by Jerrod "Thousand Eyes" Steis
So last time we talked about picking a support to synergize with your ADC and counter the opponent. If you missed that one you can catch up on it here. Now I’d like to go over another integral part of any position in League, your item choices. Learning how to itemize in-game and, more importantly, learning how to adapt your build paths is one of the biggest steps in turning from an average player into an above average player in my opinion. The only things I’d consider higher are macro game details and warding, things I’ll go over later on.
So many times I see people that build items purely because it’s following directions on the suggested build or from a high tier player rather than actually putting thought into why they’re building that item and what it actually accomplishes for them. Take some time to really think about what you get for each item. One of the biggest parts of being a support is managing your itemization because your gold income is a lot lower than anyone else on your team. Your items not only have to be effective, but also cost efficient. Sure that Warmog’s is awesome to help tank, but by the time you get that finished, you’re so far behind in terms of stats and helpfulness, you’re a liability to your team.
So without further ado...Let’s get into it!
Starting Choices
On almost any support you have a choice of one of 3 starting items. Relic Shield, Ancient Coin, and Spellthief’s Edge. There are a few caveats to this, but we’ll cover that later.
Relic Shield: This is a no-brainer for anyone tanky. It gives health and lets you “steal” minions from your ADC and share the gold at the cost of a charge, which comes back every 60 seconds, and you can hold up to 2.
Your auto attacks will execute any minion under 200 health and heal you and the closest person to you for 40 health (A large amount in the early game) as well as giving them the gold. It’s important to note that only melee attacks will trigger the execute, however, if you kill a minion in any way shape or form and have a charge you will proc the gold and health transfer. Save your charges for Cannon minions as they give the most gold per kill.
The charges take a long time to build up until you upgrade it, so building it into its older brother, Targon’s Brace, is important to do early. Once you do that charges stack up twice as fast and you can hold 3 instead of 2. Targon’s also adds more health and health regen on top of all of this for 500 gold.
Your final item in this line is Face of the Mountain (FotM). In addition to more health, charges, CDR, and health regen, you get a nice shield to place on an ally that explodes after a set amount of time, even if the shield was destroyed. There’s multiple ways to use this shield. One, and probably the most obvious one is to place it on your ADC if they get dove. This keeps them alive as the shield scales on your health, and the damage it deals scales on 100% AD (In comparison to 30% AP) of the person you place it on. Second, you can use the shield on your assassin as they dive in, giving them more damage, especially if AD, and a little extra tankiness. Yasuo and Zed are prime candidates. Finally, and one of my favorites, baiting a fight by running in and using the shield as the enemy chases you down. So many times I’ve fooled the enemy into death by waiting for them to blow a cooldown on me only to shield the killing damage and walk off, leaving them defenseless.
This item is especially great for supports like Leona and Braum since they scale well with health and also lack any innate sustain. This lets you zone out the enemy and take some poke while also being able to keep yourself healthy in the process. If you’re really good you can feign like you’re going to go in and just take a minion instead, leaving your opponent to wonder when you’re actually going to be aggressive. Finally, using both charges on the first wave lets you shove and get a quick level 2, which as we learned last time is a huge advantage, and you’ll still have a charge ready by the time the first Cannon minion comes around.
Spellthief’s Edge: Just like tanks love Relic Shield, magey supports love Spellthief’s Edge. This item encourages being as obnoxious as possible in lane. Poke the enemy and receive gold for it. There’s a lot less going on here as far as stipulations, as long as you haven’t taken a minion recently and have a charge, you’re able to either auto attack or hit a spell and get extra gold. Be careful though, you can easily get caught out trying to poke and give your enemy a lot of gold in return.
Spellthief’s is very powerful in the early levels and can help zone out the enemy hard. If you’re running a long range auto attack support, like Zyra or Annie, take advantage and poke out the enemy. Biggest mistake I see in terms of this though is, DO NOT TANK MINIONS TO GET THIS POKE OFF. I’m guilty of this too, but attacking the enemy only to take return damage and minion aggro means you lose the trade. If you have to move past minions to attack the enemy, it’s not worth it. Wait until the enemy ADC goes to last hit and time your attack in unison with theirs. If they attack a minion they can’t attack you, at least not without blowing a spell or chasing you.
