LoL Boots Guide: Every Pair Ranked and When to Buy Them

Seven pairs, one slot, and most players buy the same one every game without thinking about it.

All seven ranked, what each one is actually for, and how the tier three upgrades really work now.

LoL Boots Guide

Every Pair Ranked

Items

Seven pairs, one slot, and most players buy the same one every game without thinking about it.

All seven ranked, what each one is actually for, and how the tier three upgrades really work now.

No costs or numbers below, because those move every few patches. The job each pair does doesn't.

#7: Boots of Swiftness

The most movement speed and slow resistance in the game, on the pair almost nobody buys.

They're last here because most games don't ask the question they answer. When one does, though, they're not a compromise: against a team built on slows, these beat every other option and it isn't close.

#6: Gluttonous Greaves

Sustain on a boot, which sounds minor and reads much better on a bruiser who's already fighting constantly than on anyone standing at the back.

#5: Ionian Boots of Lucidity

Ability haste plus faster summoner spells. The second half is the reason to buy them and the half people forget when they compare the stat lines.

Supports and roaming champions get the most out of it, because those are the ones whose game is a sequence of Flash and Teleport windows rather than a damage total.

#4: Berserker's Greaves

Attack speed, bought by almost every marksman on autopilot, and correctly so most of the time.

The mistake is that "most of the time" gets treated as "always". If the enemy has two champions who kill you in one window, the defensive pair does more for your damage output than the attack speed does, because damage you don't get to deal isn't damage.

#3: Sorcerer's Shoes

Magic penetration, and the reason mages feel like they fall off when they skip it. Flat penetration is worth the most against the squishy targets you were trying to kill anyway, which is exactly backwards from how most people think about penetration.

#2: Mercury's Treads

Magic resist and tenacity together, so they answer two completely different problems at once.

Buy them for the tenacity first. A team with three sources of crowd control makes these correct on almost anyone, including champions who take no magic damage all game, because the seconds you spend unable to move are what actually kills you.

#1: Plated Steelcaps

Armor plus reduced damage from auto-attacks, which is a narrower effect than it looks and a much stronger one.

Almost every game has at least one enemy whose damage comes out of their right hand (a marksman, a jungler who duels, a top laner who wins by standing next to you). These turn all of that down at once, for less gold than anything else that does anything comparable.

They're first because they're the pair most often correct and least often bought. If you're not sure what to build and somebody on the enemy team is auto-attacking you to death, that's the whole decision.

The Upgrades

Every pair has a tier three version, and they map one to one: Berserker's to Gunmetal Greaves, Gluttonous to Immortal Path, Swiftness to Swiftmarch, Sorcerer's to Spellslinger's Shoes, Steelcaps to Armored Advance, Mercury's to Chainlaced Crushers, Ionian to Crimson Lucidity.

You don't buy them. Complete the mid lane quest and whatever tier two pair you're wearing transforms into its tier three version at no cost, on the spot, and if you finish the quest before you've bought boots at all it fires the moment you equip a tier two pair instead. The upgrade used to cost 500 gold (750 before that), which is why plenty of guides still tell you to bank for it. That price is gone.

So the decision changed shape. The upgrade no longer competes with your next real item. You're choosing which tier three effect you want to be holding when the quest lands, and the tier three versions sit much further apart from each other than the tier two ones do. Pick for the effect, and forget loyalty to the pair you started in.

One catch. The transformation locks you out of Undo, so a misclick on boots just before it fires is permanent.

The bot lane quest does something else entirely with the same item. It moves your boots out of your inventory into a separate role quest slot, which hands you a free sixth slot for the rest of the game.

Conclusions

Boots are the cheapest reactive purchase in the game and the one most players make on reflex before minions spawn. Every pair above answers a specific thing the enemy team is doing, and the enemy team is visible in champion select.

Look once before you buy. That's it.

Related reading: the shop tricks that make swapping a buy faster, where the gold to afford them comes from, and the other reactive purchase people skip.