Support Lanes 101: Be the Annoyance

(Artwork by ClandestineKnight)

by Jerrod "Thousand Eyes" Steis

In lane, a support’s job is to help their ADC farm in a safe fashion. There’s different ways to accomplish this based on what support you’re playing. Some supports excel at making the laning phase hell for the enemy. Sona or Zyra are great examples of this. Others just want to survive and make more of an impact in teamfights, a la Braum or Soraka. Finally, you’ve got your old-fashioned kill lanes. These lanes want to get in the face of the enemy and just fight fight fight. Leona or Annie can accomplish this pretty well; this is also where a lot of non-meta brusier supports fall too.

Poke Supports

To start, let’s look at the first category, the poke/harass support. Keep in mind I’m looking mainly at laning phase strengths. Supports that fall under this category are the following:

Excel in the Category

• Sona
• Zyra
• Vel Koz
• Karma
• Lulu
• Zilean
• Any and all mid lane mages (Xerath, Ziggs, I don’t know what weird stuff you play.)

Can accomplish it, but not the best

• Annie
• Nami
• Morgana
• Fiddlesticks
• Soraka
• Janna

If you’re playing a poke support, you’re going to want to know the range of your enemies and your lane partner. It’s easy to know your limits, most people are able to pick that up after playing a champion a few times. To really excel at playing a poke support though you have to know your enemy’s limits. There’s a huge difference walking up to a Janna and walking up to a Taric or Blitzcrank that can punish your misposition hard.

Make good use of your auto attacks. Never let the enemy get something for free. If you watch your own minions and see when the enemy goes up to last hit, you know they’re committing that auto attack to that minion. They can’t retaliate if you sneak a little hit in. Just make sure you’re not agroing minions in the process either.

This is where it’s nice to get experience on a lot of other supports even if you want to focus on one. You’ll get a better feel for the cooldowns after using the abilities yourself than just watching. Take Blitzcrank as an extreme example. He’s extremely scary until you realize that one missed hook makes him a lot less useful as a champion.

This is really what will separate a good poke support player from a bad one. It takes a lot of awareness on all accounts. You have to keep 4 people’s cooldowns and ranges into account while only being able to see one set of them. You have to keep your position as tight as your ADC because with most of these champions, if you get caught out in the wrong spot you’re going down. Take note of if you have a heal or not because this can play a part in your ability to poke someone who could possibly poke back. One of the worst things is to trade with someone and put yourself low in the process when you have no way to heal it off.

If you’re playing Sona vs Janna, you can be a lot more aggressive in trades than you would with a Zyra or Lulu, Sona can heal off that damage immediately, while you only at best have a shield otherwise. Of course, these other supports usually make up for it in CC abilities.

Engage Supports

Next up we have the engage support category. This is the kind of support that can do basically two things. Fight or zone. They’re either going to get your lane really far ahead or fall behind so it’s important to try and make some kind of play with these. Here’s your list:

Excel in the Category

• Blitzcrank
• Leona
• Annie
• Morgana
• Thresh

Can accomplish it, but not the best

• Nami
• Taric
• Braum
• Zyra
• Alistar

Engage supports are generally binary in their success as a whole. What I mean by that is either they dominate their opponent in lane or do almost nothing. It’s possible that you can use some of your stuff to peel as well though, so keep this in mind when a 2v2 brawl starts and you aren’t the initiator.

These types of supports are generally tanky and are actually pretty great in solo queue. Because of their inherent tankiness, they are pretty forgiving if a miscommunication happens, and that’s not as often as other types of supports since they’re pretty obvious when they either go in or make a pick.

These are also the supports that are going to roam a lot more. Roaming is a great habit to get into, but it takes a lot of communication between you and the rest of your team. Your ADC has  to be aware that you’re leaving them for a while and that they need to play accordingly. Tag team a gank mid with your jungler. You can have the jungler chase them down into you when they head towards river and get a nice easy kill.

The weakness of these supports is that they are pretty cookie cutter in their impact, and if that strategy doesn't work, you’re in a bad spot. It’s also important to note that some of these supports will fall off later on in the game because they focus on bringing a lot of damage in early engages. Once a team starts getting some resistances, your damage will fall because you’re not primarily focusing on building it. Annie and Zyra are examples of this.

