User blog comment:Zero Sheep/Choosing a Support/@comment-5162027-20120703010832/@comment-3213627-20120703095818

Ryze is a horrible support. He requires farm, and lots of it, and doesn't bring auras or enough cc. Sure, he has very nice poke, but if the enemy can't deal with his damage they will simply farm, and have a better late-game support.

Orianna may see some more play, thanks to her buffs next patch. However, you may find it more efficient to play her AP mid now; they forgot to reduce mana cost on q, even though it does less damage now. Even at level 18 she can run out of mana in 30 seconds, which is really way too fast for anyone without a heal.

Nidalee is a decent pubstomp support. Her spears do a lot of poke damage (if you walk away from your spear, it does more damage up to 1500 range), and she heals pretty cheaply with an AS buff. She has very good manaless AoE farm for when she's alone. However, all of these benefits can be negated by a good opponent; her spears won't land, they will wait for the AS buff from heal to disappear before engaging, and without farm she is pretty useless lategame without cc.

Nautilus is decent in that he can deal quite a lot of damage with little gold, as well as having great initiation. He's like a Leona, except with a better movement ability compared to engaging over minions, and a flat damage-preventing shield instead of armor/mr. However, he's getting a few nerfs this next patch. His dredge line cooldown is likely to be horrendous, so stick to Blitzcrank or Leona.

Volibear... I really don't know enough about this. He does do well with only hp, but even so, he needs to build a bit of attack speed in order to be useful. Getting that Ionic Spark, even at the (likely) cheaper price next patch, delays other support items.

Kayle has really great lane dominance, as you would expect from viable top. She deals tons of damage with all her spells out, and her ult is amazing for preventing forseeable burst. However, she has no hard cc, and as two of her skills are there to increase damage, she really doesn't do well without farm.

Karma is somewhat of a pubstomp support. She has really great initiation by with mantra-w on your jungler, and deals a ton of damage. However, she has no hard cc, and requires a lot of farm to become effective lategame. E is for damage and defense, W is for mass engagement and disengagement, Q is damage and healing (poke).

So, to summarize, only Nautilus can support effectively out of the ones you listed. The others may be good at support, but they really fall off without farm.

With incoming Janna/Soraka/Alistar nerfs, I would really practice Lulu. She's still top tier even after a ton of nerfs, and has even higher survivability than Janna in some situations. Her poke really is quite godly considering all her moves can be used defensively. You can also try Leona for the standard kill-support.

tl;dr: your listed supports require too much farm, everyone else is getting nerfed, play Lulu/Leona.