A Love Letter to Supports with DIG Biofrost
Biofrost highlights why Support is one of the most rewarding roles in League of Legends.
It’s September now which means there’s about two months left in the season to reach the rank of your dreams! Whether you’ve played only a dozen games this season, or a dozen games a day this season, it’s always worth reflecting on what your strategy is to learn and improve at the game. A great place to start is by re-assessing if your Primary role is right for you!
That’s why I sat down with one of the biggest names from the North American server for the Support position, Vincent “Biofrost” Wang, to discuss why Support is the greatest position and so misunderstood among the larger player base.
To pick the right role, you need to have the right intentions. It’s important to understand that there are five roles in the game and no matter what each game will have five players win, and five players lose. So, what’s all this we’ve been hearing about how it’s impossible to win on Support? Or, at least that it’s impossible to carry on Support. Is this even true? How can it be true if you’re just as likely to win as any other role
If you start from scratch, the best way to find the right role for you is to look at the differences between the roles and consider how the unique parts of the role align with your preference for playing the game. For some, that might be dealing as much damage as possible. For others, it might just be as simple as finding games faster! Either way is fine, sometimes you choose the Support life, and other times, the Support life chooses you!
I started playing mid lane back when you couldn’t select roles and ended up with five mid lane mains on the team back in like Season 2. A lot of the time, Support would be the role that nobody wanted to play so I would fill Support a lot. I ended up realizing there are too many mid lane players, so I decided to make the swap and commit to Support from then on.
Swapping roles might seem daunting, but there’s more transferable skills between each pair of roles than you may realize! Especially when you’re already a bot laner. Over the course of time as a bot laner, you start to really know what you want your Support to do to enhance your abilities. Many argue that by switching, you can do exactly that for someone else and it just requires less mechanics!
I’m a firm believer that if you are good at the game, you can play any role well because you know the fundamentals.
If Support Is So Great, Why is it So Undesirable?
The reason why Support is so misunderstood is that it’s the most qualitatively leveraged role. The other roles have the luxury of accessible statistics to indicate what’s been done well, and what’s been done poorly to help you improve. Since we know that KDA doesn’t matter for Support, there’s not much to really tell you when you’re doing a good job or not.
To add, many players think there is a lack of play making potential. In reality, it has a lot of play making! Many players underestimate just how much power the Support has in the early and mid game where there are huge opportunities to impact your average solo queue game! A lot of early laning is dictated by the Supports in solo queue. You can roam to help your mid laner or jungler win, and you can have all of this impact without the added complexity of multi-tasking to last hit!
Supports have huge play making potential. Especially on Supports like Nautilus, Thresh, or Bard. If you are playing enchanters, you’re going to be pretty useless in the early and mid game because you’re very reliant on your team. But that can be a good thing, too. If you want to just sit back and relax, play exchanters!
What’s the Best Part about Support?
For most, it’s landing that insane Flash prediction Death Sentence or the massive four person Headbutt-Pulverize combo, but for others, it’s just about dominating the lane and snowballing your advantages to an easy win!
People tell me they hate Support because they don’t have enough of an impact on the game. I think that’s the case for every role, but people put more emphasis on this for Support. You need to pinpoint how you can impact the game in the games you do have control over. It starts by winning lane! It’s much easier to play the game out when you’re ahead. It’s about finding the things you can change in lane to impact the rest of the game because once you can win lane you can start to roam! There’s not a lot of roles that can do that!
What’s the Skill-Curve like for Support? Is it Easier or Harder than Other Roles?
Support is probably the most divisive position for this conversation. Many will say that Support is the easiest position while others will say because of how few stats can help you improve, it’s actually the hardest. While Support is about how you move around the map and how you’re pressuring the lane, how you’re controlling the map with vision is obviously hard to quantify. There is the vision score, but it doesn’t indicate the vision provided transferring to a kill, for example.
In high ELO you have a good idea, or at least a rough idea of what you could be working on. Whether it’s bush control or how you’re throwing skill shots for example. Support is great for casual players to be honest. If you’re bad on a ranged support like Janna, it’s not that noticeable, but if you’re bad on an AD carry or a jungler, everyone will notice it. That’s why, if you’re bad, stick with the ranged Supports! (laughs)
Image courtesy of Riot Games
What Characteristics Make for a Great Support Player?
To be a good Support, you’ll need to be good at self-regulation, especially in the laning phase! If you’re a good laner, other aspects of Support will come more naturally because when you’re ahead, it’s harder to be punished for getting vision or aggressively setting up plays to widen your lead.
You can separate Support into a couple of categories. First would be the laning phase, second would be warding, third would be roaming, and the fourth would be teamfighting. After that, there’s not really a lot. The most important is laning, and then warding. If you don’t roam at all, you can still have a lot of impact if you’re good at laning and warding is obviously always important around objectives.
How to Stay Calm Under Pressure.
It’s pretty hard. I have the firm opinion that some players are going to perform under pressure and some will choke. Obviously you can do certain things that can make it swing one way or another. Let’s say you choke a lot… What causes you to choke? Is it the stress or the high stakes? Maybe you need to just imagine it’s just another game. Or maybe you’re a player that doesn’t rise to the occasion. How do you raise the stakes for yourself for that game?
Staying calm and focused under pressure as a Support where your teammates will look to you to lead the way is critical. There’s a lot of sports psychology involved in balancing the Yerkes-Dodson bell curve of optimal performance.
Honestly if it wasn’t about any major decisions, then it just came down to mechanics and how well I could press my buttons… and I was pretty good at pressing my buttons! (laughs)
What matters most is the practice and confidence in your ability. You need to instill good work-ethic in your practice to ensure you’re getting the most out of every second. If you’re capable of that, then it just comes down to execution.
Why is Support the Best Position?
Support is the best position because I have my job playing Support!
While we might not all be like Biofrost, it’s fair to at least say that you still might not be convinced that Support is the best position, but it’s at least worth trying it out again and seeing if it’s right for you!
As a parting tip, Biofrost has one more crucial tip to share.
If you’re bad, just play Janna!
