Supportal Combat: Visualizing NA LCS Support Play Styles

During the summer split of the NA LCS, teams have been making more roster swaps and trades than ever before. One focus of this has been the support role. Teams such as FlyQuest and Optic have upgraded at the support position, which has helped propel them from the bottom of the table to playoff contention. The league’s top support in spring, Smoothie, was traded from Cloud9 to Echo Fox, and the support with the most assists in the spring, Adrian, has been benched. Needless to say, it has been an insane summer for the NA LCS, and the support position appears to be at the center of the chaos. All the turmoil surrounding the position intrigued me, and got me wondering if there are tangible differences between supports that manifest in overall play style trends.

If past research has shown anything, it’s that the best and worst teams can execute different strategies and succeed. Likewise, teams can execute the same strategy and have varying levels of success. We would expect to see the same for players, given that an individual’s performance affects the team’s overall direction and visa versa. Any trends that we can reveal about players through this investigation mainly indicates a support’s experience with certain play styles. It does not, as we will see, guarantee a mastery of their own play style or the team’s direction, but does reveal the basics of a players’ overall strengths, without demonstrating nuances like mechanics and decision making.

In this way, the insights we can gain here might be beneficial for teams struggling to adapt to changes in the game, through patches or meta shifts. By looking at the temporal distribution of a support’s assists, the players whom they assist, and other metrics, we can get a good grasp on where individual players will succeed, and might struggle. It is important to note that these trends are from just one 18-game season. For a more wholistic and reliable view, next steps would be to look at each players’ solo queue tendencies, and to compare a player’s various metrics with the varied success they have across seasons. No attempt is made here to actually rank the league’s various supports. There is really an endless frontier of investigation in these types of analyses at the moment, but for now, we can get moving quickly and start with the temporal distribution of assists:

While there is an incredible amount of information to unpack in these simple graphs (I encourage you to go through and investigate by yourself), there are a couple aspects that stand out for both overall trends and individual players. First and foremost, most supports seem to gather most of their assists after 20 minutes, with most of the assists coming from mid- and late-game team fights (understandably). Notable exceptions to this are Smoothie, Olleh, and to a certain extent, Adrian. This is maybe not surprising in that both Smoothie and Olleh have been lauded for their ability to win lane and affect other lanes (but as we will see later, they do this in different ways). Certainly this type of play can be effectively used by these players. If you threw a player like Mithy into a similar role, he may struggle initially, since he has such a late-game focus with TSM.

If it wasn’t readily apparent, the supports are ordered by the final placement of their team at the end of the regular season. With this in mind, we are once again shown that different play styles succeed and fail, even on the individual level. Aphromoo’s “fairly” parabolic distribution of assists is certainly a far cry from Mithy’s late-game focus, and Smoothie’s early aggression. His distribution might most closely resemble Hakuho’s and Biofrost’s distributions, who were competing for the last playoff spot. Likewise, Matt and Hakuho had very similar distributions, even though Golden Guardians had the worst record in the league and Clutch Gaming made playoffs. In many ways, teams and players can use this info to predict when a support will be more or less aggressive on the map in comparison with other players.

There is most certainly hours of research and analysis that can be applied just to the temporal distribution for different players, but for now we’ll keep moving a bit. Although the temporal histograms give a great view of player’s overall play, it is also important to understand their laning tendencies as an integral part of team success in the early game. In these circle charts, each support’s assist distribution is highlighted in color, with the other players in clockwise order as ADC (botlane), Midlaner, Jungler, & Toplaner (e.g. Adrian is in orange, and clockwise are assists to Altec, Fenix/ Damonte, Dardoch, and finally Huni):

1. Adrian, Hakuho, LemonNation, Stunt: Plainly, these supports assist their midlaners the most during the laning phase. In some cases, as with Hakuho, these players assist their midlaners significantly more than their laning partner. Of this group, Stunt stands out because he has so many kills during laning, and LemonNation for also resembling the assist tendencies of Olleh very closely with varied levels of success. Players in this group tended to have the lowest number of assists during laning, probably as a result of a dependence on roaming to and from midlane rather than jungle and adc pressure.

