Support is a rewarding role with many champions to choose from. As a beginner, it’s recommended to play champions that help you learn the role. These champions should provide an easy way to learn fundamental skills. Learn about some of the best support champions for beginners.
Support is often viewed as an easy role for beginners in League of Legends. While that’s not wrong, there are many things to learn if you want to master the role. The champions you play as a beginner should support your learning. For a champion to do so, they should be mechanically easy and teach you important skills that you can apply to other champions. This allows you to focus on learning the role without the distraction of complex, unfamiliar champion mechanics. In this guide, you’ll find an overview of five beginner-friendly support champions and an explanation of the skills they can teach you.
Leona is a tanky engage support with reliable crowd control abilities. Her kit allows her to dive behind enemies and lock them down with a low-cooldown stun. To support this playstyle, she also can reduce incoming damage and increase her resistances for 3-6 seconds. Finally, her ultimate is a ranged area-of-effect slow that stuns enemies in the center, allowing her to further extend her crowd control.
All of Leona’s abilities are intuitive and easy to hit, making her mechanically simple. Despite this, her ability to lock down enemies as early as level 2 gives her a lot of playmaking potential, especially in the early game.
The fundamental skills that you can learn from playing Leona are:
Health management is central to Leona’s success in the laning phase. You need to learn to minimize avoidable damage to ensure you have enough health to engage safely. Minimizing damage also helps to gain a health advantage over the enemy. This is applicable to all champions.
Choosing fights is about knowing when a fight is advantageous. As an engage support, one of Leona’s primary roles is to initiate fights for her team. This means that you need to learn to make decisions on when to fight. In addition to judgment, choosing fights requires awareness of the map and game state. Regardless of your role, both awareness and decision-making are vital skills.
Applying pressure is a core skill of all engage supports. You must learn how and when to position aggressively without putting yourself in danger. This pressures the enemy into backing off, protecting your ADC and denying CS. All champions and roles can benefit from learning how to apply pressure. The only difference is in how effectively they can do so.
Combos are vital to making the most of Leona’s kit. The first thing to note is that Leona’s Q cancels her auto-attack animation, allowing you to auto-attack twice in quick succession. Secondly, all of Leona’s other abilities can be cast during her E animation, saving time and guaranteeing stuns from her ultimate. Lastly, to maximize the duration of your crowd control, you need to time your ability casts with the end of the crowd control. Abusing these mechanics with combos makes the most of Leona’s damage and utility. Most champions in League of Legends utilize combos in some shape or form, making this a valuable skill to learn.
Peeling shouldn’t be overlooked just because Leona’s an engage support. Her various reliable crowd control options allow her to effectively hinder enemies, buying time for vulnerable allies to escape or kill the enemy. You need to learn how to judge when peeling can save an ally and when doing so provides value. Peeling is a useful skill for all supports and can even be applicable to other roles.
Target prioritization ensures that Leona’s ability to lock down targets is utilized effectively. You need to know how to identify the highest-value target for your crowd control abilities. Generally, this will either be the enemy team’s biggest threat or someone that can be killed quickly to create a numbers advantage. Learning to identify the enemy team's biggest threats and how to remove them from the fight can benefit champions of all roles.
Lux is an artillery mage support with a healthy mix of damage and utility. For utility, she has a root and a shield. Both are ranged skillshots that can hit multiple targets. Additionally, she creates a small field on the ground, slowing enemy champions that move through it. Recasting this ability detonates the field, dealing damage to enemies in the area. To round out her kit, her ultimate is a long-range frontal beam that deals significant damage at the end of the cast. Compared to most champions, Lux’s ultimate has a relatively low cooldown. This allows her to cast her ultimate whenever she wants without being punished for the cooldown.
Despite all of her abilities being skillshots, Lux is very beginner-friendly. Most of her abilities have either large hitboxes or low cooldowns. This makes her abilities far less punishing for those with poor mechanical skills.
The fundamental skills you can learn from playing Lux are:
Skillshots, even if they’re easy to hit, are essential to playing Lux effectively. Lux provides a forgiving environment to improve your aim. For champions that are more mechanically intensive, the ability to hit skillshots consistently is crucial.
Spacing allows Lux to leverage her range advantage over her enemies. You need to learn to position yourself outside of your enemy’s range while still being in range for your own skills. When playing ranged champions, spacing can minimize the damage you take while maximizing the damage you deal.
