Take a deep breath, clear your mind. Watch this video and take in the essence... you are now the honey badger, you have no fear, no reservations, you just don't give a ****.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg


Now this is exactly how you will play lee sin, you will tower dive all day. You will ****ing engage 1v5. You will chase people down through 3 tiers of towers, kill them, then say worth it in all chat; cause your a ****ing honey badger.

No fear, just pure badassery, this is the mindset you must have when you play lee sin. If you do not, you will just fall into the crowd of many wanna-be lee sin's that end up doing nothing but feeding. Be one with the honey badger.

For an example of how to play lee sin as such, refer to my thread with all my replays: http://www.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=699559 .

The core item build is fairly straight forward, you want to be aiming for the first 5 items of yours to be:
1) Brutalizer
2) Warmogs
3) Mercury Treads
4) Atma's
5) Force of Nature


The Last few items between Last whisperer-Frozen Mallet are all up to your choosing. Whatever the Situation calls for, just experiment a little



Now after this point the game is pretty deep in and if you are not raping already you are doing something wrong. However your team may be anticarrying you, those damn scrubs, so what do you get now? There is a multitude of options depending on the situation.

For example, let's say you are just getting locked down by heavy magic damage and cc while your team does jack **** about it. No problem, pickup a banshees veil. If the game goes even farther, sell your brutalizer, pickup an IE, or turn your brutalizer into a youmuu's. The last 2 slots are really at user discretion, and this will come with experience playing lee sin, testing builds etc. But most games won't even go that long, you will be legendary far before you even get your 5 core items.

Agressive, this is where the honey badger mindset comes in. You play so aggressive that you either first blood or get first blooded. Again refer to my replays for specific instances of my laneplay (note how i get FB a vast majority of the time). Using your q at level 1 paired with exhaust you can dish out plenty of damage. But you have to make sure to use your increased attack speed attacks and second Q efficiently.

Your job is not to farm at all. Your job is to kill the enemy, you do not give a **** about creeps. Your job is to lock down the enemy in your lane so hard that he just becomes worthless. Use Q to initiate and close the gap if he is ranged, then use W to increase your attack speed+stats and to give yourself that shield. If he is melee just run up to him and use W for shield/increase stats and use Q when he starts to run away then finish him off with second Q.

The brush in top lane is your biggest weapon, use it wisely. Whether it be to throw a invisible Q from the brush or to use it to bait a 1v2 gank into a double kill for you, or to run away in that situation. Using your q to jump to enemy creeps, w to jump to your own creeps and flash you should have no trouble escaping if you use the brush properly

So basically as lee sin in team fights your job is to do multiple things:

1) Use your ultimate to CC as many people as possible OR use your ultimate to knock an enemy into 1v4 against your team.

2) Do not let the squishies on the enemy team dps at all, either rape them or zone them out or just slow their attack speed with tempest. After this, just overall control the battle with how much you can fly around/slow people and knock them around.

3) Protect your carry. Now i realize this is kind of hard to juggle with keeping the enemy squishies away, but if you play lee sin right, the enemy carries should be dead or out of the fight in the first few seconds of the fight, leaving the rest of the fight for you to protect your own squishies.

4) Soaking up damage. If this means tower diving into a 1v5 do it. With my build you will not die, and even if you did you probably either took a couple of people out with you or set up the team fight for your team perfectly.

5) DPS. Yes that's right not only do you have amazing battle field control and utiltiy, you can do quite a bit of dps! Using your attack speed increases between skills is key to this as well as properly using Q and R (many situations you may not be able to use your R in a situation that would enable you to do #1, so you can use it for some burst damage). e.g. lee sin's q does more damage the more hp they are missing, so now im fighting a trynd, hes half hp, im half hp, and i know he wants to ult really badly, but hes trynd, dies very quick, so i throw my Q at him and in a quick flurry ult him then Q him again [note how i ult first to make sure hes as low as possible], if done correctly trynd will go half -> 0 before he even has a chance to ult.