The upgrade for this item is great, although I’d argue not as immediately necessary as Relic->Targon’s. Your gold income increases, and your damage goes up, but come teamfights you’re not going to want more poke damage, you’re going to want more stats and more spells. If you’re behind, or you find you have the gold income, there’s nothing wrong with going for a Sightstone or Chalice over upgrading this item, especially if you find you’re not able to get a lot of procs off for it. Especially since the passive gold gain doesn't go up, and the damage it adds only increases by 5.
The final item in this path, Frost Queen’s claim, gives a nice boost in AP (10->50 AP) and some CDR in addition to letting you get procs off after taking minions. The active fires out a shot that explodes, does a miniscule amount of damage, and slows everyone hit by 80%. Great for chasing someone down, and even better at disengaging fights when you’re getting chased down. Do not forget this item when running, it’s instant cast and can save you and your team’s life.
Ancient Coin: Ancient Coin is in a weird spot right now, and it has to do with recent changes to it. Ancient Coin and its upgrades is meant to be the sustain line of items, in comparison to the poke and tank items we’ve gone over already. It gives mana regen flat, and some health every time an enemy minion dies in addition to gold. For more passive supports this was awesome. No need to poke, tons of sustain, and gold for just being around dead minions.
One of the simpler items in terms of gold gain and use, at least before final build. Just sit back and let the gold flow in. Upgrading leads to more health and mana regen, including health regen that doesn’t rely on minions being around, some movement speed to avoid getting caught, and one more gold per dead minion. Pretty self explanatory, keeps your sustain and gold flow moving. Upgrading this is really useful if you’re getting shoved in since you can get some nice health regen without needing to have minions die first, but similarly to Spellthief’s Edge, it’s understandable to try and get a Sightstone before upgrading if you need the wards and health immediately.
The active here is what makes this item, and honestly is the only reason you should ever build it. It gives a huge movespeed boost to you and everyone around you. This can be used in so many ways it’s crazy. In a game like League where positioning is key, especially in lower levels of play where positioning sucks, the extra movespeed can get someone where they need to be faster and save lives. Use it to engage fights, disengage fights, and during fights to reposition and regroup. Use it to quickly get to objectives.
The damn thing has a 60 second cooldown, use it a lot!
The last time I wrote about support items, this one still had 20% CDR at final build, and was one of my favorites because of this and it’s active. Well, Riot nerfed the CDR and placed some CDR in other items to compensate. While having other CDR options is always great, The fact that this item doesn’t give any type of lane dominance basically screws you in terms of trying to come out ahead in lane. You’re basically telling your opponent that you’re not going to try and do much in lane with this item over a Spellthief’s Edge.
One of my old builds I had been messing around with before was rushing this and Lucidity boots (CDR boots). This used to give me a very fast 40% CDR and I was able to cast a large amount of spells which, since supports usually rely on base values and using their abilities as much as possible, was great. Now with the CDR the same as all of the other items, it really has nothing over them outside of the great active. The other 2 items give more gold and lane presence, and have decent actives themselves. Until something is changed, this item is only going to be useful when bought fully completed.
Some off-builds that can work:
Doran’s Shield: For a while this was a preferred start for a lot of people, but with the nerfs that it received a few patches ago, it’s not worth sacrificing the gold gain for the stats it gives. It’s not bad if you’re planning on fighting hard early and often, but if you don’t get a lead immediately, you’re going to be behind on gold.
Ruby Crystal: This is actually a start I can get behind, especially on supports that don’t have a large preference on any of the gold income items, looking at you Thresh. Picking this item up lets you rush an early Sightstone, which means more wards earlier. Take control of the vision game early, once again a strategy I think is very viable in lower levels of play. You can warn someone that they’re in an unsafe position tons of times, but if they see that Jungler coming they’ll definitely back the hell up.
Doran’s Ring: This one is an old favorite of people who hate to support, but get stuck in the role. Zilean is probably the only person I could really recommend this on since he needs more mana regen, and builds a lot differently than other supports would, but even still you’re losing out on possible gold gain with this one. Basically don’t do this one, just go Spellthief’s over it.
Moving Forward (Base Items)
Ok, so you’ve got your first item and you’ve even upgraded it. Great! Where do you go from here?
