Summary
- Debate is raging in the League of Legends community over a recent clip.
- This sparked a discussion about the basic design of tanks and carriers and how they relate to each other.
- It's a balancing act for the design team.
If you think about it, balancing League of Legends is a huge task. There are 169 champions in the league, many of which require constant tweaking to ensure they are neither too weak nor too strong. Sure… Riot Games occasionally let something too powerful slip through the cracks, or keep a champion artificially weakened by numbers because their kit flipped. Overall, though, the balance team has done a respectable job of keeping the game going year after year, patch after patch.
However, a recent clip from streamer, content creator, and former pro gamer Jon “Reptile” Fritz has recently sparked a massive debate in the community about the fundamental design of ships and tanks. The original clip was posted on Reptile's Twitter account on Monday. The video shows Reptile playing Jinx in a relatively strong state of play. Enemy Tahm Kench (who is 0/8) goes into it, and even though Reptile plays the fight near perfectly and the opponent plays it pretty poorly, while also being behind, he wins the fight only thanks to the intervention of his support Soraka.
Tanks vs Carries, the old debate
“That's no damn way… 0/8 top laner kills me… I dodge every ability, dodge every Q, dodge W, everything. How is that even remotely close? I have three items, I'm an AD Carry (ADC ) – I'm supposed to be good against tanks now. I can't believe it, I'm double his farm… double his farm two levels away, three items versus one item,” Reptile says after the fight.
The clip is still the subject of much discussion in the community days later as everyone expresses their own opinion on the dichotomy of tank and ship design. It's a fundamental issue that goes right to the core of League of Legends' design. AD Carries have to do enough damage to kill tanks, but tanks also have to do enough damage to threaten ships or they'd never be picked.
Riot solves this problem with reach and scale, i.e. AD Carries have a range advantage over tanks, so they can kill them at a safe distance. Of course, in an isolated one-on-one scenario like the one in the clip, tanks can just use their tools to close the distance and dump their damage on the carrier. The second solution is scaling – AD Carries start the game weaker than tanks, but eventually build up enough items to crush them. However, tanks also need to scale well, as 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 over the years, while currently – tanks scale very well with health stacking. This creates a scenario like the one depicted in the clip, where even a fed AD Carry struggles to crush a health-laden tank like Tahm Kench.
This topic has been discussed in several Reddit threads, such as this one by Barb0ssaEUW , this one by Gockel , and one by Derk08 . Plaz clarified his stance in a later tweet, saying “Even if Tahm is broken, that's not the point of this tweet, the point is that all (or most) ADC items are fucking garbage, anyone who disagrees is delusional.”
It's a debate that will likely rage in the community forever, as League of Legends class design is a tenuous balancing act. There will always be one of the character archetypes that is slightly more powerful than the other.
