LoL Support Tips and Tricks To Help You Play Better!

Playing support is often a thankless endeavor but is rewarding when you see your other teammates start popping off in fights that you helped initiate or facilitate by keeping the right members alive. Even though only a handful of people notice a good support player from a bad one, it’s still worth it to master playing this role. Here are some LoL support tips that should help you improve playing inside and outside of your lane to increase your chances of winning the game.

LoL Support Tips & Tricks

The role of the support player is never to be the shining star that deals the most damage in a fight but to keep those that can do that alive and strong as long as they can. One of the best LoL support tips that mains often give to new players is to learn how to read what their teammates want to do and act in accordance with that. While there are times when the support and carry don’t have synergy, it’s always a good idea to, at least, try to coordinate with your bottom lane duo.

When it comes to learning some of the most useful LoL support tips, this role might have the most things to study and practice. Despite so many players saying that support is the easiest role to learn, it’s really difficult to learn about so many things especially since you have to keep in mind your teammates’ playstyles too. Here are some of the best LoL support tips and tricks that you use to improve playing this role and start ramping up your win rate when you play.

The Importance of Roaming

If you haven’t read our LoL Support Guide yet, we emphasize that support players need to roam often but not in a way that would put your carry at a disadvantage. Roaming is important because it doesn’t only help you secure vision around the map but also gives your carry some time to collect some experience. As a support, you aren’t expected to keep up with the other player’s levels so sacrificing some experience will really go a long way in terms of helping the team.

Roaming doesn’t only help the bottom laner and your team secure vision. Whenever you roam, you should do it when the allied lanes are in a good position. You can walk all the way up to the top lane if you think that your teammate has a chance to kill the enemy with you around. Again, you should roam only if you think your ADC can survive without you in the lane and you’re sure that the enemy jungler isn’t on the bottom half of the map to gank the lane.

Help the ADC Clear Wave

People always emphasize that the support should never take away CS from the ADC. The problem with this is that supports often misunderstand that as not touching the minion wave at all. Supports should help the ADC in damaging the wave so that the minions will push faster towards the enemy turret, which causes them to lose gold and experience when the minions die. You can either use your auto-attacks or your abilities to help clear the wave and give the ADC an easier time.

The trick to helping your ADC clear the wave is to hit the minions until they are about 1/3 HP. Putting all of the minions lower might cause them to die too quickly which will be a loss in gold and experience for your ADC. When the wave crashes towards your current, you also need to help your ADC manage the minions by damaging the minions low enough that they’ll be enough for your carry to last hit them. This skill takes a while and is a LoL support tip that will carry you until the late game.

Body Block Skillshots

One thing that supports don’t do enough is body blocking the enemy skill shots for your laner. In theory, your ADC shouldn’t even be in a situation where they’re getting hit by the enemy skill shots but during 2v2 fights, it’s a good idea to stand in-between your carry and the enemies even if you’re not playing a tanky character (yes, even if you play Yuumi). Blocking a few skill shots will save your carry enough HP to turn the fight around in your favor.

Of course, we don’t mean taking skill shots unnecessarily during the passive laning phase. Your ADC has some responsibility to dodge out the harassing skill shots the enemy is throwing out during the laning phase but if you can see that the enemy is about to throw one out and your laner doesn’t seem to notice the intent, you should move towards trying to block it. Remember that in League of Legends, the carry’s life is always more important than the support.

How To Use Relic Shield/Steel Shoulderpads

For beginners playing support, using champions that use Relic Shield and Steel Shoulderpads can be quite tricky. Using these items significantly increase the amount of gold you gain despite being a support player. Remember that the most efficient use for these Starting Items is to use it on Cannon Minions or the melee minions if you’re about to get max stacks. Never let these items reach the max stacks so if you have the opportunity, always activate the effect to get gold immediately.

These items upgrade depending on the amount of gold that you’ve gained so far. Hitting cannon minions yield the highest amount of gold which is why these items are usually reserved for them. One of the best LoL support tips is that you can use your abilities to last hit a minion and still activate the effect of this item. This is useful for when you are low on health and can’t walk up to a minion wave or if the enemy’s cannon minion is positioned dangerously far back.

