This article takes a significant portion of time covering the nature of the term “ADC” and whether or not it even applies to modern League of Legends as a positional term for the Bot Lane. If you’d like to skip over this discussion and get straight into the guide portion of the article, click here.
The ADC, or the Attack Damage Carry, is both a role and a position in League of Legends. A Mid Laner might play a control mage or an Assassin, but will never play a “Mid”. The same logic applies to the Top Laner, who might play a tank or a bruiser, but will never play a champion whose archetype is “Top”.
Conversely, when most people refer to “ADC”, they mean both the position in the Bot Lane designated to the carry and the role the carry should play in terms of champion selection.
Admittedly, this terminology is somewhat archaic, and Riot Games has been moving away from referring to the Bottom Lane as a position for a Support and an “ADC” and instead just refers to the roles as “Support” and “Bottom”. The reasoning behind this change in thinking being that some players in the Bot Lane prefer to play as APCs (Ability Power Carries) or sometimes opt for strange strategies such as a two supports or a bruiser bottom, which makes calling the position “ADC” inaccurate in the modern game.
Despite the terminology being somewhat confusing for a new player, this article will be focused on the traditional Attack Damage Carry role that 99% of teams, both solo-queue and professional, will play with.
Below is a set of core principles every ADC should be adhering to and honing their skills in to have a successful split. Some of the advice is for total newbies, while some is aimed at practiced veterans. Feel free to read through all of them or select the specific steps that you feel are most pressing for your development.
- Pick a Champion (or Three) to Main
- Play at the Pace of Your Support
- Apply Pressure
- Understand the Macro Game
- “If it matters to my team, it matters to me.”
Step 1) Pick a Champion (or Three) to Main
This is the first and easiest part of playing any lane: Pick a “main”.
When playing as an ADC, a League player needs to be committed to their role as the greatest source of damage on the team. When it comes time to teamfight, the ADC’s ability to dish out high amounts of DPS while staving off death from enemies will often be the deciding factor in which team comes out on top.
This means that an ADC needs to have one champion that they “main” and, at most, two other champions as side picks in case in their main gets banned or counterpicked.
It’s hard to stress just how important this step is for any new player to wrap their head around: maining a champion for one entire split will give you a FAR better win rate than trying to become practiced on a few rotating mains. Do it. Main one champion. Only choose your side picks if absolutely required, and make sure your main is a proper Attack Damage Carry.
If you want to play hyper-carry champions that can snowball quickly and take LP in a short amount of time, you might opt for lane bullies like Draven, Samira, or Tristana.
If you want to play champions who are self-reliant and can carry games with less reliance on your support’s skill, you might opt for high-mobility champions like Ezreal, Kai’sa, or Lucian.
If you want to play champions that provide utility for their team on top of their high DPS, you might opt for champions that provide Crowd Control or great wave clear like Ashe, Sivir, or Varus.
Lastly, if you’re a textbook player and would like to be the absolute best champion at dishing out DPS and burning down objectives, you might opt for late-game critical strike / on-hit ADCs like Aphelios, Jinx, or Kog’Maw. Keep in mind that these picks are particularly skill testing and require a fair bit of focus from your team to make work.
Step 2) Play at the Pace of Your Support
Samira paired with a Nautilus as her Support is one of the most dangerous lane bullies in the bot lane. That same Samira paired with a Janna becomes rather docile on the engage, but retains some versatility during skirmishes and disengages.
In soloqueue, you aren’t always going to get a support that compliments your main well. And even when you do, you aren’t always going to get a Support that plays in the way you want them to. Because of this, playing to the pace of your Support is key for success.
If your support plays passively, you play as passively as possible. If your support plays aggressively, you play as aggressively as possible. Ultimately, the ADC that most often succeeds is the ADC that is on the same page as his or her Support.
Step 3) Apply Pressure
As an ADC, you’re in charge of dictating the nature of the pressure you apply. If you’re playing as a lane bully, working with your support to land engages and snag kills is ideal, but your kill pressure can also be used to deny CS and freeze out opponents from XP and gold, furthering your early advantage.
If you’re playing as a hard-scaling ADC such as Aphelios, simply farming well and avoiding death applies pressure on your opponents who are inching their way closer to a likely defeat the longer the game progresses.
Most often, an ADC can apply pressure by shoving enemies under tower and roaming, temporarily, to dragons and scuttle contests.
In higher elos, it’s possible to set up “absolute freezes” against your opponents when ahead. To do this, work in tandem with your Support and your Jungler to force enemies off of their own tower by threatening assured tower dives. This pushes the enemy Bot Lane back, and into a state where they can’t sap XP off of minion deaths. If your lead is sufficient and your timing is good, you can alternate between shoving the opposing bot lane off of tower and shoving the opposing Jungler off of their camps. When performed correctly, this can result in multiple waves lost for the enemy Bot Lane and 2-3 camps stolen from the enemy Jungler before a TP from a Top Laner or a Roam from a Mid Laner breaks the freeze.
Step 4) Understand the Macro Game
“Macro” is a term in League of Legends that usually (although not always) encompasses everything not related to individual champion mechanics. “Game knowledge” is a similar term. For an ADC, the key components of the macro game to understand almost all revolve around Jungler habits.
In the early game, knowing how Junglers like to path will aid you in properly timing your freezes, shoves, and backs. For example, if you know you have roughly thirty seconds before the enemy Lee Sin, who started red on the opposite side of the map, is going to be done clearing his camps, it would be wise to hard shove your lane early and let the opposing waves bounce back into your tower so as to not get frozen out while avoiding ganks.
Inversely, if that same situation is taking place but your own Jungler communicates their intention to counter gank, it might be wise to wait another 30 seconds before hard shoving the lane so that the opposing Bot Lane will be forced to fight into minion aggro to work with their Jungler, resulting in an almost assured victory in the ensuing skirmish.
Later in the game, a good ADC will understand when to rotate to the Mid Lane. This gives them a greater sense of protection via their Support and Jungler at all times, a greater reach of influence on both Top and Bottom objectives, and allows the Mid Laner to begin side-laning, resulting in more isolated forms of free-farming and stronger pressure in obtaining prio.
Following the theme of playing around your Jungler’s macro habits, an ADC in the Mid Lane should be prioritizing obtaining lane prio before rotating for an objective their Jungler wishes to contest.
This is the general rule of thumb for the mid and late game.
Step 5) “If it matters to my team, it matters to me.” -Zeri
As an ADC, your role isn’t just to threaten the enemy team with high DPS. Your role extends to melting objectives, forcing opponents out of fights early, and generally just helping your team apply pressure in extremely efficient ways.
It is extremely common to see ADCs win games by rotating with their team to burn down Dragons and Barons while the other team mispositions to contest a splitpush or simply isn’t aware of what’s happening. In the late game, an adc like Aphelios or Kog’Maw can melt a baron down with their team in a matter of seconds.
Additionally, it is in your team’s best interest to protect you, so give them ample opportunities to do so. Many ADCs openly lament the lack of “peel” they receive during games, but just as many make no skillful effort to position themselves in such a way to effectively front-to-back while also remaining in range for their teammates to protect.
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