In this review, let’s find out what makes a few of these support champions so good picks in the current meta and why they are held in their respective position in their tiers. Here is the list we will be using today from our main site, tier list league of legends.
Support tier list is one of the five positions you can play in League of Legends. The support exists to help and aid the entire team and assist them in their goals such as providing help in team fights, helping the jungler in skirmishes, warding the bushes and other locations to provide vision of that area to avoid unpredictable ganks by the enemy team or to know the position of the enemy team so your team can adjust accordingly. That being said, the support stays with the ADC for the entirety of the laning phase unless they see a chance to help out other lanes by roaming while the ADC plays in a passive state. Support’s main goal is to help in boosting the respective laner’s dominance of their lane in early game so that can be by trying to catch and kill the enemy opponent. They provide a lot of vision and help through their abilities later in the game be it CC or shields.
Support LOL Tier List
The support tier list shown below includes the current supports which are in a good position and can do a great amount of impact in your games based on their tier mentioned below. You can check out the main page for tier lists on other roles to know what champions are dominating in other lanes like Mid lane and ADC and potentially learn the meta of all the lanes to synergize with your support pick.
S Tier
Alistar, Soraka, Zilean, Janna, Leona, Lulu, Seraphine, Thresh, Bard, Rell
A Tier
Galio, Morgana, Shaco, Sona, Swain, Blitzcrank, Maokai, Brand, Pantheon, Lux, Nautilus, Zyra, Senna, Nami, Yuumi
B Tier
Annie, Karma, Taric, Shen, Xerath, Vel’koz, Braum, Rakan, Pyke
Support Tier 1 Champions
Here we discuss on the best support picks of patch 11.4 and what is the reason for their position in the tier.
Nami
Nami is a great pick for Solo Queue because even though she is one of your typical caster supports, she has a lot of tools in her kit. That make her stand out a bit. The fact that she has a lot of Crowd Control built into her kit compared to other caster supports like Janna or Lulu or Soraka makes her different to these other picks. Another fact that makes Nami a good pick is that she has a really strong laning phase, not only because she can poke enemies down with her W but she also provides sustain in the same ability. On top of all that, there are a lot of tank junglers and tank top laners in the meta right now and Nami synergizes extremely well with all these champions and has a follow up engage built into her kit, another thing to note about Nami is that all of her abilities are very clear and very obvious animations so it can be fairly easy to get out of the way of them coming from the enemy’s perspective but the reason we call them follow up abilities is because after your tanks have already engaged then there is a very high chance that these abilities will land and will make them very effective.
Janna
Janna is one of the easiest support picks to play and execute with, which makes it so that many players can pick her and play her in a top-notch level instantly. She is a safe pick as she doesn’t get banned all that often and people who have been auto-filled to support and don’t know what to pick can choose Janna blindfolded. And to talk about her safety, you can play very far back from the place of action and still have a large impact on the game, she has the peel in the game combined with her tornado knockup. She is played by a lot of people for the reasons stated above and has such a high playrate and also is able to achieve one of the highest winrates in the game. We are really surprised that Riot hasn’t tried to change this level of dominance because typically this means that a champion is in a really good state and should be adjusted.
Gragas
Gragas support is so good right now, especially if you go semi-damage. He really hurts now because of the buffs he got. Riot gave him a lower cooldown on his W and also gains some bonus range and a little while ago he also got his AP ratios buffed meaning he would do more damage now. Gragas is a monster frontline, an engager and kind of a damage support as well that is going to work a lot like an Alistar. Your belly is going to be your engage, you have your awesome follow-up damage with your barrels and your allies and with aftershock and the damage reduction from W, you aren’t going to be instantly blowing up either. Koreans also abuse Zeke’s Convergence with him massively. This item lets your AD Carry burn a target for 50% more damage which is insane when you think about it. It’s a crazy damage boost, you use your ultimate and you activate it, you’re in the middle of a fight, you’re semi tanky anyway and you have damage reduction and you and your AD Carry nuke them down. He’s also an amazing roaming champion with Mobi boots because he’s a fantastic engage tool. And this lets him run around the map alongside a more damage heavy jungler now because you’re playing support. Zeke’s Convergence and Locket of the Iron Solari are the standard build, you can go more AP oriented in your build if you want to. Aftershock is your keystone though, you kind of need defense in runes to survive whichever build you go. If you get ahead, you’re definitely going to do well, it is a kill lane remember. He’ll probably be played in the LCS very soon and then definitely get more popular after that.
