I know everybody says to play a carry, but sometimes you're stuck being the tank or support. Your team begs you to do it, the comps better that way, or you just want to do it from time to time. How do you determine which champion is the right pick? When do you engage or disengage? When do you follow your team as they attempt to 1v5 in an unwarded jungle vs. letting them die?
Carrying as a Tank or as a Support or as a Support-Tank ?
**Tank : ** Peeling for your carries & counter-engaging against the enemy engages unless it's to your advantage to initiate. I find that in most cases it's usually more effective to counter-initiate unless you have back-up rather than to initiate unless you have a very strong initiator or wombo-combo initiate.
Support : Some supports can transition into APC.
Support-Tank : See above in the tank-section, but more than that, you need to be tankier than the enemy team's tank/support/burst/etc., for best chances of winning in early fights/skirmishes, even if you're putting off the Sight-Stone until after you've obtained a Cinder-Hulk (much as this may seem counter-intuitive for a support-role, sometimes it is necessary, depending on how likely fights are likely to be forced, such as against a lane with a Thresh).
Rest of it is a matter of pinging objectives at the right time, pinging where your allies should be on the map at the right time, when they should back off via V-Pingingg, always warning of danger any time ANY of the lanes have gone MIA (ping the paths in which they're most-likely to head after they've disappeared from lane followed by a warning ping), make sure pings are focused on the right objectives (i.e.: you cannot be pinging everybody to focus a tank unless their team-formation is such that you're forced to go through the front-line in order to get to the back), ping to grab turrets instead of chasing past, end game when inhib is targetable instead of wasting too much time on side-lanes when you can end it immediately, and make sure everybody backs off via pinging them away starting from when enemy death-timers are only 10 seconds remaining (this is the time to GTFO so that you don't get home-guard countered).
You have to carry your TEAM MATES in this case, not the players. Unless you are going damage or something. You have to say your team "omg you fuckers when i initiate follow me ffs and we win" with less insults
trust me, it's possible. i've been playing Taric support a lot and he's been taking me places.
first, you have to find a champ and stick with them. play a few normals so that you can learn item builds and skill allocations that work best for you. you have to learn the odds and ends of that champ in order to understand their weaknesses and opportunities. if you know a champion well enough, match ups are no problem and idiot team members still exist but by that point you'll be a force to be reckoned with. it takes a while to finally become really proficient with a champion, a lot of games where you lose, but don't give in and always strive to improve the way you play.
I main Thresh support. After you buy a Frozen Heart, check to see how your team is doing. If you can get it early enough, get a bf sword and turn it into a Mercurial Scimitar (Assuming the enemy team has AP, if not, get Bloodthirster.) You're still building tank, but you can do SOME damage to turrets while your team is out killing itself in the jungle. :/
