Best Summoner Spells in LoL: All 11 Ranked From Worst to Flash

All eleven summoner spells ranked, counted down from the one nobody takes to the one nobody plays without.

Two buttons you pick before the game starts, and one of them has been the correct answer since 2009.

Summoner Spells in LoL

All 11 Ranked From Worst to Flash

Fundamentals

All eleven summoner spells ranked, counted down from the one nobody takes to the one nobody plays without.

Two buttons you pick before the game starts, and one of them has been the correct answer since 2009.

Summoner spells are the one part of your kit you choose rather than get given, which makes them the most interesting slot in champion select and the one people think about least. Nine of the eleven are on Summoner's Rift. Clarity and Mark only exist in ARAM, and they sit at the bottom here for that reason. Counting down by how much game they give you.

#11: Clarity

Clarity gives back half your own mana and a quarter of every nearby ally's. It came off Summoner's Rift in 2015 and lives in ARAM now, where the health relics already top up your mana on the walk to every fight.

Every mage's item build answers the same question on its own. Nobody has ever lost a teamfight because they walked out of it with too little mana left over.

#10: Mark

The ARAM snowball is the most fun thing on this list and the hardest one to place. It flies a long way, marks the first enemy it hits, and lets you dash straight to them while you're untargetable. That's a free engage in a mode where all ten players are already standing in one lane.

It marks minions too, so a snowball that misses the champion can still carry you over a wave. It just doesn't exist on Summoner's Rift. Rank ARAM on its own and Mark would be arguing with the top three, and the players who insist their team lost because nobody hit one aren't entirely wrong.

#9: Barrier

The safest spell in the game is Barrier, and that's precisely the problem. You get a shield for two and a half seconds on a 180-second cooldown (the shortest of the defensive spells), and it saves you from exactly one thing: whatever lands inside that window.

It's a fine pick when the enemy team has one obvious burst threat and you just want to not be deleted. Everywhere else it's a bad habit. The shield ends and you're still standing in the same bad spot with nothing to show for it.

#8: Cleanse

No spell here is more conditional than Cleanse. Against the right team it wins games on its own, because the enemy plan was to hold you still for three seconds and you declined. Against the wrong team it's a wasted slot for forty minutes.

It strips stuns, roots, slows, charms and taunts, takes Exhaust and the Ignite burn off you, and leaves you with 75% tenacity for three seconds afterward. What it can't touch is a knock-up or a suppression, and a suppression stops you casting it at all. So Malzahar and Warwick walk straight through it.

You have to make the call in champion select, before you know how the game will go. Get it right and you look like a genius. Our crowd control guide lists every type and which ones a cleanse removes.

#7: Heal

Heal does two jobs at once. It puts health back on you and on the ally nearest your cursor, and it makes both of you 30% faster for a second. That second of speed is what gets a marksman out of a kill the enemy jungler had already called.

A good one turns a bot lane 2v2 into a fight the enemy shouldn't have started. Two things work against it, though. A champion healed by it heals for half from a second Heal inside 35 seconds, so a lane where both players took it doesn't get double. And Grievous Wounds cuts it, where Barrier's shield doesn't care.

The real trap is holding it too long, because the shortest gap in League is the one between deciding to press Heal and being dead.

#6: Ghost

Ghost decides who gets to leave. It doesn't get you over a wall, so people write it off, and then they meet a champion who walks at them for ten seconds straight through minions, up to 51% faster by the late game, and learn what movement speed is actually worth.

It's best on the champions who win any fight they're allowed to finish. Top lane got easier to run it in, too. Finish the top lane role quest and the game hands you Unleashed Teleport as a bonus spell, so Ghost and Flash no longer means giving up Teleport for the whole game.

#5: Ignite

Ignite is the only spell that finishes people.

Everything else on this list changes a fight. This one ends it. The burn is true damage over five seconds, so armor and magic resist don't get a vote, and it keeps ticking after they've flashed the wall and think they've got out. If that last tick is what kills them, the kill is yours.

