With the recent preseason changes to items and the shop, it is important now more than ever to understand when and why to build certain items. With around 100 finished items in the game, League’s item system can seem complex and incredibly unintuitive to newer players. This guide will help to remedy that, offering some quick and easy build solutions to counter some team compositions that you might run into when playing League of Legends. While it will be far from all-inclusive, you’ll hopefully leave this guide with a solid understanding of how to counter some common threats and issues that novice players might think insurmountable.

Fighting Against a Tank-centric Team

One way that newer players are defeated is by the enemy team being borderline unkillable. After all, if the enemy team has a bunch of bulky champions that all stack armor and magic resistance in their inventories, it can seem like they just never die. Let’s go over some ways that you can counter this if you’re playing different types of champions.

If you’re a teamfight-oriented tank with immobilizing crowd control effects who wishes to go toe-to-toe with the enemy frontline, perhaps consider purchasing an Abyssal Mask. While this item will offer you more survivability by providing health and magic resistance, its unique passive is what really makes it shine. Making an enemy vulnerable to 10% more damage after immobilizing them is potent against all enemies, but especially tanks who thrive on taking minimal damage from maximal hits.

Fighters, brawlers, and bruisers might instead consider building a Black Cleaver or the mythic Divine Sunderer. While the Black Cleaver shreds enemy armour, making it potent when your team deals primarily physical damage, the Divine Sunderer makes your champion’s strikes deal damage based upon the victim’s maximum health and provides additional penetration as you build more legendary items. Both options present a way for close-range fighters to enable themselves and their team to take down bulky opponents.

If you’re playing a caster, building a Void Staff and one of Liandry’s Anguish or Riftmaker can allow you to sift through tanks with ease. Both Void Staff and Riftmaker provide scaling magic penetration, meaning that you’ll be shredding more magic resistance as the enemies build more of it, and Liandry’s Anguish burns enemies proportionally to their maximum health over time. Collectively, these options provide a way for casters to deal with tanks without breaking a sweat.

Finally, marksmen should consider purchasing a Blade of the Ruined King and a Wit’s End against bulkier enemies. Both of these items provide sustain through lifesteal or movement speed, and both deal additional on-hit damage. Where Blade of the Ruined King is good against enemies who are building a lot of health items, Wit’s End allows a marksman to diversify their damage portfolio and catch tanks off guard with their mixed damage. As for a mythic item, the Kraken Slayer lets marksmen deal true damage to tanks, rendering their resistances null and void.

Fighting Against Enemies Who Rely on Healing

To fight against enemies who rely on healing, there is one passive you need to know about: Grievous Wounds. This passive reduces the potency of healing applied to whoever is afflicted by it, and many items are able to apply Grievous Wounds in offensive and defensive ways. For example, tanks can purchase a Bramble Vest and eventually a Thornmail to apply Grievous Wounds to any champion who dares basic attack them. Champions who deal primarily physical damage can invest in an Executioner’s Calling to work towards a Chempunk Chainsword or Mortal Reminder to apply Grievous Wounds when attacking. Quite similarly, champions who deal mostly magic damage can purchase an Oblivion Orb, which builds into the Morellonomicon and the Chempunk Putrifier, to apply Grievous Wounds to enemies via casting spells. In short, it is no hard feat to purchase an item which applies Grievous Wounds to a healing-crazed enemy team, so there is truly no reason to let healing run rampant against you.

Fighting Against Enemies Who Deal Burst Damage

If you’re playing a tank, this might almost seem like an irrelevant question to ask; in the end, burst damage is not a threat to you, only your teammates. That being said, if you are a tank who is heavily reliant on your team to deal damage and engage with you, perhaps consider using one of your item slots to purchase a Knight’s Vow or a Locket of the Iron Solari. Both of these items provide your champion with the tank stats that they want while also offering an additional way to protect your teammates from incoming damage. The sacrifice of these items being ‘less impactful’ is weighed out entirely by the survivability that they provide for the carries on your team.

Brawlier champions might instead want to purchase a Maw of Malmortius or Sterak’s Gage. Unlike the items for tanks, these items are purely selfish choices, providing the buyer with a shield when they take a certain amount of damage in a short period of time. While the Maw of Malmortius is best against magically-oriented compositions and the Sterak’s Gage is limited to attack-damage-centric champions, both items are strong within their nicheness and offer fighters a solution to burst damage.

When playing a mage, the classic answer to this issue has always been to build a Zhonya’s Hourglass. In all truth, this timeless strategy is nearly infallible, as the item itself offers stats that magic-damage-dealing champions want while also granting that glorious active which freezes your champion in time. However, with the new update, Demonic Embrace is also a worthwhile item to consider, especially if the enemy burst-damage-dealers fight front-to-back rather than flanking. By purchasing a Demonic Embrace, mages essentially transform themselves into magical bruisers over the course of a teamfight, making this item a tempting option.

