What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
It would be wrong to say that nobody enjoys playing support, but it’s not particularly
surprising that statistics show it’s the least popular role by a large margin.
It’s actually a lot better now than it used to be in the early seasons, with newer support
champions having more interesting mechanics and playstyles that add a bit of excitement
to the role.
The issue lies with proactivity, or the lack of it.
When you’re playing as a healer, all you can do is wait for a teammate to get damaged
and then heal them, which is a reactive playstyle.
Although the ability to react to a situation is important, a lot of players generally prefer
to be proactive - meaning they can create or control a situation themselves.
Modern supports such as Thresh, or casters such as Lulu and Karma enable players to take
on a more proactive role while playing support - so it’s not all that surprising that they
are more popular with the player base and help encourage people to play support.
That being said, Riot still has a long way to go to bring support up to the same level
of enjoyment as other roles for the average player, and their latest attempt to do this
has been in the form of item quests.
Proactivity comes in a lot of forms, but the most common way is starting a fight or making
a pick.
This is the key reason that Riot has struggled to make playing support an engaging experience
- every other role will initiate some form of combat during the game, but supports aren’t
ever really able to make those types of plays outside of the laning phase.
Sure, some caster supports will let you poke at the enemy and some heavy engagers like
Leona can kickstart a fight, but the key is really that you can never do anything by yourself,
you pretty much always need some form of assistance from your team to make something happen.
Not only that, but you’re automatically going to be missing out on gold and experience
simply because you are not getting the resources like the rest of your team is - so not only
do you have a slower game experience, but you are weaker than other champions in the
game and take longer to scale.
This is the core of what item quests are aiming to introduce; a way to be proactive while
also being rewarded in a way that doesn’t require you to engage in combat for gold and
experience.
Riot’s previous solutions to the low income and experience gain of the support role was
to introduce low-costing support specific items, but this came with two downsides – firstly
and most importantly, they didn’t really make supporting any more fun than it otherwise
would be, and on release it opened up the potential of abuse, mainly in the form of
non-support champions taking advantage of these cheap, efficient items.
Anyone that played during the Frost Queen’s Claim mid lane metas will know what we’re
talking about!
Item quests are quite a clever design from this perspective - they are pretty useless
to other roles because they can’t complete the quests without sacrificing other forms
of proactivity, and they give supports an exclusive, proactive goal to work towards.
And since completing the quests gives some pretty significant and awesome rewards, it’s
in the support’s best interest to complete the quests as quickly as possible.as a result,
instead of sitting around waiting to react to whatever is happening in the game, they
now have an additional goal to work towards on the side.
As always with role specific items, there are growing pains involved - at first, Riot’s
attempts at creating a jungle specific item led to new non-jungle champions abusing them,
such as the infamous Blue Ezreal build with the Spirit of the Elder Lizard item.
This was eventually corrected by tying the jungle item rewards to the Smite summoner
spell, resulting in items that only benefited junglers.
In much the same way, item quests tie the support items to the support role in a way
that only benefits the supports.
The rewards from the quests essentially give those supports an ‘item’ without giving
them gold, which is pretty strong and potentially even OP - but that’s kinda the point of
the update.
Right now supports lack influence and excitement over the game, and these changes could really
help introduce those things to the role.
Since the rewards are gated behind support quests that are too inconvenient for other
roles to complete, it introduces the ability for Riot to completely revolutionize support
by adding in a lot of diversity and mid-game choices.
It also opens the door for a lot of experimentation in the form of item changes, since Riot can
introduce cool new ideas for rewards without worrying that other roles will be able to
abuse them.
Once Riot finds their desired balance for the support quest rewards and the support
role in general, they will likely find that the health of the game will improve massively.
There’s always growing pains with big changes like these, but the direction could set things
up to make support much more appealing to the player base, and you always have to remember,
when more people are playing support there are a lot of things that become better for
the people who aren’t.
That means faster queue times, better matchmaking and a better gameplay experience for everyone
involved.
So who knows, Support Quests and future support changes might help not only the support role
itself, but everyone else as well.