Overview
What separates a bad support from a good support? It isn’t the hardware setup or the reaction time. It’s the way they think. This guide will not focus on builds, or any particular God, or what you need to do on the map. This guide will focus on where your every action in life is given birth – your mind. As the old proverb goes “As a man thinks, so he is.” So… let’s learn about what separates the good from the bad!
Introduction
Update 1/3/2021: In the coming months I intend to revamp the guide with new information, tweak some existing information, and hopefully add some video links of example gameplay. Nothing is promised, but I think it’s about time to look over this guide and bring it into the new decade. I have been on a longer than usual hiatus from the game as work and life take their toll, but the guide isn’t abandoned.
So you want to be the very best, like no one ever was? Too bad, you’ve chosen to be a support. Support is not for everyone. It takes a complete shift in mindset to be an effective support player for your team. Anybody can focus on scrubs and gank mages, but only a support can go 0-15 and actually be the biggest benefit to their team in the whole match. Like I said – it takes a complete shift in how you think to be an effective support.
(Just a note, going 0-15 is not advised or expected, but it is possible for such a scenario to occur and be true with supports. Ideally you should be 0-0 as support, but not everything can be controlled.)
To start off this guide, I will open with what is easily the most important rule of playing support effectively:
The Golden Rule of Support
That’s the most important thing to understand as a support character. This one aspect will immediately put you a mile ahead of those whom do not understand and act upon this one detail.
“It’s not that simple.” You might think to yourself. Yes, it actually is that simple. Simple, but not easy. Support is not a glamorous role. Your job is to make sure your team can do theirs. Your job is not to get kills, or push lanes, or clear minions, or grab buffs, or jungle, or {insert X here}. Your one and only role is to support your teammate’s ability to do what they need to do. That’s why you are called the SUPPORT, not the ADC, or the mid-laner, or the solo laner, or the ganker, etc. That isn’t to say that you should completely avoid these things if the opportunity presents itself, but they should definitely not be your priority.
While support is not a glamorous role, it is quite possibly the most important role. The greatest people do not focus on themselves, they focus on others.
The greatest serve others. SERVE. Not boss around. It’s quite backwards from the petty, self-centered me-focused world that you see around you. This is why support is so much harder. You are not naturally going to be able to think like a support, it does take some effort. In fact, a lot of effort for many people.
And with the “Golden Rule” out of the way, let’s move on to understanding why you are important, and why you must put others first.
Why Your Mother Says You’re Special
So why are you important to your team? What is different about a support where doing almost no damage to the enemy team is not a downside, but rather part of your role?
You can control the tempo of the game more than any other member on your team can, and everything flows off of your ability to control the pace of the game. Those who have played games like Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, or even Chess, know exactly how important control over the tempo of the game is.
Think of health as the primary resource that determines your team’s tempo. Death is a serious setback to your whole team’s tempo, so keeping them alive allows them to continue to keep that tempo. The more they are alive, the more gold they can collect, the faster they level, and get their builds setup, which equates to the faster they can overpower the enemy, push lanes, take out towers, jungle bosses, etc. All of these little aspects contribute to a faster tempo. And the bigger the difference between the speed of your team’s tempo and the enemies tempo, the harder it is for the enemy to make a comeback or pose a threat.
Remember this core aspect of your role, and support becomes one of the most interesting roles you can play. Keep your team alive, keep health bars in safe ranges the best you can, and you have effectively increased the team’s tempo. Plus, by keeping your teammates alive, they can cut the enemy’s health down – which lowers the enemy team’s overall tempo, giving you an even larger advantage.
For a more in depth guide on the subject of tempo, and how to use it to your advantage, check out my new guide on Steam, “The Pace Race” – A Guide to Tempo and Why It Matters
[link]
The Three Support Types
There are three primary ways to play a support: Tanking, Crowd Control, and Healing.
