There are many uses of Teleport top, and it is a crucial summoner spell in general at the moment. I will only be mentioning top lane Teleports in this article, and maybe some general points. Teleport may be the strongest Summoner Spell in the game at the moment, with it being a favourite go to for top laners and a very good option for mids. You can do many great things with it which is why it has risen in popularity over the past few months.

Starting off with some early game Teleport uses, there is not much to do for a top laner as you don't have many items and can't be a very scary split push threat. The two uses you'll see most often is to either Teleport top lane to catch a pushing wave so you don't fall too far behind, and the classic Teleport bot lane for the 3+ man ganks, sometimes including the top lane Teleport and mid lane Teleport if they have it. You can also use it to join a Dragon or Rift Herald fight if it occurs but you will most likely be close enough to Herald to run there. Be sure if you're looking for an opportunity bot lane to tell the laners to drop a ward in the enemy laners bush for a good solid flank.

Image courtesy of League of Tricks on Youtube

An important thing to keep in mind is if your enemy laner has Teleport, you should warn your team about the cooldown of it. Here is a good run down of everything you need to know about the cooldown modifiers. Sometimes you will have to make a critical decision of following an opponent laner with a Teleport of your own. In the few seconds you have to make an effective call you need to find where the Teleport is heading and assess the situation. Take in information such as how low is everyone, how many people are in the fight and how many more can join. You should definitely cancel any enemy Teleports you are able to.

Heading into mid game, strategies quickly open up to more than just ganking bot and going back to lane. Now you do have a couple items and can be an effective split pusher on certain champions, and your team and you can pressure major objectives like Baron Nashor and Dragon. Now would be a good time to say you don't always need to commit to your Teleports. If a situation quickly turns bad, you should always cancel it and go back to what you were doing and hope you don't get blamed!

I'm going to quickly touch on escaping tight situations with Teleport. We've all seen the highlight escapes of people getting out behind enemy lines or in the face of danger. Like this one recently features on the front page of reddit, from a Shaco player called Pink Ward (just a heads up, it's pretty loud). Or how about an LCSBIGPLAY? This is a smart use because he waits for the only person with CC, the Pantheon, to use his stun, then he Teleports to a tower far out of the enemies' range. There is a couple more examples of LCS players getting out using a sneaky Teleport when no one expects it and it's always exciting to see.

In the mid to late game, you need to pay more attention to the map as more things are happening, especially if you're on split push duty. Look for the wards you have down and try to channel your inner Zilean, see a couple seconds into the future for a possible fight breaking out near the wards. If you see an imminent fight, you should back as soon as possible and get the Homeguard speed bonus. This is very popular to do in the LCS as it makes up for the time of backing, if you had to, and you can get right in the back line's face in a couple of seconds.

Impact uses his Teleport from base to try and get a game winning flank to tie up the series.

In certain situations, it's better to just keep pushing instead of Teleporting to help your team. I'm not saying you should just forget about your team, but like I mentioned before, if the fight is going all wrong and you're pushing towers fast, you should at least try to trade objectives for the kills your team is giving up and hope you can escape, or defend in the coming moments. It's crucial to get at least one objective if you decide to go this route. A tower or Dragon will do, maybe even a couple of the enemy jungler's camps. Every little bit of punishment goes a long way in this game!

Among all these nice team plays you can make with the power of Teleporting, there is a few big plays you can make flying solo. Like backdooring the Nexus and winning your team the game. This is a pretty rare thing to happen but every once in a while you could be the saviour. If you have minions pushing or got into a spot where you could drop a ward by their exposed Nexus you have a real shot at being the solo carry you always knew you could be. This is an amazing example of what I'm talking about, ZionSpartan (now known as Darshan for CLG) Making the split second decision to breach the gates with Nasus, winning the game for the Dignitas of old and putting them up in this series 1-0 against TSM.

One of the most popular strategies to use while having a top lane Teleport is the split push. Having a good 1v1 top lane fighter or even tank opens up a lot of plays to be made map wide. For example late game you can send your top laner bottom and put some real pressure on Baron Nashor. The enemy team has to act very quickly in this scenario and often rush into a decision without much communication, in Solo Queue at least.

kfo on Fiora uses his Teleport to go bottom in this deciding match, forcing C9 to try and back or base race.

Some options for the team utilizing the split pusher are you can do a death bush right outside of Baron, or you can start Baron and make the enemy team fight you while your split pusher takes an inhibitor for maybe a couple kills or in the worst case the enemy team wipes out your team and gets Baron.

That wraps up my short write up on using Teleport as a top laner. I didn't talk about the pros and cons of using it over other summoner spells, if you're interested in that then check out BillyBoss' write up here, it's only a little bit dated as the "kill a camp then Teleport back to lane" strategy isn't really around anymore.

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