Summary
- A debate surrounding a recent clip is raging in the League of Legends community.
- It’s sparked a discussion about the core design of tanks and carries and their relationship to one another.
- It’s a balancing act for the design team.
If you think about it, balancing League of Legends is a gargantuan task. There are 169 champions in League, with many requiring constant tweaks to ensure they are neither too weak nor too strong. Sure… Riot Games occasionally lets something too strong slip through the cracks or keeps a champion artificially weak with numbers because their kit is overturned. However, all in all, the balance team has done a respectable job keeping the game ticking along year after year, patch after patch.
However, a recent clip from streamer, content creator and ex-professional player Jona “Reptile” Fritz has recently sparked a massive debate within the community about the fundamental design of carries and tanks. The original clip was posted to Reptile’s Twitter account on Monday. The video shows Reptile playing Jinx in a game state where he’s relatively strong. The enemy Tahm Kench (who is 0/8) engages on him and despite Reptile playing the fight near perfectly and the opponent playing it quite badly, while also being behind, he only wins the fight because of an intervention from his support Soraka.
Tanks vs Carries, the Age Old Debate
“Aint no f**king way… the 0/8 top laner is killing me… I’m dodging every ability, I dodged every Q, I dodged W, I dodged everything. How is this even remotely close? I have three items, I’m an AD Carry (ADC)—I’m supposed to be good now against tanks. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, I’m double his farm… double his farm, two levels ahead, three items versus one item,” Reptile says after the skirmish.
The clip is still being widely discussed by the community days later as everyone gives their own opinion on the design dichotomy of tanks and carries. It’s a fundamental problem that goes right to the core of League of Legends’ design. AD Carries need to do enough damage to kill tanks, but tanks also need to do enough damage to threaten carries or nobody would ever pick them.
Riot solves this issue with range and scaling, i.e. AD Carries have a range advantage over tanks and so can kill them at a safe range. Of course, in an isolated one-versus-one scenario like in the clip, tanks can just use their engage tools to close the distance and dump their damage on the carry. The second solution is scaling—AD Carries begin the game weaker than tanks but eventually amass enough items to shred them. However, tanks also need to scale well because they don’t necessarily have adequate tools to “force” win lanes, meaning they need to be effective in teamfights to make them viable picks.
This is the crux of the problem, AD Carries have had their means of killing tanks stripped away over the years while currently—tanks scale very well with stacking health. This creates a scenario like the one depicted in the clip where even a fed AD Carry is struggling to shred a health-stacked tank like Tahm Kench.
This subject has been discussed in several Reddit threads, like this one from Barb0ssaEUW, this one from Gockel and one from Derk08. Reptile clarified his position in a later Tweet, saying “Even though Tahm is broken that is not the point of this Tweet, the point is that all (or most) ADC items are f**cking trash, anyone who disagrees is deluded.”
It’s a debate that will likely rage on forever in the community because the design of League of Legends’ classes is a tenuous balancing act. There will always be one of the character archetypes that is slightly more powerful than the other.
