The role of a support can be an intimidating one to fill due to the fact that seeing your results can sometimes be difficult. Understanding the mental battle behind this role is imperative to your future success in it. In this article I'll discuss the mental tips and tricks that you can employ to make yourself a top support.

Picks and Bans

Probably more than any other role, your team's support dictates how your team will play. A defensive backline support will create a team that relies on picks and counter engage. An aggressive damage support will create a team that engages on the enemy any chance they get. The point is, your support pick needs to fit what your team plan is. This means that a technical support “counter-pick” is rare, but it does happen, for instance when Geb is picked into Athena because he can purify her taunt with his shield. You countering the enemy support will happen with your item picks. So what sort of team compositions can you have and what sort of supports should you pick?

A well structured and rounded composition is key to victory

It is obviously impossible for me to list every single composition and pick but I’ll give some examples. If your team is looking for a composition based on team fight control, you need to pick a support with a large AOE team fight ultimate and many different crowd control abilities. Supports such as Bacchus, Xing Tian and Sylvanus are good examples of this. If your composition is based on picking people off one by one consider supports such as Ares, Cabrakan and Sobek. These gods excel at isolating targets and making sure they can be killed before the team can help them. If you have a high burst midlaner, consider picking up a support that is good at setting them up, such as Athena, Khumbhakarna and Ymir. These are just some examples to show how your support pick should mesh with how your team is planning to win the game.

In the game
So you're out of picks and bans and in the game. What now? Well it really depends on what style of support you’ve chosen so we’re going to split this section in two, Aggressive and Defensive.

Aggressive
Aggressive supports include: Ares, Cabrakan, Ymir, Xing Tian. As an aggressive support, your jobs throughout the game go as follows:

- Laning phase: Getting your carry ahead
- Mid Game: Setting up team fights
- Late Game: Being a frontline and an initiator.

Let's start with the laning phase. As an aggressive support your job is to protect your adc just like every support but also to leave them with a lead when it comes to the midgame. You need to make sure that when you leave for team fights, your adc is far ahead of the enemy adc. How can you go about doing this?

If your adc has picked a character that is bad early game, it is your job to do as much damage as possible and try to let your adc get the killing blow as much as possible. This means that you should prioritize damage skills as you need to do as much as possible to make up for the low damage coming out of your adc. If you have a skill that is both crowd control and damage, it’s the perfect situation. A good example is Ares’ first ability, which slows, cripples and does a massive amount of damage. This means that Ares with one ability can perfectly set his adc up for kills.

It should also be recognized that if the lane is losing, due to the opponents having better clear or for whatever other reason, the aggressive support's job is to do damage to keep the enemy duo lane on their toes and always wary.

Another important job during laning phase is warding. Early rotations are always dangerous for your adc so you have to be pertinent with your wards. Base your ward placement on who is on the enemy team. Junglers with global ultimates like Thor and Thanatos will likely ult from the gold fury pit to gank you, so place at least one ward there in that case. Junglers like Loki and Ao Kuang who have invisibility will require you to ward in the areas before the entrances to the lane. If you try and ward the entrances, you won’t detect anything as they will most likely enter your lane using their invisibility abilities.

As the saying goes, wards win wars

The mid game is where the aggressive support really begins to shine. You will roam around as the core three, Mid, Jungle and Support. Your job in this combo is to be the set up. At this point, your abilities will be doing less overall damage, so your control becomes the valuable part of your kit. You have to crowd control the enemies to let the high Damage-per-second and high burst damage of your mid and Jungler can kill them easier. This will serve to get your core ahead, the lanes in which farm is the most contested and experience is most difficult to come by.

This will also have the side effect of giving you map control, as controlling the mid lane and surrounding jungles will give you control of the two main map objectives, the Gold Fury and the Fire Giant. Controlling the gold fury is extremely important as it lets you snowball into the late game. Controlling the fire giant is equally important, but you won’t be getting it during the midgame. Controlling the fire giant means you get vision over it, in preparation for taking it in the late game.