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Tanking
Now, the stereotype of a support in SMITE is the guardian class: high defense, high sustainability, and a large health pool. I will attempt to explain tanking using the following analogy:
Your team is a walled city, and the enemy is attempting to siege this city and kill everyone inside. You have your archers (the mage and hunter classes), your soldiers (the warrior class), and spies gathering intel and looking for ways to cripple the enemy (assassins). You have the most important role for the survivability of those inside the city and on the walls, including those defending the gates. You ARE the wall. Anyone who is out in front of you is as good as dead. They have left the safety of the wall and are in effect a free and easy target for the enemy. Only the soldiers (warriors) should be actively pursuing the attackers outside of the wall, and even they must fall back to ensure survival if the enemy outnumbers them. Your archers should be using the safety of the wall to fire volleys onto the enemy to whittle their numbers down. The spies, while by necessity need to leave the safety of the walls, still depend on you for refuge when they are discovered and targeted. Without you, your city is defenseless.
The walls can be broken down, of course. You are not invincible.Remember this and stay in front of your team as much as possible, taking the heavy damage, and not letting the enemy team through the gates and into the city.
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Crowd Control
A different form of support is crowd control. Often abbreviated as “CC” – this category consists of stopping enemy action, impeding enemy movement, or altering enemy positioning. This is a category of support that is not limited to the guardian class or even support-oriented classes. It is incredibly vital to your teams success, however. Not necessary, but tremendously helpful – to the point of being insane to not utilize it effectively.
Stopping enemy action typically refers to a stun, although silence is a better fit for this category. Think of Aphrodite’s Kiss, for example – it stuns the enemy and prevents both movement and action for a short duration. This small window of inaction allows your team to safely attack this character without them being able to use their abilities to counter or escape. This 1-2 second period can mean the difference between life or death of an enemy or teammate. Nox’s AoE silence ability is another – it does not stop the enemy from moving, but it does prevent enemy actions.
Impeding enemy movement is another method of crowd control, stuns would be included in this, but so would Skadi’s permafrost, or Ymir’s ice wall. Slowing the enemy, such as Grasping Hands from Anubis’s kit, is another method of impeding the enemy’s movement. This does not explicitly prevent them from being able to act, but rather hinders their freedom of movement.
The last type of crowd control is alteration of enemy positioning. Think of Sobek’s throw, or Khepri’s grab. This type of crowd control seeks to change an enemy’s advantage into a disadvantage by changing their position. Whether this means pulling them into a tower, or pulling them back from chasing a weakened ally, this seeks to present unfavorable circumstances for the enemy to provide favorable circumstances for your team.
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Healing
Remember that the concept of support is to control the tempo of the game, and that tempo is best quantified by looking at health as a resource. The less health your team has, the slower their tempo – since they either die or have to play more cautiously / return to base or even buy potions to heal, all of which slow your ability to gain levels and gold – which is what causes more power on your team, and eventually leads to overpowering your enemy and winning the game.
Healing is all about managing this. Yes, potions are a cost-efficient method of keeping the team’s tempo strong, but a potion cannot compare to effective healing abilities. Your job is to keep people in the lanes, in the fray, and not force them to fall back to heal, or allow them to die and have to wait for that respawn timer which contributes nothing to the team until it hits zero. Think of it this way: if it takes twice as long to kill a member of your team, the enemy has to work twice as hard to gain the same advantage of getting that one kill.
Just remember, the healer shouldn’t be out in front of the walls. Healers should be played in the back row, supporting from the rear. Don’t play too aggresively as a healer, it doesn’t often end well. And please, don’t give Aphrodite a black eye because you can’t control your aggression.
You monster…
There are other ways to support, of course. But technically the role of support would fall into one of the above three categories. Building aura items or grabbing a team-based relic to help support your team is not exclusive or indicitive of the support role, but almost always complimentary. A healer makes good use of Rod of Asclepius, which has an aura effect. A tank makes good use of heartward and sovereignty. Khepri comboing an ult with medi can bring a dead teammate back to 75% health in an instant. But these are all complimentary to the role of support, not the primary way to play the support role. This is important to remember.
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