Supports and ELO hell

GaijinZen·Mar 16, 2016·2 votes·554 views

So Im thinking supports need a better way to rank up. If I main support, and consistently get crap teams my performance is irrelevant. I can't rank up in solo.... Thoughts?

7 Comments

10TicklerMar 16, 20162 votes

Git Gud, Play Carry-focused Supports. Morgana -High CC, High-Damage, ez lane ez life. Rush Zhonya's and Roa, enjoy your cheese. Blitzcrank -One good hook carries the game. Miss 99 hooks, but hit one late? You're a god. Karma -poke, poke, poke, POKE ~~An enemy has been Slain~~ Nidalee -What, you weren't here Seasons 2/3? Enjoy keeping them under tower, having more warding from traps, and generally chunking your opponents with one lucky spear Annie -TIBBERS! Illaoi -Relic-into-sightstone-into-newrelicsightstone, then start going bruiser. IBG, Frozen Mallet, Deadman's Plate, Spirit Visage. You're a Tanky monster who's splitpushing safely enough, and in teamfights, you wreck their ADC/Mage for getting out of position and compromise their entire team before you engage with a mega-wombo-tentacle-smash Lux -Dur

Mysticman89Mar 16, 20161 votes

Your performance is still relevant. It can be frustrating at times, but a particularly good support will be able to basically spoon feed kills to the adcs and/or save them from their mistakes enough times that even the most challenged players get fed, and then you can climb up.

You won't be able to hard carry every game, but you can definitely edge your win rate above 50%, and so climb.

NekusenMar 16, 20161 votes

supports are perhaps the most important champion in a team, you do most of the things, but some people tend to think bad of supporting because most of what they do isn't flash and fireworks, you can activate 3 items and a skill in a battle and no one will notice it, at most they'll notice "good stuff happened but not quite sure what".

in low elo, most of the time you shouldn't bother getting a sightstone because people won't look at the map anyways, go apc bot as people won't know how to use the utility you bring to the game anyways there.

nolukjustskilMar 16, 20161 votes

as a support main i have to disagree with you mystic. even if you feed your adc and top and mid feed their asses off there is nothing you can do when adc gets 1 shot by LB because she has more kills than your whole team (and this stuff happens alot). and even if you save your adc and feed them doesnt mean they know what to do with it. what i would say to do is do what i did. take another lane, something that you can carry on. once you get a little higher then you have a chance of getting a team that isnt full of trolls/horrible players. even toward the top of silver sees horrible players!

Mysticman89Mar 16, 20161 votes

The fed assassin mid lane you can't do much about is one of the games where you're probably not going to be able to carry it to victory (and unfortunately is something that seems to keep happening even as I'm now in high gold >.>), but that'll go both ways on average (as even though your teams are typically awful, the opposing team also consists of awful, since that's low elo).

To oversimplify things, every lane(/jg) match up will essentially be a 50:50 crapshoot for which side feeds, so on average you'll have 1.5 fed members of your team outside of bot lane, and 1.5 members of the enemy team fed outside of botlane. Your job as a member of bot lane who doesn't deserve to be in that elo is to bias the bot lane odds so it's not 50:50 there, so on average bot lane will win more often than not, so (in the best case scenario where you're a godlike support an achieve 100% bot lane success) you'll on average have 3.5 fed players to face their 1.5, and so statistically you'll trend upwards. In practice you're probably not that godlike unless you're like a challenger smurf or some such, but even if your ability to bias the odds is only 2.6 fed players versus 2.4 on theirs, you'll trend up.

Sometimes their 1.5 will involve a kat or yi or LB or something that actually can 1v5 and you'll lose anyway, and those numbers are all just averages so sometimes you'll come out of bot with 2 fed members only to discover 3 fed enemies, but if you keep at it over lots of games and you're consistent, then you will rise, slowly but surely.

I'm a support main and I started this season in mid-silver (and I've been as low at bronze 4 in previous seasons) so I definitely know how frustrating and powerless it can feel at times, but you have to have faith in the statistics and keep at it.

(Incidentally I actually do like support as role to climb with, since you have the kit to directly influence another member in addition to yourself, and you're expected to be with them right from the start compared to other roles where you're pretty much on your own until mid-late. Jg can potentially be influential everywhere, but I'm awful at jg myself and inadvertently feeding lanes is counterproductive, so sup is the next best thing.)

Baby GhoulMar 16, 20161 votes

Yeah if your team feeds, then it's GG. Supports are not a carry role. The carry always has the most income and the highest level. Supports struggle to get to level 18 and usually have the least amount of gold. Even if you build like an APC, forsaking Sightstone and abusing Frost Queens Claim, late game is gonna hit and that ADC is going to delete you. Yours will be powerless.

Aiming for a high win rate is not realistic as support. Don't judge a support too much based on their win rate, we lose a lot of games because we don't have that control that other roles have.

Instead it's better to take it slow. Don't do 10 games a day, especially in Bronze. Make sure you remember that it's March, and you have plenty of time to climb. Realize packing so many games into one day is not going to help you move up faster, in fact it may make you fall back further than where you belong. The more games you play the more likely you are to make mistakes. So many people I know think that they are just going to shoot up to Gold in a matter of weeks, in reality it takes time.

Accept where you are right now, and make tiny strides each day, especially if you're a support main.

PhantomGGMar 16, 20161 votes

I went a whole week playing nothing but support and climbed a whole division, this was pure solo by the way. I only stopped for I got bored of the role.

So excuse me if I don't quite understand what you mean when you say it is harder to climb as a support.