League of Legends: an idiot’s step-by-step guide to the Teamfight Tactics early game

Stage 3 strategy

As Scarra noted in his TFT step-by-step guide (which is wholly superior to mine and is 90% what this guide is based off), Stage 3 is where you really start to set your comp and build it towards late-game. By the start of Stage 3 (aka after Krugs) you should have at least one completed item (ideally not one of the ones I told you to stay away from earlier, but if that’s all you got you make the best items you can). Based on the items you created, you should be looking to build your comp towards the late game as follows.

• If you got an Attack Speed item (Statikk Shiv, Rapidfire Cannon, Guinsoos), you should be looking build around Rangers, Gunslingers, or Sorcerers as the primary element of your end-game comp with Guardians, Knights, or Brawlers as a front line (or Dragons if there are a lot of AP comps)
• If you got an AP item (Morellonomicon, Rabadons, Ludens) you should be looking to build around Sorcerers, Elementalists, or Dragons as the primary element of your end-game comp with the above-mentioned front line units to round out your comp.
• If you got an AD item (Infinity Edge, GA, Bloodthirster) you should be looking to build Assassins, Blademasters, and Shapeshifters as your primary core of the end-game comp, with a front line to go along with it.
• If you got mostly defensive items (Thornmail, Locket, Redemption, etc.) you should be looking to build around Knights, Brawlers, or Guardians as your primary comp with some damage threat that complements it to deal damage.

The idea is that you want to leverage your strong early items to get the focus for where to build your comp as you transition to the mid and late game. During Stage 3, you ideally want to slowly swap out your stronger units that don’t fit into your late game comp with units you find that do fit into that comp.

As far as which complementary champions and synergies you should build the comp around, that’s far more situationally dependent. As a general rule, you want one or two champions that are the main focus of your comp (they’re the ones who you’re putting two or three items on) and the rest of the comp strengthens them. So if you get a three-star Vayne with Rapidfire Cannon, you probably should build a Ranger comp around her along with Garen/Leona (for the Noble buff), but if you have an Ashe as well, you could instead go for Garen/Sejuani (for the Noble and Glacial buffs).

Figuring all of this out can get complicated if you have two or more good items (what if you have two Recurve Bows and two NLRs, so you could go AP or Attack Speed?). There are too many configurations to count and generally, you want a front and back line for your comp unless you’re going a fully-stacked comp (like full Assassins) and those are generally quite risky.

It’ll take some trial and error, as well as a good sense of where the meta in Teamfight Tactics is (you can keep up to date on that with our TFT Tier Lists every patch) to figure out what is working best. However, regardless of how the meta works, if you follow those basic principals in the early game you should be fine.