Hey There, Drag Hyphen here and I want to indroduce you to my Support Gragas Guide. After Gragas got a Rework back in Patch 4.5 his damage got nerfed if you build as AP Caster. His Q and R used to do a lot of magic damage, because of high ratios and base damage, but now he got overall good base damage in his kit. Combine it with a lot of CC and there you go: a new great Support was created.

This is Not meant to be a detailed guide. It contains No basics about "How to Support" or "How to play Gragas". If you have any questions about some details, feel free to comment.

So without further ado, here is my small Guide on "How to Roll over the enemy faces and smack them with your barrel" aka "How to play Support Gragas (the way I do)".

Pros

+ A bunch of Crowd Control: (small Knockback with) Stun, Slow and Displacement
+ Extra Tankiness with Drunken Rage
+ Good Sustain (for no Mana if using Drunken Rage) with Happy Hour
+ Great %-Health Damage with Drunken Rage (damn, this Drunken Rage...)
+ Mobility with Body Slam
+ Strong Team Fighting Tool with Explosive Cask

Cons

- not really any Poke (Barrel Roll doesn't do almost any Damage with this build)
- A lot of Skillshots (3 out of 4 Skills)
- Body Slam gets blocked by Minions

The Runes are more towards dealing damage. Why? Well...why not? Just because you're a Support it doesn't mean you may not deal any damage. But damage is needed to trade with the enemy botlane properly. Why not more tank stats? Well, your masteries, seals and Drunken Rage should be enough to help you stay alive in small fight in the botlane. In between fight you gonna spam Drunken Rage to get your health back thanks to your passive Happy Hour.

The Choice of Masteries is pretty simple, so just keep it short.

It's 9/21/0 so you gonna be really tanky. Important to me are the 5% CDR by Sorcery in the Offense Tree though, it fits very well with Ionian Boots of Lucidity, so you gonna have combined 20% CDR. Now you only need 20% more and you get to the cap.

Why you should want 40% CDR? go to -> Why 40% CDR?

The Defensive Tree is just to get more tankiness, since your Runes are more about dealing damage.

First, let's see what we get if we max a certain skill.

Q Barrel Roll

- Lower CD
- Increased %-Slow
- Increased base damage

W Drunken Rage

- Lower CD
- Increased %-Health damage
- Increased damage reduction

E Body Slam

- Increased base damage

So regarding to this you have 2 options, either Q or W. Slowing the enemies is nice, but in this case you want to go with Drunken Rage. The simple combo of Body Slaming the enemy and then get the empowered AA of Drunken Rage off is just perfect for small trades and "all-in"s, just add a Barrel Roll at the enemies escape path and Q again for the slow at the latest possible moment...just don't miss the timing (it's not hard at all if you pay attention). And because you maxed your Drunken Rage you gonna get less damage and do more thanks to the skill being awesome. Besides, because the CDR gets lowered as well you can get HP back easily by spamming it every time it is off Cooldown.

Actually it's up to you what you want to max second.
I max E most of the time, because it adds more damage to the W->E Combo.

Flash because Flash, point.

Your choice of taking Ignite or Exhaust always dependents on the situation (e.g. what Champ your ADC is or What team composition you have and you face.
For Normals I always take Ignite cause it works good with the all-in style Gragas excells at.

The items are basicly tank stats and CDR and thats exactly what you want with this build, you're gonna be a walking CC-delivering Fatman...doesn't sound too bad, does it? So anyway, you may ask "why Iceborn Gauntlet?". It fits very well...thats it.
Let's take a closer look at the stats:

10% CDR - nice
60 Armor - nice
500 Mana - not very much needed but still good
30 AP - not needed but not wasted either
and then the passive: even more CC, ain't that great?

At last I want to give some advice on using Relic Shield. If you get your 2 "Spoils of War" off the first 2 Meele Creeps immediatly the moment you enter the lane, you gonna get another "Spoil" everytime a cannon minion is about to arrive or get killed. It's the most efficient way of use untill you get a Targon's Brace

Having 40% CDR is very usefui, espacially if you have a lot of CC, becuase you gonna cast your spells more often and CC the enemies more often.

You are going to cast Drunken Rage every 4 Second for 12% of the Targets Maximum Health as Damage with your next AA.

You are going to Body Slam (knock back and stun) one or multiple Targets every 4 seconds if you hit something with your last Body Slam.

Your ultimate Explosive Cask is going to be around a 40seconds CD on max rank, so you can creat picks or disengage all the time Lategame.

So this has been my small guide on how I play Gragas as a Support. And he really excells at it with a lot of CC, tankiness and still more damage than most of the other supports.

Don't hesitate to ask what ever you want to know (prefer questions about this guide :p).
Thanks for reading.
Hav'fun
Drag

What should I tell? I'm currently Platinum V but I'm playing Normals more often, cause Ranked Games aren't always as fun as they could be...Normals are neither, but it's way less frustrating if you lose a Normal, because of an AFK or a Flamer or whatever then it is if it's a Ranked Game.

So, nothing to say here.