Well, I watched the replay.  Kind of mixed results.  Some of my splits pushes were good, 1 was a completely bad idea and costly.  Another was good, but my team just threw the fight in a major way.  For example, its 4v5 mid while I'm working on the enemy inhibitor tower. My mid in that 4v5 decides to walk forward while the team is already safely disengaged.  She gets popped, people try to help her, then the whole team gets wiped.  So, while she might have been able to recover after making the boneheaded mistake of moving in when they are clearly disengaging if I was there, the problem was caused by a bad play which would did easily result in the inhib tower, but went to crap town.

I was going to piece together a vid and started making clips, but I think I've already absorbed what I did right and wrong from watching things in slow mo a bit.  Maybe I'll toss up a few clips after I finish playing tonight. 

OK - I'm going to upload 2 clips re: that split pushing game.  watch and tell me what you think re: my pushing.  Take a sec and pause at the start to see the scoreboard, what objectives were up, etc.  There were more clips, but I lost interest after these 2. 

Updating in asec...

K - vids will be here when done uploading - check in a bit if you are interested in this:

the 2nd vid doesn't have a link atm, so check the recent uploads here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/LeagueOfPacov/videos?sort=dd&shelf_id=1&view=0

Remember - pause at the start and look at the scores, what map objectives are up, etc. 

hmm... don't know i the 2nd vid finished uploading or not.  Vid 1 is live now though... apparently I needed to click on publish to share it... smeh.  Probably have to try to upload vid 2 again after work (vid 2 is sadly the more interesting 1 imo). 

Anyway, I think I've got all my goofy and/or weak support shenanigans out of my system.

Having said that, I want to talk about support shaco as I put in more than a few reps in on him. To start off, I think its worth noting that prior to running support shaco, I've logged a decent amount of jungle shaco games.   Being experienced with those mechanics give me a bit of a leg up.  But - you play him very differently as a support.  For one, you almost never stealth in to try to land an aa + shiv.  Instead, you walk up to shiv and then stealth to reposition as needed. 

Anyway, its AP shaco with low gold income.  The build works well enough (spell thief+3 health pots (no ward) >upgraded spell thief>dorans ring>boots>ruby>sightstone>dfg>mpen boots> dcap or mpen wand).  lv 1-4 = W, E, E, Q.  max R>E>W>Q.  Setup 2 boxes to leash for jungler, then immediately lane and setup boxes on both sides of bushes.  Push out boxes strategically to zone and/or save.  If they try to clear the boxes, it typically means they get wrecked and can't trade favorable/get zoned.

OK - so what's good about shaco support.  1st and foremost, he zones very well in lane.  You don't setup some cheese shaco boxes (stacked), you place them intelligently to function as 1 min wards and to gain lane control.  You'll be surprised at how quickly you can control the lane and control where the enemy laners can move. 

He can do a reasonable amount of dmg with his shivs during laning and can safely ward pretty much anywhere using his deceive to hop to safety as needed and/or scout.  Side note - its preferable to only use his q to get to safety... and super easy to juke the enemy team simply by facing 1 direction and hopping to a different location. 

Anyway, you ideally transition to late game being able to safely chunk squishies on the enemy team using the dfg + a shiv + ign.  it's generally enough to get anyone to back out off a fight if not kill someone.  You generally don't split push and instead get out boxes + wards to gain a high level of control around choke points. 

Pros

• Lane control
• Higher kill potential
• High vision control
• people aren't used to it so they have difficulty countering it properly

Cons

• You are support shaco and that at least sounds stupid
• cc is not guaranteed - only probable
• you need to be close enough to do damage, but you generally can't initiate

Cons: Lategame, you are playing a low gold AP Shaco.  Nobody thinks to themselves "man, what this team really needs is a low gold AP Shaco!".

heh... take a look at my stats and itemization, though (scroll about half way down).

http://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=pacov

or look at the details and see what my gold amt is at relative to the other players. 

Fair point though re: people not thinking it fits - honestly it fits better than a jungle shaco in solo queue gold/plat level due to late game transitioning.  It has the same sort of trade offs you get when you run a burst support with arguably better zoning/adc protection.  It requires a decent skillset, though.  I'm finding the playstyle very useful late game. 

Tip i just read that I didn't know about:

Shaco - Using R:Hallucinate doesn't break stealth. Try stealthing into a group and using you're ult before attacking. With luck, you're foes will drop their cooldowns on the clone before you come out of stealth, greatly reducing their combat effectiveness in the fight. Don't worry about losing the crit from your Q either as there is a small window after your stealth drops for your attack to crit.

