The BPSA: You can carry in other ways than killing enemy champions #1
tl;dr: Towers are more important than kills, and not everyone should build damage.
The Bronze Public Service Announcement
How to Win
In League, there are multiple ways to try to achieve victory. You can try to avoid losing team fights against an AOE heavy enemy by split pushing and taking towers on opposite sides of the map (thus making the enemy chose which lane to lose). You can stall for time while your team takes objectives like mountain drake, or baron, and then your team can force your way into the enemy base. You can whittle down your lane opponent with poke, while staying out of danger, forcing them back to base, after which you go ham on their towers. You can build up a beefy team that can soak tower shots without minion waves and push at your leisure. You can beat the enemy in terms of vision and out-rotate them, all while dodging their traps and taking a beating to whatever lane they aren't currently in.
However, all these strategies have one thing in common: taking towers.
What they don't all involve is killing the enemy champions. In fact, you could theoretically win a game without killing ANY champions.
Don't get me wrong, I love slamming my face into my keyboard until I get a pentakill as much as the next guy. After all, securing kills and minimizing the effect of other champions is also an inherent part of League. BUT that's exactly the problem: killing your enemy isn't an offensive play; it's preventative. You can't win by playing only defense all game long. You win by blowing up the enemy nexus. In fact, think of towers and inhibitors as extensions of the nexus. You need to kill the nexus to win, but you also need to take down the towers leading up to it to start damaging it in the first place. The towers are just the parts of the Nexus that can hit back.
"Let's group mid, fight them, ace, then push." "But didn't we lose five team fights leading up to this?" "Shut up, scrub."
Furthermore, you don't need to ace an enemy team to push a lane, nor should you kill four of the enemy team and blow your chance to push by chasing after the fifth until the rest of their team respawns.
If you have the champion advantage, you should:
- Take objectives
- Push lanes
- End sieges so you can start your own
If you have the champion advantage, you probably should not:
- Back for more items to continue slaughtering the people you already slaughtered and thus waste time (the dead enemies are getting items too)
- Chase the last enemy into their base, upon which you will get aced by the enemies who are respawning from that team fight you won, then blew.
Objectives are key. Seriously, if there is a 0/16/0 Tryndamere with 32k objective damage from split pushes and a 29/2/17 Draven who hasn't tried autoing a tower all game long on the same team, only one has directly contributed towards pushing their team to victory.
And I'll give you a hint: it wasn't the Draven.
"So damage is all there is? Then I should only pick high damage champions." "No, please, god, no."
This is where we get to carrying a team to victory.
The best carries are the people who allow your team to take and keep taking towers. Damage is not the end-all be-all of a game.
Maybe the carry was the Soraka who made sure your ADC never died. Maybe it's the Sion who suicide pushed seven towers. Maybe it's the Nautilus who single handedly CC chained the enemy team into irrelevance while your team took down the tower they were fighting under. Maybe it was the Jax who never ganked but soloed every drake and stole a baron. Maybe it was the Wukong with Duskblade that caused blackouts, warded, and cleared enemy vision like a Korean Challenger, thus allowing your team to slip through the jungle unnoticed and un-ambushed on your way to the next push.
Hyper carries tend to need a lot of gold and time to ramp up damage. If four out of the five people on your team go full damage and expect a gold starved support to hold out and tank until everyone else is full build, it's quite possible you might lose. Pick a niche besides damage to excel at in League, though, and you can expect your win rates to go way up.
End of motivational public service announcement/rant.