find yourself in helpless situations, where you played a good laning phase, maybe got a kill, and are thrown out of the game by a sudden, and deadly gank. This is often ot just an equliser, but a game-ender.

Those ganks are so deadly, because an inflation of gapclosers, blastcones and sometimes ridiculous followup damage.

This leads to the weird scism in gameconcept. While the Gold-Gen-Items encourage "risky" gameplay, but the current Meta and the distribution of power around the map place a damocles sword above the botlane to lose it all with one gank.

It remains to be seen, if Riot manages to shift some of the gameweight away from the botlane, and if the rework of the support items manages to fix some of the problems.

Kudos, if you read this. For everyone else: TL:DR: -There is a problem with the gold-gen Items -Roaming is discouraged in soloq -Meta and powerdistributions encourage junglers to camp the botlane -The game is too botlaneheavy -The Botlane is in a weird Stomp/ or get stomped situation/generally unrewarding -Graves deserves his cigar