Best support?

Yeah but they have such amazing OTHER rolls to play, and other supports offer more of those other things you were talking about. Plus both of these characters are pretty gold dependent, which means if you want to make them useful late game, they are going to have to take some farm from the AD carry. which is a no-no.

More of which things? The CC shield? Nope, no-one else has afaik. Yes, the snare and AoE stun are done by other characters as well, but I don't know of any other character that has them both.

Nidalee's good points are also done better by various other characters, but she's the only one that does them all.

And your point about gold dependency is irrelevant, I'm afraid. The length of a snare/stun is not linked to AP. Heals are, but if you're using, say, Morgana, it's a non-issue.

i've played gragas support and fiddlesticks support, both work well even though they have other roles.

Nidalee and Morgana don't NEED gold both are there for utility. Nidalee's heal has a good base and a pretty good ratio so, her traps don't need ap and her spears only

Morgana has a snare spell shield, and a multi-target aoe snare, plus her MR debuff from pool. Just because they are good at other roles doesn't mean they can't be played in other roles.

I don't think this is what makes Nidalee support viable, because the same argument applies to Karma and she's fairly weak as a support. That her heal has a pretty strong AS buff and that she can poke extremely hard in the early game are pretty much what do it. If she can land early spears, even if not at near-max range, she and her AD are much more likely to win the lane. She really wants to go balls-out aggression at level 1, leveraging the MS from her passive to dart in and out of bushes, to work best (or, rather, that's what all the best Nid supports I've seen have done).


Morg really has the same problem as Lux, except perhaps more so. Her snare is a slow-moving skillshot with an 11 second cooldown (plus it can be more easily blocked by minions) and her shield has a 15 second cooldown (plus it only protects from magic damage in a lane dominated by AD carries). Lux is, IMO, much more viable as a support because she can use Lucent Singularity as a free ward (with 50% or higher up time if she spams it) and has a shield that, even if weak, actually protects her carry.

I think Karma is a pretty underrated support, she's certainly not weak.

also Morgana is a much more consistent support than Lux. Lux is entirely skill shots, Morgana is not. Her Q obviously is, but she still has her Black Shield and ult to fall back on should she need to. Additionally, morgana's black shield might be a 15 second cooldown, but pretty much all of lux's cooldowns are 14+ second cooldowns

i'm not buying her E as a "ward", that's pretty ridiculous

even if you use it as a ward, thats one less ability you can use

Karma's heal range is extremely low, her shield doesn't carry any sort of useful buff, her movespeed bonus isn't very good at low ranks, her heal is too small to be useful for effective sustain, she can only use her heal or the damage effect on her shield once every thirty seconds or so (even if it stacks twice), and basically no one who plays AD carry has any idea of how to lane with her. While the intersection of her abilities is interesting, none of them alone are powerful enough (even with their Mantra effects) to make her worth using over other supports. Don't get me wrong, I think Karma is one of the coolest champions in the game. But, unfortunately, she is lackluster at best as a support, and is going to remain so until Riot reworks her.


My point was rather than both have long cooldowns on their abilities and that even if Lux's shield isn't as strong as Morgana's, it actually prevents damage. As for how many of Lux's skills are skill shots, I'm not perfectly sure that it matters much; good players tend to hit their skill shots. And you also have completely ignored the point that Morgana's skill shot snare is much easier to minion block than Lux's.

As for the rest... Honestly, if you're playing support Lux and not skilling E or ever using it for vision... You're doing it so wrong that I don't even know where to start.

As much as i hate to do this, i have to agree with Mooninites on one fact. The " Karma isnt a good support" part. She is possibly the single most challenging support to learn, but if you can wrap your mind around all the uses of her abilities, all the tricks and utility, she is either Jesus himself or Beelzebub in a *****, depending on which side of the field you are on in comparison to her. The fact that her heal has a short(ish) range and is actually a skillshot, is not that big of a deal in lane, as long as you can put a champ in a cone (which should be a no-brainer if you play this game AT ALL), plus the fact that it is an AOE heal that doesn't heal less for healing multiple targets, and heals based on % missing, AND while its healing, its also dealing AOE damage in the same space, which is AWESOME for teamfights. Her utility in either making sure a friendly unit gets a kill or gets away from certain death with Spirit Bond takes skill to recognize but is awesome when mastered; her shield in lane ( which is ALOT better than Black Shield because it actually blocks AD damage... since you are, after all, in a lane against a heavy hitting AD character) is very comparable to Janna and her shield and people think she does just fine, plus it deals damage to enemies if you charge it.

Lux is decent as a support, her shield isnt that great, but w/e. she has a slow, with vision, and a stun, so she DOES work. Especially if you have a GREAT jungler, and she has a useful ult late game.

blocking AD damage is fine, I get that it does that. But to me I value blocking a blitz grab, naut gank, or something like that than 100-200 damage from the enemy AD. It would depend on the support and/or jungler you're playing against. A support like soraka or janna would be harder to Black Shield for. As would a jungler like Dr.Mundo and maybe lee sin. But against Blitz, Taric. Ali, Lux. etc. I'd rather have a black shield

I'm going to be honest, comparing Karma's heal to pretty much every other heal in the game, it's simply weak during the laning phase. The only one that's weaker is Alistar's, but he can spam his far more often than Karma can spam hers.

Heavenly Wave heals for 35/55/75/95/115/135 + 5% missing HP (+.02% per AP). Comparing this to a fairly standard heal, Imbue at 60/100/140/180/220 (+.6 per AP), Heavenly Wave's base healing is 25 lower than Imbue's at rank 1. This means that in order for the two to match up in terms of healing done, Karma's AD carry needs to be missing 25 / .05 = 500 HP. Ouch. Of course, this gets worse at higher ranks, where Karma's AD carry needs to be missing 900, 1300, 1700, 2100, or 1700 (again) HP in order for them to even out.

To compare scaling, I'm actually going to use Astral Blessing, because its AP ratio is pretty pitiful. Each point of AP Soraka has gives her an additional .45 HP healed, while each point of AP Karma has gives her an additional .02 % of her target's missing HP healed. So the two become equal (for single targets) when Karma's target is missing .45 / .0002 = 2250 HP. Again, ouch.

As for your claim that the relatively low CD on Mantra at high levels brings Heavenly Wave's healing per second (HPS) in line with other heals, I am again going to compare it to Astral Blessing, which isn't that much larger than other heals but has a pretty terrible cooldown (and which happens to be identical to Mantra's past level 13). If both Karma and Soraka have max CDR, their respective HPSs are going to be (in the long term) (135 + (.05 + .0002 * AP) * (missing target HP)) / 12 and (350 + .45 * AP) / 12. This means that the two become equal when the target is missing HP equal to (215 + .45 * AP) / (.05 + .0002 * AP). The amount of HP missing required is over 3000 until the two supports have about 440 AP, which is entirely unrealistic to expect on a support. In fact, the most reasonable about of AP to expect on a support is right around 0 for pretty much the entire game, when it would take 4300 missing HP to make the two equal. And, simply for the sake of argument, as AP approaches infinity, the amount of missing HP required for them to become equal approaches 2250, just like above; on targets who are missing less HP, Astral Blessing will always heal them for more.

(As a note, if someone else wishes to run some numbers on multi-target heals, all you'd have to do is multiply Karma's base heal by the number of targets effected. The portion of her heal that scales with target missing HP does the same percentage of each, so you can simply use the total amount of missing HP on all targets rather than doing them individually.)