Everything you need to know about roaming as a Support in League of Legends. From the meaning of roaming, or when and how to roam, this guide will help you recognize your opportunities, climb the ranked ladder, and become a true all-around Master of the Support role.
There are three classes that hold down the Support role in League of Legends: Tanks, Mages, and Enchanters. And the play-patterns of each of these classes differ heavily. Tanks focus on disruption and play-making depending on whether they are a Warden, like Braum, or Vanguard, like Leona. Mages thrive off of poke and pressure. Brand, Zyra, Swain, and Xerath all punish Bot Laners and Supports alike for daring to last hit or pressure wards. Enchanters fall into a near exclusive defensive category and provide shields, heals, and utility, like movement speed, to accent the strengths of their team or cover their weaknesses.
There are core mechanics and goals behind each of these classes and their respective playstyles. However, beyond the class mechanics, there are role mechanics that they must incorporate. Things like ward timings, tracking the enemy Jungler, in-game adaptation, and roaming.
The latter of which will be our focus today for this guide.
So, what is it? Roaming is where a Champion moves away from their lane to either establish vision, gank another lane, pressure the enemy Jungler, or offer backup to their teammates.
A common misconception throughout lower ELOs of play is that only the Mid or Top should roam. While the Support sticks to their Bot Laner, only briefly floating out of vision to get safe vision. Though the strength of Duo Lane is safety, when we compare this mindset to that of D2+ Support Mains, you’ll often see a priority on roaming effectively versus staying with their ADC.
But, why is that? Well, to answer this we first have to look at Support’s closest comparison role, Jungle.
As it stands, Jungle is perhaps the most polarizing role in the game. For the majority of the season hard farming Junglers like Udyr, Lillia, and Morgana have dominated both in and out of Solo-Queue due to their simplicity, clear speed, and ability to impact the game via neutral objective control. And despite changes in 11.10 bringing some more gank focused Junglers into the Meta, it doesn’t look like hard farmers are going to slow down. Especially within higher ELOs.
With Hard Farming becoming a main strategy this season, Junglers have naturally ditched Champions like Sejuani and Jarvan who have lower clear speeds but make up for it with early ganks, tank scaling, and utility. These Champions simply lose in an isolated 1v1 Jungle matchup against Hard Farmers. Lillia will maintain a level advantage over Jarvan in the perfect world where both Champions are undisturbed since she clears through her camps and resets them faster.
So, when taking this into consideration from the Support Role, players have put a heavy emphasis on picks like Nautilus, Leona, and Alistar this season to cover the lack of high-impact early game that once came from the Jungler role in previous seasons. These picks bring the CC and CC that Junglers once offered, and they further set up the Hard Farmers when it comes to successfully ganking, rounding out the weakest aspects of their game. Additionally, as the Jungle meta comes to include picks like Xin, Elise, and Rek’sai more, these picks will only benefit from the inclusion of more set-up from these CC-focused Supports.
All of that leads Supports to adopt a more roam focused mindset, especially if you consider the nature of most Marksmen needing around three items to really impact the game. Sure, Supports could create early advantage with their partner, but if you’re looking at how to win the game in the fastest way possible, you’re more likely to establish that your two item powerspiking Jungler or Mid are more likely to control the tempo, over your late spiking Marksman.
So, now that we’ve got all this context in hand, let’s really strap on our Mobility Boots and talk about how and when to effectively roam.
Before deciding to roam, you have to break down several aspects of your particular match to make the most of your impact and to avoid any negatives your movement might have.
“Is My ADC able to stay safe and continue farming?”
This is the most important question to consider. I mentioned before that tempo is often controlled by the Jungler and Mid, but Marksmen are often the knock-out punch that closes out games. No other class in the game can apply as much unavoidable damage as they do, and as a trade off they suffer from not only fragility issues but item dependency as well.
So, Marksmen need to farm and they need to get it safely and quickly. In situations where you’re roaming as Support, and your AD is against aggressive and potentially dive-ready opponents, it’s unwise to leave them to fend for themselves. Supports provide the disruption, peel, and bulk necessary to protect an AD as they scale, so this is an important question to cover first.
And how you evaluate if your AD is going to be safe is based on the tandem of opponents that you have present down Bot, as well as what Carry your lane partner is playing. If you’re matched as Caitlyn-Bard versus a Kog-Lulu lane, you can take comfort that Caitlyn has a reliably disengage and that Kog-Lulu aren’t exactly going to be looking to dive her if you leave her solo. On the opposite end, if matched against someone like Samira-Leona, and your AD is playing an extremely immobile carry like Jhin, you’re in a far more threatening situation. In this instance, before you make your roam, you have other conditions or timers, that we’ll discuss later on, that you’ll have to meet.
“Is the lane I’m roaming to gankable?”
When moving away from a lane and looking to make a play elsewhere, you essentially act as a second Jungler for your team. As such, it’s appropriate to consider the same information that a Jungler would when looking to make a play on a lane. This is why I’ve grown to really suggest Supports off-role Jungle to really get an idea of how to master these approach angles to better help their primary role.
