SMITE Supporting General Guide

SMITE Supporting General Guide by OGreatFox

Let’s say you’re just playing ranked for some practice, but you’re at the bottom and forced to support. Well, as a support main, I can say that those kinds of people are amazingly fun to go against, considering it’s very rare they do much right. So, I decided to just write some stuff to hopefully help some people out.

But just note, I’m not going to say a lot of the basics, as I find it redundant to this audience honestly.

Warding

So to start, warding. This is the first subject because warding early game is very weird in its actual effectiveness.

What you want to know is about early warding in specific. Pretty much, if you think your carry is a half competent player, you really don’t need to ward in the first 5 minutes or so. This is because it’s very rare for an invade to happen, and if it does you should be watching around for it before you do whatever you’re doing anyways, so it shouldn’t catch you off guard. For that reason, I suggest starting 3 health and mana potions.

If you want to buy wards early, I would say buy 2 wards, 5 multi potions, and ward their blue, but save the other ward to reward their blue when the first one goes down, or to ward your own blue for ganks.

Now be aware, whether or not you ward, the jungler will be on the duo lane’s side of the map anywhere from 1:30 to 3:00 minutes in, generally. You want to be constantly watching the map to know where the jungler is and if they’re going to gank or not.

Other than that, don’t buy sentry wards if you’re behind. Just don’t. It’s not worth you spending 85 more gold just to have that extra little bit of vision in that area around objectives. Ward around the objectives and have good map awareness and it should be fairly obvious if they go for an objective or not.

But on that same note, if you’re ahead, sentry ward the objectives, just not extremely commonly. If you constantly have a sentry ward at an objective, then that’s a consistent waste of 85 gold that you don’t need because you have map control, and so sneaking a gold fury or fire giant should be very difficult for them. So, watch your sentries.

Laning

Laning is all about poke. Obviously you should go for kills if you can, but poke is very relevant no matter what you do. You should always be looking to clear and poke as much as possible.

Don’t give up lane advantage if you’re left, and try to gain lane advantage if you’re right. Generally the right side will be at a disadvantage because minions will be pushed from the other team quicker. So if you’re left, make sure you poke your opponents and make them unable to get lane advantage. If you’re right, try to catch small mistakes and poke for it. It’s semi-rare to just gain lane advantage by just walking up and pushing, but it does sometimes happen.

Lane advantage is an important part of a support’s play because it dictates rotations, farm, and poke. If you have it, keep it, but don’t get overaggressive with no vision on the jungler.

Objectives

This is the part that every non-support player should know just as well as support players.

First of all, obviously the support will generally be the one with HoG 3 on a team. This means that gold fury and fire giant are focused very much around the support player. So, many times in fights mid game, the support is the most important player. This allows you to contest objectives much easier, so if the enemies would be able to get an objective off of a death, don’t suicide.

Now, let’s say you just won a fight, but their support and someone else is alive, but all of your team are alive. You can still go for the objective (provided you are healthy enough), but there are very key plays to make sure the enemy support cannot get in. This situation often throws games, just because people don’t know how to play it.

First of all, if their support tries to walk in, STOP DAMAGING THE OBJECTIVE. This is the most important part, because the enemy will be taking consistent damage from your team. At that point, you either want to CC them or kill them. Generally one means the other, you need to kill them eventually pretty much. So, to recap, if their support walks in, kill them, don’t just sit there thinking your support will get the HoG before them.

Also, the support can zone objectives, if they have good enough awareness and not many people on the enemy team are alive. They have high CC, so they’re actually very good for zoning. But generally, if the support goes to zone, the entire team should follow for kills.

Next, this goes to the team, not the support, if the enemy support has blink, dear god put them in combat. If not that’s just asking for them to steal it.

So pretty much, if the enemy steals an objective, it isn’t because the support is BS and should quit Smite like most people think, it’s because the team didn’t do their job.

Now, stealing objectives. Generally, you want to be just getting into range of the objective as it gets low enough to be HoG’d. If you have vision of the objective it’s much easier, but sometimes you have to make it work without vision. You get in, judge the damage, and HoG before the bar turns yellow, or at least don’t be reacting solely to it turning yellow. You want to be risky, you want to get it without it just being a battle of reaction times. With play you’ll find out when a good time to HoG is.

As a long time support player, I’ve gotten to the point where about half the time I can HoG before you can even see yellow. It takes a lot of practice, but eventually you can get there. If you have a guaranteed objective, then practice on it. Just try using your HoG as early as possible, and if you fail it shouldn’t matter if it was a guaranteed objective.

On that note though, try to go more off of reaction if you’re trying to secure it and your team isn’t killing the enemy support. They should be trying to use their HoG as early as possible, so it’s likely they’ll fail, so it’s pretty much a 50/50 at that point.

Team fighting

This is another huge concept that people just lack knowledge of as a support. After you initiate and whack out your ultimate and stun or whatever you have, you should be peeling people off of your squishies. Don’t go trying to secure a kill, leave that to your healthy squishies, you need to peel for the other ones. Generally after your initiation you have to wait a good 10 seconds to do anything really worth peeling, but fights are generally about 30 seconds long so that shouldn’t be an issue.

Also, learn who you trust on your team. If your teammate just always goes in and suicides at the beginning of every fight, let them, they’re useless. Sorry, it’s true.

Random other tips

Finish Midas boots before you work on actives, no matter what. HoG 3 does very little early for a few reasons: the gold fury has such little health that it barely even does more than HoG 1, and you shouldn’t be doing “risky” gold furies early either. You should only call it if you know you can get it, so don’t get HoG 3 before Midas’ boots. That’s not saying HoG 3 is useless, just Midas’ boots are MUCH more important.

Hold lanes. This means that if your carry is walking up the lane and your wave is in the middle, don’t clear the wave, wait for your ADC. I always thought this was common knowledge, but it’s rare that I see people actually doing this. A similar tip for all roles would be don’t steal experience from someone: if you walk to their lane to gank, don’t place an Ao Kuang tornado up the lane away from the ADC and zone them from a wave. It’s so inefficient and so stupid.

And the biggest tip

This is probably the biggest tip, so I saved it for last: SHARE EXPERIENCE. As support, everyone thinks you should be the lowest farm by far. Really, late game you should be the lowest level, but other than that, early-mid game you should be very close to everyone else. You do this by not over-rotating, and by sharing experience wherever possible. If you’re about to leave lane for mid camps (a wave meets in the middle of the duo lane just after the 3 minute mark, for example) tag the wave with an ability then rotate. I don’t care how mad your ADC would be for you “not helping with the wave”, you need the experience. After you rotate mid grab a wave mid, etc. etc. and DO NOT rotate for no reason. If nothing is happening, farm with your ADC. You’re a bigger factor in teamfights early anyways, so your farm is crucial as well.

So, that’s all. Thanks for reading but I dunno if anyone would actually read all of this, but it’s just some things that even at very high level play I see little of. Competitive included.