Teamfight Tactics (TFT) improvement cheatsheet

The key concepts for getting the best out of your play style

Welcome! In this article, I want to talk about some key concepts for improving one’s playing style in TFT. The concepts covered in this article are valid for any set, so they will be valid almost regardless of the time you read them.

Disclaimer: what is discussed is taken from this very interesting video

Introduction

If you ask a TFT player which are the fundamental characteristics to be a good player, he will most likely answer you:

• Knowledge of the strongest comps (meta) and the ability to play them
• The ability to always play the strongest board at my disposal

This is true, but far from exhaustive.

We can identify 4 macro-categories, with a relative percentage of importance on the quality of the playing style:

Fundamentals (40 %)

• Playing your Strongest Board
• Economy
• Itemization
• Tempo

Being the most important section and impacting the outcome of the game, especially at high elo, we will go into more detail about these aspects in the following sections.

Set knowledge (20 %)

• Understanding what each unit does
• Understanding BiS (Best in Slot) for each unit and synergies
• Understanding of augments

Flexibility (20 %)

• Understanding of probability and rng (Random Number Generation)
• Understands playing for the highest EV (Effective Value)

Patch Knowledge (20 %)

• What comps are strong in this patch?
• What units should I hold on the bench?
• What units should I avoid?
• Are we living a Flexible, Hard force, or reroll meta?

Playing your Strongest Board

Figuring out how to play the strongest possible board is a complex task. You have to take into account

• activatable traits
• augments
• level and value of available champions
• partial and complete items

You can play with this awesome team builder from tftactics.gg.

Let’s see an example:

2 traits comp — Image by Author

This comp seems strong, having two active traits and related buffs. Compare it with the following:

Leona 2 stars comp — Image by Author

Although there are no active traits and it may look like what I call a ‘convenience store comp’, this comp is likely to be more effective, especially if in agreement with a good economy.

We can therefore define 5 rules to be used as important guidelines for playing our strongest board:

1. A higher-cost unit is better than a lower-cost one
2. A higher-starred unit is better than a lower-starred one
3. An item is more effective on a higher-value unit than a lower one
4. Synergies are more impactful on higher-cost units than lower ones
5. You wanna have an equal amount of frontline and backline

Important disclaimer: it is easy to find an exception to each of the rules presented. This happens because of the complexities of the game and the number of variables to be considered. Nevertheless, they are good guidelines valid in the vast majority of situations.

Itemization

How do we properly manage our items so that we could get the highest possible value out of each component

We must notice that the highest value doesn’t mean the strongest possible board. In this game, we must try to stay alive as long as possible!

A very common mistake, which affects me personally, is to look for the best comps on the various statistics sites and try to replicate them, including itemization.

TFT Meta Team comps — Image by author

This then leads to wanting to make only a small number of complete items, keeping our items unused for long periods of the game

This then leads to wanting to make only a small number of complete items, exactly those ideal for the target comp, keeping our items unused for long periods of the game. Once the ‘perfect comp’ has been obtained, we will certainly have a very strong board, but we will have wasted a huge amount of resources: we will have played for many turns as if we had no items / with sub-optimal items, losing HP and monetary resources that we could use to out-scale our opponents in the late game.

Let us, therefore, see some very interesting questions we should think about:

1. Does creating this sub-optimal item get me more value than greeding for the BiS?
2. Does creating this item lock me out from certain comps?
3. Is a certain item absolutely necessary for a certain comp?

As a reference, keep in mind that:

• 4 components on the bench: always slam
• 3 components on the bench: almost always slam

Economics

Knowing exactly when and what you should spend your money on throughout your tft game

We’re talking about, i.e., when and why we should level, when and why we should roll, and knowing which units we should hold.

The easiest way to approach Econ is to follow the following guidelines. These are made of three different routes: Win streak, Lose streak, and Standard.

Win streak (strong board)

• 2–1 → 4 (0g)
• 2–4 → 5 (10g)
• 3–2 → 6/7 (30g)
• 3–5 → 7 (20g)
• 4–2/4–5 → 8 (all in)

Lose streak (low-roll opener)

• 2–1 → 3 (10g)
• 2–4 → 4 (30g)
• 2–5 → 4 (40g)
• 3–1 → 5 (50g)
• 3–2 → 6 (50g) — We can roll down here for a tempo swing or go to7 on 3–5 and swing there instead
• 4–2/4–5 → 8 (all in)

Win/Lose/Win/Lose — Standard (typical game)

• 2–1 → 3 or 4 depending on if the board is weak or strong
• 2–4 → 5 (10g)
• 3–2 → 6 (20g)
• 4–1 → 7 (40g) — you can roll a bit there to hit pairs
• 4–5 → 8 (all in)

Is also recommended to play level 8 comps instead of Reroll comps because the second ones are much more complex to play. These require a lot of decision-making about when and how to reroll. Reroll comps are easy to learn, but really hard to master cause of Tempo.

These are very useful guidelines, but so is critical thinking, so let us ask ourselves why we level or reroll at certain times. By understanding this, we will be better able to adapt to different scenarios.

Insight: for every turn you’re not at 50 gold, you need to pay an extra X amount of gold per turn

A very common mistake is to buy a high-value, high-cost champion early on if found, and keep him on the bench. This is a huge mistake:

Let’s consider a standard scenario: we have 20 g and we buy a champ for 4 golds. This champ is part of our desired comp, but we’ll keep it on our bench because is not useful at the moment. This champ won’t effectively cost 4 g to us, but up to 8–10, because we’ll lose e bunch of interest during the following turns. We’ll most likely find the same champ later on while rerolling, paying only 4 (effective) gold for him.

Tempo

The ability to artificially manipulate your board strength relative to the strengthof the lobby.

• In a high-tempo lobby, most players are playing for a Win Streak, with many champs on board and dealing around 10 Hp damage to other players at each turn.
• In a high-tempo lobby, most players are playing for econ, dealing lower damage to other players at each turn. These players are going to be really strong by the end of the game cause of their econ.

Our playstyle must adapt to the lobby: in the first case, there will be no point in playing for an early reroll, which could lead us to lose the whole game very quickly. In the second case, we will have to choose whether we also adopt the same playstyle or opt for a massive win streak.

Not taking advantage of win/lose streaks can lead us to lose huge amounts of gold.

Key to having a good tempo

• If you’re on a Win streak, you don’t have to be way stronger than the lobby, but just a bit stronger
• If you’re on a Lose streak, you don’t have to be way weaker than the lobby, but just a bit weaker

Broadly speaking, we should keep a trend similar to the following graph:

Conclusions

I hope this article may have interested or been useful to you, until next time,

Marco