Making Support "Feel Good"
Reading through the patch notes over the last while and seeing in-game updates, Riot has really put a lot of emphasis on rebuilding the support role. A lot of what they have done is amazing and has made support feel better to play. Feel better is a term that Riot throws around a lot when talking about the most unpopular role in league of legends. The question they try to fix is "Why isn't support fun?".
Gbay99 has a good video on this and I think he is right - it is the lack of comparability with other players. Other roles have multiple ways to compare to their teams and the enemy - score line, damage taken, damage dealt, KDA, etc. Support has 1 measure - how many assists did you get? This really isn't that good because everyone gets assists and a really exceptional game could see a support with less assists than a main damage dealer. It seems that (along with the obvious of not killing your opponent) this is a big part of what makes support "not fun."
Support has a HUGE impact on the game and the results really aren't tangible.
To fix this I have thought of two interesting things that would at least give supports something to look at and compare to other players as well as possibly guide them to being a better player (after all, seeing that you deal less damage than a laner you beat might show that your harass is low or you are roaming too frequently with no benefits).
1) Add a new line in the post game stats that you can plot on the graph for "disruptions". Pick some of the crowd control that is shared by supports (i.e. a snare, a stun, and a silence) and count those for each player throughout the game. At the end of the game this would show how much impact a support player *really* has on a team fight, on a laning phase, and on a game (it is a LOT). Having all of these in 1 category would allow for a direct comparison as not all supports crowd control the same.
2) Add a new line in the post game stats that you can plot on the graph for wards placed. Have this broken down to see how many Control Wards you place and how many trinket/support item wards you place. This again allows support players to compare themselves directly to the other 9 players in their game and offers another stat to track an area they could be improving in.
That is pretty much it. These are stats I would love to see and would improve my experience player support. Add your thoughts below :)
Caelith
TL;DR Support can't compare any stats directly to other players really. Add two new stat lines to compare the number of times a player disrupted an enemy in a game with crowd control innate to supports and the number of control wards/vision wards placed each game. This allows for comparison + info to improve gameplay.
need to have their ults added to that shielding stat), they also have vision as you mentioned although vision is of paltry importance to what supports really do. I dont see a good way for much of what a support does in relation to controlling battles be very easy to quantify. Like waiting to heal an ally so as to bait an enemy into taking extra damage which will in a minute or two cause them to be low enough to die, in that case the support may have been the one who caused the death of the enemy but they may not even get an assist for it. It kind of sucks but it's also the nature of the role. Unfortunately for us we are at the mercy of our teammates as far as having them recognize our skill due to how much we do behind the numbers to secure the win.