My top 5 tips for improving your support ability

I play a lot of support and anyone who's mained one role knows that you quickly find mistakes you repeat over and over again and then you strive to fix or at least help these issues, thus improving yourself at that role.

I decided to do a little write up to discuss what I commonly did wrong or didn't do so well so players new to support (or those in ranked stuck filling in all the time) can hopefully improve pretty quickly or at least have some things to keep in mind while playing.

 

5 - Practice warding!

This might seem silly but learning where to ward can be extremely useful. A lot of over-wall wards can fail easily, so simply looking up guides and practicing more advanced wards in custom games can really help you. I've often tried to ward over walls and just had them completely miss, and while it's pretty funny to laugh at it can easily be a wasted ward which gives you no vision at all. Which only slightly related, generally remembering to keep buffs and objectives warded at all times as well as the river is a great thing to remember, this sort of thing can also be practiced in custom games. Practice is always useful and (rarely) even pro players can get it wrong sometimes!

 

4 - Try to remember and count the enemy lane's cooldowns and summoners

Knowing when the enemy ADC's flash and ultimate is down is critical knoweldge especially for a jungler who may want to help and gank your lane. But what's even more important is keeping in mind is when these are back up. It could be a waste of time if you think someone's flash is off cooldown when it in fact isn't. Obviously it's difficult to remember every ability and always be counting their summoner spells, but just keeping in mind rough estimates can be useful enough; for example assuming someone has no summoner spell cooldown reduction masteries, flash is 300 seconds or exactly 5 minutes. It's just a little thing but keeping a count always going in the back of your mind can really help your lane.

 

3 - Remember you're a support

This might be one tip that's more specific to me than most people however I think it can be taken quite generally and applied to a lot of situations. I tend to over extend and assume I can tank a bunch of damage or get a lot of poke down when I'm simply too far out and putting my self at risk. Sometimes it can just be good to keep remembering that, at least in the early laning phase, your job is simply to help your ADC get farm and win trade offs. You also shouldn't over extend just to get a ward down, like in tip 5, practice some over the wall warding (river bush ward over wall from purple/red lane etc). Dealing damage or getting a ward down is pretty much never worth it in the end.

 

2 - Learn the ins and outs of your favorite support's abilities 

Again this might seem fairly obvious but knowing exactly how the champion you're playing works (and while you're at it maybe how your AD works to an extent too) is going to really help you. Sometimes, for example, using Sona's E's powerchord to slow is better than simply dealing more damage to an enemy. Sometimes you just have to remember not to Blitz hook an enemy into you if your ADC is nearby and very low. Another slightly more obvious one is a Thresh lantern can be used to shield too, helping against maybe the last tick of a damage-over-time effect for example. Leona can use her basic attack-Q-basic attack combo to take out an enemy ward as it's placed at level one, which is incredibly useful. Just making sure you're 100% familiar with your champion and how they can support is a great advantange and really every support should be practicing their champions and playing them over and over again.

1 - Communicate as best as you can

Communication in a duo lane is incredibly important, the better you can communicate with and understand your partner in lane generally the better you will do. Knowing when to go aggressive, hold back, freeze a lane, or push, it is going to put you miles ahead if the enemy lane is just failing at communicating. Whether it's voice comms or just simple pings and a little bit of typing, or even if you lane with the same person a lot you may just start to sync your ideas and know how the other plays and what they want to do at a given time. However silly it sounds as a support you really can "learn" a certain person's ADC play style. Of course into the later game communicating with the rest of your team will be a huge help - champions like Sona rely on you knowing exactly when to get the crucial Crescendo and then let the rest of your team move in to do their thing.