Twelve minutes into your typical ranked game. Your Support is flaming your Jungler, your Midlaner just accused the enemy Mid of scripting, and your ADC has 35 CS. At this point, the game is basically over, but your ADC insists that "we can win guys, we scale, just farm up!". But how do you know that's the truth? What actually qualifies a team as "scaling well into late game" and how can you identify it best?

Scaling is defined as a changing value in comparison to a norm. In League of Legends terms, that means how well a champion or a team composition is compared to the average champion/team at a certain moment in the game. However, when people say "my champion is scaling!", they usually mean that their champion strength goes up over the course of the game.

Renekton is a lane bully, but provides little usefulness in the late game, whether it's split pushing or teamfighting. On the other hand, his brother Nasus (played traditionally) is a weak laner, but can melt turrets and duel almost anyone later in the match.

Factors that determine scaling

In League, every champion has stats that scale throughout the game: Health, health regeneration, mana/mana regeneration for most champs, ability cooldowns, ability damage, ability utility (like the duration of a stun or the strength of a slow)... The list is endless. So, when your teammate in your ranked game says "we scale", he is always technically correct (the best kind of correct), but it doesn't mean you scale better than your opponent. To determine that, you have to look at the champions and matchups in the first place - and then look at the different things that makes those champions scale. Those usually differ in different roles.

DISCLAIMER: Scaling is often a matter of opinion. That means some people say X outscales Y, while other people have different opinions. The following classifications and examples are not set in stone and rather guidelines to understanding the concept.

For ADCs (okay, Marksmen), scaling is rather simple. They are the main damage threat in late game teamfights. Following that reasoning, they possess three big factors that play into their late game strength:

• In-built steroids that give your items extra scaling. Examples for that are Tristana's Q (Rapid Fire), which gives her additional attack speed when activated, Jhin's Passive (which gives additional AD and a huge damage boost on every fourth shot), Kog'Maw (his Q gives him attack speed passively and his W makes his attacks have a lot of additional on-hit damage) and Vayne (who has THREE steroids in her Q, W and R).
• Range. The more range you have, the easier kiting gets, which makes it easier to stay alive to dish out more damage. Examples are Caitlyn (650 Range) or Ashe (600 Range, while her passive slow helps her kite even more).
• Synergy with crit. Critical hits are needed to still do damage to enemy tanks late game, and abilities that amplify that crit damage even more result into a quick death of any tank that dares to come close to you. Examples for this are Vayne's Tumble (Q), which amplifies critical damage as well when the tumble attack hits, or Caitlyn's Headshots, which can crit as well (and have great synergy with Runaan's Hurricane!).

For Midlaners, the scaling is a lot more complicated than for Marksmen. The reason for that is that Midlaners have to fulfill many different roles, so their usefulness is determined by many different factors.

• DPS, or damage per second. Botlane carries are usually the main source of damage for a team, but they cannot kill the entire enemy team alone. That's why it helps to pack lots of late game DPS to help decide the outcome of those late game teamfights; every champion has some amounts of DPS, but the lower the cooldowns and the higher the ratios and base damages on your abilities, the more damage you can do with them. A prime example would be Cassiopeia who has constant damage with her Twin Fangs (E), which when poison-activated, has a 45% AP ratio on a 0.75s cooldown, giving her access to enormous amounts of damage against any target, or Azir's Soldiers.
• Consistent burst. Almost any midlaner has the ability to kill the enemy marksman after about 35 minutes into the game. The question now is how reliable your burst is (point and klick/hard to hit skillshot) and how easily you get to the priority targets to land your burst. Syndra, for example, kills any squishy target with only her ult; however, it's hard for her to get in range to ult without dying to the enemy frontline in a standard fight. The same counts for almost any assassin, especially after the reworks. Champions like Lissandra or Ahri have an easier time accessing the enemy backline and killing the enemy carries without dying.
• Utility. Utility is explained later in this article.

For Toplaners/Junglers, the scaling is limited and quite similar, since junglers are often dubbed as "budget toplaners". Mainly fighters/bruisers and tanks are found in these roles. Their scaling depends on:

• Inherent tankiness/in-built tank steroids. Almost any tank champion has at least one of those in his kit; be it Maokai with his Vengeful Maelstrom (R) that reduces damage taken in an area around him by 20%, Malphite/Poppy who get additional resistances from their W, or Nautilus with his W (Titan's Wrath), which gives him a shield scaling off of his maximum health. This helps to get even tankier than other tanky champions and is kind of self-explanatory.
• Abilities whose damage scales off of your own or the enemies' HP. Skills like Sejuani's Flail of the Northern Winds (W) who scale off of your own health are a good way to deal relevant damage late game without having to build squishy, opening up the things you can do later on; the same also counts for abilities like Sion's Soul Furnace (W) or Amumu's Despair (W), who deal damage based on opponent's health.
• Dueling potential. Not every game has to be won or lost by teamfights - there are champions that work better in a 1v1 split push scenario in a sidelane. When your champion has low single-target cooldowns, a gap closer/escape, melts turrets and doesn't get bursted down easily at the same time, chances are that he has great odds at beating anyone, even if he is down in kills and gold. Examples for that are Nasus, Fiora or Jax. This is a rather abstract concept, especially because in duels, there are lots of ways in which a worse scaling duelist can outplay a better scaling one, but it's nonetheless important.

For Supports, scaling is rarely important - their main job is to provide utility to the team, so they mainly scale with levels, while ratios and items are secondary. Utility means providing anything that isn't damage to still positively impact a fight, like heals, shields or crowd control. The more reliable all those things are, and the more AoE utility a champion has, the better he scales in this part of the game. For the purpose of scaling, you can treat supports like midlaners - though the vast majority of them are based in utility, there are exceptions to the rule who play for burst or DPS, for example Brand, Zyra or Vel'Koz.

The ways champions scale are, of course, not set to a certain role in the game. For example, some scaling toplaners provide additional damage per second or burst in teamfights (like Kennen or Rumble), while some midlaners are great duelists. Utility, which was not mentioned yet except on supports, is a great way of scaling into late game without having to be ahead in the game on any role. It can be a great scaling factor on many champions, from marksmen (Ashe, Jhin) to midlaners (Veigar, Lux) to toplaners and junglers (Vi, Maokai).

So now that we determined how certain champions scale, the thing that's left is deciding how your team itself scales - and there are different layers to that.

In a good late game team composition, you need to find balance between utility and DPS, because too little of either makes it a lot harder to win teamfights. All the DPS in the world doesn't help you if you get charged at by a 700 movement speed Master Yi and have no chance of escaping or locking him down. Similarly, if your team doesn't have the damage to kill a Maokai in under a minute, the chances of you winning the fight shrink drastically. And at last, if the enemy Caitlyn gets to free fire during the whole teamfight, she can decimate your team in seconds.

At the same time, if three members of your team are amazing teamfighters, but you have two duelists constantly trying to split push, all the teamfighting potential in the world is not going to make up for a 3v5. If your team has great teamfighting and scaling, but gets destroyed in the early laning phase by early game-spiking champions, there's not a lot you can do either. And if your team has a Yasuo, but no knockup/displacement on any other champion, he is not going to scale as well as he would have if your team picked Malphite. In almost every part of League, balance and synergy are most integral to winning, and this is no different. You can impact the game in champ select already quite a bit, not only through lane and jungle matchups, but also through composition synergy and balancing out your teams' scaling.

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