How to carry as AD Carry

 

1.1) The basics

What is your role in the team?

Your main objective as an ADC is to get advantages towards late game. You should try to focus on early game farming, in mid game your job is to assist the team and in late game you should be one of the highest source of damage in your team. Although there are some ADC's that are early/mid game focused, most of the ADC´s in this meta are late game carries (Vayne, Graves, Caitlyn etc).

Why isn´t ADC as contested role as it was in season two?

There are various reasons, but the major two are meta and itemization. In season two, people used to play lot of ADC, especially since ADC's dealt really high damage at the time. Now that there has been so many item changes, ADC's lost a lot of their power. When season three started, people started noticing how much the meta had actually changed and the changes had an impact on ADC's.

In the current meta, champions like Kassadin, Zed and Fizz can delete you in a fraction of a second. This is due to their high burst, high mobility and easy snowballing. This is why no one cares if you get really fed with any squishy Champion, high mobility assasins can still easily kill you if they play it well. This is the problem with current state of ADC, and this leads to many people giving up on ADC. To put this in a nutshell: You have to rely on other teammates to do well so that you can win. 

Image courtesy of MagicnaAnavi on DeviantArt

1.2) Laning Phase

What should be my main objective in laning?

You should try to get as much farm as possible, dying as little as possible while trying to kill the enemy laners. This is really it. But, like League usually is, easier said than done. You have some variables that make you have a hard time, like junglers, how your solo laners do and your own performance as the team's glass cannon.

How much farm should I have when playing ADC?

The amount of farm you should have at Silver to Platinum level depends, but your goal should be realistic. You usually win the lane if you can get 75 CS (Creep Score) at 10 minute mark, 150 CS at 20, 200-250 CS at 30 and so on. When you get to Diamond, it should change to nine/ten minions per minute.

Why is the amount of farm you have to get so high?

It is only because the main objective in your laning is to get yourself farm. Bot lane is known for having 20 minutes of farming with only few kills traded out. When you play ADC, you have a very rarely ganked lane (in lower ELO especially) and your trading is constant trading with less opportunities to kill the enemy.

Although I am saying this, it doesn't mean your game should be only farming. Many people are known to have an agressive playstyle which leads to either crushing the lane or getting crushed in the lane.

Then how can you be crushed in lane if you are only 0/2 after laning phase?

Zoning. When playing ADC, quite a few kills still happen. However usually when you are getting crushed, it means that you can't really leave the turret area without dying. This often leads up to people getting zoned, which makes the enemy get gold you are not able to get. A skillful enemy will try to freeze the lane as much as possible to make you suffer from having already hard time on lane.

Laning in a nutshell:

Farming until your jungler gets six. When your jungler hits six, you should try to excecute a proper gank to bot lane and take the Dragon. You should farm usually until the 20 minute mark, and your goal is to have about 150 farm in a winning lane. You are doing well in a losing lane if you have atleast 110.

 

1.3) Mid game

It´s 20 minutes on the clock. How do I proceed?

Try to help your team, farm, help with objectives and sneak off a few kills. This way you are getting stronger, you are getting your team stronger and you are achieving pressure all over the map.

My farm is always lacking after laning phase. What can I do to get more farm?

This is a common problem in League. Because it is really hard to get farm after laning phase, the stages of the game are very different. In laning phase, you have excactly three reasons to leave your lane. Dying, taking Dragon and going back to get items. But it all changes when you get to mid game. You have to time it perfectly when you are going to farm.

When you go to farm, it has to qualify through three things: You are not going to fight in the upcoming 40 to 50 seconds, no major buffs are coming up and you are safe when you are going to farm (meaning that the enemy team isn´t missing in the map and the minion wave is in their bot inhibitor f.e.). I suggest you go and watch some professional ADC streams. Try to look in what situations are they excactly going to farm in bot. This is where you can see the ideal situation to go farm bot.

I am playing as a hypercarry, but my stats are horrible and the enemy team has a snowballing ADC. Help me! What do I do?

This is a tricky situation. In mid game, there are many things that can happen. You have two choices. Either continue farming as much as possible or start roaming. The first one is easy to do. Go to Golems, take farm from bot, watch if mid is backing, go take farm there, go back bot and so on. The thing with this is that you just have to pray the enemy ADC is not getting kills. If he is, you are not getting any use from farming. If you want to prevent this from happening, try to inform your team the exact moves of their ADC. 

The second one is something me and my DuoQ partner have been doing more lately, and have found effective. When you see no chance of beatiing the enemy ADC, start to roam all over the map. You can easily come and make a gank happen to top or mid, sneaking kills and focusing on helping the other lanes, building up pressure all over the map while your lane didn't go that well. But, there is the chance that you fail this. There are the games where you get five kills by roaming and there are the games where you die five times roaming. You should always remember that if you are standing at 90 farm in 15 minutes, and you have two deaths, you should not try to gank a top lane Renekton that is 6/0 at15 minutes with 200 farm. He could easily kill all three of you. You should think about it before you start to roam.

I am really fed and have tons of farm already. How should I play from now on?

