S14.2 Review Block #17: 100 games of Support

The most miserable experience a single human can have.
Started Iron 1
Peaked Silver IV
Ended Bronze 3
Overall average KDA: 2.1/4.6/13.2
45% winrate
Rakan: 49 games 46.9% winrate
Nami: 20 games 50% winrate
Swain: 16 games 37.5% winrate
Zyra: 7 games 28.6% winrate
Maokai: 5 games 60% winrate
Diana: 2 games 0% winrate
Kindred: 1 game 100% winrate

[@Mo11usq]

#1 - This is the most games of soloq I have ever played in a single split/season. My average since 2021, when I started playing, is 48.4 games. I am super happy to have finally hit this basic, entry level, number of games - due almost entirely to the reduced mental fatigue playing support inflicts (compared to jungle), which enabled me to queue up when even I was feeling tired after work, and put in more games per block.
#2 - I learnt many things over this journey. The biggest thing I learnt was improving lane positioning in coordination with other players. I am still bad at it in the grand scheme of things, but I have markedly improved compared to when I started. This was a focus for me, and of my reviews, so it is pleasing to see small results. The main thing that helped me was focusing on positioning relative to enemy threat ranges, which caused everything else to fall into place organically.
#3 - I learnt that I absolutely love playing Rakan. From a pure gameplay experience, no other champion has the highest highs and, importantly, the highest lows. However, unfortunately this was not enough for on its own. Ultimately level of effort put in to something needs to be rewarded with a certain ratio of success, and for Rakan this equation just did not balance. I found that playing a champion with less conditional impact (Nami) gave more consistantly favourable results for far less effort, despite me being 100x worse at her. I enjoyed Nami, just nowhere near as much as Rakan, I think she is a fundamentally strong pick with a lot of potential and will retain her in my core support pool going forward.
#4 - I learnt that small improvements do not translate to increased consistency in winning games. I am convinced that this requires multiple huge improvements, and for support the difference in skill between you and the enemy needs to be truly gigantic. This is because support is the most team reliant role as the member with the lowest general income and exp, and usually highest utility lowest damage i.e. most reliant on the follow up and execution of others.
To concisely demonstrate this argument - support is the least picked position (even after 'fill') by professional non-duoing soloq boosters. If 30/30/40 is true, of the 40% of games that are 'in your control', a higher proportion than any other role are vulnerable to someone else's performance issues. Typical reasoning from higher elo players as to why low elo players do not climb is that 'you are the common factor, team does not matter over many games, you made mistakes therefore you lose'. This logic is internally consistent. However logic relies on how well the input fits reality, and this general argument is missing some important factors. Everyone makes mistakes, worse players make more mistakes. However to climb, what matters is not 'are you making more mistakes than a e.g. diamond player?' the only metric that matters is 'are you making more/worse mistakes than the other people in the lobby?' If not, you should climb. However the reality is that there are mistake thresholds i.e. making slightly fewer mistakes (being a little bit better) does not counterbalance members of your team making slightly more. If you are the better player in the lobby, then you have to make significantly fewer and less severe mistakes than your team to overhaul the disparity. If you are the common factor in the game, and you are better than the people around you, but you don't have the power to clear waves fast, destroy objectives fast, or push enemies off your screen, then the common factor is not that you are technically bad for the elo, but just not outputting what the matchmaking algorithm expects you to. Simply put, being a little bit better as support may ironically be worse for winning games. If we don't credit that paradox, then at the very least climbing is much more swingy as you are far more reliant on your team's carry's perfomance and so individual skill takes an impractically huge number of games to manifest an impact. At higher elos where more people know how to carry a game with a lead, I can see support skill requirement flattening out. In bronze, carry's are highly unreliable, it is basically random whether you can make the horse drink, and the so skill requirement to have consistent meaningful impact as support becomes enormous and highly vulnerable to variances in fortune.
I understand this will be seen as cope. I watched the games and you didn't.
To summarise:
I really like the support role, it has the highest highs, I have really only just begun my journey and there is still so much to learn. However, I really do not like playing in Bronze, and need a break from the negative sentiments that are building up currently, so it is time for a new chapter. My mechanics are very poor and I want to focus on developing them (indeed this was a driving reason for the role-swap to support), so rather than go back to jungle, I am going to queue midlane for the rest of the split. I understand that this will likely lead to even more losses, but that doesn't matter because its not like I am going anywhere good on support. I believe this will be the most efficient way to improve my weak micro, whilst feeling like I have agency over the game result as my own win condition. I will continue to play support and review my games in order to keep improving at the role, but will restrict this to once a week. At my level it really does not matter what I play as support, so I will stick to the champions I enjoy - Rakan/Nami/Swain. I look forward to figuring out a pool for mid.