What if you aren’t ahead, or you’re getting beaten in the mid game fights? Overall at this stage, an aggressive support is less useful as if they are based on damage they will really suffer. Your control will still be important however, as you’ll need it to try and turn fights. In these situations, making sure you contest every gold fury is extremely important as you don’t want the enemy to get even farther ahead. You have to invest in sentry wards to make sure you are always the first to know about enemy movements in the important objectives.

In the late game, your role changes yet again. Your damage being meaningless at this point in the game, your job is to be the team's initiator. You are very tanky at this point which means you can walk into the enemies and activate your big crowd control ultimate to start the fight on your own terms. The worst thing you can do in the late game is to be entirely reactive, only responding to the enemy's actions. You have to take matters into your own hands and make sure you have control over the flow of the game.

Consider investing in blink to enhance your initiating ability

Defensive
Now, let's look at your roles if you picked a defensive support. Defensive supports include Geb, Athena and Khepri. Your roles go as follows:

- Laning Phase: Protecting your adc
- Mid Game: Setting up for your mid and jungle
- Late game: Initiating and protecting your backline

Geb's entire kit is designed to peel for and help his carries

Let's start with the laning phase. While your role is similar to an aggressive supports, the outcome is different. In a situation where the two duo lanes are equally matched in skill, it is difficult for a defensive support to leave his adc with a lead in lane. The simple reason for this is that getting kills with these characters is difficult so all that happens is a lane with no action. However, a defensive support will be able to peel and defend the adc more if the enemy are aggressive or gank more often. So when should you use a defensive support? Well the most obvious synergy is with a risky, lategame adc. These characters won't be getting kills anyway and require protection, making them perfect candidates for a defensive support. Geb is a perfect example of this, with his 2 and 3 being a knockup and shield respectively, and great for defending and peeling for your adc.

In the midgame, your role is nearly identical. All supports have a large amount of crowd control, so setting up for your mid and jungle will always be a viable role. However, as a defensive support you have more options when it comes to keeping your mid and jungler alive while still being able to use your crowd control to combo with your mid/jungle.

The lategame is the main difference in the roles between an aggressive and defensive support. While still possessing the ability to be a frontliner and initiator, defensive supports excel at keeping their carries alive. Your job will consist of sitting next to them in teamfights as they put out the damage and defending them from any enemies that dive your backline. While you can initiate, it is very often a waste of your abilities in the teamfight. Initiating puts you at the very front of the fight while the people that need defending are at the back. Unless you have someone else dedicated to defending your backline, it is really where you should be.

In all three game phases, the places you ward are the exact same as an aggressive support and for the exact same reasons. The only thing that changes is possibly during the late game you may have to place wards slightly further back to protect your backline from being flanked.

A word on levels
As a support, you have much less access to experience and gold on the map. Therefore, you will probably be the lowest level on your team by 1-2 levels. However, this is not a reason for worry. Late game, levelling your abilities will only increase their damage and potentially lower their cooldowns by a small amount. This will make very little difference for a few reasons. Firstly, your job isn't to do damage lategame. Secondly, these small changes in values will be insignificant because at this point your build will be pretty much finished, meaning that you’ll already have stats like cooldown reduction.

So why does this happen? Why can you be so behind in levels but still even in gold? Because everyone else is getting experience from kills, while you as a support do not have that luxury. But you still get a similar amount of gold because of sharing gold from farming and camp sharing. Furthermore, core support items are less expensive than damage items, meaning that even if you're slightly behind in gold, your build will be even with the rest of your team.

A price comparison between Deathbringer, a core item for a Jungler and Bulwark of Hope, a core item for a support.

Hopefully this guide has helped you to understand what you need to do in the game to be a successful support. The main thing to remember with playing support is to have the mindset of being the team's helper and take it to heart.