SMITE - The Support Mindset

In SMITE support is often the role last called and most difficult to understand in its entirety. This leaves people in a role that they can’t quite understand especially since the support mentality is very different from the other four roles.

The other roles require one to think about gathering experience during the early game, taking opportunities for early kills, and moving smoothly into the mid game. However, playing support your concerns and worries take a turn for ensuring your Attack Damage Carry (ADC) can farm safely, that rotations are happening to the middle camps, and creating opportunity for your ADC to get a kill.

Playing support is less about going through certain steps to ensure a strong mid to late game, and more about the mind set of assisting the team in any way possible. That starts when you begin a match: you have to be ready to complete the role you’ve taken or been ‘stuck’ with. First off that’s letting go of the idea that kills are what you should be going for. You also need to be the first in the fight and last one out, and most importantly set up kill for your team members in team fights.

The easiest way to approach this mindset is by evaluating what the support is going to do throughout a match. Starting in the early game the support should start with whatever items they would like whether it be Hand of the Gods and Watcher's Gift or another starting build path. Either way, you are always going to grab wards immediately. Not only will these wards allow you to light up key locations to get a heads up on anything such as an invade, this also gets you into the habit of buying them regularly which is a necessity of the role as well. As the laning phase picks up, the support will continue to keep getting wards.

During the early laning phase the support is going to want to focus on trying to get an early kill for your carry, and poking the enemy support and carry out of lane to deny them experience. The hardest part of this mindset is buying wards whenever you can afford it and making sure you’re avoiding taking any kills your carries or other team mates could have gotten. While this is easy to say in practice it can be very challenging, especially for players who are used to jumping at kills whenever an opportunity presents itself. In addition keeping an eye on the mid camps and rotating to assist consistently is just as important as keeping the wards up on the camp.

As the match enters the mid game, team fights will begin to start to break out in the middle lane and the gold fury half of the jungle. As these team fights begin to pick up it’s the role of the support to begins to evolve into creating openings for your other team members to get kills and push objectives. This means that it is the job of the support to exploit an opening and initiate the fight. Once the fight has begun the support must try to lock down and create kills on the enemy teams damage dealers. Focusing your CC and initiations on the damage dealers not only gives your team the ability to remove them from team fights early but also potentially lock them down and remove a lot of the threat from the enemy team.

In the late game you want to keep your mind on the team fight aspect as before but also taking the fire giant. This means that while you should be locking down and removing the damage dealers on the enemy team, also try to find the enemy support out of position. Since it is most likely that they will also have a Hand of the Gods (HoG) Rank Three, if one can remove any players with the active item from the map, the fire giant is essentially free for the taking. From here on out all that needs to be remembered is tanking objectives such as towers and phoenixes, allowing oneself to apply much more pressure to those trying to defend and being more aggressive in team fights.

While these guidelines should be cast in stone, there are a few exceptions to these rules. The first being the fire giant and gold fury. When tanking these creatures one should tank them to about half of your total health before leashing the creature to another god, so that the support can come back into the fight to safely secure the objective with HoG Three and not worry about dying to the objective. One can also focus the enemy tank or support in order to remove an opposing HoG Three from the field to safely secure an objective such as fire giant as well.

On a final note a support’s statistics should be drastically different than the rest of the team mates. First and foremost the focus of a support should be to help others in getting the most kills as possible. This is why a support wants as many assists as possible on his score sheet. To balance this out the support should have as little kills and deaths as possible. Any kills on the support’s record show a kill that could’ve potentially gone to a higher damaging god.

If all else fails there’s a few simpler guidelines that can be followed. Always be the first one in and last one out, initiate team fights and protect your allies so that they can exit safely. Be sure to play smart and safe, protect your ADC, and lastly put the team before yourself.

Larry Clark