I miss teambuilder ;_;

[{quoted}](name=Zeke Maelstorm,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=xZEFK5HZ,comment-id=00010000,timestamp=2017-06-18T20:43:21.854+0000)

I think the appeal of team builder was that you always got your role. It was nice to know that if I was willing to wait I would eventually get mid . (I was more than happy to wait 15 minutes if meant I got to play the game the way I wanted to)

Yep! This.

Every other role is reasonably well liked but Support is despised by a large portion of the community... I personally think they need to do a large overhaul on supports to give the role either real carry potential or an actual fantasy because at current it doesn't have it.

Hi!

So the main issues with support at the moment are these:

1. No one actually likes playing a supportive champion. Most people want to be the stars, and even with epic playmaking some supports are capable of, it's the pentakills that get the highlights. A truly unbelievable Thresh will get highlights, but have you ever seen a highlight reel of Morgana Qs? Of Leona dives/lockdowns? Of Janna peel?
2. We get no resources (gold + xp). Seriously, we're dirt-poor all game. Some supports, while ahead, won't have fourth item by the time everyone else is full build. I can dominate and support-carry hard and I'll still rarely be above more than one other person on my team at gg.
3. Despite getting no gold, we have to blow a usually ~half an item of our already-sparse gold (over half of which is early-game money, in the part of the game where we have the most personal power and where being able to get an item advantage is most likely to let us snowball) on vision. Meanwhile, no one else in the team bothers to use trinket wards. You have no idea how frustrating that is! Don't misunderstand - I love the vision game. It's like a little side-war of macro zone control where sneakiness and mind games matter. Consequentially, I'd actually love to be able to viably build SS or otherwise pay for more wards in other roles, but the high cost, terrible stats, and item slot usage make it completely non-viable for anyone who expects to be personally relevant late-game. 3A. Removed! Riot fixed this one and I didn't edit it out of the standard list. Woops! Thanks to Sugar Momma down there for pointing out that oversight. Please do not kill wards your support scans out. It's one of our very few ways of being rewarded for all the work we put into the vision game, and it partially (only a tiny bit) reimburses the money we blow on red wards and the xp we lose while warding and roaming.
4. Outside of general game experience, the skills you acquire are not applicable in any other position. Yeah, maybe you'll get better at harassing, landing skill shots, and watching the map, and you'll definitely get better at warding, but you get no experience last-hitting, you get very little experience with wave control unless you play with a duo laner, your roaming experience actually hurts your roaming ability elsewhere (since the prereqs for roaming as a support and roaming as anyone else are unrelated), and most of the champions you can play are not useful anywhere else.
5. That last bit actually brings me to another point: With the exclusion of Lulu and Karma, Support-style champions are not allowed to play outside of the support bot lane role. I don't just mean complaints about off-meta, but balance too. Remember when Janna mid became useful, so her Q was immediately nerfed hard so she couldn't clear any more? Rakan's whole thing is that they were desperately trying to make a support who couldn't go elsewhere for any reason. This not only makes your experience as those Support champions useless elsewhere, but it also means that you're discouraged from playing Supportive champions at all. After all, if the only place you're allowed to play them is in the most starved, least-popular role in the game, why bother? This means that few people play the champs they might otherwise decide they want to play into the duo lane.
6. Until recently (and this is such a wonderful change), we don't get nice things. For the longest time, our itemization was about making us into walking piles of actives with no real personal benefit. The new Athene's is changing that for Enchanters to a small extent, which is very nice. I only hope that continues to be a goal.
7. Our only carry potential - outside of Brand or Zyra support or something like that - revolves around feeding our team. Even after dominating in lane, ideally we move to gank other lanes once the ADC's snowball gets going. That means we get the first few kills, then go struggle vs. a fed Zed half a map over while the ADC gets ever more resources, kills, and glory. Our best hope is to force-feed our team, then put the enemies in such a staggeringly-terrible position that even the stupidest of teams hopefully can't throw hard enough to lose. Don't get me wrong, that is real carry potential of a sort, but it's not reliable, and requires us to do everything perfectly and often be very far ahead... which, as I've mentioned, is harder for a support to manage.
8. There's other stuff, but I'm tired of typing and these are the most important ones.

I'm not sure how to fix most of these, but a start would be to give us more gold and let Supportive champs go to other lanes. Break the ADC/support meta! Just make it a duo bot, with one farming hard and another acquiring gold in some other way. I'm totally okay with ADC/bruiser or ADC/AP carry being a thing if us Support-style players are allowed to do our thing elsewhere. That way, Support items could be floated up in both price and value. At the moment, their low price (for our limited gold) means that they can only be of limited value, lest people with more gold exploit their relative efficiency. Another good option is to disconnect the support role from the task of exclusive warding. Let me ward more in other lanes! Don't make the support solely bear the burden for most of the team's vision costs, especially not when we have to buy a t2 item for it instead of an item spike (like everyone else gets) at the one part of the game where we have an opportunity to snowball.

Then, give us more public recognition of our contributions. I like the ward scores and CC scores a lot, but they're tiny, incredibly easy to miss stats that few below high elo bother to pay attention to. I don't need to be celebrated all the time, but when I pull off something truly incredible, I'd love the game to acknowledge it publicly and loudly. Right now, if I want glory, if I want hard carry potential, I'm generally expected to play a damage carry and go for pentakills. No idea how to execute this, mind. A "Pentassist" like some have recommended is a fairly useless contribution. Not only could I get one just by pressing Locket or Karma R-E in a winning teamfight -> Ace, but everyone in a given teamfight would get one, and how do you acknowledge that?

Anyways. There's some of the issues. I have some ideas to solve some of them, and no clue how to solve others. You're def. right that we need a major overhaul of the role on a very basic level. As it is, why play support?

That's probably because you queued as mid. I did all kinds of off meta supports (pretty much any conceivable mid pick), and I was accepted because they didn't want to wait for another support. Mid lane was one of the most popular.

I sat in queue for 1 hour as Ezreal mid. Got kicked multiple times because they thought Ez mid was weak (this was a week or two before Mid Ez was the flavour of the month). Eventually I got into a game and proceeded to carry (along with our Vayne) a 4v5 to victory. People are way too quick to dismiss champions that aren't super meta. Morde mid isn't even strange, if it was like Lux Jungle I could understand them not wanting it.

This'd be more acceptable if this wasn't such a very long game, but often people only have time for 1-2 games at a time. Less, down in low elo (where most people are), where half our games are basically just catch. All that throwing = longer games = fewer games = less time to play what you actually want to play.