League of Legends Items

How League items work

Every Summoner's Rift game starts with 500 gold and an empty inventory. By the end of a long game, most champions carry six completed items worth well over 15,000 gold combined, and the gap between two champions at the same level is usually a gap in items. This guide covers how the shop is organized, what each stat does, and how to read the builds in your match history.

The item tiers

The shop sorts items by how far along a build path they are.

• Starter items are cheap buys for the first minutes, such as Doran's Blade or a support item. They trade long-term value for early stats and are usually sold later to free up a slot.
• Consumables include Health Potions, Control Wards, and elixirs. They are used up rather than kept. The Control Ward is the one vision purchase every role makes.
• Basic items are single-stat components like Long Sword or Amplifying Tome that build into bigger items.
• Epic items are mid-step components. They combine basics and often carry a small passive of their own.
• Legendary items are the completed items, most priced between about 2,500 and 3,500 gold. Their passives and stat totals are what define a build.
• Boots give movement speed. A champion can own only one pair, and the upgraded versions add a second benefit, like the reduced basic-attack damage on Plated Steelcaps or the tenacity on Mercury's Treads.

What each stat does

• Attack Damage (AD) raises basic attack damage and the damage of most physical abilities.
• Ability Power (AP) raises ability damage, and for many champions the strength of their heals and shields too.
• Attack Speed means more basic attacks per second. It is the core stat for marksmen and on-hit builds.
• Critical Strike Chance gives basic attacks a chance to deal bonus damage. Infinity Edge raises that bonus.
• Lethality and Armor Penetration ignore part of the target's armor. Lethality is a flat amount, so it hits low-armor targets hardest.
• Magic Penetration does the same job against magic resistance.
• Health, Armor, and Magic Resistance keep you alive. Armor reduces physical damage taken; magic resistance reduces magic damage taken.
• Ability Haste shortens ability cooldowns. It scales in a straight line: 100 Ability Haste means casting twice as often, not cooldowns of zero.

Reading a build

A build is the set and order of items a champion buys, and it changes from game to game. The enemy team's damage mix drives most defensive choices. A lineup heavy on magic damage makes magic resistance and Mercury's Treads worth more, while a lineup of marksmen and fighters makes armor and Plated Steelcaps the better value. Items that apply Grievous Wounds, which cuts healing, show up against teams that heal a lot.

Timing matters as much as the list. The first completed item is usually the biggest single power jump in a game, which is why players talk about item spikes. A champion that finishes its first Legendary at 13 minutes plays a different game than the same champion finishing it at 18. Components are priced close to the raw value of their stats, and a completed item adds its passive on top. That is part of why finishing an item tends to matter more than holding a pile of components.

Items in your match history

Riot's match data records each player's final inventory, and League Index shows it on every game in your history. Reading those inventories across many games answers questions a single game can't: whether a champion's wins cluster around one build, whether your losses tend to end with an unfinished item or a full inventory, and how often you bought defensive items against lineups that called for them. Pair that with gold per minute and you can see whether a slow build came from low income or from where the gold went.

Removed and reworked items

Riot reworks the shop regularly, usually during the preseason. Items get new stats, new passives, or leave the game outright. Galeforce, the marksman dash item in the list above, was removed from Summoner's Rift in one of those reworks. League Index keeps removed items in this reference because they still appear in older match history, and a past game makes more sense when every item in it can still be looked up.

The stats and gold costs on this page are checked against Riot's Data Dragon for the patch noted above.