Solo Queue is a term most people use for Ranked games, not Normal games I believe.  And especially not Teambuilder.

There seems to be some potential to Support Shaco, but I've grown a little distrustful of the results of playing non-meta champions in non-ranked games.  I think we'd all be very interested to see how it does, so give us a heads up if you ever decide see for sure how well it fits in Ranked.

I can't really see Shaco being better in the late game than Zyra would, and they fill similar roles early on with the epic zoning potential.  He does have horrendous kill potential though.  That fear, while less reliable than some CC, should still lead to guaranteed kills when it goes off at the right time.  Being able to get back behind the enemy carry and fear them as they try to escape is very powerful.

If you've got a good carry that can pick up the kills and win the lane, even if he's less impressive late game it shouldn't be an issue.

The fella that plays shaco support only is master tier.  He's the guy that wrote up the build and gave some playstyle examples in an ama on reddit a few days ago.  Keep in mind that master tier vs master tier champs, etc.  Also keep in mind that I'm not equating my skill level with support shaco with his - just giving a clear, ranked example of someone that seems to stay at master tier playing mostly shaco support... which I think illustrates his strengths. 

What I want to call out is that in all my games on team builder - even though weird elo occurs here and there, I've yet to really come across any over the top weaknesses against any support I've come up against other than sustain lanes make it more difficult - but you can still maintain solid zone control enabling easy adc farming.  The only times I've had trouble really are related directly to having a weak adc that chooses to get wrecked by feeding or getting chunked unnecessarily (eg I get a weak arse adc that is silver and were up against diamond/plat bot lane).  Things like that don't tell me support shaco is bad, though. 

Anyway, 7 games on team builder - 4 wins, 3 losses.  1 loss due to dc, 1 loss due to awful mid/adc.  1 loss due to a nonstop split pushing lee sin. All games I would have lost with any support with the exception of perhaps lux or annie.  When I play enough with a champ, I generally come up with reasons why I shouldn't play certain champs in specific roles - I haven't come up with a good reason not to play shaco as support yet. 

re: zyra - well, in lane, I think shaco has an edge on zoning, though zyra is certainly no slouch there - just not as good imo.  Late game shaco still provides better "set up" zone control.  Zyra's ult gives her the edge on creating instant group zone control/cc.  I think I might like zyra better late game if we are comparing dmg support shaco to dmg support zyra.  She can provide more dps than shaco can put out as shaco is mostly disruption and single target. 

Teambuilder means nothing - those games are what people do when they are goofing around or trying out new crap.  Easily the lowest quality games.  And the way that support Shaco seems to be getting gold relative to a normal support is by getting kills.  Is a support that is better at kill stealing really a good thing?  Given how time you have spent complaining about people stealing "your" kills, I would think that you would prefer supports that lock down kills for the carries as opposed to taking them themselves.

2 kills in a game isn't getting gold by kill stealing.  His gold revenue is pretty normal for a support that builds up their farm item early and puts it to decent use.  Being 2k gold behind the farmers at the end of a game is a pretty typical result for a decent support.  You wont keep up with whoever ends up carrying most of the kills, but you keep with the rest of the team pretty well.  An AP support can do significant damage just fine without robbing their partner of kills.  They just have to pass on some support utility, like getting Aegis, buying lots of extra wards.

Since he was referencing his gold amount relative to teammates, I was assuming he was referring to his multiple games with 5-8 kills.  Since that would make sense.

AP supports that do damage tend to do their damage up front.  Think Annie.  She can initiate, do a bunch of damage, then hand off the kill to the ADC.  Thats ideal.  Assassins assassinate.  Thats not ideal on a support - Shaco can't initiate even to the somewhat limited degree that most AP carries can (unless the other team is stupid).  And because of this, he is a finisher (also not ideal on supports).

I don't have a problem with off meta supports.  I just don't like off meta supports that can't initiate, can't peel for carries, and are based more around taking the kills from carries.  Not a fan of how that works even in theory.

His gold amounts are pretty close between the 5-8 kill games and the 1 and 2 kill games.

Comparing gold amounts across games isn't very meaningful since it will be hugely affected by things like "how many towers were taken", and "how many dragons were taken", and "how many barons were taken", especially for a support.

The original topic was his gold with respect to teammates.  Since all the teammates will have roughly the same gold from towers/dragons/etc, we can meaningfully look at how his gold is doing compared to his teammates in ~2 kill games vs ~8 kill games.  And behold, in 2 kill games he has typical support gold, and in 8 kill games he has abnormally high support gold (with respect to the rest of his team).