For today’s video, I want to revisit the support role and talk about the growing popularity of Carry Supports, champions who “support” their team through supplemental damage. There’s a lot of conflicting opinions on whether Carry Supports are actually supports, or just players who don’t feel like playing the role properly. So we’re gonna break that down piece by piece to see if they are viable or troll!
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#LoL #Carry #Support
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My ADC: Play an enchanter
Me, a pyke main: How about instead we just kill them?
Whats your rank Vars, totally not so I can go to that rank and practice warwick support. Pffp nooo, I would never purposely play warwick support in your game.
I love carry supports on the enemy team 🙂
WW support does have it's uses. A friend and I ran AP varus with a ww support. Suffer pre 6 and then one shot the adc every time your ults are up (they have close cd's rank 1 conveniently)
Vars is out here sending trolls into my flex games nice
Vars you madman!
As a main carry supp (Vel'Koz + Xerath) I agree, playing
carry supporthas more depth in it that people think, you have disruption which is a good counter to engage supps if timed right, aside from the typical supp tasks, vision, map control, adc peel, 1v1 the enemy adc like they're a toy, you name it.Now… what do we make of Anivia support? Her " "recent" " mana changes made her independent from her usual mana items. Her damage, scaling and cc are beyond stupid. She is the only champion I know that can come back from a horrible lane as she can just fill 3 people worth of utility while also shaping the rift the way she wants it to. Yet for some bizar reason, I don't see her being played as support at all (besides when I play her). The strategy of: Just kill the enemy botlane or survive untill you can vacuum up any leftover side pushes is literally all you have to do to make her win the game. There is no splitpusher who can split against her, no team that wants to fight near her, no carry who can compete with her for pushing. She's the ultimate stalemate that will always come back, yet she's never played for god only knows what reason. (Also, people play veigar and her e deals the same damage as a mid to end game veigar w in silver elo going as far as 1500 dmg in a point and click nuke… Just why?)
I don’t hate carry supports (pyke and such are fine), I hate mage supports because they grief my wave state, even if they don’t mean to. It will be shoved, ALWAYS, because by as they attempt to hit the enemy laners they also severely damage (or outright kill) the wave. Maybe if I was higher than gold I wouldn’t have this issue but I’m not.
Pyke prints money and ruins the game conomy
Senna has infinite range, cc and heals. They are not a healthy design.
If you need some sleeperop in soloq, try Sion.
my best friend is a xerath otp. we play bot together and as much as i love him, there is nothing more demoralizing as an adc than seeing him have twice as much damage than me on graphs after the game
troll picks
next question
Jhin and Xerath are a match made in heaven
I miss sett support so much, I mained him season 10 through 11, until recently when he got nerfed to oblivion.
I wish people would stop playing CRINGE ranged characters in the bot lane. I want to live in a world where it’s a melee 2v2 and nobody is allowed to play Morgana and Caitlyn and all the rest of those loser characters.
I feel like throwing in my hat on explanation for why I think carry supports are disliked a lot more than other types. There's a few things about carry supports that I think cause issues. 1: Synergies The adc needs to play around them, moreso than any other support type. They're a lot more synergy dependent than other supports. For example, Pyke and Blitzcrank are not great synergies for Caitlyn because dragging the enemy adc towards her is not something she necessarily wants because that gives them the opportunity to hit back (that's not saying Caitlyn's bad with all engage supports or even all hook champions, just that it's a champ type that's inherently a bit more limited in what they can do with her than with a lot of other adcs because of her playstyle). With Blitzcrank, he still has a lot of lockdown and is bulky, so he can help her finish off enemies and he can pull them off of her if needed. With someone like Pyke, however, he doesn't have enough lockdown or bulk to be able to use his hook defensively so he has to be really careful about when he hooks someone since it could easily do more harm than good, his ult makes cait's ult redundant, and him being super close range and caitlyn being super far range doesn't meaningfully feed into each other since caitlyn doesn't benefit from zoning quite as much as other adcs and it will make parallel positioning a lot harder than it needs to be, which results in the adc and support tripping over each other.
