On April 7, the ERL team Frites Esports picked the support quest and bought the support item on three of their players. Doing so, they convincingly won both of their games in the Road of Legends Spring split, the Benelux ERL. Will other teams follow them on this strategy?
In solo queue, everyone gets one of the five roles. In custom and League of Legends tournament games though, players pick their role as the game starts. In these game modes, there is no restriction on those. Because of this, several players are allowed to pick the same role and leave others vacant. Unless a rule specifically prohibits this, but the public rulebook doesn’t list one.
Is this an exploit of an oversight? Not quite. One lesser-known fact is that the solo queue restriction doesn’t apply to full teams.
In draft or flex queues, a full party is able to select whichever roles they want, and the game will play out with them.
Many junglers, however, have learned this at their expense when they entered champion select only to find out that they were locked out of taking Smite.
Stacking a role was simply never beneficial until patch 26.07.
Frites Esports win in the Road to Legend with three support items. Image Source: Riot Games
In patch 26.07, Riot lifted the support quest farming penalty. Until then, killing more than a few minions as a support would drastically reduce gold gains. On the current patch, this was removed. Now, the only penalty is 25% reduced gold and experience from minions until level 3 outside of bot lane. While consequential, this is nowhere near unplayable anymore.
Past this downside, the support item brings major benefits:
Frites Esports fielded their support, bot laner, and mid laner as supports. Jungle requires the jungle role for the Smite and companion, and top lane seems off the table.
The ADC picked Celestial Opposition as his World Atlas reward, granting an anti-burst tool. Mid laners can pick between a Spellblade item and a more general damage option.
With these items, the ADC and mid laner for the team finished their games ahead by 4k gold on average, in 23 minutes. Now that the word has spread, there is a real chance that more teams will pick up this strategy no later than this weekend.
If triple support item becomes popular, Riot will swiftly remove it from the game. Pro players, viewers, and Rioters alike don’t want the pro play experience to differ from solo queue. In this case, stacking a role is literally impossible in solo queue, only in full teams.
Furthermore, Riot Phroxzon stated that they will monitor the situation after lifting the penalty.
“This may result in some farming support shenanigans, but then you’re also denying your bot carry their quest progression; we’re giving it a go to see if anything breaks”
However, he expected the problems to come from the support, rather than from the other laners. Nevertheless, if this strategy becomes mainstream, Riot will either revert the support item changes, or add a rule to forbid pro players from picking another role than theirs.
Read also: LoL ranks explained: Rank distribution, reset, decay and more
Featured image source: Riot Games
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