How do I counter support Zyra?
Zyra as a support has a bunch of useful skills:
- She is ranged.
- Grasping Roots: A 0.75 / 1 / 1.25 / 1.5 / 1.75 root that can be used to initiate.
- Rampant Growth: No mana cost and plants a seed which can be used as a ward
- Zyras ulti Stranglethorns doesn't deal much damage but after 2 seconds, the vines snap back knocking enemies into the air for 1.5 seconds
- And don't forgot her passive Rise of the Thorns. When she dies, she shoots a line nuke which takes 99 (+ 25 x level) True Damage - this is 549 damage at level 18!
However, Zyra doesn't have any escape mechanism.
To counter Zyra I would recommend a champion that is ranged, fast, gives a heal or shield and has a good escape or group stun.
I would choose Janna
Janna has great mobility, can easily and quickly knock enemies into the air, and her shields can win fights. She also has a good slow and her ulti is one of the best escape & heal mechanisms in the game - it simply can "reset" teamfights.
Hope that I explained my decision process :)
I'm not the best support player, but maybe I can give you another point of view.
Zyra doesn't have any ability to heal her lane partner, nor does she have an escape mechanism. Additionally, her harass is based on her skills.
To counter her, I would recommend Soraka, for 2 reasons:
-
Sustain
Since you have the aability to heal your carry and Zyra doesn't, you can stay longer in the lane and harass the opponent. Ask your carry to harass as much as possible, and you will force them to go back to base, giving your partner a gold advantage.
-
Silence
Zyra is based on her skills; as Soraka, you have the ability to silence her every time she gets close to you or your partner.
If Zyra is still bothering you, simply put a ward in her brush. This allows you to predict her moves and gives vision of her to your carry, so he can harass her.
If I could choose a lane partner, I would pick Caitlyn, as her long range makes her pretty good at harassing the opponents.
As a support, your role is to keep your carry safe. If Zyra tries to harass you, silence her and attack back, healing right after. Soon, they will have low hp and your hp will stay full.
Alistar with Varus as partner.
Varus has a long range harass with his Q, what is a nightmare to no-healers supports. As Varus takes care of this part, you'll be Alistar and be a bodyguard to him. Play safe, always near the carry and try to fall back a little to coordinate ganks with your jungler. Alistar's CC will leave them helpless against a high-speed gank like Xin Zhao's or Jax's. Janna is also vary strong when facing offensive champions. Her CC and shield can frustrate the enemies if well played.
Let's just think: Zyra has no abilities for direct support and being a mage, she depends on her mana. Poking and harassing is the best way to push this kind of support back, and picking a champion with direct support will leave your carry with an advantage against Zyra's carry.
I can tell you from having played zyra over 500 games as support, the hardest match up for me is Leona, but it really depends on your skill too.
Mobility is the key. Don't stand still and don't sit in the bush vs zyra.
There seems to be a lot of misleading information in the other answers here. I play Zyra as support at Diamond 1. The thing with Zyra is that she is more of a high risk/high reward support. She can beat anyone, but strong engages is the best chance you have at beating her. The best counters to Zyra are champions that can force hard engages on her and holder her stunned/cced for a long amount of time. Short list of these would be (Leona, Thresh, Blitzcrank)
As a hard engage champion, you have 2 ways to force a fight.
1) Bait out her E so that she cannot root you as you try to run up to her.
2) Dodge her E or get close enough that even if you get hit by it you still can lock her down.
You need to then focus her down because she will often be much more squishy than the adc. Also a little known fact is that at level 3 onward, she does far more damage than the adc in these fights also. For this reason you need to try to kill her before she can unload on your adc. As a tanky support you can often live through her damage and her adcs combined (use all defensive quints/marks in addition to your normal defensive glyphs/seals and 0/9/21 or 0/21/9 masteries).
Even if you counter Zyra with these hard engages, if she gets too far ahead she will easily kill you and your adc over and over again. You need to get ahead before level 6 because it increases her burst substantially.
Alternatively, Vel'Koz actually can do great vs her. He has a much longer poke and also can stun. (Lux doesn't work as well because if they try to hard engage on you, the snare doesn't do much to stop them from getting their combo off) Never engage this fight and focus on poking safely until you force her back or she does a sloppy engage if she gets desperate.
Why don't a lot of the other answers work?
Janna: Other's stated that you can simply shield your adc every time Zyra tries to damage them. Unfortionately, Zyra's abilities do FAR more damage than Janna can shield for. Zyra's poke can be used to easily zone your ADC out of lane if you are a support Janna since you have no way to counter her damage and engage on her.
Taric: Sure he has a targeted stun, but it moves extremely slowly. This gives her plenty of time to react to the stun with a root + seed before it hits her and so the only thing taric gets off is a stun. He can't follow up to finish Zyra off and if Zyra ignored taric and managed to get a burst off on the adc, the adc will quickly die from the damage zyra just output with her abilities/plants combined with her own adcs damage.
Soraka: Her heal has such a high CD she can't heal the damage Zyra does before she can get another round of her abilities off. Also, she can safely get her abilities off before she can get silenced by soraka. Soraka will never be able to be in range for her Q to do damage until the fight is over.
Sona: She just gets destroyed by Zyra. Shorter ranged poke, not enough sustain to sustain past Zyra's damage.