Or compare that to Ziggs/Janna. Ziggs cannot get the full effect of Janna's e because it provides AD and he scales solely off AP, but it doesn't matter that Janna's shield doesn't buff him because other than it still being a shield because she has enough disengage to ensure that they're fighting at a comfortable distance for him (and her shield can be used to protect from stray bullets and stuff). Besides that, disengage is always helpful, extra damage isn't. That's an example of things going very wrong, but I'd like to point to Senna. She's got a lot of very good unconventional synergies. Because she's an adc with token utility that doesn't want to farm to get stacks efficiently, that opens the way for a lot of interesting duoqueue comps involving her and a lot of really awkward soloqueue comps. For example, a champion like Jhin does not need a second adc and would benefit a lot more from having extra utility. His token utility and Senna's token utility don't feed into each other. So if a Jhin and a Senna player queue up together, there's a high probability of the support just not being helpful since everything Senna brings to the table is covered and having more of it isn't as valuable as having literally anything else. But the thing that makes it weird is that carry supports can enable certain champions to be played adc that normally couldn't. Senna, for example, synergizes super well with APCs because the botduo will have a lot of magic damage output and physical damage output as well as a mix of token utility brought in from Senna and token utility that's not uncommon in APCs. A big one that comes to mind is Azir (because I play him bot), where the two of them have a strong early, mid, and late game because they can cover for each other if both players know how their abilities synergize and how uniquely that impacts their power spikes (basically, Azir plays like a carry support who just happens to also CS early game while Senna acts like a lane bully early game, Azir and Senna play super aggressively mid game without departing too much from each other, and then they both play like hypercarries lategame). Obviously SennAzir is not meta because Azir, but that's the best personal example I can give of the power of duoqueuing with a carry support. Also good luck communicating any of that to your soloqueue partner if you try it there. Here's the issue; a carry support could be potentially either completely useless or completely broken depending on which champion their partner locks in. There are some adcs with that issue too, mainly thinking of Kalista, where her support kind of needs to be a bulky engage support if they want to make much headway, which causes Kalista/Janna to be pretty bad while Kalista/Thresh is very fucking good (but only really if Kalista and Thresh are duoqueue and communicating, then it's kneecapped by not being able to communicate and coinflipped by soloqueue partner being some rando). It just happens more with carry supports because they need to fulfill certain conditions to be able to carry, which can be made redundant by either too closely replicating something in their adc's kit and/or requiring the adc to be able to do something that not all adcs are great at doing. You don't run into that issue as much with catchers and enchanters because they have so much utility that they can still provide meaningful help to the adc and team as a whole even if certain abilities become a lot less helpful than they'd normally be.
2: Playstyle
Carry supports can vary quite a bit, but the thing I appreciate most about them is that they're very good at bullying the enemy team off contesting you for cs or trades. They're kind of like reverse-wardens in that they make your territory so unsafe for the enemy team that it alleviates pressure off of you. That's kind of why I don't like playing against Zyra. She's very good at making it hard to move around as Thresh to get a clean engage without getting pelted repeatedly. With the SennAzir thing I mentioned, Azir has the ability to flush the enemy team out of their own wave using his sand soldiers, which lets Senna bully them out of lane early. Even ignoring that I keep plugging SennAzir into my argument, you can effectively be dealing with a lane bully and a late game scaler in the same lane. Alternatively, you have Pyke, who probably wants to engage after the adc's won a few trades.
Probably the best way to think about it is not to divide botlane into adc and support and more as two characters, between the two of them, someone wants the majority of kills, someone wants the majority of cs, and the damage/utility budget needs to be divided some way between them. Generally speaking, adc is the role you want to funnel the majority of the cs and kills into because they need to scale while the support does not need to scale. The adc provides mostly damage and a usually negligible amount of utility while the support provides mostly utility and a usually negligible amount of damage. The amount of damage to utility budget can mess around. Kalista has a lot of utility for an adc but not as much damage, Lux can deal quite a bit of damage but doesn't have quite as much utility as some of her peers, for example. There's a range, but fucking with it too much causes the character to become unsuitable for adc or support (depending on where the devs were aiming), so some of the justifications begin to feel a bit forced. Like, the reason justified for not just always playing Senna adc was because her passive scales better when she doesn't cs (which can become an issue if you're support isn't a CSer, which a lot aren't) or you get a support who will probably just give up on you halfway through the game and become the adc. Pyke's bounty on his ult also feels like it was just there to justify giving a support an execute. Either way, carry supports have super varied playstyles compared to stuff like catchers and enchanters, which sounds like a good thing until you remember that bot lane is very team work reliant in a game that doesn't give you the tools for proper communication (and probably shouldn't considering how toxic the playerbase is, like, if voicechat became a widely used thing is soloqueue, I probably would not be able to play the game). So, if your adc or support has a playstyle that you do not understand, you're not going to be able to play the game properly. Carry supports kind of make up for this by some of them being able to carry the game anyways, but that just frustrates the adc further. This is also the reason why seeing an off-meta pick for adc or support (that isn't coordinated with a friend) bugs me a lot more than seeing something so off meta in any other role, because unless both the adc and support are in on it and understand exactly what's happening, you are destined to fail regardless on the viability of that build.
Basically, Xerath and Vel'koz don't play like Zyra who doesn't play like Senna who doesn't play like Pyke and that's an issue because it makes it forces the adc to adapt their playstyle to fit one champion. Like, you can approach having Thresh, Leona, Blitzcrank, and Alistar support in similar fashions to each other. You probably want to let them engage and make sure the wave is thin enough for their skillshots to not get blocked. You can also approach your support being Lulu, Yuumi, or Janna somewhat similarly. You win trades until you can all in while your enchanter keeps you alive and then buffs the all in. But you can't treat Zyra support anywhere close to how you'd treat Pyke support or Senna support. With Zyra you probably want to let her set up a zone of control around the minions then try to freeze the wave, with Senna you want to force the enemies outside of their minions and let her chase them off from there (I also like to sometimes give her to canon depending on the circumstances), with Pyke you want him to be the bread to your damage sandwich.
