Hello, i'm a tf main since a few seasons (including times where he wasn't good) and i feel like a lot of people are misitemizing him right now, so I felt like it would be good opportunity to share this guide i've hit emerald with with a strong wr / kda on TF.

Safety is key

It's extremely important before you learn to be agressive as tf, that you learn not to die and the mechanisms that will lead to safe play.

TF is a vulnerable laner with no defense no reliable escape, no tradekill potential. Do not push or stay middle of lane without vision. Do not stay lane low health, even if you just ate a nasty poke out of base, just base again and try again. Do not greedily chase.

No one plays perfectly. What will make you better is not to avoid making mistakes. Mistakes will always happen.

What makes you better is avoiding any kind of high risk low reward situation. Before you turn the game into a win, learn not to lose it by yourself.

I would lie if I told you that you will easily dominate the lane with this champion. TF is about creating a small edge on your opponent thanks to roaming and passive, but won't generate huge mid gaps where you can solo bolo your opponent 5 times in a row.

It's worth noting however that the edge TF creates for his team can be done regardless many circumstances. When you're gaped as akali your game is gone. When you don't have a favorable matchup as a toplaner you will spend a lot of time suffering and might end up just losing based on champ selection.

When you're behind as TF, you can still play for your teammates and land a crucial gold card on a gank, you can still sidelane push and generate gold advantage for your team. TF is cheat in that he win games you were supposed to lose based on 1v1 ability; but don't trust the card dealer for making it a fair game !

My overall goal when i lane is to take the minimum possible damage.

You usually lose trades when you trade. So just don't if you don't know how to. Safe farm. Lose cs if you have to lose cs. I consider I successfuly laned when i just backed with 1300 gold at level 5. This means you have to focus well on lasthitting and back with around 40 cs.

Generally if you push you use your abilities on cs and try to shove fast but if the laner is willing to trade / punish you for this, then it's best to keep your abilities up for a card / Q threat. Double tap W to select any card and quickly disengage is sometimes a more effective way to harass than trying to select gold card every time.

You have to master general concepts of lane manipulation : in general, push if you plan to skirmish with your jungler, otherwise, play safe around your tower (but push enough so you don't have to lasthit a lot under tower while eating poke) and setup for ganking. Even if your jungler doesn't come, being safe under tower generally give you better odds of backing with that 1300: to push and avoid you freezing him, your opponent may waste mana on cs, exposing himself to opportunistic harass and/or a gank.

In all cases, back when you're low or reached lvl5, and take a closer look at the map for gank opportunities as you hit 6 with item.

There is a key component to consider when midlaning in general - but true for tf as well, is to manage well how your jungle wants to duel the enemy jungler, and be there first to assist and create a temporary 2v1. Because you have early cc and low damage, you usually want to pair with junglers who have high damage (hence synergies section).

Because your early damage is so low you usually don't want to 2v2 unless someone is low, but your gold card can help your jungler escape dire situations. It's important to note that you can be here first if you just are generally more map aware and leaning on the good side and/or if you have lane priority aka you pushed your wave to turret first.

Lean on your jungler side to be ready to assist and be there first is key to creating early leads you can snowall on.

TF is a macro king, you have to be all the time aware of what's happening on the map to know when you can roam with or without R to net a kill.

DO NOT R to farm a few minions.

R ing for anything less than saving a teammate from certain death and/or netting a kill is a total waste. Sit on your ult till you can net a kill with it.

Ping before you R whenever possible, and ult yourself in agressive positionning as to not let the opponent escape you during the cast time. Trust your teammates. And lean on sides of anyone that is of risk of being ganked for any countergank opportunity.

It takes experience and with a few errors and trial, you will eventually be able to master it.

It's important to realize as a general rule you want to create situations where the general team gold or gold value is more important than your opponent team gold.

However sometimes you want to optimize how the gold is balanced around your team (not having all on your support) and you might wonder how tf plays: does he wants kills and farms or do you just let them to your team ?

So here is my tip: I always leave kills to a good carry. A good carry is a damage oriented champion, scaling on items, such as Kha, Yi, a Caitlyn, whatever. They get more damage from 300g than you do for 300g. However, i'd take the kill from most supports, a tank toplane or jungle, or if i generally have a risk of letting someone escape not doing it myself. Not particularly looking for lasthitting stuff leaves me as a high-assist low kill champion stats, but that also led me to a lot of quick vicotries from people that I just trusted to carry the game and just did.

Although your full combo has semi reasonable burst mid to late game, the strength of the champion resides in the fact you have a 2s stun (at level 14) on a 6ish second cd (counting cd + selecting / firing time).

As a general rule, you want to stun / Q multiple times in a fight as tf. So make sure you are safe and don't always aim to bomb the backlane. Landing a gold card on anything but a pure tank, such as saving someone from these nasty bruisers, is also worth being done.

In general though, you just want to play with numbers. Fighting is easier when you aim to outnumber. When considering a tough fight, always wonder if you may instead be safer sidelaning somewhere else, possibly giving up the objective. Again, trade kill potential with tf is very low.

TF scales many ways. AD to AP, hp, cdr, mana: virtually all the stats are good on him.

The reason I itemize TF the way i did are based on season meta:

- With early herald gone, with bruiser/tanks being meta games tend to be played more late than before and having a good 3-4 item spike will be safer bet than trying to snowball from first buy
- Your first buy should probably include mana to stay longer in lane, to sustain fights and being confortable clearing a wave and still have mana to R + Q + W
- This is why ROA is sort of strong because of how cheap it is and how fast you can complete it, it has very good synergy with banshee / zhonya because its one of the rare hp/ap items and having resistances scale with hp for being extra survivable.
- You may not one-tap the adc, but one-taping champions isn't what TF thrives for. We have mid damage and low cooldowns, we aim for multiple rotations of our abilities. This build, using olschool items, is a good way to win than the S13 luden one tap build.
- Some key strengths of this builds are 30 summoner haste, reasonable ability haste, strong survivability with raw stats + banshee + zhonya (that you can do in whatever order), and still features a lot of endgame ap to decimate with W+Q.