How to Transition into the Support Role

It’s no secret that support is the least played role in Smite. After all, you have to rely on your team to do anything and it's impossible to carry your team to victory, so why play a role that inherently lowers your chances of winning? The answer isn’t as simple as the other roles in smite, you don’t need to dominate your opponents and carry your team through raw experience as the solo laner. You can’t expect to do massive damage in trades and force a lead off of outplaying your enemy laner like the ADC or mid. You can’t even expect to get ahead by farming and rotate around the map like a Jungler so why bother with supporting? Well, it all begins with having the correct mindset.

What do you mean by mindset?

Every role in Smite has different mindsets and objectives they are trying to achieve at any given point in the game. For instance, the supports mindset level one is to clear the camps as quickly as possible to get wave pressure and look to punish the enemy laners. On the Other hand, the Jungler during the level one clear is thinking what they are going to do after they finish farming Blue buff, will they farm the Solo wave? Will they go straight to Mid to look for a gank? Or are they going to farm the Mid-Harpies with their Mid Lane? The difference in mindset begins from the second the characters are picked.

So how does the support mindset differ?

Supports in Smite are tanks in most cases. As such, they cannot have the idea in their head that they need to get ahead to be useful. This means that a support has no reason to take kills, do camps or waves by themselves or save their own lives rather than a teammate. The other roles have the luxury to do these things even at the cost of the rest of their team because they have the opportunity to carry off of their own leads. If a support gets ahead, it's almost irrelevant if their carries are behind because of it, this is why having the mindset that you don’t need to get ahead is so important for supports and is also the reason many people have a hard time playing the role.

Don’t you want to get ahead as support though?

Ares is one of the worst gods in the game if he gets behind.

You always want to get ahead in Smite, especially in the support role, since if you fall behind you are irrelevant on most characters. Doesn’t that contradict what I was saying before? No, there is a difference in how a support gets ahead compared to the other roles. Since the support mentality is focused on sharing everything you do with the team, there are items which allow supports to have a different playstyle than the other roles. These items are Watcher’s Gift and Traveler’s Shoes or Talaria Boots depending on if you are physical or magical. These items promote splitting your farm with the team and allow supports to farm more from being a tank rather than killing people.

How do you transition into playing support from other roles?

Since the support role is so different and unfavored compared to the other roles, it's very difficult to change your playstyle to fit into what a support does, that doesn’t make it impossible however. The role that is the most similar to the support role is the jungle. Surprisingly,  most people believe that the Solo lane is the most similar since both positions end up transitioning into frontline tanks in the later game in most cases. What makes the Jungle position the most similar to support however is the similar mentalities that the two roles have.

But isn't the support mentality unique?

 
Athena is one of the best supports and junglers in the game.

While the support mentality is very different than the other roles, it shares quite a few similarities with the jungle position. The Jungler always has to min-max their farm potential especially in the early game. However, junglers can’t rely on pure farm from jungle camps and as such need to split waves or get kills in the lanes in order to effectively get ahead. The premier jungle item Bumba’s Mask also promotes this by allowing junglers to split their farm in the jungle without losing farm.

Why is farming the most important aspect for transitioning into support?

 
Kali is notorious for needing a large amount of farm early.

I mentioned earlier that supports need to rely on getting ahead differently than the other positions and that revolves around splitting farm with everyone else in the game. Achieving the knowledge of what, when and with whom you may farm with is the most important aspect to learn since if you don’t master that knowledge, you end up falling behind easily and becoming irrelevant, or you take too much farm and force your carries to fall behind. This coincides with the Jungle role as they also wish to get ahead by farming everything they possibly can to get ahead by knowing what, when and with whom they can farm with in order to gain a lead.

What other aspects are important to learn to become a support?

The other aspect that a support player needs is knowing what to do in a teamfight and where to position. This knowledge can be learned in one of two ways. Either through heavy utility mages from mid or through frontline tanks in solo. Both ways to learn have their own side effects however. If you learn who to target and what crowd control to use as a mage, then as a support you can have issues knowing when to go in and what positioning is punishable. On the flipside, if you play frontline tanks from the solo side of the map, then it becomes more difficult to know what you can do once you get into the teamfight with your CC and how to peel for your carries. These aren’t mutually exclusive, so it's better to play both types of characters in order to understand how a support operates in a teamfight overall.

Why are utility mages important for learning how to support?

 
Aphrodite has the most support minded playstyle out of any mage.

Mages that excel in one on one scenarios don’t help learning how to play support, and playing pure damage mages doesn’t help a player know what to do since a support doesn’t have much damage potential. So playing mages that are more useful due to their teamfight utility helps a player better understand what they are supposed to do when a fight breaks out. The utility mages that are the best for learning to support are Isis and Aphrodite. Isis has a few options that make her the ideal support type mage. She has a stun, silence and her ult has a heal and damage reduction.

These factors allow a player to understand who they are supposed to use their CC on and how to peel better as a support character, however the damage potential can also skew the perspective of what support abilities can really do in terms of damage. Aphrodite on the other hand promotes sticking close to a carry while protecting them. So for support characters the skills learned from playing Aphrodite allow them to understand what to do for their carries to help keep them alive without having huge damage to just kill the enemies. These skills especially help learning true support characters such as Khepri and Sylvanus.

How do frontline tanks help supporting?

 
Hercules is the epitome of a frontline tank.

Frontline tanks from the solo lane actually are the opposite of what you want to do as a support during the laning phase as the two roles have different goals at this point. However that doesn’t mean that the experience during the laning phase is useless, it also helps teach what not to do as a support, since you will never look for one v one trades or farming by yourself. The real lessons come during the teamfight stage. Most solo laners have one objective on their mind during a teamfight, disrupt the enemy team’s carries. If you play enough solo, you learn when you can punish the enemy carries for being too far up or too far away from their tanks. Two characters from solo that excel at teaching how to punish misplays are Hercules and Sobek.

Hercules has his major combo, knock up into his dash. Knowing when you are allowed to use this combo in a teamfight on the enemy carries allows you as a player to know when you can punish the same carries as a support, the regen and tankiness from his kit also helps know how much damage you can take before being forced to leave. Sobek on the other hand, excels at disruption in a teamfight and due to his kit, he is also one of the best supports for aggression so learning how to play him from solo doubles down since his playstyle is very similar when he is support. This playstyle helps when learning aggressive supports like Ares and Bacchus.

Anything else?

The support role is very unique and requires a much different mentality and playstyle in order to do well in. It seems like a lot of work for not much gain, right? After all it still has the least carry potential in the game. But when you have a support or face one that knows how to outfarm the entire team and knows exactly who and how they can punish the carries on the other team, the game becomes so much simpler just because the support can dominate the whole team in a way that seems almost effortless. So if you are the person that learns how, when and with whom to farm as a support and can then translate that farm into teamfights and carry your team through pure skill rather than damage or tankiness, then who knows where you could end up. I wish you well on your quest to learn how to play support and happy hunting!

 

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