Champ of the Week: Teemo Wrapup
The Teemo champ of the week has been one of the toughest yet. Teemo is missing a lot of the mobility and survivability that other champions have, not to mention that he has one of the weakest passives in the game. He can still have an excellent early game, though, as long as you’re willing to play carefully.
I started the week trying to tweak my typical Teemo build to take advantage of Trinity Force and Wit’s End. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of gold to put toward items that best augment a naturally high attack damage or a naturally higher attack speed. Teemo’s poison certainly gives him a lot of damage, but it adds magic damage to each shot, both when the attack lands and in the damage over time. For that reason, Malady/Bloodrazor seem to be the best way to go, with a little survivability as you need it. I’m not typically a fan of Frozen Mallet, but it really is a solid item for Teemo if you don’t need a Banshee’s Veil.
The strangest thing about Teemo is his secret taunt passive. For whatever reason, players love to kill Teemo. Even in fights in which I thought I was second or even third priority, I often found myself getting focused immediately. In a weird way, this can absolutely help your team. Teemo’s damage output is great once he’s farmed, but depending on map position, taking the priority off your carries can be effective.
For the most part, I think Teemo is in a pretty good place. He needs a team with enough crowd control/peel to help keep him alive, a favor he can return with the exceptional map control offered by his mushrooms. If I could change one thing about Teemo it would definitely be his passive. His passive has essentially one use and one use only: level 1 harassment. It can be helpful when setting up a teamfight, but unless you’re well ahead of your opponent, it usually doesn’t make sense to stand still long enough to take advantage of the passive. I’d like to see him get some sort of damage or utility, potentially giving him the survivability to make it into the jungle. My few attempts to counter jungle were met with almost immediate failure. Counter junglers really need to be able to control creeps, not champions, and Teemo just doesn’t have that power early in the game.
Stay tuned later today for this coming week’s Champ of the Week.
Posted in: Reviews
Tags: Champ of the Week, counter jungle, map awareness, ranged ad, ranged carry, ranged dps, ranged support, teemo, teemo buff, teemo build, teemo guide
Mostly agree about his passive’s usefulness being low. I’ve had a few games where I’ve camped in their base until a large creep wave for a turret push or inhibitor respawn then just shredded it but those occasions are few and far between.
Actually, if you’re not sure which champ you’d like to try next, I do have a suggestion.
Nasus was the first champion I ever got really good with. I still take him out and dust him off from time to time, and I had a really good game with him today.
What’s his status in the big leagues? Is he still viable and fun? What tweaks would he require if not?
Hi there –
Really enjoying your champion of the week feature, however I do feel like you may not have had the right approach to Teemo.
There are a lot of things that make teemo fun/good/useful etc, but the two that are absolutely most important are:
1. Laning
2. Map Control
These are the two things that make Teemo an absolute monster, especially in solo queue games. I feel like without the right approach to a champion you may be assessing him the wrong way.
1. Laning – With one of the best auto attack harasses in the game, Teemo has a pretty strong advantage in most lanes. Most often, players use some flat defense runes and dart in and out using toxic shot and move quick to out pressure their opponent. Very few champions can keep up with that level of harass. This is part champion and part playstyle, you have to get used to his damage and ability to harass before you can really exploit it to it’s full advantage. Apart from really aggressive anti carries, he pretty much has the advantage in most lanes.
2. Map Control – Once you hit 6, you’re a living breathing individual threat to the enemy team? Why? Because 99% of Teemo’s solo top and become extremely difficult to gank. The presence of mushrooms protects him from all but the most coordinated ganks as long as you are being effective in your placement of them. The point of counter-jungling is when you line up an escape from their jungle with mushrooms. So say you are blue team and you want to go hit their red later into the game, you shroom up that whole patch across double golems and proceed to go for their red. If they start to gank you, trek back across your shrooms so that it forces them to run over tons.
Playing teemo takes some finesse, so I’m sad you didn’t get the opportunity to really get a good feel for what he’s capable of, but good stuff nonetheless