Pyke May Be a Support, But He's Not a Warden

After maybe 3 games with a Pyke in it, I'm going to project that this was a major fuck-up and the day will come where he'll need a total overhaul. It's not a data thing, it's a Sociological thing.

Pyke is an Assassin Support. And I can't help but shake the feeling this was an attempt by Riot to encourage people to play the support role. IMO, this was the wrong way to encourage people. This only exacerbated the bad parts of the Autofill Support with Riot Sanctioning of the aggressive style.

If they had wanted to encourage more people to play support, it would have been best if they did things that put their role front and center. Come up with better ways to track how often someone was "saved" by a support being there. Not after the game, or on the website in match stats. In the game at present. Why tab & a mouse over for ward score, just put it in the KDA. If takedowns have been phased in, why not just put them together so dummy mid-laners can't accuse supports of having bad KDAs because "You have no kills."

All this assumes Riot wanted to build-up support enlistments and (and this is probably their main priority) reduce queue times. Maybe they didn't. But that's hard for me to believe this wasn't the goal.

The end result of Pyke in his current iteration is that by mid game people forget they're supports. They farm away from the team come into team fights after 3 people are dead looking for some ult kills, and they're trigger happy for kills in the laning phase because you've created a champ who makes that beneficial.

But the biggest issue I have with Pyke's involvement is that you've invited people into the role of Support who don't really get the ethos. The real support players, the Wardens, were not asking for the ability to get more kills. We always were able to sign-up as mid-lane Kat and go for kills. The real support players I've spoken with here on the boards are people who value the assist role. That's a foreign concept to a ton of players here (hence the insta-queue for supports) but it was something we appreciated. There's a few supports I play that have turned absolutely tragic bot lanes into S's for ADCs. There's not a lot of value in that, we don't get high praise. It's a rare bird that thanks their Support, but it really didn't matter. I didn't queue up for applause. I came to restructure team fights and battle fields and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Pyke feels to me like an assassin bail-out for queue times. He's not a support (IMO). He's a champ that lets assassins be assassins with shorter queue times without sinking the team. But the problem is he will sink teams because behind the legal kills is a mentality that doesn't care about the people around him. He's not here for you, he's here for Pyke. That's fine on an assassin, I expect that. But when a team fails to have a support players, over the long haul they'll feel it. For one reason or another, I anticipate a rework coming someday.