How To Be The AD Carry That Your Team Deserves

Summed up, your main objective while playing AD Carry would be farm, farm, farm and don’t die in team fights. It may sound easy, but we all know it’s not. That’s why we decided to give you a detailed guide on how to be the AD Carry that your team deserves.

As an AD Carry, you have low defensive stats, but high attack damage to start with. For the beginning, your job is simple – farm as much as you can before the fights start to occur. Last hitting is something you can always improve. We recommend playing against bots and training yourself not to miss a single minion. That means that you need to have more than 35 minions in the first five minutes of the game. Don’t stop when you first manage to do that, practice as long as it takes until you consistently get every single minion against bots in early game.  

When you start playing against real people, you may find yourself in the situation where your lane opponent is focused on pushing minions under your turret. That’s why you also need to learn how to farm under it, and at the early stage of the game, you will need your Support’s help. First thing to remember is that you always need to go for the minion the turret is hitting. For Caster minions, leave the turret to hit it once, your Support to auto attack it once, and then you last hit it. If there is no synergy between you and your Support, you can try to auto attack it once before the turret does, and then last hit it after the turret hit. It works the same for Melee minions, except you need to let the turret to hit it two times. Later in the game (usually after you buy your first item), you will be able to last hit minions under turret without your Support’s help. Let one turret hit for Caster minions, two turret hits for Melee minions before you strike. The gold should be all yours.

Next thing you should be thinking about is controlling the minion wave. If you pay attention to minions, not only you will be able to instantly count how many of them are on the each side of the lane, but you will be able to predict which minions will be lower on health first and whose wave will push. To prevent enemy minions to be hit by your turret, which you should mostly do, you need to balance out the minion waves. Don’t push if it’s not necessary; if you have the lane advantage, rather freeze the lane than push it. It will help you keep the advantage and get more farm.

Don’t forget to learn and experiment how minion aggro works. If you auto attack an enemy near his minions, they will change focus from your minions and start attacking you. Minions can easily turn around fights in the early game and bring you disadvantage in trades. If your minion wave is bigger than your opponents, try to kite your enemy around minions so that he/she takes as much damage from them as possible. If it’s the other way around, don’t try to trade at all.

Now, when you have mastered your farming, let’s go to the part where you learn how to play in a lane. Bottom lane mostly has the same, unique style. It’s a 2 versus 2 lane with an AD Carry and Support on both sides. To win the trades, you need to have a sense of cooldowns of every single player in the lane. Even if your opponents are in a bad position, you can’t win a fight against them if your Support’s abilities are on cooldown and (s)he can’t back you up. Same thing goes the other way around – if their Support’s abilities are down and you didn’t get much damage from them, this is where you should go in and harass them. Still, remember the part that minions can play in this situation, as mentioned before.

Synergy of the AD Carry and Support is important but isn’t always likely. If you want to be safe, it is recommended to adjust to your Support’s playstile. Later in the game the synergy will grow and your Support is going to trust you more, but it’s important that you don’t let backfiring at the early stages of the game. Try to ward as much as you can around your lane, especially river. That shouldn’t be a problem with the trinkets presented at the preseason and your Support is mostly likely to build Sightstone as soon as possible. If you are not in the position to ward, play safe.

In teamfights, everything comes down to positioning and, generally, you want to be there. You need to be aware of the champions in the game and how fed they are. Most of the time you should play safe and “hide” behind your teammates as long as your opponents don’t use their gap closing abilities on someone else. When there isn’t much threat and focus to you feel free to hit whoever is closest to you. You have to be on the alert all the time and keep away from the opponents who can dive you, outrange you or even one shot you. Try to keep as close as you can to your Support and teammates with CC abilities that could be used to help you. However, if your opponents do dive you, prioritize kiting and staying alive while your teammates kill them. Spend every second of the fight on auto attack and doing damage but remember to move while you’re doing them.

Unless you have perfect awareness of where the rest of the opponent team is, don’t ever chase. It’s always better to regroup with your team since you are very important to them. One last thing you must remember is that pushing a lane with an AD Carry is usually not the right thing to do, even if you can do it for free. Your job is to be in teamfights, deal damage and help your team to secure objectives. Being alone in a lane and pushing it can easily bring death to you and make your teammates lose the fight without you. The further forward you are, it’s easier for your opponent to jump on and kill you.

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