Lets take a look back shall we, back to the very early stages of development when riot was just formed, and they were coming up with what stats to use. of course they would use health, armor, magic resist, etc.. all the basics. but then came the big question. how do we make mages scale into late game?

the answer to this, was the stat ability power. ability power is just what it says it is, a stat that buffs the power of your abilities. not only was this stat useful to mages, but it was useful to anyone who wanted to deal more damage with their spells. carries such as tristana and teemo could do just that, build damage as and crit or build ability power and do great damage with their abilities if they so choose.


lets take a look at tristana for a sec shall we?

her passive and q were perfect for her role as a carry, while her other skills were their to support her role. if instead you wanted to build her as a mage, her w e and r would be there to enforce her role as an ap carry, with her q and passive well they didnt do much.


then we have some champions who were unique with their scaling, who had a skill that scaled with their damage. characters like ezreal and gangplank for example, whos q set them apart from the other carries because of their scaling. of course everything else scaled off of ap, but they had that special skill to make them unique.

then came pantheon, riots failed attempt at taking a mage, but making it scale off of ad. looking back through patch notes pantheons name shows up a lot. so what went wrong with pantheon? is he supposed to be a mage or is he supposed to be a carry?

the answer is neither, pantheon completely missed the mage aspect they were going for and nearly makes it to the dps role, but not quite. he now fits, like so many other champions, in the role of tanky deeps. i'm not saying pantheon is bad or anything i'm just saying he didnt live up to what he was supposed to be.

riot eventually comes back to this whole idea of an ad caster, and releases urgot. urgot however does all that pantheon was designed to do, he scales off of ad and deals his damage with his spells. mission accomplished. at this point though we're still seeing all the other carries with the occasional ad scale but mostly ap scaling.

this is also the time when olaf is released, followed 2 months later by irelia, trundle, and renekton. now we get to the rise of tanky deeps, champions that are built to take a punch while being able to deal out some of their own. these guys completely shake the metagame to its core, and we even start to see classic champions utilize this more and more. riot still releases champions to compliment this meta, notably lee sin, jarvan, yorick and wukong. this new meta is such a problem that riven was carefully crafted as to not be a part of this meta.

but we're almost there, and how do the real carries of today stand?

well lets look at who we're dealing with. nocturne, talon, and graves will work. here we have ad carries that have all but done away with the ap scales, not only doing great damage on their auto attacks but also having crazy damage on their skills. most notably nocturne and talon, who are built to come out of nowhere, utterly destroy you and get out before anyone notices wtf just happened.

now my question is, why does every new carry have to have amazing damage not just from their auto attacks but also from their skills? what made some champions special and unique (gangplank, pantheon, urgot) is now the standard for nearly every ad carry.


graves for example, has been nerfed each patch since released, which isnt much considering its only been 2 patches but each time his buckshot has been hit. it still has the potential to deal nearly as much as annies w for example, while also dealing amazing damage with his auto attack (not to mention he probably quickdrawed into place to buckshot your face off, giving him a massive as boost).