Well in most cases rushing to the final build on your support line item isn’t a great choice. You’re going to need some other items in the meantime. By no means is this an end all, be all decision. Remember what I said at the start of the article? You need to analyze where your team is at and what they need and build accordingly.
Sightstone: This is a must-buy. I almost always get this item after upgrading my initial support item, or if I’m really behind, before that. Wards win games kids, and this thing will save you so much money in the long run, you may as well call it a gold income item as well. If you support and don’t think about buying this…..stop please.
I will say that upgrading this item isn’t anywhere near a priority though. The only thing you get from Ruby Sightstone is more health, and the gold you spend on adding that health is literally worth what you would pay for the health crystal itself. The only thing you actually get for your money’s worth when upgrading is an extra ward to place. This is great if you’re constantly moving around the map and dealing with sieges in multiple areas, but if you’re stalling this isn’t gonna help too much.
Use your head and decide when you need that extra ward, if you find yourself running out of wards and backing to base only to recharge the stacks on this, consider upgrading it.
Chalice of Harmony: If you’re a spammy mage, this is your item. Basically lets you disregard your mana pool and spam spells as much as you’d like. The magic resist it provides is also pretty nice, even if not ideal, since a lot of supports do magic damage and even some ADCs. Only one sensible item to upgrade to, but it’s a damn good one.
Sweeping Lens: I know this isn’t an item, but I want to talk about when to switch your trinket. I know a lot of people will sit on their yellow ward trinket for a long time. There’s no reason to keep it once you have a Sightstone, and I think it’s worthless after first back. You can buy any wards you need if you don’t have a Sightstone yet, and sweeping out the enemies vision is extremely useful.
Pink Wards: Please buy them.
Seriously though, let’s talk about the strength of pink wards and why you should always have some on hand at all times.
Pink wards have the possibility of being the most gold efficient item you purchase every game. The ward lasts until someone kills it and in the right place you can have extremely important vision and the enemy could never know. I’ll cover more on pinks in another article solely dedicated to vision wars and how to play them, but I always try and spend my pocket cash on pinks. I usually have 2 when I leave base, whether I came in with any or not. You can use them to clear vision, keep vision in an area for a long time, and even bait people out by putting them in easily clearable spots.
Here’s my philosophy on pink wards: Even if they go someplace that isn’t well traversed or they don’t last long, they give guaranteed information on where the enemy is or more importantly where they aren’t.
Boots
Sounds simple enough, boots make you faster and give some extra stuff once fully upgraded. The type of boots you buy though, especially as a support is extremely variable.
Boots of Speed: Obviously you’ll start here at some point, when you buy them is kind of a big deal though. As support your gold income is a hell of a lot lower than anyone else, so boots kind of become a second thought. You should generally have 21 points in the Utility mastery tree meaning you’ll have more movespeed inherently than other champs, but you’ll need them at some point to keep up. I’d recommend getting level 1 boots soon after your Sightstone, since that’s when you’ll start to roam around a lot more and ward areas. Getting them earlier isn’t a bad plan though, especially if there’s a Blitzcrank or someone else on the enemy side so you can dodge skillshots better.
Boots of Mobility: My go to option for upgrading boots, lets you roam around the map and ward efficiently, and by the time you are upgrading boots to 2nd level you should be doing exactly that. Plus they’re great when moving into mid-lane unexpectedly and pulling off some support ganks. Once you take tower you should strive to be where you’re most needed as quick as possible. You’ll generally be moving around the map a lot and these let you do just that. Plus they’re only 475 gold to upgrade, which is so much cheaper than all of the other boots.
Mercury’s Treads: These are always solid buys. The reason being that they are one of very few items with tenacity, which keeps you CC’d for less time. Tenacity is extremely high value in gold because of this. These are gonna be more useful on tanks and especially anyone that needs to slog through a bunch of CC laden champions in order to do their job. Usually this isn’t what you’ll be doing, but for some it can be (Leona, Alistar, etc) The magic resist they add is really just a nice bonus, and lets you buy the cheap MR item for quick resistance.
Ionian Boots of Lucidity: These used to be my favorite boots on supports. They nicely fill in that 5% CDR that you awkwardly have from your masteries, but the reason they fell out of favor was all of the changes to support items that added CDR. We now have so many items that have CDR in them that it’s hard not to hit the cap already. Plus they don’t add anything special in addition to the CDR, like Mobi boots or Merc Treads do. Overall they’re great in concept, but you can get what they give elsewhere and receive other things in addition.
