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Supporting for Midlane Blitzcrank
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Introduction
Why Bother?






Picking Your Lane





Team Play
Midlane







Preempting the Tendency Towards Scaling
It's easy to look at your role within a





Wave Control




Starting Items
If you can go Targon's Brace, it's probably worth it for the sustain for your marksman. Beyond that,


If you already have an AoE movement speed buff (like from











I think it's worth quickly summarizing the assumptions I'm making about how other roles will play around
Blitzcrank. Much of this is based on how my team plays the composition; I won't pretend to understand any role but support.
More than other lanes, top is about the match-up. That being said, top-laners with strong pick potential or split-pushing power have the best synergy with [Blitzcrank]] compositions. Pick potential often means that your top-laner and
Blitzcrank have similar patterns of threat. Split-pushers capitalize on
Blitzcrank's excellent siege pressure. In addition, all of the ways that supports have synergize could potentially apply to lop-laners.
Lulu and
Karma are examples of supportive top-laners who fill an enabling role. Our favorite picks are
Lissandra and
Trundle.
Midlane
Blitzcrank severely constrains and dictates your team's jungle pick. We like to think of this relationship as "snowballing each-other". You need a jungle with a strong early gank and strong mid-game scaling. It's difficult for the opposing mid-laner to play far enough back where a
Rocket Grab doesn't create an engage for a jungle with a dash. One way of thinking of this is that
Blitzcrank makes strong junglers stronger and weak ones much weaker; someone like
Malphite or
Shyvana without good pre-six ganks often doesn't help
Blitzcrank get going fast enough. Our favorite choices are
Xin Zhao and
Vi.
Marksmen are the least diverse role so
Blitzcrank is fine with most of them. You want good siege and good burst, depending on your other picks. Sometimes it's up to the marksman to build extra wave-clear to make up for
Blitzcrank. We prefer
Caitlyn,
Graves, and
Tristana. We avoid
Ezreal.

Top
More than other lanes, top is about the match-up. That being said, top-laners with strong pick potential or split-pushing power have the best synergy with [Blitzcrank]] compositions. Pick potential often means that your top-laner and