Harassing the Enemy

Harassing the enemy is also a good way to secure an advantage in the lane. Obviously, everyone knows what harassing is and even beginners have an innate instinct to start harassing the enemy in lane. What we want to do is harass the enemy smartly so that you don’t end up putting yourselves at a disadvantage by going too aggressively. It’s okay to harass the enemy when the opportunity opens up but it’s never okay to just spend your entire time trying to land skillshots in lane.

Harassing the enemy should be done intelligently. Do it near a bush so that you don’t end up getting out-DPS’d by the enemy minions by weaving in and out of the bush to drop aggro. There’s also no point trying to harass the enemy if they deal significantly higher burst damage than you or your allied AD Carry is playing very passively. If you can’t harass the enemy, coordinate with your AD Carry to go for 2v2 skirmishes instead to achieve the same goal as harassing does.

Buying the Right Items

One of the most frustrating mistakes that a lot of support players do is having a linear build path rather than buying items depending on the situation. Items play a bigger part in how teamfights play out more than how the player can actually imagine. Having items like Mikael’s Blessing against a composition that mainly focuses on layering CC can turn the tide. Even items that have passive bonuses like Ardent Censer and Staff of Flowing Water should be considered depending on the situation.

Whether you’re playing a tank support or an enchanter, it’s always a good idea to divert from having the mindset of always building from the recommended items menu. One of the best LoL support tips that you can get is to study what all the items do and which situations they work best on. During the loading screen, study your enemy team and your team’s strengths and weaknesses so that you can mentally create a build path that will benefit you in every phase of the game.

Giving Away Wards

Vision wards provide 15 gold to the player while control wards pay out 30 gold. These might seem like insignificant amounts of gold but giving away the last hit to these wards to your allied carries can really propel their advantage. Using Sweeping Lens allows the support to get the gold for the ward even if they weren’t the one to take it so keep that in mind when using this. When using control wards, you won’t profit from clearing enemy wards but the gold influx will benefit you indirectly.

Urge your teammates to take the wards from you by pinging the wards that you’ve discovered. If no enemy is nearby, you can take it for yourself when you’re using sweeping lens. If you discover a ward using your control ward, it’s probably better to wait for your teammates to take it off your hands by leaving the ward alone unless the enemy ward is about to expire or if you discovered it inside the enemy’s side of the map that might cause the control ward to get killed before your ally gets to it.

Adjusting To Your ADC’s Playstyle

It can’t be said enough that supports need to adjust to the ADC’s playstyle. A great ADC will adjust to the support’s playstyle but there aren’t enough players that actually do that for you to really expect that it will happen in the game. This is why supports are always expected to be the ones to adjust even if it might feel unfair. A good LoL support tip that you might want to follow is studying how the ADC acts according to how they approach the lane.

You can determine a lot about the ADCs playstyle depending on how they move towards a minion wave or the enemy, who they target for their skill shots, and how often they ping. If an enemy tries often tries to move towards the enemy duo or throws out their skill shots at them, that might indicate they like to play aggressively. If the ADC doesn’t ping a target or doesn’t communicate in chat, that might indicate they will try to follow your engage rather than making a proactive play themselves.

Learn How to Spell Check

Spell Checking is a skill in League of Legends that every player from every role needs to learn. However, since the support is the one that has the least actions to do while laning, they are the ones who are expected to do most of the spell checking. To efficiently spell check, the support player needs to be aware of their minimap to check if there are any fights happening around or if a Teleport is being used by a player to go back into the lane.

A good LoL support tip to help you when spell checking is to enable Time Stamps in your chat box. This allows you to efficiently track when a summoner spell was used so that you don’t have to memorize the time stamp every time an enemy uses a spell. You’ll also want to memorize the general amount of time it takes for a summoner to cooldown before it can be used again despite modifiers such as Ability Haste that will affect them.