Ninja Tabi: These are always a game specific buy for me, even if I’m not on support. Generally they’re only really effective if the enemy has a lot of AD damage going on their team and they’re doing most of that through auto attacks. Just AD damage alone isn’t enough to validate buying these. These are a pretty rare buy for me but they have their place
Sorcerer Shoes: These are a very specific buy, basically only useful on poke supports with high damage outputs. Zyra is the only one I can think of offhand that would buy these regularly. If you’re going to run Lux support it could possibly work as well. Other boots provide more though if you’re a utility based support.
Finished Items
Here we’re gonna talk mid-late game items, basically what you could build past Sightstone, your support item, and boots. Some of these are more viable than others, and some of these may seem like good buys, but I’ll go over why they just aren’t cost efficient for most supports.
Since this is something that will be drastically different by tank or mage supports I’ll cover them in separate sections.
Mage Supports
Mikael’s Crucible: This is always my first item past the initial trinity of support items I get. Chalice alone is a great item for supports, since you’re very reliant on spamming spells, and the passive basically solves any issues with mana you’d have. Throw some CDR and tons of base mana regen on top of that and it’d be a pretty decent item.
The kicker is the active. This active basically saves your team from getting screwed. It’s a cleanse and a heal at the same time. Meaning if anyone is caught out and going to die you can save them. Plus the heal is based on % max health. Meaning it is even useful on tanks too. You can cast it on yourself, as well. Making it an amazing baiting tool.
At 2450 total cost it’s not cheap, but the components are easy enough to pick up, and useful enough that you don’t feel like you’re wasting slots till it’s finished. The active is well worth the cost though.
Twin Shadows: Another item I love for mages, and I think a severely underrated item, especially in solo queue. This thing gives a lot of AP some CDR and, most importantly, move speed. Move speed is not an easy stat to come by in League, especially outside of boots.
The active on Twin Shadows sends out two “spooky ghosts” that will look for the nearest enemy champion and make them visible as well as slowing them. A while back they added that if the ghosts don’t find a target they run back to you, and each ghost that returns reduces the cooldown of the item (which is very long at two minutes otherwise).
The active is very useful at scouting out areas, or even just showing the general direction of the enemy. Even if they don’t find anyone, they always go towards the enemy, showing their general direction.
This is another slightly pricey item at 2400, but for the amount of AP and utility you get it’s great late game when you need that extra oomph in your abilities and the ability to safely scout out areas from a distance. Definitely not needed until later on in the game though, and you should be able to scrounge up the cash by then.
Liandry’s Torment: This one kind of falls into the same category as Sorcerer's Shoes. You’ll only buy it on champions that are going to deal a significant amount of magic damage and rely on doing that damage for their job. Not gonna be a buy on someone like Nami or Janna since they don’t need penetration, and even if you wanted more damage you’d get more from getting AP and items with more utility focused passives.
Haunting Guise is cheap enough to sit on for a while and you get a nice amount of penetration when in conjunction with Sorc Shoes. Very niche item, but effective in the right use.
Now we’re looking at 2900 gold here for a completed item. Not worth it when you consider how much damage you’ll generally be doing, but there’s worse items to get for the gold.
Zhonya’s Hourglass: Speaking of items that are very useful in specific cases. Hourglass as an item is amazing, but for any support outside of Morgana or Fiddlesticks, it’s just a bad idea. Most of the time as a mage support you should be in the backline focusing on giving your teammates the heals and power to win fights. Not throwing yourself to the wolves.
Morgana and Fiddlesticks get good use out of it because they can keep their ultimates going throughout the duration of the invulnerability, no other support has an ability like that. Plus you’re gonna look to build a Needlessly Large Rod. Tell me when you get to go back to base as a support with 1600 gold to throw around.
Ardent Censer: This item has been the one I’ve built up to for mage supports. I don’t like this item. Not that the idea behind it is bad, or that it’s too expensive, but because when you compare it to other items you can get, it’s just…..lackluster.
First off let’s just look at pure stats. For 2200 total gold you get, 40 AP, 10 mana regen/5 secs, and 10% CDR. Okay, not bad. But let’s compare that to Mikael’s Crucible.
