Lee Sin is a high damage and high mobility melee character. He's very effective in any lane. You'll see him the most in the jungle, but he's also a great top laner.

Lee Sin is one of the highest learning curve characters in the game, so don't get frustrated if you don't get him right away, it takes practice.

For jungling, if you get caught in the jungle at any point you can flash over a wall hopefully to safety.

For laning, it's easier to escape ganks with Flash than with Ghost. Sometimes with Ghost you're unable to avoid their red buff, or their slow/stun (e.g. udyr skarner etc.).

If you're not a huge fan of Flash, no worries, other summoner spells are solid too.


Required if you're going to jungle, do not use laning. A lot of people have the notion 'well, I can jungle without it therefore, I don't need it' this is incorrect. If you don't carry Smite, you open up the game for the Enemy team to steal your buffs, dragons, and even Baron.

With recent changes Smite now updates to how much damage it does, so check that before smiting if you are unsure. You want to always attempt to Smite when it will kill! (Unless you're using Q smite Q which I'll explain later.)


Ghost is much better at closing gaps than Flash is; however, you cannot go over walls which is one of the detriments. As mentioned earlier Ghost generally isn't as good at escaping ganks from certain heroes.

Ghost shines when you have to stick to heroes or you have to run a long distance to get to a skirmish a decent distance away from where you are.


I would only get this in lane. It increases your killing potential early game especially, and coupled with your Q and Ult, you can potentially catch them off guard with how much damage you deal.


Exhaust is a very good summoner spell, and is acceptable in both jungle and lane. If they have more than one auto attacker you should at least consider getting it.

In the jungle, it increases potency of your ganks by decreasing their armor and MR and slowing them down. Slowing them down allows both you and the your teammate to attack the enemy. Also it's the best 1v1 Summoner skill if you ever get into a slug fest with the enemy jungle.

In the lane, it's a solid choice against auto attackers.


I haven't personally tried this on Lee, but some people like to get this on pretty much everybody. I've even seen it used with Smite.


Blahhh...It's nice to be able to teleport to dragon and teleport gank and what not, it just sucks that your killing power especially early game suffers immensely by picking this up. I haven't experimented enough with it to make a final judgment on it.


Not enough testing to fully comment. It's solid against CC heavy teams especially as Lee Sin gets punished pretty hard by CC, being unable to utilize his mobility is not good.

Other

Nope. :>

Marks

Damage

Attack Damage is very similar to Armor Penetration. If you run the numbers you won't notice a huge deviation between choosing either one.

If you do not have attack damage runes, use armor penetration, if you do not have armor penetration, use attack damage. Don't go out of your way to build an ArP/AD page for Lee both will work.

Everything besides Armor Penetration and Attack Damage Marks are pretty meh for Lee Sin.

Armor Penetration

Armor Penetration helps your early game damage, which includes your harass, ganks, and jungling speed.


Seals

Armor

Armor is really the only choice for both jungling and laning. There's nothing that really competes with it. In lane you could go AD or HP/lvl if you really dislike armor or their team is 100% ap or something.

Glyphs

Magic Resist or Magic Resist per Level

Pretty standard for both jungling and laning. It helps his overall tankiness. Nothing sucks worse than when you gank their AP mid and they just blow you up.

Cooldown Reduction

Doesn't help Lee too much, if you're in a situation where you need to spam spells rather than spell, 1-2, spell chances are you're going to run out of energy anyways.

Armor

You don't get enough Armor from this slot to make it worthwhile, it's a possibility if they have 0 AP.

Quintessence

Attack Damage vs. Armor Penetration

Attack Damage has a slight edge here, due to a better ratio to marks (as well as scaling with your E) than Armor Penetration, again, it's not worth busting your balls to buy Attack Damage quints if you're short on IP, you can get by with Armor Penetration.

Flat Health

Doesn't do much for your jungle speed or ganking ability (besides not dying when ganking against incredibly strong champs) but is worth considering if you're going to be the only tank.

Movament Speed

Another meh, he's already incredibly mobile, the movement speed doesn't make too big of a difference. I'll need to test it some with the new jungle respawning so rapidly, and movement speed playing more of a role.

If you have access to all the runes, I'd run a page similar to the one I posted above.

Laning

During the laning phase you need to be aggressive, but you also gotta be smart. Don't take too much damage from creeps or turrets, make sure you win your exchanges.

Something that sometimes catches the enemy off-guard is standing back from the creep wave, then W'ing to a creep the double E'ing and double Q'ing then backing out. There's danger in this however because you won't be able to easily escape until your W is back off CD, it's definitely a trick to utilize is you're winning exchanges and aren't worried about a jungler gank.

If you see their jungler bottom you can play more aggressive than normal.

Your main role is either protecting your carry, or sticking to the enemy carry. If the enemy carry is a higher threat to your team, than your carry is to their team, you should probably go after their carry. Be sure to pick your spots wisely, because sometimes even when your carry is behind it's unrealistic to go for the enemy carry due to their positioning or protection. Take what you can get.

Utilize your ultimate, sometimes it's better to kick someone away, sometimes to kick them towards your team, sometimes to kick as many people as possible, that's a total judgment call that is independent of each specific situation.

Try to slow (with your E) as many people as possible unless you're acting as anti-carry, then make sure to get your E on them. E can be very effective at protecting your carry as well.