Hypercarries- Misconceptions and Realities

One of the most commonly misused and misunderstood terms in League of Legends is “hypercarry.” Nowadays, most people think that a hypercarry can be anyone who has a strong late game potential such as Katarina or Zed. However, this is not true. Be it hyper carry, hypercarry, hard carry, or any other term you want to call it, a hypercarry is a specific subclass of the carry role. In order to really understand what a hypercarry is, I want to review the reality of the carry role because people can just as easily misunderstand this as well.

Carry- A Definition
The thing about carries that most people understand is that they have a relatively weak early game, but compensate for having a much stronger late game. They’re called "carries" because they must be carried through the early game in order to turn around and carry the team for the late. Although this is true for carries, this is not what defines them. It is only a characteristic. The actual definition of a carry is a champion that must obtain items in order to reach a threshold in which they can become a major source of DPS through their autoattacks. That is what people don’t understand.

To briefly explain, the term carry actually originates from the original DoTA in which an "agility carry", or carry for short, would be incredibly weak in the early game, but due to how damage scaling works in DoTA, if the character then got enough agility, it could autoattack incredibly fast while doing insane amounts of damage. Sound familiar? As you can see, while someone like Katarina may be an excellent assassin and teamfighter, she is, by definition, not a carry. The only AP champion that could possibly be considered a carry (at the top of my mind) would be Azir. Further evidence of the inaccuracy of the use of the term carry in League would be the scrapping of the terms APC and ADC in the favor of the terms marksman, mage, and assassin.

Hypercarries- Where They Come In
For the most part, carries in League translate into the marksman role. However, there is still great diversity within said role. You have your casters such as Corki and Ezreal, your normal carries like Ashe and Caitlyn, and then you have your hypercarries. “Caster carries” are pretty easy to separate from carries and hypercarries because a large portion of their damage comes from their abilities. They still do damage with their autoattacks, but they usually have more burst than sustained DPS.

Carries and hypercarries may seem harder to distinguish between at first, but there is quite a division between them. A hypercarry is a carry that has DPS that scales IMMENSLEY with items. They don't just do damage, they can shred entire teams with their autoattacks.There are normally functions within a hypercarry’s kit that cause an exponential growth to its DPS when key items are obtained.

For example, Vayne and Kog’maw are two hypercarries for the same reason. Both have abilities that make their autoattacks do a percent of their enemy’s maximum health as damage. When you buy items such as BoRK or Phantom Dancer on these champions, you aren’t just getting the standard increase in damage through stronger autoattacks, but you are also increasing the number of autoattacks with percentage damage. Other examples of hypercarries include Tristana, Twitch, and Jinx.

Tristana has a gigantic attack speed steroid, maximizing efficiency of any AS items you buy, along with the percent damage on BoRK. Twitch’s AOE ultimate allows (with proper positioning) him to increase his DPS merely by hitting the entire team with one autoattack. With proper items, such as Yomuu’s and BoRK, Twitch’s DPS potential skyrockets. Jinx is an interesting combination between Twitch and Tristana, having both an AOE autoattack as well as a major attack speed steroid.

Are Hypercarries restricted to Marksmen?
One of the reasons I stressed the definition of a carry was because of this. No, hypercarries are not restricted to Marksmen. That being said, this doesn’t mean you can go around labeling anyone who does a lot of damage when they get items a hypercarry. No matter how much damage they do, Katarina and Zed will always just be assassins. They are powerful, yes, but they aren’t carries. However, there are still champions besides marksmen that can be considered carries.

Master Yi is a good example, his E, Wuju Style, gives a percentage increase to his total AD, and then can convert that into true damage. On top of this, his ult, Highlander, gives a large percentage increase to his attack speed and movement speed, allowing any previously bought stats to increase multiplicatively.

Anyways, this about brings us to the end. Thanks for reading everyone, and I hope this can help you further understand exactly what a hypercarry is! I could stretch out the definition of hypercarry to list a few more champions, but I want to leave that up to you guys! Now knowing the definition of a hypercarry, what champions do you think could be considered one?

Credit to artist anice from zerochan for cover photo.