Talk:Graves/@comment-180.215.87.89-20111215214014/@comment-3165723-20120112083345

If you're saying graves vs. X-carry, you'd probably wanna put your money on graves. If he can do well early game and put the enemy carry down and keep them down all the way through, graves will, of course, own. But if you aren't the kind of player who wants to play aggressive early game and would rather farm and play safe, don't pick graves. I won what was essentially a 4v5 in ranked by shutting down their kog maw and keeping him down all game through, even through a fed enemy kat. Vayne if you're more of a wait-til-late-game kinda player and graves if you have no trouble playing super aggressively early game.

It also should be mentioned that graves has a great amount of survivability in a straight fight 1v1 or something, but in a team fight, his relative beefiness isn't enough to take all the punishment from being focused. The fact that champs like cait trist and vayne have an actual disengage (Net, Jump+ult, Tumble+stealth) to keep them alive in team fights makes them more likely to survive a team fight. Graves does have his E and W to help him out, but since his dps basically requires him to be in your face and blowing cooldowns and his E is more of an ENgage instead of a DISengage, it's more difficult for him to get out.

Basically, graves doesn't carry as well as other carries because he doesn't have a really good scaling steroid and/or a good attack range. Vayne has Q, Cait has her passive and range (basically half of both of those things each), trist has her crazy range and insane AS boost, Ashe is somewhat of an exception since she has a huge amount of utility and her auto attacks hit extremely hard late game.