Finally, in lane you’ll want to have a control on vision, doubly so if you’re a champion that wants to force fights with skillshots. This would be Morgana, Blitzcrank, and Leona possibly. If the enemy can’t see you, you get a nice surprise on them to hit your shot. Also, having their bushes warded makes it easier to hit them obviously.

Teamfight/Utility Supports (Mostly No Lane Pressure)

Excel in the Category

• Alistar
• Braum
• Janna
• Soraka
• Thresh

Can accomplish it, but not the best

• Morgana
• Nami
• Taric
• Lulu
• Karma

The basic gist here is that these are the supports that bring power to their teammates. Some of them do it by buffing, others do it by being a tanky wall and standing in the way. A pretty common theme in these supports is not only their ability to protect, but also a lot of them have a very large lack of lane pressure. Let me state, this doesn’t apply to every champion in this list, just most.

Strategizing with these supports often involves sitting back a bit more and using the unique abilities you have to help your carry and/or team win in fights. These supports synergize best with late game focused ADCs and are at home sitting on top of them.

When picking a lot of these supports you have to realize that your laning phase is going to be a bit lackluster when compared to a support like a Sona or Leona. Your kill potential is low and you don’t have a way to retaliate poke most of the time. Granted some supports that bring a  lot of teamfight potential also are a boon in lane. Thresh and Taric can bring some decent engage potential to their ADC, Karma can poke people out pretty nicely as well.

Of course, don’t mistake this ability to bring some of the other categories in as reason to call that their strength. While Thresh and Taric do bring some nice engage, let’s take a look at what they can bring in a teamfight setting.

Thresh can push multiple people off and slow an enemy group while also grabbing a teammate and pulling them to him. Taric is able to bring extra armor to his team and can trade that off for armor pen for his team if he hits an enemy (very useful for an ADC getting chased by a tank). His ult is also one of the most undervalued abilities in the game as it brings free stats to all of his teammates near him and it’s on an outrageously low cooldown.

The idea here is that while you might have some ability to pressure in lane, your real strength is your utility after laning that you can still bring to the team. You give stats and peel to your team that isn't available to a lot of junglers or solo laners since they need abilities that can do damage.

One strength in lane that I do want to mention though is turn around potential. Since these supports are almost all focused on keeping people alive and giving them some extra oomph, they all have a great ability to turn fights around. Whether it’s through shielding damage, healing teammates, AoE CC, etc. you can make a lot of clutch saves for your team and pull out some great wins from losing fights. This is a counter-gankers best friend.

If you’ve got a jungler who wants to try and help you snowball, tell them to sit bot and that you’ll play really aggressively. If they wait a bit they can counter engage, and with your superior utility and safety, you’ll generally come out on top through buffs and debuffs.

Wrapping it up

Overall, it’s important to recognize what you’re able to do in lane as whatever champion you’re playing. Fully understand the weaknesses and strengths of what you can do and make sure the rest of your team is aware of this as well. Forcing yourself to play a champion in a laning style that isn't conducive to what they’re best at can not only hurt your chances in lane, but snowball the enemy team ahead to a point where your late game power spike will only be a spike to catch up. They say laning in solo queue is huge, so make sure you know what you’re doing.

Be sure to check out my other articles:

Support Lanes 101: How to Pick your Support

Support Lanes 101: Part 1.5: (Pocket Pick Supports)
Support Lanes 101: Itemization Choices
Support Lanes 101: Warding
Support Lanes 101: To Dive or to Peel

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by Jerrod "Thousand Eyes" Steis

Support Specific Items : Which One is Best for You?

by Jerrod "Thousand Eyes" Steis

Now more than ever there’s a bunch of great support specific items. Ancient Coin, Relic Shield, and Spellthief’s Edge are awesome items with really interesting and useful interactions all throughout each build. For some champions, like Morgana, Leona, Braum, the choices of what to build are pretty concrete. Leona and Braum have kits and themes that play them up to be extremely tanky melee champs that soak up damage in fights. Morgana and Lulu hit from afar and do deceptively large amounts of AP damage. Then you get to supports like Thresh, Nami, Soraka, and Janna. They could make use of two or sometimes all of these items. So the question becomes what do you want to build? Let’s take a look at each item and how it works with each type of play style and champion.

