Why Teemo Is the Best Champion in League of Legends

I peaked Gold II two seasons ago, playing almost exclusively top lane Teemo. 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.

Teemo is the best champion in League of Legends. He isn’t the strongest one right now, patch 14.15 has him sat in the middle of the top lane tier list, and that’s mostly down to how much of his kit goes to waste if you don’t know the specific things it rewards. Strength and quality have never been the same thing. Every part of his kit rewards understanding something specific rather than reacting fast enough, and understanding specific things is the one part of this game I have ever reliably been good at.

Guerrilla Warfare: the passive people dismiss as a gimmick

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. 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.

Blinding Dart: 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, 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 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.

Move Quick: a lane-phase stat check, and I mean that literally

The passive on Move Quick 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. Every trade in lane comes with a second cost on top of the damage: whether taking the hit is worth losing that speed advantage for the next five seconds. That is exactly the kind of arithmetic that rewards someone who treats lane phase like a spreadsheet rather than a fight.

Toxic Shot: the poison that 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 is 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.

Noxious Trap: the shrooms are a vision problem, not a balance one

Noxious Trap places a stealthed trap that arms after a second and detonates on contact, dealing damage, slowing and revealing whatever set it off. People call this obnoxious, and it is, because the damage was never the reason it’s annoying to play against. A well placed trap in a river bush or on a jungle path barely needs to deal damage. Its actual job is denying information, and denying information to an enemy jungler is worth considerably more than the number on the tooltip suggests.

The build, as of patch 14.15

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 is exotic. It’s 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.

None of this makes Teemo hard to play. It makes him easy to play badly and only slightly harder to play well, and the gap between those two things is bigger than it looks from outside.