Marksmen, both because of and despite their fragility, have plenty of options which help them overcome their main weakness: burst damage. For example, Phantom Dancer provides a marksmen with the ability to keep out of harm's way with increased movement speed, relying on their positioning to avoid burst. The new mythic items also provide marksmen with defensive options, with Immortal Shieldbow having a Lifeline passive, similar to Sterak's or Maw, while providing lifesteal, attack damage, and health. More mechanically-talented players might instead choose the versatile dash and movement speed provided by Galeforce to dodge burst damage rather than relying on surviving it.

There is also something to be said in this section regarding boots. Since different types of boots can be shifted in and out of a build pretty flexibly, do consider purchasing defensive boots rather than offensive boots when facing burst damage. Subbing out your Berserker’s Greaves or Sorcerer’s Shoes for a pair of Mercury’s Treads or Plated Steelcaps could mean the difference between life or death when facing a burst-heavy composition, so think wisely before just defaulting to your favourite type of boots.

Fighting Against Enemies Who Rely on Crowd Control to Engage and Disengage

For tanks, being hit with crowd control can make or break their ability to achieve their goals. If you’re playing a tank against a composition with lots of crowd control or incredibly impactful forms of crowd control, perhaps consider investing in a Deadman’s Plate or a Force of Nature. Both options provide resistances and the ability to compound upon your existing movement speed. Since tanks are less susceptible to burst, they are in-turn less impacted by being struck by immobilizations and disables, so overcoming slows is crucial for buying space and time for your carries to do their jobs.

Bruisers and assassins can deal with this threat relatively easily by investing in an Edge of Night. Since this item provides a shield which blocks one incoming spell or ability before needing to recharge, it can sometimes block that one crowd control effect which would reduce your gameplan to nothing. Of course, if you’d rather play reactively rather than proactively, Silvermere Dawn provides attack damage, health, and magic resist while also granting the buyer the ability to cleanse most forms of crowd control.

Mages can counteract enemy disengage with one of the new items: Cosmic Drive. This item provides ability power, ability haste, and health, all while offering a passive which boosts your movement speed whenever you deal damage with an ability. With this, any mage can more easily dodge incoming crowd control as well as engage upon and disengage from enemies with ease. It is also necessary to mention Banshee’s Veil, which operates in the same way as Edge of Night but provides the stats that a mage would pine for.

Marksmen have the sister item to Silvermere Dawn, the Mercurial Scimitar, as their main option to fight against crowd control. While this item provides critical strike chance instead of health, it is functionally identical to the Silvermere Dawn otherwise. Marksmen could also purchase the Edge of Night to play more proactively, however this option does not synergize as well with the other items that marksmen typically like to build.

Supports as a whole are worth mentioning here because of an item that they can build: Mikael’s Blessing. When activated, this item allows the user to cleanse themselves and a teammate of most crowd control disabilities, along with healing that teammate in the process. Support is really the only role that can sacrifice an item slot to build this powerful item, but it is important to not underestimate an extra cleanse regardless of where it comes from.

Boots are once again important to acknowledge, as both Mercury’s Treads and Boots of Swiftness provide a way to resist crowd control. Where the former grants the purchaser some tenacity, the latter provides slow resist and thus lowers the potency of incoming slows. Just as before, choosing to purchase different boots as necessary is the key to being an adaptable player.

Concluding Thoughts: How to Apply This Information

So, now that you know all of this, how can you apply it in game? The most obvious answer is to make sure to build adaptively and to remember that no build is perfect for any champion. However, it is also important to acknowledge that no single build can cover everything the enemy team has. That’s why it is important to be decisive when choosing how you want to build and base that choice upon the state of the game rather than any preconceived ideals. For example, if a team is mostly tanks but has one assassin that is absolutely demolishing your team, build to counter the assassin who is carrying the game rather than the tanks that are not. Specializing your build is the key to meeting greater success via itemization, but it is certainly not without its limitations, so make sure to specialize against what you feel will best help you succeed.

Thinking beyond the scale of yourself, also consider giving your teammates a heads up when you think that they should build an item. This is also situational, as sometimes your teammates will just not be willing to cooperate and move away from their notion of an ideal build, but sometimes having one extra person building an item with grievous wounds is worth the hassle. Obviously, if one of your teammates is threatening to do the good old Nunu conga down the middle lane, perhaps refrain from addressing them. Speak to your teammates who you know are playing to win and improve, and who you know are willing to do what it takes to win by adapting their item build midgame.

If there is one key idea to take away from this article, it should be that League of Legends’ item system is both infinitely complex and easy enough to understand. At first glance, and especially after the recent changes, it might seem like this bottomless pit of reading and learning. However, if you focus on how to build adaptively on a handful of champions rather than trying to absorb what every item does all at once, you’ll be building yourself an inventory of wins quickly.