You should try to play so that you help other lanes from now on a bit more. You should try to follow the enemy bot lane and make their game as horrible as possible. With the right ward coverage, you can get easy kills from the enemy jungle and you should try and secure as many Dragons as possible. If mid lane is fully pushed, Dragon down and the enemy bot lane dead/in base you should go bot to push the lane. Also, if you like to make the enemy bot lose as much farm and experience as possible, only go to bot to stop the lane getting pushed to your turret. This way, the lane stays steadily pushed towards you and the enemy has to over extend to get any farm.

Mid game in a nutshell: You should try to maintain high farm while helping out your team in the mid lane. When possible, try to contest/take Dragons and push down as many towers as possible. You can form out fights already, but most of the fighting will start later on.

 

1.4) Late game and teamfighting

What to do when the game is rolling to its last ten to twenty minutes?

Now this is the part where you shine. You are really strong at this part of the game (except for few champions, but I will go through that later). The ultimate goal is to try and end the game with strategical fighting leading to objectives and sneakin in a few unexpectable barons while the enemy team is unable to contest.

You should always go through a priority list of questions in your mind, thinking that what to do next. For those reasons, I made a flowchart just for you!

Now that you've mastered the art of playing as an ADC in a team, we can go on!

When teamfights start, who should I attack first?

Teamfighting as an ADC is really difficult, since you need to make important decisions in fractions of a second. First thing you have to look for are any high priority targets that are mistakenly in front line. If there are, you should target them. Then you should look for the biggest. Prioritizing should go so that you should attack the highest threat to the team that is in your attack range and make it so that you are as safe as possible. It can change in matter of seconds, but the target who is the most scariest can also be a tank. You've got to remember that you do not make this mistake. Tanks are also high priority targets if they are a threat to your team!  Tanks are really scary since they usually have high amount of CC (for example Zac) or just has really high damage (like Renekton). 

Teamfighting is something that happens regularly, but is still incredibly complicated.

Summary of Late game: Late game is the time when you push in to victory. This is always not easy as an ADC, since you need to fight to win, and fighting as an ADC is quite hard.

 

2.1) Mechanical tips

Fast peek

This is something you should learn early on. There is no excuse not to learn it, but there are only benefits. Basically what you do is that you kill a minion and as soon as you see you got the gold, you watch the minimap, their laners, your support, your positioning and the enemy lanes. This provides you three important things: Knowing if the enemy laners are potentially heading to your lane, are you able to trade and if you should back away potentially. 

This tip is the one that is hard to do, but as soon as you learn it your skill level rises,  I guarantee it.

Stutter stepping

The way you can do this, is that you press A near you and then you let the AA projectile to go out. When the projectile is near to hit the target, you cancel the ending animation and continue walking. So practically, you hit the target, you move, you hit the target, you move and so on. This is pretty important to learn, since you don't have time to cast full animation autoattacks when you are being chased. 

This is a perfect example of great kiting involved with really good stutter stepping:

As you can see in the clip, as he is escaping with such a little bit of health, Imaqtpie starts to attack between his moves. At first, he activates his E, giving him a huge attack speed boost. Now, he starts to make use of his Bloodthirster and he tries to get in as many attacks as possible to get maximum amount of health back. This is the perfect example of good stutter stepping. Everytime he gets an attack on Meteos, Qtpie falls back to make it much harder for Meteos to get his skillshots on him, and after every little movement he has made he attacks him to get more health.

Trading with support

This one is by far the biggest mistake people make in Gold and lower. You let the enemy support just roll around because you focus on trading with ADC´s only. Believe me, it harms the lane much much more if the support has to back than if the ADC has to back. If the support isn´t there to protect the ADC or provide vision to him, he is vulnerable to ganks. But, as always, remember to use prioritizing, since ADC loses a lot of gold and experience by being dead or sitting on the base.

Freezing the lane

It is important to "steady the push". To a skilled support player, you are basically saying you want to get killed by pushing the lane all the time, no matter how you are laning. That is why in most situations, you want to attack the minions only when they have 10% HP left. This way, you are guaranteed to get the CS every time and you don't unnecessarily push the lane. Although I say that freezing the lane is an important skill, so is pushing at the right time. Sometimes when playing alone, you have to keep really good eye on the enemy support. If the enemy is trying to push really hard, it might be so that they can place down a vision ward there.

Zoning

I talked about zoning earlier, but how does that really work? Zoning has two requirements. First, you don't put yourself in any danger and secondly you aren't extremely overextended.

In this picture, you can see the effectiveness of wise zoning. I am positioned so that I take their creeps without them damaging me. At the same time, the enemy Nami has backed and I am in the lane with my support. Now to speculate my positioning. Poppy has warded tribush and the river area, which means I am not getting surprise ganked. Also, I am not overextended, I am far away in the lane, but in no way am I overextended. We positioned this way for the reason that their Corki can't poke me. Since he is not level six, he can't take farm and he can not move towards us without getting stunned by Poppy. Corki lost at least 5 CS before Nami was able to come back in lane, and this way lost almost 100 gold.