It does a second job people forget about. For the whole burn it applies Grievous Wounds, cutting their healing by 40%, and a Cleanse takes the fire off but leaves the healing cut in place. That makes it the cheapest anti-heal in the game against a bruiser who was counting on getting that health back. Our anti-heal guide has every other source and who on your team should be carrying one.

#4: Exhaust

Exhaust is the most underrated spell in League and it isn't close. For three seconds the target moves 40% slower and deals 35% less damage, and turning off the one champion the enemy team was relying on is worth more than anything you could have done to your own health bar.

Point one at an assassin mid dive and the dive simply doesn't work. The only clean answer is the Cleanse spell. An item cleanse strips the slow and leaves the damage cut sitting there. Its one blind spot is true damage, which it doesn't reduce at all, so it's a worse pick into champions whose damage is mostly true.

It also counts toward assists despite dealing no damage, which our kill credit guide covers along with the rest of the assist rules.

#3: Teleport

Of all eleven, only Teleport plays the map instead of the fight. It turns a lost lane into a lane you're still in, and it turns a won fight two lanes away into a tower, because you got there and nobody else did. At 10:00 it upgrades to Unleashed Teleport, which travels faster and gives you a burst of speed when you land.

Top laners who take it and finish their role quest get the upgraded version on a shorter cooldown, plus a shield after the channel. It's also the easiest spell to waste, and wasting it is genuinely expensive. Spend it to save fifteen seconds of walking and the objective it would have won shows up ninety seconds later without you.

#2: Smite

Every jungler pays for the role with Smite, and the game now enforces it. In every permanent Summoner's Rift queue, only the player drafted into the jungle can take it, and that player can't swap it for anything else.

It also decides the two biggest moments in most games. Dragon and Baron come down to one button pressed at the right health value, by one player on each team, while eight other people watch. Nothing else in League concentrates that much of a game into a single input.

#1: Flash

Flash was always going to be first, and the interesting thing is how completely it won. Riot spent the game's first three years raising its cooldown, from 180 seconds in late 2009 to the 300 it still has now, and players kept taking it anyway, because a short blink through terrain does more for you than any amount of anything else.

It's an escape and an engage in one button, and it's the reason a wall isn't really a wall. Every other spell here does one job well. Flash does whichever job the current second needs, and it's instant, so the enemy sees the result before they see the cast. It even works during most of your own cast times, which our cast time guide explains.

The game is played around its cooldown. Both teams track it, dives get planned around it, and a lane goes from even to lost the moment one player has it and the other doesn't. No other button in League gets that kind of respect.

Why Pros Burn Summoner Spells Early

Watch a pro game and you'll see Flash go in the first few minutes over a single kill, which looks reckless until you do the arithmetic. Flash comes back after 300 seconds. Burn it at 3:00 and it's up again at 8:00, long before Baron spawns at 20:00. Burn it at 16:00 instead and you walk into the first Baron fight without it.

So the early game is the cheapest time to spend one. The first dragon doesn't spawn until 5:00, so nothing that decides the game is on the map yet. What a summoner buys you early is a kill, a lane lead, or an enemy laner without Flash for the next five minutes, and that last one is the reason both teams write every cooldown down. A laner with no Flash is where the jungler goes next.

Holding a spell buys you surprisingly little. A summoner spell doesn't get stronger for sitting unused, and its cooldown only starts once you've pressed it. Pros treat an early trade as the cheap version of a fight they'd otherwise have to take later with the objective on the line.

Conclusions

The order comes down to how much of the game each spell touches. Down at the bottom, a spell saves you from one moment. Up at the top it changes where you can be, what you can take, and who's allowed to fight you, and that's a much bigger thing to hand somebody for free.

The practical version is short. Take Flash. Take the second spell that fixes the thing your champion can't do (skip the one that makes their best trait slightly better), and press it before you're already dead rather than after.

If your champion has nothing else to get out with, our list of champions with no escape shows who leans on their summoners hardest.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.

Which second spell do you actually take, and are you right? Let us know in the comments below.