Upcoming changes for League of Legends supports hinted at

Riot’s lead champion designer, Andrei “Meddler” van Roon, clued players in to upcoming support changes in his State of the Game post.

Many players are still getting autofilled into the support role due to the lack of support players. Though Riot tried to combat this by releasing 10 free supports to play for about a month, it didn’t help as much as people thought it would. The goal is to make support a more fun role for everyone.

Short version is that we’d like to make support appealing to more players to give people a more enjoyable experience, reduce autofill, and reduce queue times. At the same time, we don’t want to compromise what makes it an attractive position to existing support players.

- Meddler

Meddler also recognizes that when supports are being helpful to the team by roaming, warding, etc., they’re losing experience by not being in lane. A fix to balance this is coming.

There are also small quality of life changes coming for supports, including not getting full gold for revealing wards that get killed.

Despite the fact that supports are a more unappreciated role, the support items Locket of Iron Solari and Redemption have become must-buys for any support. This has made it so it’s less important what support you’re playing and its more important that you just buy those two items.

There will be nerfs to the two items, lessening the amount of health Redemption gives and the shields Locket gives. Riot is also considering buffing Ardent Censor, Eye of Equinox and items in the Chalice line.

These updates should be coming throughout the season, but no official time for them has been announced.