How to Carry a Losing Team as an ADC?

The AD Carry is one of the primary damage dealers on a team. They are usually the ones who can dish out high damage outputs and take lots of punishment. But what happens when the rest of your team is losing?

As much as possible, you would need to Farm and Scale in order to get ahead of the enemy team as well as to open up opportunities for your team to make plays across the map. 

While farming and scaling is probably the only option for an ADC when playing from behind, being aware of your macro gameplay should give you and your team a strategic advantage during the game.

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Farming and Scaling

As simple as it sounds, you would need to be fed in order for you to carry your teammates in the late game. Since you’re playing from behind, you would need to determine how you can do it safely and minimize the risk of getting killed.

Finding Isolated Lanes

While the rest of your team is making plays across the map, you should go and farm on a lane that is being pushed by your minions while no enemy is in sight. Eventually, this will result in creating pressure on the enemy because you’re pushing an isolated lane aggressively. The enemy would likely end up recalling to cover for the tower’s defense.

Additionally, you’ll end up funneling gold all to yourself. This will help you in achieving your power spike by buying items that are beneficial to your skirmishes and duels.

Building Items by The Situation

While the goal of your farming and scaling is to deal as much damage as possible, you would need to identify what items should be beneficial for your pushing and for your teammates afterward. 

If you are building items passively, you will end up only building items that just simply increase and amplify your current damage. You should assess the current situation before buying an item. 

For example, if the enemy toplaner soaks a lot of damage and has a higher rate of self-healing (Ex: lifesteal, regeneration), you can consider buying an item that has grievous wounds so that the healing would be reduced and you’ll end up peeling damage properly and more effectively for your team. 

Also check out: How can an assassin carry a losing team?

Find Something To Trade With If You Can’t Contest An Objective

Since your team’s backed against the wall, you always can’t get objectives and make a “hail mary” play by stealing dragons or barons. Doing so will just cost your team their own objectives such as towers, nexus, or a chance of taking a neutral buff later in the game.

If your team cannot contest an objective, you must find something to trade it with by taking another objective from the enemy team. In an example scenario, the enemy team would be taking the dragon for free because they know that your team can’t take it and would just end up winning the teamfight. 

In response, you can take an objective from the enemy by pushing and destroying a tower since it is an isolated lane.

Trading objectives give an advantage to both your team and the enemy team. Following up on what to do after taking an objective should be the next focus since you will need to make use of what objective you’ve taken from the enemy team.

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Tracking The Actions Of Your Team

If you have come to the point where you have earned enough gold and bought items to increase your damage output, you can now try and control the momentum of the game. However, you should know when to create pressure and group up with your team.

Pushing Sidelanes While The Enemy Is Taking An Objective

This will create pressure on the enemy team because an enemy champion would need to defend a turret which then leaves them one less teammate behind. In response, your team can now try and contest objectives since the risk of “numbers advantage” is reduced.

Grouping With Your Team

You can’t always win fights by yourself. That’s what your teammates are for! 

As your team plays the role of the frontline, you should now be able to peel for your team and contest what upcoming objectives should be available. This in return, will shift the momentum of the game, and playing from behind is now paying off. 

Also check out: How can top lane carry in a losing team?

Managing The Wave

Pushing the lanes can be as simple as killing waves of minions and pushing them together. But did you know that you can manage how the waves should be pushed?

Strategically managing the waves can cause shifts in momentum throughout the game because you can contest objectives with your team while the rest of the minions do what they do best: pushing.

Slow Pushing

What Slow Pushing does is it creates a big wave of ally minions and will allow your minions to take less damage. Your minions will last longer when pushing because they have the numbers advantage in play.

To Slow Push, you just need to kill the enemy’s caster minions in the wave. In return, the enemy melee minions and a siege minion will be the only ones left in the wave. The ally minion wave will then out damage the enemy’s minion wave since the enemy’s caster minions are not present. After a few more waves, the wave of the ally minions in the lane would somehow increase.

Since the enemy team can see that a huge wave is building up in a lane, they might be forced to recall to clear the wave and prevent further damage. For your team, you can use it as an advantage by taking other objectives together with your team and making other plays around the map.

Fast Pushing

This is the most commonly known type of pushing since you are clearing the wave together with your ally minions. This comes off as “aggressive” because your ally minion wave will get to the objectives faster and create another pressure on the enemy team as they’re forced to fight with one less enemy champion. 

To fast push effectively, kill the following minions in order: Melee Minions > Cannon Minions > Caster Minions. Try doing this as quickly as possible.

In order for the fast push to be even more effective, your ally minion waves should have more minions because the pushing potential would be faster and stronger.

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Make Up For Your Team’s “Minor” Shortcomings

As irritating as it may be, some of your teammates don’t really know how to provide benefits that can possibly help you during the rest of the game. Instead of letting upcoming punishments come into play, it’s up to you to make sure that it doesn’t happen or it doesn’t cause a huge shift in momentum.

Sometimes, it’s up to you to provide deep vision in the map with your Farsight Alteration ward. As simple as it may be, it allows your team to determine where the enemy is without the risk of going “too deep” in the enemy jungle or lane.

If you can’t start fights because you’re alone or outnumbered, the next best thing is to not engage and scout the enemy instead. This provides information for the rest of the team and creates other effective responses in return.

Conclusion

By effectively executing these macros, it will benefit the rest of the team during the game and be more competent.

It’s not always mechanics that carry the game. Being a more “proactive” teammate that applies macro mechanics allows you to maximize what you can do to be more impactful during the game.

It’s up to you on how you can influence your other teammates to make simple actions in the game to be more effective which then ends up causing a huge impact on the game.