User blog comment:QuantumFeint/Botlane meta - where did all the supports go?/@comment-6061249-20140906234658/@comment-24558666-20140911154221

Hello Roznosiciel,

you ask why would people play Vel-Koz(or Annie, or Orianna) support? I would like to give you honest explanation of this concept. This explanation is not sign of mental retardation, but of out of box thinking.

To explain this idea, we need to ask first: why does support(role, secondary bot lane) even exist? Some might say it is for the sake of vision control and assistance for team. That claim is load of crap. You see lot of junglers controling vision, and Lulu, utility mage with supportive trait freely occupies mid lane or top lane.

Answer is much simpler. There are 4 ensured gold and exp sources - jungle, and 3 lanes, but 5 players. Therefore, no matter what, one of 5 players need to get short stick of being either goldless, or sharing lane. There used to be time of roamers, and roaming, while being usually inferior to any lane position can actually still work. But if for second skip all these unorthodox things, we find few ways out.

1) Meta way(Secondary bot laner). You get one player to play ADC protector in one lane. ADC scales mostly with item and is key in teamfights, because he is persisting damage. He does not get much gold, but uses gold generation item to help himself bit.

2) Dual top. You get relic shield on two top laners. In that case, strong adc can go mid lane and mobile mage can go bot-lane. This strategy have negative points. I can't analyse real effectivity of such playstyle, because I never tried it, but I believe it could be somewhat effective.

3) Secondary meta way(killer lane). You go two people bot lane, one adc and other murdering damage dealer. Le blanc "support", AP trist "support"(fear the Valkrin) and THE ANNIE, could be examples. Point of this strategy is to use not-so-sure way to gain gold - killing champs, to generate more gold overall, which can grant you "second mid-laner" in late.

Last one is answer to your question. Getting aditional kills and getting one more assassin in lategame can with correct composition be good enough. Especialy in soloque, where people don't trust their teammates performance, lot of non-support mains have much higher chance of winning game this way than other.