How is everyone's ranked season going? I wanted to post a little update on my NA account - I'm trying an experiment where I queue for jungle/support or fill to see if I can make progress (by contrast on EUW I'm queueing for mid/top).
has anyone had success carrying themselves out of bronze soloqueue by playing support?
So I just got promoted to bronze 1 after 4 wins in a row playing support. It's been a bumpy ride, however - I'm currently at 15W 21L for a 42% win rate.
Some champions have been more effective than others.
Here's a quote from Flying Dice that I decided to test out in the field:
Bully the enemy laners early, go for kills if you can snag them. If you're playing a high-damage support like frost mentioned, keep doing that. If you're playing a tanky support, become unkillable and hope that you have a competent carry (if you do, follow them around and protect them from their own mistakes while setting up kills for them). If you're playing a utility support in low ELO you're fucking dumb. The bottom line is that, like any other role, you have to be a forklift or a dump truck. Either you lift your team up and shove them at the enemy, cleaning up in their wake, or you load them all into your backpack and drive them to victory, come hell or high water.
My results with soraka, 1W 5L, seem to back this up (it could be a case of small sample size). I went for a standard build, and just never felt effective. I like the champion and think she has potential, but the co-ordination with the team just wasn't there a lot of the time. Team-mates would typically dash out of W range to their deaths, I spent a lot of time trying to chase down wounded allies who seemed intent on trying to get themselves killed. I also missed having a way to engage and start fights, the E is more for counter-engage or follow up CC.
Note: when people refer to "utility" supports, they often refer to janna and soraka. So utility in this context has come to mean: neither tanky nor known for having damage. Do sona and bard count as utility supports, or do they have enough damage to elevate them from that group? If you play a Q-max thunderlords soraka, do you become a damage support?