League of Legends: League of Lessons

This part of the guide is courtesy of Darren Seah, another avid League of Legends player, who is largely involved with the Singapore LoL community, via EqualsD Gaming.

The Support is like a babysitter to the steroid babies. Her job is to ensure that the steroid baby she is nurturing develops into a hard-hitting, skull-cracking monster. Like any good parent, the Support must be able to protect her child, keeping those who would seek to harm her baby at bay.

For part one of this series, I will be covering a general guide for most Supports.

The lane phase

The current meta game for Attack Damage Carries and Support is to hit the bottom lane and play it as a team. Out of all the lanes, bottom is probably the lane that sees the least action at the early to middle phases of the game, and will most likely stay as a two-on-two skirmish between the two sides. The only times that both of you move out of your lane is when your team decides to contest for dragon, or when your team foresees a clash at the bottom half of the map.

Map awareness

The most important task as a Support is to know when, where and how many enemies are coming for a gank. Picking up Clairvoyance is highly recommended for Support. This pre-emptive ability is mostly used to predict and prevent the ganks by your opponents on the bottom lane. Rule of thumb: the longer your AD Carry is alive and farming, the stronger he gets. AD Carries scale up really well, relative to other roles in the game.

The best tools to help you with this task, besides Clairvoyance, are Sight Wards and Vision Wards. Where to ward is one of the major questions that new players of League of Legends inquire about, so we will be covering prime ward locations for both the blue team and the purple team.

Clairvoyance for dummies

Opening Clairvoyance

The opening Clairvoyance should be done within the first 15 seconds of the game. This is useful, because it grants you insight into the opponent's opening items. At the bottom right of the picture is the opponent's starting items that I was able to gain intelligence on just by a simple Clairvoyance at the start of the match.

Jungle Clairvoyance

The next Clairvoyance you should be aiming at is the opponent's jungle, primarily targeting the enemy's Ancient Golem or Lizard Elder. Of course, it would be better if I had actually captured the enemy jungler in action, as we would have more affirmative intelligence on his location, but this is the second-best option, as we now know that the opponent's jungler is either at his own blue buff or counter-jungling our jungler's red.

Good places to use Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance of the map beyond this point should be based on your predictions of where the opponents will move. It's either that, or using it on a location where your allies foresee themselves getting ganked and request a Clairvoyance.

Depending on the situation, occasionally you would want to hold Clairvoyance so you are able to use it in the middle of a clash to spot a fleeing opponent. A thought to keep in mind, though, is that a well-placed Clairvoyance can decide whether your team wins or loses a game, as it could save your squishy carries from getting caught in a bad location and getting taken out even before the fight begins, or spotting out singular opponents wandering in easily gankable places. Clairvoyance is definitely one of the most game-changing spells in League of Legends; imagine if the military had this ability!

Warding for dummies: jungler gank path

Purple line: purple jungler's gank path

Blue line: blue jungler's gank path

Here, you can see the common gank paths that junglers use to gank. There are, of course, more unorthodox gank paths available, but, due to the rarity of their usage, I will not be covering them. So, based on this image, we now know where the prime spots are to ward and safeguard our lane with pre-emptive map intelligence.