The recently launched patch 14.14 is a significant update for League of Legends tournaments. Accordingly, Riot Games has nerfed several champions that were too strong in competitive play, such as Tristana, Corki, Zyra, and Brand. Therefore, a champion that is rarely used in the professional scene like Teemo did not receive any direct changes in this patch.
However, the statistics site U.gg reports that Teemo’s win rate at Gold rank and above has skyrocketed since the release of patch 14.14. Specifically, Teemo had a win rate of only 48.82% in patch 14.13 and was ranked in tier D (relatively weak) in the Top Lane. However, when patch 14.14 was released, Teemo’s win rate surged to 52.75%, and he climbed straight up to S-tier (very strong champion).
So what caused this transformation of Teemo? According to bug expert Vandiril, Riot Games has made some subtle changes to Teemo’s passive ability, resulting in a severe bug. Currently, Teemo becomes invisible immediately after each basic attack while in the brush, whereas previously, players had to wait a few seconds to activate this effect.
This bug makes facing Teemo in the Top Lane extremely challenging as players struggle to pinpoint his location. Furthermore, this “feature” allows Teemo to continuously receive additional attack speed from his passive, significantly increasing his damage output. As a result, Teemo’s opponents take too much damage without any opportunity to retaliate.
It should be noted that before patch 14.13 was released, Teemo had a rather annoying bug where the time to enter stealth mode was longer than described. Therefore, Riot Games attempted to fix this bug in patch 14.14, but inadvertently caused Teemo to encounter an even more severe bug. Consequently, despite no direct changes to his stats or abilities, Teemo has become incredibly powerful in the current patch.
As of now, Riot Games has not yet taken any action to fix Teemo’s above-mentioned bug. Hopefully, they will soon identify and address this excessively annoying “feature” and help balance this character better.