Guide last updated on 9-18-11
**Cleaned up the guide a bit**

** If you are downrating me, please give me suggestions on how to improve the guide **
So you want to play Teemo do you? Are you MAN enough to step into his tiny shoes? Are you MAN enough to plop down mushrooms and force the other team to deal with it?

Lets check out some reasons why Teemo is the illest Yordle on two legs.
- He Offers amazing Map control via Noxious Trap.
- Blinding Dart cripples AD carries.
- He is agile and has the ability to dart in and out of team fights.

Sounds great right? Wrong. Every Yordle has his demons.
- He is squishy ergo very susceptible to crowd control.
- Often focused due to annoyance.
- Needs to set up mushrooms properly before team fights.

Blinding Dart: This is your main team fight ability. Low cool down, high AP ratio, and is very punishing for AD champions. Try to make sure you are keeping it the physical carries locked down with it in team fights. If you are laning against a champion such as Ashe, you can safely move in, Blinding Dart + Auto Attack, for massive damage and the blind will keep you from taking counter damage.

Move Quick: A fantastic ability. It is essentially a permanent speed boost to teemo and gives him a quick "Oh snap!" button. Due to the increased speed, Teemo is very adapt at weaving in and out of fights. This allows him to safety dish out damage or dart ahead of foes to plop down mushrooms in their escape path.

Toxic Shot: This ability may not seem like much with its poor ability power scaling, but it, like Teemo, is a tiny power house. Your early game auto attacks turn into a flogging for those in range. It boosts your level one attack, with AP runes, by about 50 damage if the poison cycles. Late game, after getting a chunk of AP under your belt, your Auto attacks will let you maintain extra damage between each Blinding Dart.

Noxious Trap: This is the most powerful weapon in Teemo's arsenal. It provides the entire team with extreme map awareness. Even if this ability didn't do any damage, it would still amount to a free ward every ~25 seconds. If you are following this guide your mushrooms will become the bane of the opposing teams existence; no bush or cross road will be safe. With an ability power coefficient of .8, no one will be able to escape them unscathed. Regardless if you are the worlds worst Teemo, as long as you can put down your mushrooms in efficient spots you positively effect your team.


For my skill leveling order, I follow the above formula after taking a point in each before level 4. This maximizes your damage first and caps off the lesser of those inputs last, along with Move Quick. There really isn't much reason to deviate here.

Recommended:
Teleport: One of the most powerful summoner abilities in game. Allows you to quickly secure a lane, save a falling tower, back door structures, orr set up ganks. What makes this spell even more potent is the fact you and your allies can teleport to a Noxious Trap, enabling powerful map control.

Flash: This is a must have on any light weight ranged champion. It is simply too good at allowing you to escape situations that would otherwise result in certain death.

Acceptable:
Exhaust - Very useful ability that will greatly increase your effectiveness in team fights. Also lets you get in for many early game ganks. Between this and Move Quick it will be easy for you to dart in front of them, drop a Noxious Trap, them pop it, and seal the deal.

Ignite - As with Exhaust, this will improve your team fighting ability and help deal with annoying champions like Taric and Soraka who squeak away with just a small amount of life.

Why not?
Cleanse - This ability is very user dependent and situational. In ranked if you seem them carrying an overabundance of cc, you might be tempted to pick this us but by and large there are better options. If you are in range of CC, odds are you are equally in danger of being engaged by a melee or ranged champion. In this situation I strongly feel that Flash takes the cake in terms of preventing death. Watch your positioning and when you enter a fight and you will be fine with out.
Ghost - You have move quick so you naturally out run other champions ergo Flash would get you out of the more hairy of the situations
Clarity - Play smart and use your mana smart. This guide has more than enough mana regen to over compensate for poor playing practices.
Clairvoyance - Your mushrooms give you unrivaled map awareness. True it would be useful for early game and counter jungling, but it is a useless ability late game.'
Heal - Too little health late game, only useful for trolling early game. If someone dies to a summoner heal early game, you could probably have killed them anyway due to their ignorance.
Smite - Completely useless as you can not jungle and have no problems killing minions.
Revive - Aside from reviving and teleporting to a shroom to get back into the action, this has no use. Even then your shrooms in close proximity have been popped or you wouldn't contribute anything substantial.
Fortify - Not impressive for a champion who can benefit so much more for other abilities. Fortify rarely saves towers, only delays their destruction.
Rally - Bad ability by design. Who even thinks about this?

You need speed and couple the extra penetration from this and your runes and you should be setting more MR than a typical caster or squishy carries around giving you maximum damage. A completely acceptable alternative to these are Mercury's Treads fpr heavy crowd control teams.
: You are squishy. Period. Rod of Ages gives you an amazing chunk of HP and ability power. The mana is extraneous yet not a waste. An alternative to this would be Rylai's Crystal Scepter which adds a slow to your Blinding Dart and sacrifices 130 health, 720 mana, and the constant replenishment of health and mana from the passive.
: This item is god like. Building from your Meki Pendant it gives you everything you'd want. Massive CDR, Mana regen, and Ability Power. Thanks to the scaling on Toxic Shot the attack speed is certainly not going to waste; it powers up your farming ability and your tower damage. An alternative to this is Morello's Evil Tome which trades you additional CDR and AP for the Attack speed.


Once you complete this, you can get any of the following items in whatever order your situation demands. If you need more burst, go Lich Bane. Try on a Rabadon's Deathcap if want to amplify your overall damage. If you are getting focused hard, pick up Zhonya's Hourglass or Banshee's Veil. If the enemy team is packing a ton of Magic resist, pick up Void Staff. : Massively increases your total AP and brings nearly 200 AP to the plate by it's self. This item really doesn't need an explanation and is very consistently my fourth item as it turns your shrooms into nightmares and your Blinding Dart will hit like a truck.
: This item turns your Q+Auto Attack into major burst. Blinding Dart is really your only reliable trigger for the extra damage, aside from in fight mushroom drops, so it isn't that effective of an item choice until you have a modest amount of ability power.
: By the time you make it to this item it will be very deep into late game. Everyone will have completed or be near completion with their items builds. Most of these builds will include a slew of Magic Resist to try to avoid the decimation of Noxious Trap. You can figure it out from here. : I rarely find myself picking up this item unless the enemy composition is too heavy on CC or one of the ever popular AoE teams. Gives you a healthy boost to AP and the ability to live long enough to get off a few more attacks.
: This is easily one of the best items in the game. Teemo's Move Quick allows him to skirt in and out of battles easily, but champions with hard CC like Sion and gap closers like Irelia on the same team can cause you troubles. Bite the bullet and pick up one of these. You can't do damage if you are dead.

Grab your Meki Pendant and 2 Health Potion then head to your lane. You can solo or double lane easily and your Meki Pendant will keep you good on mana for a long time. If you wiggle out an early game kill or need to back focus on picking up Fiendish Codex early. This will give you a nice cooldown reduction on your only damaging ability Blinding Dart and set you up for quicker shrooming once you ding 6.

At level 6, your Noxious Trap should put your lane on lock down. Baring champions like Twisted Fate and Nocturne, you should now be ungankable. Make sure you are setting your traps in the bushes and river leading up to your lane. If the game is very calm at this point, keep pressure on your lane by keeping shrooms in the lane ( Bushes on top/bottom , along rim of river if mid ).

Typically level ~10 is when team fights start to bust out all over. Hopefully by this time you have your first few items, including Catalyst of Aeons. When team fighting try to weave in and out of the fight. Try to stay out as long as possible, Catalyst of Aeons and your mana regen should allow you to farm quite safely. Farming out your Rod of Ages and Nashor's Tooth is very important; don't wander around chasing hopeless kills.

Late game you should be packing quite a punch. Try to keep plenty of Noxious Traps laying around at surviving towers and dragon/Baron. Focus on predicting team fights and getting shrooms in escape paths. For example, if the bottom lane is pushed to the base turret, heavily shroom the lower jungle to cut off the escapees from the imminent team fight. AD champions will be very deadly this late in the game so make sure you are keeping them blinded with Blinding Dart.

One of the most important elements to being the world's most annoying Teemo is your mushroom placement. When placing a mushroom you need to ask yourself one important question; How often will someone walk through here? You always want to place your shrooms in high traffic areas.

95% of the mushrooms I place in a game fall into these locations.

Prioritize locations that are seeing a lot of action. For example, if your top tower is down, focus your efforts on middle and bottom lane as they will be taking the pressure soon. Always try to drop mushrooms at dragon and the paths coming out of the jungle to prevent ganks and monitor enemy movement.
Here are two graphics on how to shroom your specific lane in the event you can not leave or have the immediate area covered. Remember to start the chains by putting shrooms father away and in the bushes/outlets first then work your way in. You should be covering escapes/entrances first then moving to doubling up in certain areas to bait them in to a shroom chain. It behooves you to pace them apart by decent distances to maximize damage. If an enemy walks over 3 shrooms within a second he will really only be taking the damage from one shroom where if you spread them out the shrooms have time to tick between each pop.

- Noxious Trap isn't just a preemptive move, it can be used to actively farm. If you are staring down a nasty minion wave, take their aggro and plop down a mushroom. The mushrooms have a large AoE range and will pop, killing most of them after several poison ticks. This is an extremely useful tactic when coupled with Teleport. You can save a failing tower from a massive minion wave with a single mushroom.

-In team fights, don't be afraid to circle around the enemy team and quickly shroom their exits. Utilizing Move Quick and Flash you can cut off all hope of escape by flashing through walls and laying down your cargo load.

-Remember to account for the small delay between laying a mushroom and when its ready to detonate when trying to drop on top of an opponent. Move Quick keeps you quicker than most champions so gain a bit of ground ahead of them before you drop it.

-Don't be afraid to shroom the enemies plan of attack. If they are going to be pushing into your base soon, drop some shrooms around inhibitors and within the base to snare them for a counter attack or to weaken them enough to wimp out of the push.