support gets credit

The mossy frustrating thing is when you do great as a support, your carry becomes godly and everyone says how great they are. When you do bad everyone leta you know.

And in pubs there is nothing worse then grabbing a 2nd support and asking the first to grab wards ajd getting told they can't afford it

It's a tough job to play Support in a pretty much all but the high level brackets. Up there, you are kind of required to know when and where to ward. It is a super thankless job. The usual daftness we see as Supports is that even though I placed 10 wards all along the river, sometimes 2 at a time, and pinged to let you know they were coming to gank you, and you still stayed in lane and got ganked 3 times, I'll just stop placing wards for you. You didn't pay attention to your mini-map or even really use them.

Supports job is to keep maximum map vision, counter-ward, carry some aura items, and die to save a carry/semi-carry. That's about it. I'll totally jump in front of a 5 man gank squad and present my 700 hp self as an easy kill, maybe stunning or disabling one guy to try to save my carry. You can flame me calling me noob, but I just saved your gold farm, exp, and time up. Everytime I eat a bullet for my carry, I think, well they are one step closer to being able to 3-shot those guys.

Stacking ancient/jungle camps and pulling camps to off-set creep waves isn't terribly fun, but it is quite time intensive. As well as knowing when I have a spare second to come out to lane to harass or just interfere with last-hitting and exp range zoning where possible. Playing a Support is more a task of time management and making good use of the time you do have in game. You are going to be underlevelled heavily, you are going to only really have boots/Mek & maybe one other item by the time the game is over...which is what like 4-7k in items TOTAL! It's tough to make a lot of good stuff happen with only that. But a well timed stun/disable, or sacrificing yourself to get someone off a carry who has a kill streak and is worth a mountain of gold to the opposing team, that's just pure economics!

in the lower bracket game, its worse.

they have a rule: mid lane gets courier.

You guys make it sound so bad... In pub game support makes MOST of the kills early to mid game...

That's even worse, support should always give kills to carry whenever possible.

That's true, but what he was trying to say is that without supports early kill attempts would be very rare if not completely absent; I always try to give kills to my carry too, but sometimes having that extra gold and experience on, let's say, Crystal Maiden or Nyx Assassin is worth more than some cash for the carry. I sometimes get upset when easy kills for the carry get purposely stolen by the supports, though.

Returning on topic, people often say that playing support is the easiest role and requires almost no effort (and that's why they think it's boring), but as you climb the matchmaking ladder you will find out that carrying your own team is much easier than supporting as long as you can last hit and have a good lane partner(s): I also prefer watching how supports play in competitive games rather than seeing what the carry wants to do since, after you see 3-4 matches played with the same carry and you know the skill/item build, the difference between the performance of the different carries depend on the early-game decisions of the supports.

Also, if you want to be considered by your teammates when supporting just invite some friends: whenever I play with 2 or 3 people from my friends list I always enjoy supporting as I know they think I'm very good at doing that, sometimes (I wanna be modest here, heh) even more than them.

True, it's easy to Right-click Creeps Early Game, but difficult to balance Harassing, Warding, Ganking...and Right-clicking Creeps. There's also the fact that Carries, only need to consider which items they need for themselves, whereas Supports have to consider the whole Team. Ever wondered why a Io would get a Vladimir's Offering? It's because you don't want a Chaos Knight/ Tiny/ Ursawasting over 2000 Gold and an Item Slot.

Carries may Carry the Team, but Supports Carry the Carries who Carry the Team!

This thread makes me smile.
However I don't play supports so others can look and comment on how awesome I am. If I can walk out of a game feeling happy that i have supported well. then I'm happy :)

I am playing support exclusively at the moment and it is often thankless task, especially as I am only at level 11 (W94, L86) in low level pubs where most of the games people are not appreciating support and just view the stats and moan.

I have just ended a losing streak of 5 and it was incredibly frustrating. Whilst i definitely made mistakes (and acknowledged them in game), the end stats suggest i was feeding but the reality was we had bad composition, bad communication and immature players and it really felt awful!

But.... I ended that bad run with playing Crystal Maiden in a team that wanted to act as a team, acknowledged the role of a support, communicated and generally appreciative of all the warding and team fight support. In that one game it restored my faith in the role of support and that of humanity! :o)

I will keep plugging away as when its good, i find support play highly enjoyable!

I like this thread! As a constant hard-support, it really can be a frustrating job in Pub games.

I will almost always pick support unless, in some unlikely situation that my whole team picks up supports and we lack a different role (Carry, mid etc). I find that people really don't appreciate a good support, it's more of something just expected of you.

I find far too many games, there is no thanks given. Buying courier, upgrading courier, warding and blocking camps with Observers, de-warding with Sentries, Sentries and/or Dust for detection if needed, stacking, pulling and all of this while making sure you're ready to TP in and help out team-mates if and when needed. It's a lot to keep on top of, and even when you do, the majority of it will go unnoticed by a lot of players.

I do love playing support, I find it much more rewarding because you carry out everything and make a massive impact on games without any farm or items. I find it far more impressive when a support plays his role correctly and helps to win the game with no items, relying only on his timing, positioning and decision making. Rather than a hard-carry who gets babysat through until late-game then destroys everyone with all the items he has. I definitely prefer knowing that I outplayed someone using skill, than beat someone because I had better items than them, but that might just be me.

I also find that, like many have said, if something is not going right then it's always "blame the support". I've had instances where if the carry feeds early because he makes very bad decisions, it's supports fault. If you lose a team fight, supports fault. You lose a game, all because of the support. Not that the rest of the team didn't play well, it always tends to come back on the supports lol.

I think a pet hate is when people pick a support, but they don't actually play support. They'll pick a good support hero, so I think we'll be fine, but then they don't buy couriers, wards or anything. They'll also kill-steal, take last hits from carries and even in some cases, I've had supports snatch aegis's from the carry lol. If you're going to pick a support, then please for God's sake, play support! Lol.

Also this is a thanks to everyone else out there who likes to play support and actually tries to play the role correctly and unselfishly. Good on you! May I run into many more of you on my team lol.

Always remember: "Nobody likes to play support, but everyone likes to win" lol.