Making advantage on enemy cooldowns

If the enemy laners have the same amount of gold as you, it is very risky to try and out-trade the enemy if you are not guaranteed to win the fight. But, if you think you potentially have more damage than they have, let them burn their abilites. Wait for the moment that the enemy support uses all of his abilities and then jump in. If the support doesn't have any abilities left, they are doomed to die in most cases. A Thresh without Death Sentence and Flay is not probably able to contest you nor try to initate. If their Alistar uses Headbutt - Pulverizer combo, he can not help the enemy ADC at all. Because of this, try to maintain as much attention to the enemy as possible to get easy kills.

Last whisper

This item is incredibly strong. This item is the core of the core for every ADC that scales to late game. But for some reason, people don't build this item. Let's look at some statistics. 

This here shows the most popular items on Bronze. Now, when you look at it, do you notice that Last Whisper is not in the list? This means that although items which are usually built to ADC are there, Last Whisper is not on the list.

Now, here is the graph showing you what are the most popular items on Challenger. In this graph, Last Whisper is third!

Last Whisper is one of the strongest items on an ADC, if not the strongest. Last Whisper ignores the enemy armor by 35 percent. The people in Diamond/Challenger have understood that this item is the reason you take down tanks. I don't actually know why it isn't more popular in low ELO, but it does say something that it is so popular in Diamond.

Last Whisper should be always built as your third item or if you are able to get your three first core items in 20 minutes, then it should be built fourth. Now if you are still quite unsure, go and watch any ADC stream you can find and try to find even a single game where a Diamond ADC doesn't build Last Whisper as their third/fourth item.

Punish mistakes

Let's assume you are playing as a Vayne against a Draven. This is a hard matchup where you have to punish for mistakes in order to win the lane. Draven's damage and trading potential are both based on his Spinning Axe. This is why everytime Draven doesn't catch his axe, you should try to trade. If you get your Condemn, Tumble, Auto attack combo, you have won the trade. Draven can not contest you without his Spinning Axe.

 

2.2) The more psychological part of playing ADC

But before that: Hear me out. This is not going to be the part where I am going to talk about which parts of your brain get stressed out when you rage or anything like that. This section is dedicated to the part where you can improve on your fundamentals. This part also considers logical thinking and concentration on the game.

Compliment your support

This is easy, effective and very useful thing to do. The reason why you are doing this? Because most of the time you are not the one making plays in the bot lane. Do you initiate to their bot lane while your support is just trying to avoid all damage in the background? No. This is why you should try to say at least "WP" for every single Thresh hook or Alistar Headbutt/Pulverize combo that leads you to a kill. This makes the support feel like he/she is not the guy that got left with the worst role in the team. The role where you serve the ADC and get blamed for every single mistake you make. This way your support will play better and have more fun, which makes him/her more relaxed and makes your game easier this way

On the other hand, I think this upcoming part is obvious. Never blame your support. Ever. You make them demoralized and you make them feel bad. Try to help your support have faith that you are not necessarily going to lose. Try to make it so that you will have a worriless lane. If you do this, I can guarantee you, you will definitely climb at least a few divisions.

Keep your Champion Select open all the time

If you really want to win, be aware on the champion select. This way you can prevent upcoming deaths and wrong runes/masteries. For example, when you are on champion select and you understand you are playing as Vayne against Alistar/Varus lane with AP runes and masteries with ignite, you are probably going to gather some unneccesary deaths.

... and the same with Loading Screen

You should try to focus on some kind of check list during your loading screen. This way you can try to think of things you can do at the start of the game. Is it going to be a hard matchup? Do they have a jungler that can gank bot easily (Zac, Aatrox)? Do they have powerful early levels? The list continues, but the main point is that you should try to gather as much information as possible in the start of the game. This increases your chances of winning the game.

Concentrate on your situation more than anyone elses

"Mid laner is feeding, top laner is raging, jungler is punching on his screen with frustration. Why do I always get these teams???"

Is this the sentence you end your game with? Then you have some work to do. I have given this tip to a few people, and they have started playing much better. This tip is generally for everyone. Tell me, does it matter how your teammate is doing? No, it doesn't mean he is losing the game for you, it means he is taking your attention of the game. This is why people often start throwing in soloQ. 

If you start to concentrate more on how can you save the game and how can you make a difference on how the game will end, it makes your game much more winnable. Of course this doesn't work always. Sometimes you get the rare case of someone intentionally feeding. You can´t really do anything to that. But, you got to remember that in some point, he starts getting worthless to the enemy. He is not worth anything to you nor the enemy team. So why would you pay so much attention on flaming him instead of trying to make your team succesful?

Mute

Seriously, people are not doing this enough. You can just push the button and he is out of your mind. If someone else is doing something that irritates you even slightly, press the button. Just press TAB and that little speech bubble in the right of the guy that is annoying you.

So why would you do this? The one who is raging at you might say something really important that can make your game change, right? Answer is no. You don't have any information you need from him. If you don't mute people you can not get mad about their whining/flaming etc. Just use the button. Daily. Every game.

 

Thank you for reading this article. I will post later on this week another article, which will talk about the current state of ADC's and about the ADC champions.