2. Olleh: Olleh has a fairly unique assist distribution in that he has a large, similar number of assists to his lane partner as well as his midlaner. Olleh has by far the highest number of assists during laning phase, certainly a cause and result of TL’s early-game dominance and extended laning phase. Although he got a lot fo flack from Doublelift, he still helped dominate botlane.

3. Biofrost, Mithy: Both of these supports (TSM products!) tend to generate assists predominantly for their lane partner. With two highly praised lane partners, it’s not necessarily surprising that these supports focus on their lane partners. It seems as if they have less jungle and mid-roam pressure to-and-from their lanes, and have a below-average number of assists.

4. Aphromoo, Matt, Smoothie: These supports seem to interact with their laner and jungler the most, with a slight focus on their lane partner. Overall, they have a well-above-average number of laning-phase assists, and probably a significant jungle focus on their lane and ability to roam. Interestingly, this group contains two of the most-praised supports from the spring split in Smoothie and Aphromoo.

Although there is even more to analyze in the laning phase than I have, we can abstract another level to look at the overall assist distributions for the supports to get a sense of their comfort in distributing assists in different ways throughout an entire game:

1. Adrian, Hakuho, LemonNation, Olleh: This group distributes assists to their lane partner and midlaner most effectively. Often, these supports provide more overall help to their midlaner than their botlane partner. The number of assists that each support provides varies widely in this group, mostly because the overall number of assists is commensurate with team strength generally.

2. Mithy, Smoothie: Standing alone, these two supports distribute their assists more evenly across three players than the others. They are rare in that they provide nearly as many assists to their toplaner as their lane partner. Certainly this an indication of their toplaner’s ability to carry, but also the support’s play style. Whether it is an indication of a lack of focus on protecting one carry in teamfights or an indication of equal strength across the roster is yet to be seen, and probably requires more investigation.

3. Aphromoo, Biofrost, Matt, Stunt: These supports tend to have one major focus on their lane partner for the duration of the game, helping put the “carry” in AD Carry. They tend to distribute their assists across the other players fairly evenly, but certainly have experience funneling (!) their attention to one specific player, which might have proven helpful during the summer split.

Overall, the different trends that support players exhibit in both laning phase and throughout the game are incredibly interesting. To finish, I will give some one-sentence synopses of what seems to be each player’s overall play style. As with the rest of the article, this does not rank the players, but rather provides an overall look at a system that they have experience executing from the spring split. I doubt there will be many surprises, but for me it helps to categorize the less-successful supports and compare players. As always, there is much more analysis than can be done, and has been done, in this arena, even just analyzing more nuances of support play. Please feel free to reach out with questions, comments, or critiques of my visualizations and analysis:

• Aphromoo excelled at synergizing with his jungler and ADC during the early game and focussing his ADC in the late game (propelling him into the MVP talks) to create a well-balanced play throughout full games.

• Adrian combined a moderate early-game aggression with mid-lane synergy that balanced out in the late game as he distributed assists between his ADC and midlaner evenly.

• Mithy has developed an intense late-game focus that distributes assists across his three laners fairly evenly, in contrast to his botlane presence in laning.

• Olleh combined unique, aggressive laning with synergy through midlane and his ADC to have a well-balanced distribution of assists throughout his games.

• Smoothie stands out in the very-early game due to his varied aggression across multiple lanes, and distributes his assists across multiple carries incredibly well.

• Hakuho funneled his early-game attention through his midlaner and transitioned to a more balanced focus in the late-game that lead to a very even distribution of assists throughout the game.

• Biofrost maintained a high focus on his ADC from laning to late game, that led to success throughout the mid- and late-game, but a non-impactful early game.

• Stunt had an abnormally high amount of kills during laning, and transitioned from an early midlane focus to a heavy botlane focus that lead to a very strong mid-game preference.

• LemonNation split his attention between midlane and botlane from laning to late-game, and ended with the fewest assists of any starting support.

• Matt used a strong synergy with his ADC and jungler in the early game to maintain a fair aggression from the end of laning to the mid-game, when he focused heavily on his ADC.