General Carry Theory

Every so often a thread pops up asking about hard carries so I decided to make this so I could helpfully link.

What makes a Hero a carry
Generally speaking, a 'carry' is a Hero whose abilities and skillset scales with items and/or stats. These are often referred to as 'damage steroids'. For example, let's look at the quintessential carry, the oft-reviled Anti-Mage.
He has a spell called Mana Break, which is passive like most damage steroids. It burns 64 mana per hit from the target and deals damage to them based on mana burnt. To capitalise on this, you build a lot of attack speed on Anti-Mage (this also is affected by his Base Attack Time, or BAT, but more on that later). Mana Break also transfers to illusions, which is why you see so many professionals build Manta Style on him.

There are other kinds of damage steroids, too - they do not have to be right-click abilities. See Skywrath Mage's Arcane Bolt (though he isn't technically a carry, this ability does scale directly with him meaning that if you get enough of a lead it's easy to maintain that lead) and Tinker's Rearm, which allows him to refresh the cooldown on all his nukes and deal more damage.

Generally, scaling abilities can often be determined by a multiplier in them, or a % based effect.

The Different Kinds of Scaling
Back to right-click steroids. There are three kinds of scaling - attack speed scaling, damage scaling and attribute scaling. Some abilities, like critical strike effects, fit into both categories.

Attack speed scaling is clearly visible by on-attack effects which usually have a set number to them - Lifestealer's Feast and Spectre's Desolate, as well as the aforementioned Mana Break, are both attack speed scaling abilities. There is usually a point in the game where the ratio of attack speed to enemy HP pool is at its peak. After this point, they will begin to fall off. To capitalise on these abilities, you want to build attack speed.

Damage scaling abilities are abilities which scale with the Hero's damage. These abilities often have a cooldown such as Weaver's Geminate Attack. These are much rarer. Damage scaling abilities can also take the form of bonuses to attack speed, such as Fervor from Troll Warlord and [Night Stalker]]'s Hunter in the Night. To make the most of these abilities, you build flat damage. On Heroes with an innately high attack speed due to their passives/skills, you can also build on-attack proc effects like Mjollnir or Monkey King Bar.
NOTE: Despite being scaling, Bounty Hunter's Jinada is NOT a damage steroid, the cooldown is far, far too long. It is better classified as a scaling nuke which deals physical damage. By extension, Bounty Hunter is not a carry.

Attribute scaling is an ability that scales with the Hero's attributes. Prime examples are Outworld Devourer's Arcane Orb and Riki's Backstab, which both deal damage based upon the mana pool and agility of the Hero, respectively. Illusions come under this category.

Carries and Semicarries?
In its most basic form, the difference between a carry and a semicarry is this: carries scale with items, semicarries scale with levels. While semicarries often gain a lot of benefit from items, a semicarry is more level-reliant than item-dependant. A level seven Zeus with Aghanim's Sceptre and Refresher Orb is a lot less effective than a level nineteen Zeus with no items. Some Heroes can be both carry and semicarry, such as Shadow Fiend, who will go to the midlane, achieve a level advantage and allow his nukes to snowball him into a powerful right clicker. Many semicarries also have right-clicking potential, but not to the extent a carry does, such as Queen of Pain and Viper.

The Difference between a Carry and a Hard Carry
This is a crucial difference of deciding when to end the game. For a hero to be a hard carry, there are three criteria they MUST fulfill:
1) They must have a high amount of damage in the lategame.
2) They must have the ability to survive or maneuver to deal this damage.
3) They must be unkiteable.

For the sake of explanation, I will compare four Heroes whose abilities encompass much of the different kinds of carry abilities you will find: a hard carry, Spectre, and two normal carries, Lifestealer, Weaver and Outworld Devourer.

Spectre is an illusion Hero, as her illusions gain her Desolate ability. This ability is an attack speed scaling ability which due to the illusions carrying it, and Spectre's mediocre attack speed, peaks very late in the game. Her ultimate, Haunt, also summons an illusion at all of her enemies which contributes to a huge chunk of her damage. Finally, Dispersion deals more damage the higher your HP pool, encouraging many Spectres to build tanky. These three abilities combine to fulfill criteria 1. To fulfill criteria 2, Spectre uses Spectral Dagger to move around a fight and keep in position, and Dispersion also keeps her alive. The combination of Spectral Dagger's powerful slow/speed boost, the massive radius of damage reflection from Dispersion, and the high speed of illusions from Haunt, make Spectre extremely difficult to kite, fulfilling criteria 3.

Lifestealer also has an attack speed scaling ability in Feast which scales with the enemy's HP pool, allowing it to maintain high effectiveness throughout, and also possesses a damage scaling ability in the form of Rage. These two abilities make him a high damage target His Open Wounds slow, spell immunity from Rage, ambush powers from Infest and the life leech from Feast all combine to allow him to fulfill criteria 2. However, Lifestealer is considered one of the most easily kiteable Heroes in the game; while he does have a powerful slow, he is melee, does not usually build a Yasha for extra speed, and the presence of Ghost Scepters and Force Staffs will ruin his day. He does not fulfill criteria 3 and cannot be a hard carry.

