Support is a role a lot of people either don’t want to play or don’t fully understand. Some people would rather feed and intentionally lose than play support. I’m going to talk today about some of the basic support strategies and give some basic tips to help shed some light on the unsung heroes of Summoner’s Rift.

The support role has a lot of responsibilities. Your main goals are map control and ensuring your adc does better than the opposing enemy adc. The first goal is usually something everyone helps with, but in bronze and low silver this is not always the case. The adc is also responsible for their performance. However, again in solo queue they may not always see it that. I’ll get into that more, later. Today, my main focus will be map coverage and control.

One of the first things you need to be able to do well is ward. Warding wins games. I cannot stress this enough. It can swing a close game in a favor. Early game it can prevent ganks. It can also cause their jungle to waste time sitting in a bush waiting for you to push, which you wouldn’t do because you know he’s there. Mid and late game it lets you know where the enemy team is so you know which objectives are same to go for.



This is one of my main reasons for getting a sightstone. The sightstone has to be one of my favorite items added in season three. At 950 gold it pays for itself after 19.5 minutes assuming you are laying down two wards every three minutes. But the better feature is the fact that you have four charges on it. This allows you to ward on the fly.

Say you’re playing on purple side you’re being aggressive, you ward tri bush and river. You see the jungler is coming down so you run back to your tower. On the way there you use your sight stone to put a ward in right lane bush. This helps the adc have vision and helps against getting zoned, it also gives your jungler vision on the enemy team to see who is still around, which can help your jungler determine if they can come down and turn the tide with a counter gank.

Another great example and my personal favorite is dropping wards in bushes during exchanges, especially those in the jungle. Let’s say your jungler goes to steal red buff. The enemy team goes to defend it. You notice this and follow suit. While fighting their adc starts to run into the bushes you quickly use your sightstone to provide vision in the bush and your adc is able to continue auto-attacking and picks up the kill. If you had just bought wards you most likely wouldn’t have any left and your adc may not have picked up the kill. The adc would of also been angry with you and called you a noob or scrub.

Now while a sightstone and later a ruby sightstone allow for good map coverage. They are not a cure all. You will still need to get pinks for dragon area, and later the baron area. An oracle is always nice as it gives you confidence that the enemy team has no vision where you currently are. I would only recommend getting one when you are confident you won’t be dying in the near future. If you’re already 1-8-4 it’s probably not the best idea. It would be better to just buy a couple extra pinks or see if the jungler or top will pick up an oracle. You can see in the picture below that with some help from a vision ward we knew they didn't have direct vision on dragon giving us the confidence to secure and kill the beast.

There may be games where you won’t need to upgrade to a ruby sightstone right away. There will also be games where you will need to get extra wards early on top of having your sightstone. A good way to determine which course you need to take is if the enemy is playing a very mobile game then you would benefit from more ward coverage. If you already have a sightstone and you have enough gold to start your aegis or locket than I would do that. If you are unsure if you should upgrade your sightstone or start your aegis or locket, I would recommend just getting a ruby crystal as it can be used in any of those recipes.

With some practice, your map control can help carry you to victory in many games. The sightstone is a great tool in your arsenal because it allows for mobile warding. It allows you to grant your team vision during team fights, which is an invaluable asset to your team. It also makes sure you almost always have wards on hand to drop at a moments notice if the momentum is switching one way or another.