First we're going to look at what is probably the most general of all the support items, Ancient Coin -> Nomad's Medallion -> Talisman of Ascension.  Ancient Coin's passive gives sustain in both health and mana, with health being given as long as you're around minions that are dying. Speaking of that, you'll also get gold along with health every minion death. This is important because it's the only support item of the three that can provide gold without the use of another champion. In other words, it's easily the most consistent gold earner of the three.

This item is best synergized with a passive play style. It rewards staying in lane as long as possible and its stats reflect this. This is going to remain true all throughout the build path. This item and what it builds into are pretty much all about avoiding straight up fights and trying to outlast the opponent.

            Once you upgrade to Nomad's Medallion you gain more health and gold per minion death, 10 and 4 respectively, and a lot more mana regen. Also, you’ll start gaining gold per second passively. Upgrading this item quickly increases your gold by a large amount and hastens your acquisition of the rest of your build nicely. If you're willing to spend a bit on actual wards, you can delay Sightstone for upgrading to Medallion.

Your final item, Talisman of Ascension, will require a Forbidden Idol (2 Faerie Charms +390 g) and 585 gold. With this upgrade you get 10% more CDR for a total of 20% (Forbidden Idol gives 10%), double the health regen, some more mana regen, and an active skill on top of the same passive as Nomad's. This active skill gives a huge speed boost to you and all allies near you that decays over time.

This active ability is what makes Talisman very powerful. It can be used in a multitude of ways. The way it was initially intended to be used was as an escape, which follows what the rest of the item's stats imply. There are an endless number of different uses though. The speed boost does an awesome job at helping your team chase people down, both after a won fight or if you see someone out of position. It can also help in the middle of a losing fight. Pop it after your team gets jumped by surprise and you'll give everyone a chance to put themselves in a better spot. Finally, an underused tactic is to use it in making a move towards different objectives. Pressure mid lane and then have your team rush to top before the enemy can respond. The active for Twin Shadows really synergizes well as it gives you an engage solely through the use of items, leaving your actual abilities ready for the ensuing fight. In short, Talisman's active, just like the rest of the item, is the most versatile of the three.

So, who should you build Talisman on? Well, to be perfectly honest, Talisman works with almost any support. It may not be the optimal choice, but I dare you to name a support that gets nothing out of any part of it. Every conventional support uses mana, has health, and can benefit from CDR and a burst of speed. If you're new to support and you don't know what you should get or you're afraid to poke or go all in, build a Talisman. Your team will appreciate the extra utility you give everyone through more frequent skill uses and, of course, the active.

Specific Champs to Build Talisman:

·         Nami - Her passive gives movement speed already and she excels and strengthening the speed difference between her allies and enemies. Hit all 10 players with her Ultimate and pop Talisman and you'll see what I mean.

·         Janna - once again has a passive involving movement speed. (Albeit an extremely weak one atm.) She excels at peeling people off her ADC and this gives her ADC a type of self peel on top of all that. Run a hyper-carry like Vayne, Twitch, or Kog Maw with her.

·         Thresh - This is really more just an issue of Thresh doesn't work well with any support item. He doesn't scale well with AP, he's ranged so he has a hard time using Relic Shield (I'll explain in a second), but at the same time he doesn't burn through mana or focus on sustaining out the enemy.

             Really, Relic vs. Coin start is a matter of preference. That's why you'll see some pros starting with a Ruby Crystal, so they can rush Sightstone, an item Thresh undoubtedly gets full use out of. They'll usually pick up a Coin or Shield item later on in the game. Personally I like Coin because I'm a utility hog. The more I can do to put my carries in a position to win, the better off I feel and the move speed in conjunction with CDR on Thresh's abilities feels great.

  

Relic Shield is a tank's best friend. Granting health, HP/10, and a passive that let's you "steal" minions from your ADC (don't lie, you've done it before).

