User blog comment:QuantumFeint/Botlane meta - where did all the supports go?/@comment-15244341-20140907114313

People get too obsessed with tags. A support is someone that can protect the AD Carry and that provides utility that is gold-independent. They usually do this by providing top quality crowd control (grab, hook, Dark Binding,

Then you have the three tipes of duo lanes: poke lanes, all in lanes and sustain lanes. Poke lanes need disengages and long range harass. All in lanes need damage buffs, CC and initiation. Sustain lanes are the rarest but normally are played with a healer. Then the "triangle" of who wins against whom goes something like this: Poke>All in>Sustain>Poke. This is a fact, and those are the kinds of bot lanes you will see about 90% of the time.

As long as you can play a champion in this role and not have that champion be a poor replacement for a true support (Sona support>Nidalee support) in what it does, it is a support. Period. No support can fit in every kind of lane, since that would be unbalanced (say, a cc tank with poke and heals).

To make a point, from your reasoning, Gankplank is a support champion. He has two slows and a AoE buff for his carry plus a poke. And, honestly, he will always be much less of a support than Thresh is right now.

I'm afraid you seem to (for some reason) not think of tanky bot laners as supports, which is kind of baffling, since with the exception of Nami they are pretty much the best supports right now because of how much more CC, free damage and resistances Riot can pack on melee/short ranged champions compared to longer ranged champions.