Why Is Solo Carry Potential a Good Thing?

Tiniest Turtle··8 votes·3,793 views

To me it sounds dumb that one champion can snowball out of control and win a game single handedly with little effort while their entire team could be doing absolutely nothing and the enemy team could be making smarter plays but just can't win because one dumb champ got a little too fed and now you don't can't do anything about it. The entire concept that one player that gets ahead should be able to make up for the sins of their whole team and overcome the actual skill of the enemy team to win a game thanks to snowballing just seems unfair to me.

7 Comments

Tempest of Flame7 votes

Because without it every game feels like a cointoss. Solo carry potential up to a certain point gives players more agency in terms of the outcome of their games. Without it, games are just decided by whether or not you picked the right teamcomp and which team has the better bot/jungle, leaving especially the solo lanes in the dust.

Alzon2 votes

This is why no one wants to play a tank. Zero agency past lane phase.

Hayaishi5 votes

There's difference between solo carrying because you as a player know how to abuse leads with proper macro and game knowledge than solo carrying because your champion scales so fucking hard he becomes unstoppable.

The former is good, the latter is dumb and should not exist.

theChibiTina4 votes

Solo carry potential has decreased significantly though. Unless you get way ahead and super fed, it's really difficult to solo carry. It's way easier for one person to cost the team the game than it is for one person to carry the game.

woodvsmurph2 votes

If that's the case, then adc's have been a first class criminal the majority of the time in almost every season and should be permanently jailed.

Ok, now that we've got the obvious out of the way... let's give a bit of discussion points and food for thought.

  1. I agree a team should be able to deal with a fed or winning champ if they play correctly as a team.

  2. How much it costs the team to deal with the fed person either in a teamfight, a skirmish, or in a splitpush scenario depends on how well that fed player's teammates play while you are dealing with him/her. This is where the player has "1v5" or "solo carry" potential that I'm ok with. A strong player that's earned their lead through superior play (not bs broken champ/item or mechanic) should be rewarded. If you have to invest multiple resources to shut them down or even just contain them, then their team should be getting advantages elsewhere.

  3. If their team is taking advantage of the snowballed player's ability to 1v2 or whatever, that isn't truly solo carrying. It's giving your team a massive advantage, but it still requires your teammates to take advantage of that lead. This is ok. Mundo running in 1v5 and tanking everything w/o dying and killing your whole team just because your adc is behind is NOT ok. There's a difference between these two and I hope people can see it.

  4. Solo carrying in the one sense as I described above is ok and even healthy for the game because it opens new strategies (splitpush, tp flanks, etc.) and offers counterplay. Solo carrying in the other sense... my champ has x items or kills/kda by such and such a time... I can literally 1v5 your whole team even if you play properly... is NOT ok. *exception would be a complete one sided stop where entire team played like crap and is now many levels and items behind even the enemy support. In that scenario... yeah, you played like crap and the enemy should be able to 1v5 you.

  5. Solo carrying exists beyond splitpush. In most teamfights, the entire game revolves around isolating a tank and killing them or picking off a squishy and bursting them down. Why? Because marksman dps dictates most fights beyond very very early game. The combo of their damage and the peeling and durability of a frontline (plus any support peeling) means that marksmen are generally more enabled to solo carry a game than any other role. And so even if your mage is stronger or your frontline is just as tanky but has more damage, you lose if your marksman is weaker or less skilled than the other team's. Which means that the marksman is basically a solo carry - regardless of how strong another role/champ is except very extreme cases. Sure you can see an occasional outplay, but it's just that... an outplay. There's no such requirement for a marksman needing to "outplay" in the majority of scenarios compared to other roles in teamfights. This is why you can often see toplaners playing stuff like orn or malphite or maokai even if a bruiser or fighter is strong in the lane and in solo queue during that patch. Because the jayce or darius or whatever eventually becomes irrelevant in terms of their advantage as far as teamfights are concerned... due to adc's. The other team's toplaner just has to get tanky enough that they die less quickly than your darius does - regardless of darius being ahead of his lane opponent for example. It's not on the adc to outplay the darius who's half an item an a level up on the orn. Instead it's on the darius to outplay even though he's as far ahead of his opponent as the enemy adc is ahead of her lane opponent... if not moreso.

  6. Because of point 5, this is all the more reason that having a lead should be meaningful as far as enabling players to solo carry (in a healthy manner as described above) via splitting, tp flanks, etc. Because come teamfights, a lead in top or mid or jg only matters if either you can 1-shot an enemy carry, or it's very early into the game and adc's haven't come online yet. Otherwise just due to the nature of their role (and at certain points in history, also the broken items) their reliable damage from SAFETY will outweigh an opponent's damage or durability advantage who has to take more risk to deal damage and is more vulnerable to cc.

Onandaga1 votes

Because without the ability to carry the game would be boring as shit. Everyone would just feel like a cog monotonously carrying out it's role. There is a reason why tanks and supports have been historically unpopular compared to carry oriented classes like assassins, fighters, mages, and ADCs.

rayzo1 votes

if solo carry potential wasn't a thing, everyone would have a 50% winrate everywhere and have zero impact on the outcome of games.

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