Items and stats

In League of Legends, you will earn gold. Every game you start out with a low 475 gold in most cases. You can earn gold in many ways but you will earn most of it by killing minions, enemy champions, and overtime. Gold is very important in League of Legends because it allows you to buy items that can increase things such as how much damage you do and how much health you have. Each player can have a total of 6 items and a trinket. A trinket is a free item that has its own personal item slot, you may only own one trinket and each one has its own unique purpose.

There are many kinds of items. To understand which items do what, you must first understand your champion's stats. Each champion has attack damage (increases the damage of your basic attack* and the damage of all abilities that use attack damage). A similar stat to attack damage is ability power which increases the damage of any abilities that use ability power. Two more stats are armor and magic resistance which. Armor decreases damage done to you from abilities that use attack damage and magic resistance does the same thing but against abilities that use ability power. 

Another important stat is movement speed which increases how fast your champion moves. A few more stats are lifesteal which allows you to recover hp from dealing damage to an enemy with an attack damage ability or basic attack and spell vamp is the same but for ability power abilities. There are four more stats, attack speed, health, mana**, and cooldown reduction. Attack speed increases the speed that you can use basic attacks. Mana increases your mana (obviously) and health increases your health. The final stat, cooldown reduction, decreases the time that your abilities will be unusable***.

*A basic attack is a ranged or melee(up close) attack, which does more damage based on your attack damage.

**Most champions have something called mana. It is used to cast abilities and slowly regenerates so that no one may spam(repeatedly use) their abilities.

*** Each champion ability has a unique cooldown time, which can range from 3 seconds to 2 minutes, where it is unusable.

Now that champion stats have been explained, I will now describe the purpose of items. All items increase certain stats based on how expensive they are. Items can give an increase in one more stats but no items increase all stats. Some items also have a passive. A passive gives your champion a unique ability that is always active such as slowly doing damage every second to nearby enemies. Some passives can be stacked (gotten over and over) while some passives are unique passives. Unique passives do not stack.