Riot’s champion reworks for League of Legends have generally been positive. Almost every champion rework has seen mechanics that flow better and allow for more interesting play by both them and their opponents. Heimerdinger has been in the rework pipeline for ages, with promises he would be ready soon–and soon is finally here.
The Glorious Inventor is in the public beta environment with his changes, meaning barring any truly incredible issues all he needs are tweaks to the numbers on his abilities and some bugfixing. So how has Heimer changed in this rework? Let’s look at it ability by ability.
Passive: Techmaturgical Repair Bots
For the most part, Heimer’s passive remains the same. It has one big difference, in that it no longer gives health regen to towers. It regenerates his turrets and nearby allied champions, but not towers any longer.
Q: H-28G Evolution Turret
This ability saw several changes. First of all, Heimerdinger can place a maximum of three turrets at all ranks of the ability, and the turrets gain in maximum health based on Heimer’s level, not based on the ability’s rank. What ranking up the ability does do is allow Heimerdinger to carry more than a single turret kit at a time, allowing him to place several at once. It also increases the damage they do.
There are three other major changes to this ability worth noting. First, the mana cost is now only 20 mana, making it much less important to have a huge stock of mana. Second, the turrets now have a higher damage beam attack in addition to their cannon. This attack pierces and fires every 12 seconds, with the timer modified by cooldown reduction. Last, turrets shut down if Heimerdinger moves away from them. They reactivate when he gets close again if they aren’t destroyed, but he has to be close for them to be a threat.
W: Hextech Micro-Rockets
This ability is the one most changed from its prior incarnation, and with good reason. Heimer’s micro-rockets were effectively unavoidable and actually did good damage, making them decidedly unfun to play against, with no counter-play of any sort other than simple distance.
The new version is a targeted skillshot firing fire rockets which converge wherever the ability is targeted. Once they reach that point, they continue in a spread past it. Enemies hit by single rockets take damage, while the damage of being hit by more than one rocket is drastically reduced.
This new way of doing the ability creates interesting possibilities for Heimer players, being able to either clear a wave by targeting the ability closer and using the spread or targeting on top of an enemy to maximize the single-target damage, and is actually avoidable, albeit with difficulty, making it more fun to play against as well.
E: CH-1 Electron Storm Grenade
This ability is the least changed overall. It replaces the blind from the AoE with a slow. The stun at the AoE’s center is unaffected, and it has a new animation showing an actual thrown grenade.
R: UPGRADE!!!
Heimerdinger’s ultimate is the ability which changed the most. Whereas before it healed his turrets and gave them a slowing attack, now it simply makes his next spell free and gives it an extra effect. Those extra effects are awesome, though.
If the spell cast is Heimer’s Q, he will drop a bigger turret which does three or four times as much damage with its cannon and over twice as much damage with its beam. The turret will charge its beam in half the time as normal, has extra health, and does not even count towards the normal three turret maximum. It will fall apart after eight seconds, but the damage it can throw out in that time is extreme.
Cast with Heimer’s Micro-Rockets, the effect is identical to the base spell… except that it fires four waves of rockets instead of one, allowing for some truly absurd damage potential, especially when realizing the AP ratio applies to each wave of rockets.
When used with the grenade, it bounces after detonating, blowing up three times before vanishing. It also increases the radius of the stun and the slow, and increases the slow to 80%.
The Heimerdinger rework looks good.
Lots of Heimer’s more difficult problems look to be getting cleared up, and he should once again be strong in a slightly less limited sense without being bullshit-overpowered within that niche. Look for him on the live servers soon!
Published: Oct 12, 2013 01:08 pm