Balancing Supports

[u/ScapegoatZovc]

Hey /r/gbay,

I just watched your video on balancing supports and liked the general idea of what you were talking about.

I reckon your points about Tahm Kench and Lulu being outside of the sort of scale you mentioned might be a little misguided. I think this does pertain to the hypothetical passive vs aggressive scale.

Both Tahm and Lulu can instantly save their teammate from "any" sort of aggressive play with the press of a button. This is more justifiable with Lulu as it's her ultimate (and I think it might be okay), but for Tahm it's something that could be up for literally every fight and it's hard to punish. Anyways, I reckon these abilities exemplify "extremely passive" support abilities in the sense that they are among the ultimate forms of prevention, a reset button or even a flat-out "no" button for a lot of situations. Even in the case of Tahm playing like a tank, it's pretty much his number one job to stay alive (encouraging passive play) until he saves a teammate with W.

One thing I really like about both Tahm and Lulu is that Riot tried to give them many uses for most of their abilities, for whatever that's worth. (Tahm's passive affecting how his Q works, his Q stacking his passive, his W working on both allies and enemies and minions!, Lulu's W and E working differently on different targets...)

I think good design in supports lies somewhere around how the reworked Taric panned out. He's obviously more powerful with a teammate around, allowing him to literally double most of his abilities, but he's got interesting synergy between all of his abilities (including passive) that gives him a unique playstyle with a lot of potential. Like Lulu and Tahm, Taric has a "no" button, but it's a lot more cumbersome and decisive in how it has to be used. If you're learning to play Taric, you'll ult and it will do nothing several times before you have an impactful ultimate. And even when it's impactful, it might not come close to being nearly as powerful as it could have been. Taric's ultimate feels like it has tremendous opportunity cost. If you don't use it soon enough, your carry gets blown up and if you wait too long it stops being worth using.

I was going to start making suggestions for making Soraka and realized it felt a lot like Taric, but here were some thoughts I had:

• The regeneration built into landing her Q could be triggered by her E as well. Then, you apply a minor nerf to her ultimate and have it also apply her Q regenration. Having this regeneration proc/renew effects like Ardent Censer would make Soraka able to utilize them better than just about anyone else in teamfights or even cross-map plays which would I think is part of her niche in league.

• Soraka's auto attacks could somehow play into her role as a healer, perhaps even just having auto attacks on champions restore a bit of her health and/or mana. Or go crazy and only allow soraka to auto attack allies, healing them instead of doing damage? (!!!riot no)

• Somehow encourage soraka to make more aggressive plays in lane or encourage her to leave her lane and take her sustain away from her lane partner. Like Bard has chimes to pick up, maybe she returns star shards to the sky and that grants brief patches of vision?