For just 250 more gold, you can get on base stats alone a lot more MR and more mana regen. No support has high enough AP ratios to make use of just 40 AP, so having the ability to crank out more spells and not dying is more important.
Now let’s look at passives. This isn't going to be as cut and dry.
Mikael’s gives a nice mana regen passive, which as long as you’re not button mashing should give you enough mana to rotate spells, and even if you do run dry you’ll get more back fast. It’s second passive is that great heal/cleanse we talk about already.
Ardent Censer gives move speed, which is a great stat, but this one is a unique passive, meaning if you get another Aether Wisp for a Twin Shadows, you’re not getting any more movement speed until you actually finish Twin Shadows, since they’re both unique.(I have been corrected on this thank you!) So I was actually wrong on that one. My fault, however, I still think you're going to get more from the actives and passives of Twin Shadows/Mikeal's for your team rather than Ardent Censer.
The shielding/healing effect is more interesting, giving attack speed to everyone you shield or heal, but you’re relegating this item to people who shield and heal right off the bat. On top of that, how many of those champs really only shield or heal one person? Taking the value of this passive down even further for those champs. Finally, and most crucially, how many champions on your team will actually make use of more attack speed? Extremely reducing the effectiveness. Why wouldn't you spend 250 more gold for a much more useful passive in saving people? If you want the AP and movement speed, get a Twin Shadows, since it’s double the AP and the movement speed isn't unique.
In short, Ardent Censer is an item that’s stuck in between being a support item and an offensive item and it really doesn't accomplish either very well when compared with other items. It could possibly work will someone who shields or heals AoE, like Alistar or maybe even Karma if you're willing to pop ult for it, but the vision and utility other items have just outclass it hardcore.
Ohmwrecker: I’m not gonna spend too much time on Ohmwrecker since it has a lot of similar issues to Ardent Censer in terms of not having a clear in-game use. It gives health and a decent amount of AP. Both of these are useful for dives yes, which the passive also assists in, but you’d want health on one champion and AP on the other, it’s just a really wonky item and other items do more in the same slot.
Tank Supports
Tank supports are a bit different in that they need to build to be tanky like a solo laner, but on a fixed gold income. There’s tons of great tank items out there, but you’re not going to want to build all of them because of gold value. What you need more than anything cheap stats.
Magic Resist Options
Locket of the Iron Solari: Probably the top MR item for tanky supports, very team oriented and perfect for supports. The stats it brings are a little bit gold inefficient until you bring into account the passive or the active. The aura brings 760 gold worth of stats to each allied champion. So if you’ve got all four champions near you that aura alone brings 3040 gold worth of stats to your team.
Now the way the stacking of these items works is weird. Except for special cases, you’re not going to want more than one on a team, so it’s important to let your team know you’re building it. We’ve gone over how it’s not gold efficient in stats on its own, and needs to have at least one person to give the aura to. Well, if you’ve got two people with the item, you’ll get it stacked twice on the people who have a Locket, and only once on anyone else, making it extremely gold inefficient around small groups.
By the way, because I never see people mention this, you get the aura as well. You’re getting 40 MR not 20, and you’re also getting the health regen.The base stats look like crap for a reason, because the possible value you can get from this item is immense.
Banshee’s Veil: Probably the best high MR item you can get. A bit expensive on a support budget at 2750 total gold though. You’re getting a lot of MR and if you have no self healing mechanisms (Braum, Leona, etc) you’re always going to want this over Spirit Visage.
Banshee’s has two unique passives and one is more prominent than the other. First off we have the shield. It blocks one spell every 40 seconds you don’t take damage from enemy champions. Basically a poke shield and a counter initiation shield. Very effective against skillshot initiations like Blitzcrank’s grabs since they can already be hard to hit and now you’re adding the fact that the shield needs to be popped beforehand.
The second passive helps more against poke. It’s basically a mega version of Spectre’s Cowl’s passive. Once you take damage from an enemy champion you get 45 health regen/5 for 10 seconds. In other words, you’ll get 90 health back, which is sometimes more than the damage you took, and it will reapply every time you take damage. This thing gives you so much in one package, it’s a great item.
