Champ of the Week: Teemo Wrapup

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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.

  

Champ of the Week: Teemo trouble

Easter Bunny Teemo.

This is now the sixth part of the Champ of the Week series and I can honestly say I haven’t had this kind of bad luck yet. Every time I’ve picked Teemo this week it has resulted in utter failure. My first serious attempt at counter jungling I ended at 4-10, basically tanking for our team because our real tank was never with us. In other games my teammates have been all over the place, or we haven’t had any CC.

I also had the unique displeasure of laning mid against Warwick. I can’t wait till they nerf that hairy bastard. He was tower diving me at level six and otherwise nuking straight through the 80 magic resistance I had at level 10. It was an infuriating experience.

For right now I’m just trying to keep the faith. I know I’ve had fun with Teemo. I know I’ve done well with Teemo, and not just in that fluke, the-other-team-is-a-wild-pack-of-noobs kind of way. Still, I’m having a hard time seeing those games right now. That’s one of the funny things about this game – it’s so easy to get into a rut with a champion or a comp or a class or anything and just forget to try and dig yourself out. There are champions I haven’t played in ages, probably because my last experience wasn’t so great.

Not Teemo. I won’t let that little Yordle down. If I give up on him, who are we going to send to make mushroom art on the moon?

  

Champ of the Week: Teemo

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I was sad to get a late start on the Champ of the Week this week, but the weekend away was totally worth it. I drove late last night thinking of who I felt confident I could fully test over the course of a short week and kept coming back to the same answer: Teemo. Yes, I’ll be playing everyone’s favorite Yordle this week.

I used to have nothing but loathing for Teemo. It took him forever to get a decent mushroom field going and his damage was fairly lackluster. Now, though, he’s got a pretty solid kit and he’s certainly capable of tying a team together. He also offers his team some crazy map control, which can be a lot of fun.

Teemo does suffer if he has a lackluster early game which is made especially painful against teams that push through the laning phase early. Without a big farm, Teemo feels especially dull. His health is too low to survive the bursty teams and his damage doesn’t ramp up fast enough to cut down the tanks.

That said, Teemo does have some nice early game damage and I think he has a pretty cool skillset for some counter jungling. I’m hoping some of my Nunu skills will carry over. Teemo definitely doesn’t have the creep control that Nunu does, but I could see him being powerful as a ganker against some of the slower, softer junglers.

My first experiment with it did not go particularly well. I was having a terrible string of luck, not to mention my opponents had a very competent Karma running Clairvoyance, which made things all the more annoying. Hopefully I’ll have more to report in the next several days.

  

Pro Tip: Stop picking Teemo

Don't pick Teemo.This post is fueled in part by my own rage surrounding some recent losses, but it’s something that also really needs to be addressed. If you expect to win ranked games, stop picking Teemo.

Some of you are going to say “lolwut?” and lucky you. If you aren’t seeing Teemo in your ranked matches, you’re in much better shape than I am. I see him regularly, and most of them are players without any concept of how the game works. A recent Teemo actually said, after I took mid as Ez because I was the carry, “lol since when does Ezreal carry?” At any rate, if you’re picking Teemo, I’ll give you a few good reasons to stop.

First, his passive is nearly worthless. The attack speed bonus made it better, but better from the most situational uses in the game. If you’re looking for an attack damage champion to play, consider Tristana, whose passive keeps her out of harm’s way, or Ashe, whose passive grants critical strikes when you’ve been out of battle for a period of time.

Beyond his passive, two of Teemo’s other skills are next to worthless. Poison is only good at very early levels – it’s laughable damage later in the game – and Move Quick (or as I call it, Scamper) is only good for getting up to a fight. His one real skill outside his ultimate is his Blinding Dart, which only affects one target and has a fairly long cooldown. His mushrooms can be nice, but they require you to go out of your way to bait people into them, and most smart players won’t follow you. They are also directly countered by an Oracle’s Elixir.

If you’re playing against a smart team, Teemo turns into a one-skill champion. He can blind, and that’s about it. There are plenty of ranged carries offering more utility and a much more devastating lineup of skills to help bring your team a victory.

Please remember, this is a guide for ranked games. Teemo can be a lot of fun if people aren’t paying attention to your shrooms, so by all means, enjoy him in your normal and practice games. If you want to improve your ranking, though, leave Teemo at the champion selection screen.

As an aside, Teemo generates more fan art than any other character as far as I can tell.

  

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