The other thing is that Carry Supports singlehandedly turn botduo into a feast or famine comp, when it otherwise would not have been that, which would annoy some adc players.
Carry supports aren't troll but they aren't fun or "supportive". Most mages don't even care if their adc dies if they get kills that's just not what the support is meant to do. The difference is that the perception of those players of support is different since giving the adc free farm because the enemy is dead counts as supporting for them.
Well, running in with a tank warwick and fearing the enemy that way isn't that crazy. And with his ult he could be used as a fear bomb and lockdown.
So warwick suport might actualy work if he goes chemtank
I stopped playing carry supports for one reason: EGO. Players do not care that you are a 20/2 Xerath Support, they won't peel you neither will they listen to pings or calls because you are "just the support". It was fun playing 500 Brand Games Last season but it made me realize how pathetic League players are most of the time.
The problem ultimately is that support is a team focused role and everyone is a selfish dickhead in league.
When you are only level 29 and you have 3 other sups… I guess I have to carry
Picks Zyra
Did you forget the wonderfull meta a few years ago when adcs were so garbage they belonged nowhere ? 😀 That was probably the most fun time to be a suport or adc and go botlane since you could play whatever
Personally I feel like there is no support triangle- at least not one that works well. Enchanters don't beat out Carry supports because in the early game they are just as squishy as their adc and lack the items and their full kit to properly disengage/sustain through damage. They also struggle into engage supports that can lock them down and kill them and they cannot match the same roam pressure.
There are of course certain match ups like Janna into Leona or Rell that the enchanter easily beats out and Lulu into a lot of carry picks as the main engage gets polymorphed and then can't do much.
But generally the rule of thumb is in laning phase outside of a few matchups enchanters generally lose out as they cannot easily establish lane pressure or kill pressure. A good carry support generally out pressures enchanters but can't go toe to toe with tank supports but depending on the carry they could be a better pick than a tank or a much worse pick than the enchanter. Tank supports are easily the rulers of bot lane being bad into only a few matchups and generally are countered by other tank supports.
When laning phase finishes, Carry supports have either established a lead they can snowball and win the game with but assuming an Enchanter support has safely made it to their first item this is when the Enchanter pick becomes more relevant as they can essentially neutralise the Carry support by making it much harder to get picks. If they have managed to be more effective than the tank support they can dissuade engages by poking out the enemy or killing an important member the tank couldn't protect in time. Meanwhile the enchanter vs engage support gets more volatile as if the enchanter's team is ahead they can essentially position to take over the game with their fed teammate or make their team pretty untouchable, if they are even then it's kinda skill based slightly in favour of the tank support, and if they are behind there's no chance.
Carry supports like brand, velkoz, xer are straight up unhealthy for the game. The fact that they dont have to farm and get the same if not more gold than the solo laners. Riot should start to act cuz the shit strom drama around the support role is getting bigger and bigger.
“little to no kills” well…
I used to play Jarvan and Leblanc support long before Pyke and Senna, it was so much fun
Plat 3 Ezreal main (I know RNG was on my side): I prefer to have a carry support
Me as an Adc main: Oh!I got filled support? Sure! I'll… support you
locks swain and 1v9s
Your Videos are so good, you deserve way way way more attention. This level of quality with this upload rate is just insane. Keep up the great work
I think an important part about a champion that can successfully play as a carry support still needs to provide some form of utility. Senna, while a marksman (which by nature means she deals damage), has a heal, hard cc, movement speed, and global shield which is what pushes her into the support role/fasting utility carry. She also has a multitude of items that augment various play styles, like her niche moonstone build, or her (currently pretty bad) tank build which allowed her to take an insane amount of damage she otherwise shouldn't be allowed to. Pyke has cc on top of his immense kill pressure, and carry mages all have cc. Lux also has a shield and a slow, but I'm not sure if she really counts as a carry support because it really depends on how you build her.
When I pick Senna, my ADC is now just a support who farms
As both an adc and support main i very much enjoy playing with a good carry support. Hell, 2 of my favorite bot comps are jhin-pyke (my 2 mains xd) and jhin-xerath/vel koz
Ww support us funny, not great though, can confirm
I like to pick according to what your team needs. Team picked all ad? I'll go Xerath/Zyra. Enemy picked Vayne/Yi? I'll pick Teemo. Enemy picked melee support/Yasuo? I'll pick Senna. etc
I play a lot of Shen support. Its so satisfying to block the last auto attack of a killing blow with shens w. Shen also does a lot of damage early on and is basically a 2nd jungler by level 6.
where maokai
It's ok Brand support can go 0/10 and still do the most damage on the team
I love Zyra
If you are in low elo just play these supports to carry
carry supports are so cringe
In what of these categories Zilean belongs to?
I see to main Brand support and rhylai’s rush was big. Gives you a slow into a stun into your 3 hit passive, and if your adc is afk farming and not doing shit, they’ll usually notice and try to come up for the kill. If they get it, sweet. If I get it, it was mine anyway
As a support main, having a pocket Senna is very helpful for games where I doubt my team’s structure.
Nice editting