Support is the most versatile role in League of Legends. To get the most out of the role, you need to take advantage of this versatility. Learn to adapt to each game and dominate teamfights as a support.
One of the great things about League of Legends is that every game is different. One thing that separates a good player from a great one is their ability to adapt to these differences. As a support, you have various tools to protect your team and disrupt the enemy. Identifying what your team needs in each game will increase your impact and improve your win rate. This guide will teach you how to get the most out of your champion by adapting your playstyle to the situation.
The most basic goal of a teamfight is to kill the enemy champions while preventing your team from being killed. Support champions facilitate this by filling one or more of a variety of different roles. Below are just some of the roles a support champion may fill.
Peeling creates distance to help allies escape or reposition. Crowd control, displacement, and even some buff abilities are crucial to peeling. Effective peeling denies enemy kills and sets allies up to punish engages.
Engaging is facilitating the start of a fight. This is usually achieved by displacing or immobilizing the enemy. Engaging allows your team to gain a positional advantage or land key abilities before the enemy can respond.
Tanking is the act of taking damage in place of your allies. Tanks utilize defensive stats, self-healing, and damage mitigation abilities to soak up as much damage as possible. Tanking keeps your allies alive and creates space for them to position themselves.
Buffing refers to enhancing your allies' stats, attacks, or abilities. Buffs are mostly provided by specific abilities, although there are also items that allow the user to provide buffs. Depending on the buff, there are countless ways to help your team dominate a fight.
Healing and shielding protect your allies by replenishing health or mitigating damage. This allows them to stay in a fight longer and prevents the enemy team from getting kills.
Damage isn’t typically the primary role of a support champion, but there are some exceptions. Mages (such as Xerath or Lux) and assassins (such as Pyke) can deal a lot of damage if they get ahead. Even for champions that don’t focus on it, dealing damage is still important. Every point of damage has the potential to change a fight.
Zoning creates space by denying or punishing enemy movement through an area. Terrain creation, long-lasting ground effects, and traps are the most common ways to zone enemies. Allies can take advantage of the space created by zoning to position themselves safely.
Keep in mind that these roles are very broad. There’s a lot of nuance in the roles of a teamfight. You’ll often find yourself filling multiple roles. Sometimes you’ll even fill roles that don’t fit into any of these categories. Don’t limit yourself to fitting cleanly into one of the above roles.
Before you identify what you need to do, you need to first figure out what your champion can do. This requires strong champion knowledge as a foundation. If you know the tools a champion has, you can compare them against the roles in a teamfight. It’s important to recognize that there’s more than one way to play a champion.
To illustrate this, I will be using Leona and Nami as examples. These two champions have entirely different playstyles. Leona is a tanky engage support and Nami is an enchanter. Despite these differences, there is a surprising amount of overlap in what they can bring to a fight. Typically, Nami’s role is to heal and buff the team from the backline, peeling when needed with her ultimate and Q. Leona, on the other hand, is used to engage fights and lock down priority targets.
While less reliable, both champions are able to fill each other's roles to a certain degree. In games where your team lacks reliable engage tools, Nami’s Ultimate can be used to initiate fights. Conversely, in games where your carry is threatened by melee assassins, Leona can play in the backline to peel with her Q and provide shields with Locket of the Iron Solari. Each champion has a playstyle that they’re best suited to, but that doesn’t mean they’re limited to that playstyle. Depending on the situation, other playstyles may provide more value in a fight.
There are two main things to consider when looking at your team composition. Firstly, what do your teammates need for their champions to function in a teamfight? And secondly, what tools do your teammates have that facilitate this? By answering these two questions, you can work out what you can provide that your team is lacking. In a perfect world, your team would have everything it needs.
Unfortunately, team compositions in solo queue will rarely be so perfect. Because of this, you need to use the information you have to make a judgment on what provides the most value to your team. Doing this requires a lot of experience and game knowledge so don’t worry about getting it right every time. The key is to prioritize your team’s needs and identify what’s most important for your team to function. You also need to consider what your champion does best. When choosing between two roles of equal importance, it’s always better to pick the one your champion is better at.
Just like your team, the enemy composition will also have things it needs to function. Analyzing what these things are and how you can disrupt them is important for a complete picture of your role in a fight. Bear in mind that if the enemy team is functioning completely, they will be disrupting your team's function as well. One example of this is Assassins. If they’re fulfilling their role in a fight, Assassins will be eliminating your carries early on, crippling your team for the rest of the fight. By dealing with an Assassin, you are not only disrupting the enemy team but also facilitating your own. This principle applies to any threat that the enemy team has. By identifying the threats on the enemy team, you get a better idea of what your team needs to function.
Game state is the final thing you need to consider when finding your role as a support. As already mentioned, the goal of a support is to disrupt enemies and enable allies. Throughout the game, the relative strength of every champion is constantly changing. This is important because it directly affects the value you get out of your actions. Disrupting an enemy is only valuable when the enemy is a threat. Likewise, enabling an ally is only valuable if they’re strong enough to capitalize on it. Not only will your team's needs change throughout the game, but so will your own capabilities. Depending on the game state, the value of each role will change. Adapting to changes in the game state is crucial to maximizing your impact on the match.
Every support champion has a set of tools to impact the game in a variety of ways. Identifying how best to use these tools maximizes your impact on the game. This involves analyzing a variety of factors, such as the tools available to you, team composition, and game state. While applying the concepts in this guide requires knowledge and experience, I hope that they help you on your journey as a support player.