Jungle
Midlane








Marksman
Marksmen are the least diverse role so






None of these are really supports you can't play. Picking one of these for the laning phase is potentially the right call, especially because of how important the early snowball is to
Blitzcrank. All this really means is to be wary about the counter-synergy or gaps in your composition that you might be creating with a sub-optimal pick.
Giving
Blitzcrank faster positioning can let him land an unexpected
Rocket Grab or just pressure an objective. Often this requires better communication than realistically happens in solo-que, but it is, in my opinion, the strongest choice in team play.
Karma,
Lulu, and
Zilean offer the most in this department.
An additional advantage that
Karma and
Lulu have over
Zilean is their shield (
Inspire and
Help, Pix! respectively), which is useful in the siege situation. They are joined in this respect by
Janna's
Eye of the Storm, who's actually the best in this department. Any support with strong non-committal siege is strong with
Blitzcrank, but the strategy of shielding your marksman while they weave auto-attacks works really well with
Blitzcrank's pattern of pressure.
Playing when not super ahead with
Blitzcrank often means that after you make a pick you need to get out of dodge fast with your whole team. You can think of a lot of aspect of
Blitzcrank's play in this way; the reason he doesn't want to
Rocket Grab tanks is because they give their teams time to counter-engage. As a support, you have many tools to respond to teams with counter-engage, and it's something you should be considering heavily in champion select
Traditional disengage champtions like
Janna do this job the best. Placing
Janna in between the
Rocket Grab target and the enemy team gives your team the most time to make their pick.
Gragas can do this job worse but from a safer position, and the rest of his kit is so different from
Janna's that choosing between the two is a larger compositional decision.
Champions with long-ranged AoE CC also create a delay between your pick and their counter-engage. Throwing a
Bard
Tempered Fate or a
Sejuani
Glacial Prison can either let you disengage from the pick or give your team time to finish the pick and force a teamfight. This approach to preventing counter-engage is best for snowballing leads with compositions that want messy, scrappy teamfights. It's also worth noting than many of these champions lack enabling tools for
Blitzcrank.
Zone control supports, often traditional midlaners with high based damages, can punish but often not prevent counter-engage. Forcing the opposing team to wade through
Zyra's
Rampant Growth or
Anivia's
Glacial Storm might be disincentive enough to give your team time to disengage. If not, starting your teamfight with a pick and some free damage hopefully gives you an advantage.
Having CC that can easily set up a
Rocket Grab without much commitment provides an additional threat in stand-offs over objectives. While generally attempting an unlikely shot can be not worth trying because of the lost pressure, having multiple long-ranged threats gives all of those threats freedom to take risky shots. I like
Morgana,
Lux, and
Syndra here due to their high range and burst.
Bard's ultimate also provides long ranged engage, but it's different because it's a high resource commitment. The way that
Bard contributes to siege situations with
Blitzcrank is very different from other champions in this department.
What I mean by this is CC which chains after the pull has landed. The disadvantage of this approach is that these champions often lack ways of threatening an engage which synergies well with Blitzcrank. The advantage is that these champions are tanks. Often, choosing this option is a function of necessity in champion select. Follow-up CC is something which becomes a lot less useful if
Blitzcrank can burst squishy targets without help. The top-tier supports for this are
Alistar and
Braum.
I don't often think that getting primarily chain CC from someone who isn't a tank is an efficient pick, especially with
Blitzcrank. That being said,
Nami actually has great ways to capitalize and enable
Blitzcrank's CC. If you trust your
Blitzcrank or just think their
Rocket Grab is going to land, shooting your
Aqua Prison right in front of him will guarantee good lockdown. You also have a small movement speed buff (
Surging Tides) and
Tidal Wave is actually a pretty good way to stop the counter-engage.
One of the glaring weaknesses in
Blitzcrank's kit is his lack of waveclear, especially in tower defense situations when he is saving his
Static Field for a potential dive. Because many team compositions depend on their midlaner for wave-clear, a
Blitzcrank pick might force you, the support, to pick up the slack. You want to be wary of making this a priority when it causes you to forget about other ways to synergize with
Blitzcrank. Other members of your team can contribute to waveclear, with the worst case scenario being an early
Runaan's Hurricane for your marksman. If picking someone like
Zyra or
Vel'Koz leaves
Blitzcrank without enablers, you're probably losing out. My favorite picks with both wave-clear and utility are, once again,
Lulu and
Karma. Keep in mind that, especially with
Lulu, you probably need to build more damage to keep up the necessary wave-clear.
My favorite champions to pair with midlane
Blitzcrank are
Karma for the speed buff and wave-clear,
Janna for the siege and disengage, and
Alistar for the chain CC and tank threat.

Movement Speed Buffs
Giving





Sieging
An additional advantage that









Preventing Counter-engage
Playing when not super ahead with



Traditional disengage champtions like





Champions with long-ranged AoE CC also create a delay between your pick and their counter-engage. Throwing a





Zone control supports, often traditional midlaners with high based damages, can punish but often not prevent counter-engage. Forcing the opposing team to wade through




Long-range CC
Having CC that can easily set up a







Chain CC
What I mean by this is CC which chains after the pull has landed. The disadvantage of this approach is that these champions often lack ways of threatening an engage which synergies well with Blitzcrank. The advantage is that these champions are tanks. Often, choosing this option is a function of necessity in champion select. Follow-up CC is something which becomes a lot less useful if



I don't often think that getting primarily chain CC from someone who isn't a tank is an efficient pick, especially with








Waveclear
One of the glaring weaknesses in











TL;DR
My favorite champions to pair with midlane




Nautilus
Predicting where your








If you are forced into playing





Tahm Kench
Flanks are








Thresh
The bar for successful communication between








Sona












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