Why Teemo Is the Best Champion in League of Legends

I peaked Gold II two seasons ago, playing almost exclusively top lane Teemo, and Gold sits comfortably above the median rank for the server (Silver, according to the last distribution numbers I checked), which is enough to have an opinion from without needing to apologise for it first.

I went and checked the current tier list before writing any of this, half expecting patch 14.15 to have finally caught up with him, and instead found him sat exactly where he usually is, in the middle of the top lane pack, mostly because so much of his kit goes to waste if you don’t already know the specific things it rewards. Every part of it rewards understanding something specific rather than reacting fast enough, which happens to be the one part of this game I’ve ever reliably been good at, and it’s why, tier list or not, I still think he’s the best champion in League of Legends.

Guerrilla Warfare

Stand still for 1.5 seconds, or walk through brush for the same duration, and Teemo goes invisible. Break that invisibility by moving, attacking or casting, and he gets Element of Surprise, a burst of bonus attack speed that lasts a few seconds afterwards.

It’s an easy passive to write off as a joke, mostly because most Teemos never make full use of it, but played properly it turns every bush on the map into a decision point for the enemy team, walk through and risk an ambush, or take the long way round and lose the tempo instead.

The blind everyone explains wrong

This is the ability I enjoy being pedantic about most, because “he blinds you” is the shorthand everyone uses and it undersells the whole thing. Well, technically, the blind only stops basic attacks from landing, it does nothing to true damage and nothing to ability damage that isn’t a basic attack, which is a distinction that matters enormously against an auto-attack reliant champion and matters not at all against a mage who was never going to right click anyone anyway.

Land it on Katarina and you’ve achieved almost nothing, land it on Tryndamere and the fight is definately over before it starts, same two seconds of blind both times. “Just build a blind counter” is advice that only holds up against the second champion, because it does nothing about the ability damage the first one was always going to kill you with.

A lane-phase stat check, and I mean that literally

Move Quick’s passive grants bonus movement speed until Teemo is hit by a champion or a turret, at which point it switches off and comes back five seconds later, so every trade in lane comes with a second cost stacked on top of the damage, whether taking the hit is worth losing that speed advantage for the next five seconds, which is exactly the kind of arithmetic that rewards someone who treats lane phase like a spreadsheet rather than a fight.

Toxic Shot does the actual damage

The mushrooms get all the attention and the poison does all the work. Every basic attack applies Toxic Shot, an on-hit poison with damage over time, and that damage is boosted by 160% against monsters, which turns out to be the actual reason a competent Teemo clears jungle camps or splits a lane faster than the tier list suggests he should. Build into it properly, Liandry’s Torment and Rylai’s Crystal Scepter both amplify damage over time, and the numbers stop being a footnote and start being the reason the enemy top laner is dead.

Why the shrooms actually matter

Noxious Trap places a stealthed trap that arms after a second and detonates on contact, dealing damage, slowing and revealing whatever set it off, and people call this obnoxious, which it is, though not for the reason most of them think, since the damage was never why it’s annoying to play against. A well placed trap in a river bush or on a jungle path barely needs to deal damage at all, because its actual job is denying information, and denying information to an enemy jungler is worth considerably more than the number on the tooltip suggests.

Whether Riot has any actual plan to bring him back to relevance rather than leaving him as a permanently mid-tier pick I genuinely don’t know, and nothing in how he’s been treated patch to patch over the last couple of years gives much of a hint either way.

The build

For anyone taking notes rather than just my word for it: Sorcerer’s Shoes, Liandry’s Torment, Rylai’s Crystal Scepter, Zhonya’s Hourglass and Rabadon’s Deathcap, roughly in that order depending on how the lane’s gone, none of it exotic, an on-hit poison scaling into a straightforward AP burst and slow, which is more or less what Teemo’s kit has been built to do since the character existed.

I still lock him in champion select whether the current patch agrees with me or not, and I’ve largely stopped checking the notes hoping for a buff, because he doesn’t get them often and there’s no obvious reason that’s about to change.