Positioning is similar to spacing but also accounts for ally positions. Because she lacks mobility and survivability, Lux needs to position herself safely to avoid dying in team fights. Ideally, Lux should position towards the back of her team, allowing allied tanks and bruisers to protect her. Every champion requires good positioning, however, squishy champions such as Lux are punished more heavily for poor positioning.
Combos maximize Lux’s damage per second. Lux combos revolve around using her root to guarantee that she can hit her other abilities. Additionally, Lux can weave auto-attacks in between her abilities to proc her passive for extra damage. Due to their simplicity, Lux’s combos are an effective way to introduce beginners to the concept of combos.
Nautilus is a bulky hook engage support who punishes mispositioned enemies. The core of Nautilus’ kit is his hook, ‘Dredge Line’. This is a ranged skillshot that pulls Nautilus and the first enemy hit towards each other. Alternatively, his hook can be used to pull him towards terrain. Nautilus has several tools to support his engages. He can impair enemies he hooks with an area-of-effect slow and his auto-attacks which apply a root due to his passive. On top of this, he can also gain a temporary shield that increases his damage and improves his survivability. Lastly, his ultimate is a shockwave that chases the target, knocking up enemies in its path and stunning the target.
With only one skillshot, Nautilus’ kit requires minimal mechanical skill. Other than hitting his hook, beginners should have no issues piloting Nautilus.
The fundamental skills you can learn from playing Nautilus are:
Applying pressure is just as important for Nautilus as it is for Leona. Nautilus’ hook and ultimate are powerful engage tools. By positioning aggressively, you can force enemies to sacrifice resources to avoid them. Because these abilities have high cooldowns, you must learn to cast them sparingly. While they’re significant threats when you have them available, you lose your pressure while they’re on cooldown. Learning how to best use your kit to apply pressure can give you an edge over your enemy regardless of the champion you’re playing.
Health management helps Nautilus to engage fights safely. Though not to the same extent as Leona, Nautilus moves closer to his enemies when he engages. If your health is low, the enemy can simply kill you and back away before your team can follow up. To prevent this, you need to learn to conserve your health and judge whether you have enough health to engage. Even on passive champions, the ability to gain a health advantage over your enemy will always be useful.
Hitting your hook consistently will make you a far more effective Nautilus and apply additional pressure to the enemy. Because Nautilus’ hook is his only skillshot, you have far less to learn than with other champions. You must familiarise yourself with the range, hitbox, and projectile speed of the hook, and learn to position around minions. Other than that, all you need to do is predict how your target will move. It can be useful to time your hook with your target's auto-attacks, as they’ll be unable to move during the animation. Learning to hit your hooks on Nautilus will help you with other hook champions like Blitzcrank and Thresh.
Choosing fights carefully ensures that Nautilus’ engage tools are used effectively. As an engage support, Nautilus will often be the one to initiate a fight. If you were to blindly engage at every opportunity, you would risk losing fights that you didn’t need to take. You need to learn to consider what you stand to gain or lose from a fight and what your chance of winning is. Many beginners fail to understand that fighting and getting kills are means to an end. If a fight is risky or doesn’t benefit your team, it’s better to avoid it. This applies not just to engage supports, but to all champions.
Target prioritization is critical to Nautilus’ success. The point of Nautilus’ hook is to put enemy champions in a disadvantageous position. While this is very effective against many champions, some actually benefit from being pulled towards your team. You need to learn not just who you should hook, but also who you shouldn’t hook. Learning to pick your targets will help you teamfight more effectively on every champion.
Soraka is an enchanter that excels at outputting large amounts of healing. Her basic healing ability is unique in that it costs her own health to cast and cannot be self-cast. To help with this, she has a ranged area-of-affect ability that heals her if it hits an enemy. For crowd control, Soraka can place a circular zone on the ground, silencing enemies within the zone and rooting those that remain in the zone when it expires. To add to her healing, Soraka’s ultimate heals all allied champions regardless of where they are on the map.
Both of Soraka’s heals are targeted abilities while her area-of-effect abilities must be aimed. Despite this, both abilities have large areas of effect and short casting animations, making them easy to land for beginners. New players should have no mechanical difficulties playing Soraka.
The fundamental skills you can learn from playing Soraka are:
Resource management is an important part of Soraka’s gameplay, especially at early levels with limited health and mana regeneration. Casting her heal too frequently can quickly deplete her health if you aren’t regaining that health by hitting enemy champions. Similarly, healing while low on mana can leave you without a way to regain your health. You should learn to monitor your health and mana and avoid wasting resources by overhealing or missing abilities. There are many champions in League of Legends that require resource management to be effective.
