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When will we address the problem with being a support main in solo queue

Void2258·3/12/2014, 4:25:41 AM·1 votes·181 views

Playing support in solo queue is EXTREMELY frustrating. You have almost no say in how well your team does, because you and you alone are the only player who absolutely CANNOT carry the match to make up for having a poor team. This puts those of us for whom support is our best position at an EXTREME disadvantage. We are completely and totally at the mercy of the match maker. We can either play a role we know we are not as good at or pin all our hopes on either getting someone very good or not getting anyone very bad.

There is no middle ground on those extremes, because even if you are very good yourself, you cannot single handedly carry the match. You can literally tell within 10min in most games if you are going to be able to win, because either the other team has massively fed on one or more of your guys or they haven't. At the higher ranks this may be less of any issue, but in bronze and silver it makes 90% of games completely binary. Either you win massively or you lose massively. Neither one of these is fun.

For all their talk about evening out the power curve of supports for S4, which I acknowledge they did to an extent, the fundamental problem that no one, not even those who love to play support, actually WANTS to play support in low ranks because of how little say they have in the outcome of the match has not been addressed.

3 Comments

ratcharmer3/12/2014, 8:01:04 PM3 votes

I don't think it's entirely fair to claim these frustrations are solely the domain of support players. Any role can get frustrating in solo queue, and NONE of them can single-handedly win the match.

Linna Excel3/12/2014, 5:42:27 AM1 votes

Place wards
???
Gain LP

The problem is in lower levels, teammates are less likely to look at the map and the worse you are doing, the less benefit sightstone has for you. That's a double wammy, really. A support needs to get a sightstone. Wards are nice when you are winning, but when you are getting backed into your inner turrets, you need something better than a sightstone.

Also the support items aren't making your life any easier. Their ADC comes back with a BF Sword and all I have is a frost fang or a medallion, I'm in trouble. Oh I might have a sightstone if my ADC did well. That means it'll take 3 more AAs to melt me.

IMO the biggest problem is itemization.

Lady Luck3/12/2014, 2:40:55 PM1 votes

Keep in mind I don't like the strong support champions atm and so I've not played any ranked this season. But I feel like my experience is general enough to be relevant.

Last season I played all but two of my games as support. And I know I made a difference in a good number of my games. (With games where the other team raged at me and nobody else - not because I killed anybody, but because I turned easy kills into escapes or actually turned things around.) I ended silver I.

What I learned is early game as a support main your goal is to keep your adc alive. Not even feed your adc. Just keep them alive. A lot of ADCs aren't that proficient, so you're just trying to reduce the damage of having a bad ADC. (I'm not blaming them, ADC was often last pick.) This prevents games in bot lane from being decided in ten minutes. Because nobody fed. (Or at least, not more than a kill or two which is not that big a deal in the long run.) The mindset of simply reducing the potential for feeding really helped me climb.

No, you're not carrying your game in a traditional sense. But I found very few games where one person did all the carrying on either side (it does stand out when this happens, but it's not as common as it feels like). In which case having one less feeder on your team and one less fed person on their team makes a huge difference over time. Two if you include yourself.

Outside of laning phase is just learning when to do what, like any other class. If you have a scared team and you're playing as Leona, save your ult for a counter initiate because they may not follow you if you use it to initiate. Pay attention to the map so you know when to go where. If your top laner is idling about alone and you see somebody on their team headed top, go to help - even if it's just to give a good disengage so he lives.

And always use smart pings.

Support is a different mind set than any other role. I wouldn't like it if support just turned into another class that can carry games alone. I like utility, and being able to use that utility to help my team and reduce the impact of mistakes. And reducing the impact of mistakes feels like an incredibly powerful tool at lower levels of play. (But, like I said, I don't like the current supports. They seem stronger at taking advantage of their mistakes rather than mitigating your own team's mistakes. Except Thresh who does it all.)