Weaver, conversely, is utterly unkiteable. Shukuchi alone fulfills criteria 3. He is also able to move around a fight, being extremely elusive and hard to kill due to Shukuchi and Time Lapse. However, his damage steroid, Geminate Attack, is very weak and does not give him nearly as much damage as he needs to be a hard carry.

Outworld Devourer certainly possesses the damage - Arcane Orb and Sanity's Eclipse are both attribute scaling abilities that eat faces. He is also unkiteable, being ranged, fast and almost always building Rod of Atos and Scythe of Vyse. However, he is squishy, having little HP, and if you can get a silence off on him his damage shuts down. He fulfills criteria 1 and 3, but not 2.
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Now, I'm certain there are things I forgot, so if you have anything I missed please tell me and I'll edit in more information.

Tchuss!

However, some "hard" carries simply don't fulfill the criteria. Take Medusa. She scales very well because ALL THREE ATTRIBUTES go into her EHP and split shot deals a good percentage of your attack damage to 5 enemy units. However, she is so easy to kite its just kinda sad. I would say she is the Sven of late game carries. Solid pushing and tankiness(more tankiness than Sven) but is still easy to kite. Sven isn't considered a hard carry because of his lack of mobility, but maybe thats because you can just run from him until his ult is on CD and then engage him to just kill him.

Great thread

1 rep/applaud

Heres the definition of a hard carry without going into the characterstix:
"a hard carry is a hero that, given the gold advantage provided to them by coordinated plays by other teammates, can hold the other team on their own while defending its base and structures and converts the enemy's push into their loss or significantly diminishes fighting potential of the enemy team either by klliing opposing carry through manfight or killing the utility and support carriers so that the opposing carry is rendered worthless. It is imperative to mention that the carry must have the potential to scale as long as the game progresses and has tremendous advantage once it has farmed tier4 items that help scale its own abilities that may or may not benefit from attack speed or damage or health or armor."

What my mentor told me( opening my eyes and letting me rediscover dota)
A hard carry is born, not made.
You cannot play any hero as a hrad carry.
Traditionally, why a carry is called hard is because of his HARD SKIN, because it stacks ARMOR, scaling its EHP becoming more survivable late game at the point when armor scales late game.
With that being said, he can stack items that benefit his abilities that may be active or passive.

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now lets look at hero stat attributes.
Str gives hp,
Int gives Mana,
Agi Gives Attack speed AND Armor.

Taking damage out of consideration you can see the game has bias towards agility.

Take also the fact that many chance based items scale well with Att speed and also the fact that Talisman of evasion is best used in butterfly. Also the fact that UAM like diffusal blade is made out of agi item(i dont see any other stat making an item primarily giving a UAM).
Has anyone used two ogre clubs to make diffusal?
When was the last time a mystic staff was used to make an impressive carry item,(shivas guard arguably keeping aside, scythe for me is not a carry item but the best utility item in game)?
The game is skewed towards agi.
STR has to make armor attack speed.
Int has to make armor and att speed.
Agi only has to get str.

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This sums it up, a discussion enrobing the hard carry discussion. You cannot look at hard carry in a vaccum, you have to see it with stats and how stats scale.

Take chance of item procs out, and you got everyone that scales well with items.
Take chance proc out of abilities and agi will not be the only carry.
Take armor out of AGI attribute and STR will be the new carry class.
Let magic damage scale and strip the 25% magic resist out, and INT might just dominate all of the classes.

But DoTA is a game where only one is made rich and all know that only one is needed to win the game, too many chefs spoil the dinner, too many carries spoil the draft(unless we are talking troll warlord support). Someone has to be a ward *****, someone has to carry utility, some one has to make space and someone has to let all other mates attempts come to fruition once that guy is farmed.


Hope it enlightens anyone lost out there.

Also worth noting, generally, there are 5 main types of carries with some crossovers, under two categories.
PHYSICAL DAMAGE
1 v 1 me m8's: Heroes like Faceless Void, Troll Warlord, and Morphling
1-5 v 5 me(us) m8's: Heroes like Spectre, Ember Spirit, and Sven
1-5 v 5 me, (my team) and my illusions m8s: Heroes like Spectre, Chaos Knight, and Phantom Lancer
5 v 4 my team while your base melts m8's: Heroes like Terrorblade, Lycan, and Nature's Prophet

MAGICAL DAMAGE
SCREW YOUR ARMOR, IM NOT DEALING WITH THAT M8's: Heroes like Necrophos, Tinker, Enchantress

Some heroes fit into both categories even, such as OD or Storm Spirit(Actually thats about it...) but it's a good way to categorize carries.