Support Tier 2 Champs
Let’s discuss on the support picks that are in a good spot to play in the patch 11.4 and as good as S tier but clearly not the best or not as popular as the above.
Rakan
Rakan received a few buffs back in 11.4. These buffs were different from what we used to see previously on Rakan. Normally Riot plays around the numbers of the cooldown of the abilities or the CC duration and then in 11.4 we see quite some changes to his AP ratios. So this means he is going to be doing now a little bit more damage and initially when we went through these changes, we believed they wouldn’t do too much of a difference because it’s mostly the CC nerfs from last season that have been hurting him and not really his damage. But to our surprise, his winrate has gone up quite a bit. Rakan is such a great champion because he has everything he could possibly want in a support. He has a long range engage, he has heals, he has shields, sustain, decent laning phase if you’re able to play him correctly. He also has really good scalings into the late game. Rakan also received a several changes that made him quite viable without Xayah. In previous patches, it has always been Rakan needed Xayah more than Xayah needed Rakan, but now that they have increased the range to normal allies by a bit for him to jump to, it has definitely put him in a better state.
Taric
Taric was probably the best support pick around six months back, but since then, tanky supports have taken quite a hit and thus placing him in A tier. However Taric is a caster support in disguise, he isn’t reliant on building the super tanky items that Leona or Alistar would be extremely reliant on. He can go for the options that champions like Soraka would build, like he could go for an early ardent censer and get away with it and the reason that this works is because he has so many heals and shields in his kit. So even though Ardent Censer isn’t the oppressive item that it was last season, when you are playing a champion like Taric who has so many heals and shields, it makes it a really good item because of its constant procs. Building these items like Ardent Censer or Redemption won’t make you extremely squishy and you could go ahead for the tankier items like Knight’s vow further into the game, and you’ll still do fine as Taric has good amount of base stats making him tanky enough. Another reason why Taric is such a good pick right now is because of his ultimate, he has one of the best and strongest ultimate abilities a support has. It is such a great ability if used probably, and does require some practice to use it to it’s complete potential.
Support Tier 3 Champs
Let’s have a look at a support champ that are in a fine state to play and can do extremely well but other choices mentioned above are just easier to cause the same impact with.
Karma
Karma uses the new iteration of manaflow band so ridiculously well. She bullies lanes very well with her Mantra + Q combo. And since tank supports have been nerfed and hit quite hard, and since snowballing in lane and taking turrets and roaming to other lanes is in the premium right now, she gurantees that you win every range vs range matchup. She just does an insane amount of damage. She has a snare to setup kills and ganks. And se also synergizes with the current meta ADCs which are poke based like Jhin, Caitlyn, Ashe, Varus and people have started picking up Kai’sa so Karma does really well against Kai’sa since Kai’sa is short ranged and Karma can poke her down pretty hard. And since games are over pretty quickly, you aren’t running over scaling issues so Athene’s Holy Grail is a good item to be picked on her as well as it synergizes great with her as she’s cycling through all of her spells. But she is definitely being overpowered by other support champion picks only for the core fact that they synergize better and do what Karma does even better.
Fiddlesticks
Fiddlesticks support is the number one winrate support so far in patch 11.4 and for a really good reason. So many people are playing Morgana as support right now and she is such an annoying champion, and Fiddlesticks is the go-to Korean counter. It mostly comes down to you being able to nuke her shield with your E and then instantly fear afterwards which is amazing and a massive screw-up to anything she wants to do. You’ve got good harass in lane. Your fear is dumb, and silence is dumber and your ultimate helps securing more kills as well. And you’re definitely not the best later into the game but very good in lane and for early fights. You take aery for the poke and chuck your E around all game, you get Zhonya’s you peel with your fear for your AD Carry and it’s surprisingly very good. It’s not a dive-into-the-backline sort of pick but your fear is such a good protection tool for your AD Carry to nuke them down with you. Ofcourse, consider picking up Mobility Boots, so you can run around like a madman and have more impact and presence around the map. We recommend you trying this out if you are laning against Morgana as a support or if you are looking for something more aggressive and something pokey and harassing.
Final Words:
Hope you enjoyed going through this analysis on the support role’s current meta picks. There is not much variety in terms of the types of supports but internally there are a good amount of caster and enchanter supports which are in a strong position. Pick them up and do well easily in your games! This review was made for you to understand why they are in such a strong position at the moment. Hope it made sense to you and helps you understand the reasoning behind some of our picks in the support tierlist. Thank you for reading and have a great day!