Playing support can be extremely tough as the role can be very demanding. As support, you are tasked with aiding ADC by providing shielding, healing, and peeling, but you also have the responsibility of helping out other team members.
All this can be overwhelming, and that is why we created a guide teaching you how to be a good support in League of Legends.
How to be a Good Support in League of Legends
Laning
The most important part of the support gameplay is the laning phase. In this stage of the game, you will mainly want to develop dueling skills. For example, if you are playing support with ranged auto-attacks and abilities, you can take advantage of that by poking the enemy bot lane each time they walk up to get CS.
The ranged supports are not the only supports that can put pressure on enemies in the lane. For example, if you are playing hook supports, you can still put immense pressure on your opposing laners. Say you are playing Blitz or Nautilus, you will always want to be in and out of bushes, walking in the range of enemies, threatening to use hook.
When you are doing stuff like this, the enemy ADC is forced to pay attention to your movement. All this thinking is depleting their gameplay bandwidth, forcing them to expend less attention on other things that matter (farming, tracking enemy jg, etc).
Warding
Another thing that separates a good support from a bad one is warding. A good support will know when to ward, and why they are warding. Let’s take the early game for example, when would be a good time to drop a ward? Well, that would depend on the location of the enemy jungler. If the enemy jungler has started red, and you are playing on the opposite side of the map, the right time to place a ward would be around 2:40-3:10. This would give you a vision of the enemy jg as he approaches your lane.
Going back to the same example, if the enemy jungler has started on the side of your lane, the ward should be placed almost immediately (1:10-1:30 in-game time). The point is, you always want to be thinking forward, and place words in advance. Playing like this enables you to counter enemy plays before they even attempt to make them.
Considering all this, it’s also important to be proactively thinking about warding in the late game. You will always want major objectives (dragon, herald, baron) warded before they have even spawned.
Roaming
The third thing that will make you a good support in LoL is a good roaming sense. To roam well, you need to judge the cost and benefit of every trip outside your lane. The most beneficial roams will be the ones where your ADC can survive the lane solo, or where you can score major leads on the enemy team by joining the objective fights (grubs, drakes, etc).
Final Thoughts
Being good at supporting is a tough business, however, there are a lot of things you can start working on immediately. Most of these things will come with experience, however, you still have to be mindful about them. We are talking of course about laning, warding, and roaming. Getting good at these will make you a pretty great support player, and it will definitely reflect on your ranking.