So, what are some conditions that make a lane gankable?
These are but a few quick reads to help you gauge your approach on a successful gank. But ultimately, gank-ability is reflected in how well managed a player’s resources are. Resources are spells, health, mana, abilities, basically anything that helps them manage their game state. And if one of these is off focus ever so slightly, you can capitalize on it and punish for your team’s benefit.
“Where is the enemy Jungler? Where is my Jungler?”
The third thing to consider when roaming to make a play is the pathing of the enemy Jungler. While Supports typically have higher impact early game, they pale in comparison to the potential of Junglers, even some scaling options. After all, one role is designed to work off of gold and scale (Jungle), while the other one isn’t (Support). So, while through the early game Supports and Junglers could be potentially equal in terms of damage/CC output, should they cross one another as the game goes on Junglers will win that catch every time.
Further, you never really want to be coordinating a gank on a situation where the enemy Jungler can counter gank. If you’ve tracked their positioning with deeper vision throughout the game, you should be able to glean when your roam call is going to be in a safe two versus one situation. Or if your tracking has gone unnoticed, you’ll be able to time your roam to act as a counter-gank if you’ve controlled vision.
Counter-ganking on the enemy Jungler is far more impactful and safer for your team than it would be for you to initiate the gank and the Jungler countering you. It comes down to that resource and ability management we spoke about earlier. If the enemy Mid and Jungle blow their combos/kits trying to set a kill on your laner, and you come in from fog with disruption for that initiation, you’ve turned what they felt was a positive situation into a negative by way of having access to more abilities between you and Mid.
Finally, coordinating a three man gank, though sometimes unrealistic in Solo-Queue is a sure fire way to layer the situation in your favor. Especially if you and your Jungler are coming in from opposite escape angles to cover the Mid/Top Laner’s paths. Again, this is harder to do without coordination though, so I’d really only look for these opportunities when you’re duoing with a Jungler or with a Top Laner that enjoys playing high impact roamers like Kled or Camille.
“Is my Champion best served roaming in this game?”
It’s just a matter of fact that some Champions are just better than others in certain aspects. Leona is going to start fights better than Sona. Janna is going to disengage better than Xerath.
This can continue on with some Supports being designed to be more impactful via roaming than others.
Bard has a mechanic that allows him to traverse terrain allowing him to quickly move across the map and escape from enemies or gank lanes. Pyke has stealth and movement speed to sneak over enemy vision and quickly get on top of opponents for his assassinations. Alistar has a point and click CC-combo that hard locks an opponent in place, setting his laners up. Thresh has utility out the wazoo and can either chain-cc an opponent down, or act as a counter-engage/disengage option with his lantern and box. These Champions are all high-impact roamers, but even if you’re not on these Champions, you can still be impactful even if you don’t provide the best setup or have the best approaches.
It’s all about these questions that we’ve been breaking down and all about the timers that we’ll discuss in a bit that determine whether your roam is going to be high or low impact. It doesn’t necessarily boil down to your Champion choice.
Let’s run through an example scenario:
You’ve opted to lock in Lulu alongside a Kog’Maw. This is one of best hyper-scaling options you can play in League and will likely translate to your lane wanting to play passive. Your Kog, however, has eaten some Peacemakers to the face so he’s having to back disjointed from you. With your opponents stacking a freeze outside of turret range, you’re at risk if you push to break it. So, with nothing better to do, you elect to roam.
Your Mid Lane is in a neutral state with waves in the middle of the lane, and both laners at 100 HP & Mana. Your Mid ‘mispositions’ themselves and baits the all-in from the opponent towards your side of the lane. You pop your purple head out, soak the enemy’s damage with your E and pepper them with a bit of damage alongside your Mid before the enemy is forced to flash out position further back and regen with potions.
Overall, you didn’t earn a kill. But you did blow a Flash, and you did take away resources from the Mid Laner. (The HP/Mana/Energy and potions.) Which has granted your Mid Laner an advantage. Now with their opponent more vulnerable, any poke they successfully land could push the enemy out of lane. Any misstep could lead to a kill for your Mid. If they straggle, then they’re vulnerable to a gank from the Jungler which now knows flash was blown Mid. And even if all that doesn’t come to pass, the enemy Mid is still forced to try and farm without resources which makes wave management tricky.
With all that in hand, don’t let the fact that you picked a “Non-Roaming” Support trick you into believing that you can’t roam effectively. It’s about the conditions and timers on which you can. When properly executed, any roam by any Support can be effective.
We’ve talked a lot about timers and questions. In reality these two ideas are hand-in-hand at the end of the day. The questions that we’ve asked before are just the biggest window ‘timers’. They’re the ones that every Support can implement. But there are some more specific instances that’d I’d like to quickly point out for you all if you’ve ever asked, “Would this be a good time to roam?”
So, we’ve unpacked a lot of concepts today. From unpacking the very concept of roaming to talking about what timers and windows are available within each game, it’s now on you to look out for all this and apply it in-game. I hope this information serves you well in your roaming endeavors, and remember when your Carry is bad, you’re just a boots buy away from boosting your Mid Lane!