For more clarification, the Relic Shield passive shares gold with the closest ally in a specified range and heals you both for a portion of your max health, at the cost of a charge which refills over time and stacks up to two charges. Additionally, if you're melee you'll get an execute passive on your auto attacks if the minion is low enough on health. If you're a ranged champion, you'll still share gold, but you have to kill minions the old fashioned way of timing it right. This execute is great because most supports have a laughable base attack damage and if you try and farm minions without it you'll run a high chance of misjudging your attack and then no one gets gold.

If you're keeping the item stacking continuously (make sure you're never sitting on full stacks) you can make a huge amount of gold off of this line. You're literally doubling the gold amount from each stack you use. Biggest issue is though, you need another ally around you to use it at all. Roaming is discouraged with this line, purely because you'll end up walking around with full stacks and never using them. Note I say discouraged, not that you should never do it. There's a time and place for everything.

Some quick notes on how the passive of this line works and how to make the most of it:

·         Try and keep one stack up for the cannon minion each time it spawns. Not only is it worth the most gold, but because the execute is based on max health, it's the easiest to proc a charge on. Even better are super minions.

·         Don't double jungle. It doesn't work on jungle creeps.

·         As long as the minion you kill is within the item's range of an ally it doesn't matter how you kill the minion. Sure the execute applies solely on melee auto attacks, but that doesn't mean you can't use abilities as well!

·         The heal can keep you and your ADC in lane a bit longer. Don't underestimate its strength.

·         This is the only item in the trio that never gets gold passively. If you’re not taking minions you’re losing money. The stats aren’t efficient until you take enough minions.

             As you upgrade, you gain more total stacks. Targon’s gives you three and Face of the Mountain has a maximum of four. These stacks will grow quicker after you upgrade to Targon’s Brace, meaning you’ll gain gold quicker after putting a bit more in. You’ll also gain more health, HP/10, and because the recipe for Face of the Mountain involves a Kindlegem, 10% CDR.

The active for Face of the Mountain really plays on to the role of a health-stacking tank. There are a lot of weird numbers here though so stick with me. The active is a shield you can place on any ally champion. The shield strength is determined by a portion of your max health. After a few seconds, the shield will pop, a la Sion (if anyone even knows what that means). The damage the shield does is based on the amount of AD the person who is being shielded has.

There are a few things that aren’t apparent with how the shield works though. For instance, rather than shielding someone else, you can shield yourself. This a great way to jump in and do your thing and try and make sure you can get out when the enemy thinks you’re dead. It’s also really clutch at saving people from any kind of damage over time (DoT). Another cool fact is that the shield can be completely taken off and the explosion will still occur. Don’t worry if you tossed it onto an assassin like Zed or Kha’Zix. The shield may die quickly, but as long as they stay alive the damage portion will still occur.

Specific Champs to build Face of the Mountain:

·         Leona - The staple champion that was a contested pick when the item came out. She tanks, she scales well with health, and she’s a good contestant to throw the shield on herself if all else fails. As long as you flex your muscles you can zone and grab all the farm you want.

·         Braum - Speaking of hotly contested picks, Braum is great for the Relic line in almost the opposite way that Leona is. Sure they both tank damage all day, but for completely different purposes. Leona dives, while Braum saves.

·         Alistar - Look at him...he’s a giant cow. Just like Thresh, Alistar can realistically build two different items. His kit can function in two styles dependant on how you play him. If you want to get in the fray and knock people around, go Relic and be the damage soaker you crave. However, if your plan is to try and just peel people off your carry and heal them whenever you need to, you’d be better off building a Talisman for the extra CDR and mana. This can be different every game, so it’s up to you to try and realize what you need here.

           

            The Spellthief’s item line really opened up the possible support picks. This item is made to be used by an obnoxious poking mage that harasses and whittles down their opponent in lane. This line brings you AP, mana regen, and passive gold/10. The unique passive on this item uses a charge and enhances your spells and auto attacks by putting a small amount of flat damage on them. To further drive players to poke at the enemy, every time you lane a spell or auto attack you gain a bit of gold. Both the damage and gold per auto/spell work off of charges similar to Relic Shield. Keep in mind that if you take minions at any point, the passive portion of this line will go on a cooldown.

