No matter what game you play, there’s something you hate playing against. Most of the time it’s something cheesy or broken, but sometimes you hate something not because it’s good but because it shouldn’t be. Because seemingly everything about its creation was intended to be as irritating, frustrating and rage-inducing as humanly possible. Sometimes you play against a monster and anyone who picks Teemo is that monster.
Make no mistake; Teemo, one of League of Legends and most iconic characters, was designed to be an annoying little brat. He’s barely fun to play as, let alone to play against. Sometimes, it feels like he’s literally only in the game to troll people who know better than to pick him. However, unlike most unwanted devil children there’s actually a battle over his true parentage.
Whether League fans like it or not, their game in its earliest days wasn’t exactly a wellspring of originality. Many aspects of its design including champions owed a lot of concepts developed for DOTA allstars, the Warcraft 3 mod that preceded DOTA 2. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at Ashe and Drow Ranger; or Corky and Gyrocopter. It’s kind of shameless, really.
Back in its day, the DOTA allstars forums were packed with dozens of suggestions from designers and fans for Heroes that never even made it into DOTA and one of those ideas was a Wicket, the big game hunter. Wicket was supposed to be a hard to catch, quick character with crowd control traps that were annoying to play against, and that shouldn’t be a surprise given that he was based on Ewoks who, aside from destroying the Emperor with arrows in a non-cannon game, mostly existed to annoy the Empire and also you, the movie watcher.
Anyway, Wicket was one of the many DOTA character concepts that Riot allegedly reworked into one of their early champions for League of Legends. According to an article on the creation of Teemo, Riot producer Jeff Jew says the design team wanted cute characters in their roster but also wanted something that had a gameplay identity that was at odds with the cute cuddly aesthetic. The adorable characters were named yordles, apparently because a Riot artist had a dream about Yoda and fellow species named Yaddle and use their names together when he woke up.
For a while Teemo’s kit was in flux as designers experimented with everything from a six second stun dart to a starcraft nuke he could target from stealth. Eventually, after stranger and seemingly random inspiration they equipped the little bastard with toxic mushrooms.
Teemo entered the rift in the sixth week of league’s alpha and early on wasn’t actually that bad of a champion. His purpose was to counter tanky damage dealers like Garen and though he’s rarely been played competitively, he did see unironic use in the LCS as late as 2014. “Teemo actually beats up on most of the current top laners in League of Legends. People just haven’t started playing him because they don’t think he transitions into teamfights very well”.
Hilariously, Riot actually nerf Teemo the next week because even they don’t want to live in a world where Teemo is a viable pick, but to the unacquainted, what is it that makes Teemo such a pain? Well, for starters, he has a blind which gives him more survivability than a squishy character should ever have.
He can become invisible if he sits still. He has damage over time, and he can create invisible mushroom traps that slow and apply a dot. To make matters worse even, his personality is mad. His shrill high-pitched laugh is not only the stuff nightmares are made of, but it’s often used as a global taunt that universally inspires rage towards a little scamp. Nothing about playing against Teemo is fun but as LoL evolved, coordinated teams have learned to absolutely take him apart and while his damage output is high, his overall kit doesn’t make him worth picking. Especially as newer champions like Neeko are much more viable choices.
Teemo is essentially a peck that tells everyone in the game that you aren’t taking it seriously. You don’t really care about actually winning, you’re just here to guarantee at least half an hour of misery for all involved, especially your teammates. But who cares, as long as you’re having fun, right?
Confoundingly, outside of pro play Teemo remains pretty popular. His pick rate has never completely cratered, he still gets regular skins, and outside the game Riot sells tons of Teemo merchandise including hats that you’ve seen it literally at every League event. Teemo is basically League’s mascot and simultaneously a symbol of players soloqueue travails.
So with us being champions for a positive change, we wanted to see if it was possible to impact the community’s perception of Teemo for the better and we discovered that despite your best efforts to be a positive, cooperative Teemo main, the best thing you can do for everyone involved, including yourself, is to not pick him at all. He’s straight garbage.