Spirit Visage: Now this is the other high MR item you could buy. Interestingly enough, this item is actually gold efficient without it’s passive, giving 3203 gold worth of stats for 2750. Nice!
It’s less health than Banshee’s and similar MR, but you’re getting CDR and flat health regen with Spirit visage. First off, let me clarify how this passive works. You get more health regen on yourself, not on or from your teammates. Self healing is the only way to make use of this. It is a very selfish item in that aspect. It won’t affect abilities that grant health, this would be something like Lulu ult or anything else that is only temporary health.
(Side note, Lulu’s ult is also not affected by Grievous Wounds.)
One thing that always bugged me was losing the passive on Spectre’s Cowl when I upgraded the item. However, because you get effectively 24 health regen per 5 if you include the passive on the 20 health regen you get, it’s actually more than the Cowl’s passive and doesn't need anything to trigger it.
Armor Options
Frozen Heart: This is a monster defensive item. It gives 100 armor, 400 mana, and 20% CDR. All for the low low price of just 2600 gold. Even without a passive this item is giving you 3433 gold worth of stats. Glacial Shroud is also a pretty nice mid game item, considering it gives you armor and CDR pretty cheap.
The aura is similar to Randuin's Omen, which we’ll look at in a bit, in that it will lower attack speed, but Frozen Heart will lower the attack speed of anyone near you. Minions, monsters, or champions. It only won’t affect Dragon or Baron. The best counter to anyone who relies on auto attacks. Which, lo and behold, is every ADC. Really nice too on supports because of the massive CDR and mana it gives. I’d always get this on someone like Braum because the amount of stats you get for this item is crazy.
Randuin’s Omen: No mana or CDR here, but a nice bunch of health. This one is gonna cost you 3000 gold though. It’s actually not gold efficient in the slightest since in total you’re only getting 500 health and 70 armor. You do get a passive and an active on it though.
First up, let’s look at the passive. This passive is completely seperate from Frozen Heart’s passive and can stack. When you get hit by an auto attack, that person’s attack speed will lower by 10%. This can be great for divers that want to get on your ADC like Tryndamere, Jax or Aatrox. Get in their way and force them to hit you. However, it’s mainly only useful on people that dive themselves since it’s hard to force someone to attack you.
The active, however, can be very useful for peeling. It slows everyone around you for a specified amount of time. It actually increases the time with more MR or armor. It’s a great way to keep people from reaching your teams backline.
Sunfire Cape: Cheaper armor basically, once again better for diving champions not peelers. The passive here is constant damage around you, but considering you’re gonna be dealing with tankier people trying to beat their way past you it’s not gonna do as much damage since that bruiser would probably have some MR built on that would negate a lot of the constant damage.
The only champion you’d want this on maybe is Leona since she’s almost always diving in on the enemy, but even then it’s an iffy buy.
Iceborn Gauntlet: I’m kind of split on this item. It’s less armor and CDR than Frozen Heart, and you’re not really getting much out of Sheen on most supports since damage dealing shouldn’t be your main priority.
That’s enough of crapping on the item though. This thing is has awesome peeling mechanic in auto attacks, I could definitely see someone like Braum or Leona or Blitzcrank building this because of their synergy with auto attacks. Blitzcrank maybe not as much, but the amount of slows you could stack on Braum could be very nasty. I’d still rather see Frozen heart, but there are worse items you could build.
Thornmail: Basically pure armor. There’s a time and place for this item, but it’s much better on solo laners since they have more slots open (no Sightstone, support item, etc.) It’s not gold efficient on its own, and the usefulness in the back line is mediocre at best. Health would be much better usually since it would mitigate both magic and physical damage.
Warmog’s Armor: Too expensive on your budget. Gotta think about your gold income before you buy, and this item even if it is good, is just way too expensive to get. Health is an awesome stat, since it’s visible to the enemy and can intimidate and will mitigate all types of damage. Focus on getting health from other items in conjunction with some MR and armor.
Remember, armor and MR can increase your effective health multiplicatively, whereas when you buy health you’re only adding on to your pool of health.
So this basically covers all the itemization I wanted to look at for supports. Obviously every game is different and you'll want to focus more on MR for some games and armor for others. This should at least explain why you buy certain items over others. Stay tuned for the next installment where I go over everything about warding!
Be sure to check out my other articles:
