Basically the only viable position for teemo in last two seasons is support. And when you pick him there you can bet your adc will feed and flame. In top he beats maybe few specific tanks that nobody plays anymore. He is viable only in low elo where players don't know how to play against him, junglers are scared to gank him and nobody uses sweeper in lategame so you can actually use his passive to assassinate someone.
I tried about every rune setup except conqueror. Attack speed? bad early, good scaling, but due to short range is easy to zone and deny access to backline and it takes him too long to kill tanks with some MR items. So not really viable.
Phase Rush? Good for splitpush but no damage. And the mobility creep is so huge now that you can't escape anyway. Those Akalies, Pykes or Rivens and more will chase you down easily anyway if they want.
Comet? Kinda weak because you can rarely harass with Q which is the only spell that can proc it. Mushrooms can proc it too but mushrooms has 2sec delay to get armed after throwing so they are not reliable.
Aery? Decent, but reveals your position.
Glacial, Spellbook, Klepto? No damage at all.
Grasp? Not bad but low damage and don't really help with survivalability - you get oneshot by everything anyway.
Guardian, Aftershok - useless.
Hail of Blades/Predator - don't know, Predator might be actually better than Phase Rush.
Electrocute - might be better than Dark Harvest, hard to say.
Dark Harvest - probably the best choice.
Seriously there is probably no matchup where Teemo won't get outscaled. Yes you can bully some champions like Nasus, Olaf or Garen early but if you don't get at least 2 kills on them and level advantage too you are doomed. You will die in every gank enemy jungler pulls off (assuming he is playing champion with good mobility/cc like Camille, J4, Hecarim, Nunu. And if you don't maintain big lead enough and that is really hard to do in plat+, you will lose 1v1 to basically every champion in game. Even those tanks you were harrasing for 15 minutes will just combo-shot you just by base damages and the fact that you will not do any damage to them.
Teemo legit needs 20+ autoattacks to kill fighter/bruiser/tank champion. They need just 3 abilities which usually cannot be denyed by blind to 100-0 you.
Thanks to conqueror, nerfs to swiftness boots and tons of free damage for bruisers from runes and items even matchups where is Teemo supposed to have an advantage like Trynda or Darius are now hard-counters against Teemo lol. Picking Teemo into Darius (assuming plat+ player behind Darius) goes like this - you are harassing him everytime you have a chance. He was not able to get close to you for 15 minutes, then you failed to dodge his E for the first time (or you failed to counter-flash his flash-E or you didn't have flash because enemy jungler came) you die without any counterplay (because displacement cc, massive slow from his AA reset, ms he gets from Phase Rush/Phage/Triforce, and execute ult that cannot be even flashed from) he takes tower because you even respawn (or 3 tower plates) and snowballs of that so hard you will just feed to him if you want get any cs.
Teemo main issues are:
- very slow wave clear
- very short range of autoattacks on a champion that has just autoattacks (basically every bruiser ability/mobility will zone you as range of those abilities is about same as your autoattack range)
- W is basically the worst speed buff ability in game, super weak and you can't even max it anyway (it has no effect even when maxed and you cannot sacrifice damage from E/Q or you lose in lane hard)
- he has single ability
- his strongest build has no/low CDR which makes it easy to outplay him as he cannot use blind twice in same fight (mostly), and 45%cdr build has much less damage so it is not really an option
- his shroom is projectile (which means Yasuo wall and Braum E blocks it) with super slow arm time, it is worse than Caitlyn's traps, it is not possible to use this ability in fight to any effect unless it was pre-placed in advance
- passive is weak and flat out bad and sweeper counters it hard
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"bUt YoU CoUnTeR HiM" yeah, totally, him popping his R and his W slow, I can totally beat that, my blind will make him miss maybe 1 or 2 Qs if lucky, I totally counter him and don't have to make him run into like 4 shrooms just to escape
