MOBAholic: The Support Problem

These days, it seems like everyone's trying to get in on the multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA) action. Originally popularized by the Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (and StarCraft's Aeon of Strife map before that), this team-versus-team real-time strategy subgenre is quite the hot item in PC gaming. In this regular column, GameSpy writer and MOBA junkie Ryan Scott offers up his insight into this ever-growing field of competitive (and largely free-to-play!) multiplayer PC gaming.


I'm that weird guy who doesn't pick the damage-soaking tank, the bursty carry, or the reliable physical damage-dealer (AKA the DPS, or damage-per-second character). I'm the dude that dives straight for the support champion -- the purer, the better. But some serious problems permeate support champions in MOBAs, and I'm frankly not sure what to do about them.

I Support Support

I'm going to use League of Legends as my example, since that's what I tend to sink most of my MOBA time into. I'm fond of its myriad support champions; I heavily favor picks like Janna, Sona, Soraka, Lulu, and Taric (basically in that order). Heck, I've even written an exhaustive guide for Janna (it's a bit outdated, but the play style advice is still very sound). So, the basic gist of it is, a support champion sticks around to... well, support their team. The typical five-man metagame dictates that a tank and carry respectively solo the top and mid lanes, while the ranged DPS and support buddy up on bottom, and your fifth man jungles. That's all well and good... but that's where the weirdness sets in.



In the early stages of any match, playing a MOBA is all about killing minions and accumulating gold. The more, the better -- if you're good at last-hitting minions and controlling the flow of the creep waves, it means you're getting more gold than your opponent, and helping to secure a resource advantage against the opposing team. But, as the support character on a dual bottom lane, following this advice actually makes things worse. It's statistically more advantageous for you to avoid killing minions and racking up gold, and leaving it all to your DPS-heavy lane partner.

How It's Done

It's mathematically sound -- after all, the DPS champion scales better with items, and thus makes better use of that precious gold -- but in practice, it makes the early game feel way too passive for a properly played support champion. When I play Janna, my laning consists of me attempting to secure and dominate a good position in the brush, where my lane enemies have a hard time seeing or reacting to me. I pop out to harass them with occasional auto-attacks, or sometimes throw one of my tornadoes out at an overzealous foe. If they move in, I Eye of the Storm to shield myself or my lane mate and mitigate some incoming damage.

But under no circumstances do I ever touch any of those minions.


This behavior model carries the additional problem of leaving the average support champion very gold-starved throughout the match. And if I'm not killing minions, it means I need to get the majority of my gold from items... thus establishing another metagame necessity, which is the cookie-cutter support item build. No matter which of the support champions I pick from my aforementioned list, my item build always starts off the exact same way: I rush a Philosopher's Stone and Heart of Gold for the collective 10 gold per 10 seconds benefit, and I buy some Boots of Lucidity. They're cheap, they give me more gold, and they give me a bit of durability and sustainability. I'm lucky if the typical game lasts long enough to get far past that, which means that I don't have the chance to deviate from this single item build in most games where I play as a support champion.

Essential Equipment

It's also the support champion's job to give vision to the rest of the team using Sight Wards and Clairvoyance. I don't have much of a problem with this, since it fits very well with the support role (and because I'm damn good at warding the map, if I do say so myself). My issue is that I don't have much flexibility in what summoner spells I choose, as it's a foregone conclusion that Clairvoyance will always occupy one of my two slots. It might be nice if this spell were somehow incorporated as a support-only mechanic, freeing the slot up and allowing for some variance in the summoner spells that support players are able to competitively select.


That was a slightly long-winded way of saying that support champions experience a comparative lack of variety. The early bottom lane metagame is somewhat dull and passive, with the support player forcibly opting out of the laning phase's core gameplay. Item builds trend toward rigid gold-per-five items to compensate for the lack of minion kills. And the fact that support champions basically need to bring Clairvoyance means 50 percent less flexibility in summoner spell choice. However, this situation has persisted for so long because it's a tough problem to solve. Incentivizing creep kills for support champions would mean crippling their lane partners (and would probably result in a way-too-powerful support dynamic). Adding different types of gold-generation options to the utility mastery tree would make support build options more restrictive and probably open up a whole different sort of abusive metagame.

Maybe support champions are just saddled with an impossible problem, but I'd like to think that some savvy designer will eventually crack this Da Vinci Code. Until them, I'll keep playing 'em... and begrudgingly surrender my creep kills for the good of the team.


Ryan Scott managed GameSpy's day-to-day editorial operations, until a bout of temporary insanity took him away. Nowadays -- when he's not yelling at someone for forgetting to call mid lane MIA, that is -- you can listen to his weekly ramblings on various podcasts over at Geekbox.net. And if you've never given these MOBA thingamajiggers a try, he thinks League of Legends is an excellent place to start.


Spy Guy says: It sounds like support players need a support group! I guess that's the problem with most class-based games, though: there's always an odd man out when it comes to perfect balance. Is there any game you've played that's made playing a support role as fulfilling as a combat role?