Map awareness allows Soraka to make the most of her ultimate. One of the things that makes Soraka’s ultimate so powerful is its ability to save people from anywhere on the map. To achieve this, however, you need to learn to be aware of what’s happening in other parts of the map. Map awareness is one of the most important skills in League of Legends, and Soraka’s ultimate is the perfect opportunity to learn it.
Zoning is one of the best ways to make use of Soraka’s silence. Placing her silence in key areas deters enemies from passing through. This buys time for your allies to reposition, secure kills, take objectives, or escape. For zoning to be effective, you need to learn to identify when zoning provides more value than the silence itself. Aside from Soraka, any champion that has a way to deter enemies from an area can benefit from learning to zone.
Positioning lets Soraka support her allies from outside the range of the enemy team. Like Lux, Soraka lacks mobility and survivability, making her an easy target for enemies. While there are times when Soraka can safely move in to land abilities, she should usually position herself behind her allies. Playing Soraka teaches you to position yourself safely without restricting your impact. Positioning is relevant to all champions but is most noticeable when playing frail ranged champions.
Choosing who to heal maximizes the value of Soraka’s healing output. Because her single-target healing output is finite, you need to prioritize your targets. Your priority can be broken down into two main factors, whether the heal will save the target and the target’s value. If the heal won’t save the target, either because they’re in no danger of dying or because they’ll die regardless, healing them is a waste of resources. If instead there are two or more targets that you can save, it’s better to save whoever will contribute the most to the rest of the fight. Learning to prioritize your healing teaches decision-making skills that are useful on any champion. Saving allies isn’t exclusive to healers.
Nami is an all-rounder enchanter with a bit of everything. Her passive provides a small speed boost to allies that are hit by her abilities, even if the ability doesn’t affect allies. That’s not the only way she can buff allies, however, as she can also provide a buff that empowers the next three attacks or abilities, increasing their damage and adding an on-hit slow. For healing and damage, Nami has a targeted ability that bounces between champions, damaging enemies and healing allies. Finally, for crowd control, she has a small area-of-effect stun and an ultimate that creates a large wave, slowing and knocking up all enemies hit.
Although most of Nami’s abilities are easy to use, her area-of-effect stun is a notable exception. Its long cast-time can make it difficult to land, especially for beginners. Regardless, Nami is still fairly mechanically simple. Once you’ve adjusted to the timing of her stun, the rest is easy.
The fundamental skills you can learn from playing Nami are:
Skillshots are necessary to make the most of Nami’s potential. Her stun and ultimate are important parts of her kit, and you’re far less effective if you can’t land them consistently. The hardest part of Nami’s skillshots is their speed. You need to learn to predict enemy movements and identify opportunities. Taking advantage of her buff ability to slow enemies can also make your skillshots easier. Learning to hit Nami’s skillshots is useful for any champions with slow skillshots.
Positioning keeps Nami safe in teamfights, allowing her to focus on supporting her allies. Despite having many tools that aid her survivability, Nami is very squishy. Because her heal bounces to damage nearby enemies, she doesn’t even need to be in range to contribute to damage. As for her stun, it’s often useful to save it for enemies that target the backline. Playing Nami teaches you how to contribute effectively from the backline. This skill is particularly useful for enchanters but can also be applicable to other champions.
Peeling is one of Nami’s biggest strengths. She has various ways to hinder enemies while increasing allies’ movement speeds. This allows Nami and her allies to disengage from fights when they would otherwise die. You need to learn when to disengage and how to best use your abilities to facilitate that. Peeling is most relevant on tanks and supports, however, any champion with crowd control can peel to some extent.
Holding abilities ensures Nami has them when she needs them. While her stun and ultimate are extremely impactful with the right timing, it’s easy to waste them if you use them thoughtlessly. As an additional benefit, holding onto these abilities can pressure your enemies, limiting their available options. Learning to hold your abilities is useful on many other champions. There are countless abilities in the game that are best saved for the right timing.
Although these champions are helpful while learning support, the most important thing about a champion is how much you enjoy them. Enjoyment not only motivates you to improve, but also engages you in your gameplay, making you more likely to remember what you’re learning. If you’re particularly interested in a specific champion, try them out. While more difficult champions may take longer to learn, learning isn’t a race. Worst case, if you’re struggling, you can use the champions on this list to learn the basics and try again once you’re more confident. I hope you find a champion you like in this guide. Good luck with learning support!