Compared to Ancient Coin, you get less mana regen, but more damage and a way to get more gold, and in a way that’s dependant on other champions rather than minions. As you move up the line you gain more passive gold, AP, damage and gold per skill landed, and more mana regen. You won’t get as much mana regen as Coin, but you’re trading that off for more damage and the possibility of more gold gain. Once you reach Frost Queen’s Claim, along with 10% CDR from a Fiendish Codex, you get an active that shoots a bolt that explodes, causing damage and slowing any enemy caught in the blast. The damage scales per champion level and the slow is hard capped at 80% and decays over two seconds. A really nice point of fully upgrading is that the deactivation on minion kills no longer occurs. You can kill minions and still get gold and extra damage right afterwards.

Once again this active works well with the play style intended. Your role here is to sit back and poke as much as you can, meaning you don’t want to fight unless you’re the one initiating. Just like Talisman, it can be used to engage or disengage (but not as well as Talisman). In my opinion, the best way to use the active is in objective or area control. Whether you hit someone or not, it always is explodes in an AoE. If you don’t hit, you at the very least close off an area to the enemy for a little while. This can be key in obtaining or denying objectives such as Dragon, Baron, or any of the buffs on the map. The biggest difference between Talisman use and Frost Queen use is the fact that Talisman is for repositioning yourself, while Frost Queen is purely map and enemy control. You can use Talisman to position yourself and gain objective control, while Frost Queen let’s you do this from a distance.

Frost Queen’s Claim is what let usual mid lane mages run bottom lane. Champions like Syndra, Vel Koz, Kayle, Anivia (a personal favorite of mine) will benefit from the extra AP, damage on hit, and CDR. These are played as kill lanes and can be very hard to counter because they will force fights whenever possible, and they can take you down very quickly. Late game, they’re still able to scale well if they get a lot of gold from their item and possibly kills. If there’s a mage support, there’s one less spot on their team for a tank. Build tanky to survive the burst and you should be ok if you don’t give a lot of kills.

Specific Champs to build Frost Queen’s Claim:

·         Zyra - Not only will plants proc the passive gold and damage, but her auto attack range is ridiculous. She is a support that excels at hitting you from afar, both with spells and auto attacks. She scales well with AP and because she’s immobile, the slow on the Frost Queen active is very useful.

·         Morgana - The first champion we really saw building Spellthief’s. Her Tormented Soil(W) is the reason for it. The passive effect procs on every “tick” of damage, making DoT skills very useful for getting all charges off. You can lock people down with a Dark Binding(Q) and force them to take all charges with a W underneath.

·         Lulu  -Her abilities all scale well with AP now. More utility, and with the extra damage on Glitterlance(Q) she chunks people hard early and can dominate from there. The AoE slow synergizes well with her movement speed and total ability to get away from people by knocking them up with Wild Growth(R), Polymorph(Enemy W cast), speeding up with Whimsy(Self W cast) and a slow that scales with AP on Glitterlance.

·         Karma - Karma could go Talisman as well, and this is a great opportunity to once again highlight different play styles. A Karma with the Spellthief’s line will focus on chunking out her enemy with Mantra - Inner Flame (R->Q) and poking out her enemy. This makes her early game very very strong, but because of her lack of a “true” ultimate, her scaling after 6 is poor. If you go for a Talisman on Karma, you’ll focus more on her utility in her Inspire(E) shield and the movement speed and crowd control(CC) and low CDs to put her team in the best position to fight/kite.

(Bonus points if you pop Talisman, Defiance(R->E), and Sivir’s On The Hunt(R) in succession. The amount of ground you’ll cover is amazing.)

                                                      Summing it all Up

So in review, the three items have three distinct play styles. Talisman is sustaining and forcing or avoiding fights. Face of the Mountain is for tanks whether they peel or dive, you’ll want to brawl a lot with this. Finally, Frost Queen’s Claim is more for poke/area control making it hard to walk through an area, and dominating lane with constant harass. Depending on which champion you’re playing and what your play style is on top of that, you’ll build different items. Don’t feel you’re stuck building certain items. Experiment, and you may find something you like and something that works.