Hi all,

I am very new to the realm of these type of games. I am level 8 in this game, but I am still a noob. Anyways, I have not played WoW, DOTA, or anything related. But I find LoL fun.

I have a couple questions that I tried searching for in the forums.

Here they are:

1) How do you use the item trees?
2) I have heard "recipes," what is it?

For example Rylai's Scepter, there are three items under it. If I get those three items will it automatically get the Rylai's Scepter? or do I have to additionally pay gold for the scepter?

Once I get the scepter, what if I sold the 'ingredients'? Will the scepter I bought go away?

Sorry for asking a simple question. Reason I am asking, is because I have been one-shotting it and buy the scepter for over 3k, but that takes forever. I see other players get items that are very strong before I can even get a 2nd big item.

Thanks for any help that I receive!

Recipes come from DotA, where the combination items, like Rylai's Scepter (as an example), required a few items, and usually an additional cost for merging them

Using your example:

Rylai's Scepter
Blasting Wand, Amplifying Tome, Giant's Belt

Means you can buy each of those three items separate, and then pay the small cost to merge them into the Scepter. Some items, it is better to buy parts of it and just make repeat trips to the shop to upgrade and merge them.

Items can either be purchased directly for gold, or for a combination of gold and lesser items that are used as components. A recipe is the set of items that are needed to turn in to buy a greater item, which generally combines all of the stats of the lesser items, and adds a bonus on top of that. Essentially, in exchange for a bit of extra gold you get to collapse all of those items into a single slot and get a significant bonus on top of that.

In DoTA, purchasing an item through a recipe required that you have already purchased the items that you need to sacrifice as components. In LoL, the process is somewhat simplified, as long as you have the total cash needed for the product of a recipe, the shop will let you skip on the purchase of the components, and just build the price of the components you don't yet have into the total you have to pay for the product. This allows you to purchase the product of a recipe even if you don't have enough slots to hold all of the components.

In general, you want to plan in advance which of the recipe items you want to work towards, and buy the components as you can afford them. This way, you can get part of the benefits of the final item and only have to pay part of the price at that time. As you build up the components in your inventory, the price for the final combine will get increasingly cheaper, to the point where you can just buy it outright without needing to save up your money too much. There's no disadvantage whatsoever to buying subcomponents early on, as long of course as you don't use up gold that you would have spent working on a different combine.

Once you've purchased the product of a recipe, the components are gone forever, and if you want them back, you'll have to buy them from scratch. The product is generally worth much more to you than the availability of the components, though, so I wouldn't worry at all about that for a while. Just bear in mind that if you spend components on mid-tier items like the ones that give you gold over time, they won't be available for more expensive items that you'll want for the endgame.

The top item is the combiner, and it makes all the other items you bought "merge" into a single, better one.

Recipe is what it sounds like. What you need to make it. Like the recipe for Ninja Tabi is 1 Cloth armor, and 1 Boots of Speed. You can buy either of the two parts of the recipe before you have enough for it all, and when you can afford the combine, the boots will be made.