LoL Teemo Beginner’s Guide

LoL Teemo Beginner’s Guide by Deadwinter

With the new skin coming soon, my spidey sense is telling me some people are going to start playing Teemo. I play Teemo quite a bit when I feel like having fun, so I am going to run down some basics for people looking to pick him up.

Now, there are 4 roles where you can play teemo, but there are only 2 where you should play him. Teemo can be played in any role other than jungle, but his two main roles are as a mid laner and a top laner. To play Teemo, you need to have some knowledge on basic things such as

• Map Pressure
• Kiting
• Splitpushing
• The blind mechanic
• How squishy you actually are

Teemo’s main issues in both the top and mid lane is he is extreme squishy with no easy escapes. Therefore, you need to be able to kite opponents without taking much damage.

There are many ways to build Teemo in both top and mid, and as such theres a long list of items that work on him.

• Liandry’s
• Rylais
• Nashor’s tooth
• Runaans Hurricane ( Only buy when splitpushing or when you have a strong frontline so you can spray the enemy team )
• Frozen Hammer
• Standard AP items ( Rabadon/Morrello/Void)
• Wits end

You could realisticly combine any of these items ( and more! ) and have it as a working build, but you generally want to focus on one area of Teemo to build towards

• Splitpushing
  • When splitpushing, you want to build so you can clear waves quickly and push towers down fast. You want to cause people to come top to chase you. This creates map pressure allowing your team to take objectives easily down bottom.
  • Runaan’s and Liandry’s is your bread and butter here, it allows your E to melt down a whole wave.
  • Frozen hammer and Rylai’s are both great items for a split push build to stop your enemies from chasing you down.
  • Building Liandry/Rylai/Frozen Hammer makes you quite the tanky adversary, allowing you to live longer when pursued top.
  • Using your mushrooms as wards here is super important, when splitpushing you typically dont want to fight, but just run off and return when someone comes to get you. You can also use your passive to stealth somewhere. The goal when splitpushing is to be an annoying constant push that applies map pressure the entire game
  • Running teleport is key, you will need it to return to the top lane quickly, or teleport to drag in order to assist your team. ( When splitpushing with this build, you might not be very useful in a team fight depending on the cercumstances. If both teams are fighting bot, you may want to continue pushing top and get a tower if you feel you will not be useful in the fight.)
• Attack Speed/AP
  • An AS/AP build allows you to fight other champions with the purpose of whittling them down with your E. This would be used against a team with a strong frontline that you can’t get past to assassinate somebody.
  • A Nashor’s Tooth and Liandry’s would be your two main items here. They allow you to melt down tanks in a team fight, so your team can just push them over.
  • From here you could itemize into Void staff or Deathcap depending on how far ahead you are in the game. Later on, a wits end could be used if the enemy team is stacking MR.
  • This is a very versatile build, being a hybrid between the utility based splitpushing build, and the full AP assassin build. You can do a lot with it, and it is the easiest to learn and build.
  • Your mushrooms, while still not extremely potent, do a good bit of damage and are more than a mild inconvenience with this build.
  • This build can be used in the top, or the mid lane. Ignite is recommended in the mid lane, and teleport in the top lane.
• Full AP Assassin
  • As per the name, the point of this build is to burst someone down before they have the chance to react. This is best used against a team comp with 3 or more squishy champions, or a fed adc that needs to be shut down.
  • You would build this similar your average mid laner. Morello into Deathcap then build based on need. No attack speed would be used in this build.
  • Your three most important tools of this playstyle is the sweeper, your mushrooms, and your passive. If you spread your mushrooms throughout the map, not only do they do a lot of damage to a squishy champion, they allow you to make picks. If you see that the enemy adc likes to roam the jungle. You can plant shrooms to see when they are coming. Using your passive to ambush and kill them when they step on a mushroom makes it laughingly easy. It also causes the enemy team to buy pinks + sweepers/
  • Your objective in a team fight is simple. Q –> auto a squishy, back off until you can do it again. Use ignite to secure the kill.
  • You are very squishy using this build, be careful.
• Abilities
  • Q – Simple, blinds the target and does a flat amount of AP damage. Main damage ability when building AP. Ruins the adc’s day.
  • W – A passive amount of speed when not on CD. When used, gives a short boost of higher speed. In a long drawn out chase, don’t use this because you will be very slow when its over. Use when you need ashort term boost of speed.
  • E – A passive poison applied on your auto attacks. Weaving auto attacks when building full AP is very important. Auto attacks are your main damage when building AS/AP.
  • R – Your Mushrooms, the cause of people hate for Teemo. Makes you literally hitler when they are spread throughout the entire map. Force fights where you have a large amount of mushrooms, these can make or break fights.

That’s the basics of Teemo, a fairly complex champion that requires some knowledge to play. Thank you for reading, and please leave comments below so we can all discuss this amazing champion.