According to riot Donger was supposed to be made less oppressive for melees?

Check his top lane winrate.

The answer to your question is, "No, it's gotten worse."

I think the issue with Heimerdinger isn't just his turrets, it's the fact that he also has poke and hard CC to supplement them, too. Champions who get within melee range of him are bound to get plinked down automatically, yet Heimer doesn't even need to step outside of his safe zone to be effective, as he can chunk people down from safety. Removing his health regen did make damage stick to him more (which works well for champions with poke, not so much dive-heavy opponents), but it also made him better at kiting enemy melee champions from within his turret nest, so in the end his changes couldn't really have hoped to make him all that less oppressive.

I've seen more heimers top in the last two weeks than I'd seen in the last two years

that champ deserves to burn in hell playing a melee into him is literally impossible

Assuming Riot ever understands a problem well enough that they can actually accomplish the goals they set out for themselves when starting those projects is just silliness on your part. Riot 100% of the time has at best an incredibly shallow understanding of any aspect of their game that doesn't sell Ahri skins. They do not understand heimer, because they've never seen or played it and they never will because they've got some d5's on their QA team bro wut u want.

I played him once outside of ARAM because I got him from a reroll. Fought an Ekko in mid.

Easiest S rank of my life.

I think Riot plays a different game from the rest of us tbh

Heim is oppressive as shit to melee champs.

He'll always be hell to lane against as 90% of melee champions. It's just good his pickrate isn't high

I'm glad his pick rate is as low as it is. The fact that he has extremely good waveclear with normal mage burst abilities and 3 ults tilts me too no end as a champion

Is he really played that much right now?

Of all the champs to complain about you choose heimer lol If anything he's heavily nerfed because his missles no longer instantly apply thunderlords so you are stuck using nerfed aery or dodgable metor.

my only pantheon counter lol

is allowed to be anti-fun against melee champions, but can't?

Hypocrisy at its finest.

if anything it's gotten worse, you get on top of him and he can stun you for lasers and then rocket you while you're still stunned for more lasers

Weird, i don't remember donger being a massive issue for melee champions back when his turrets unlocked armor/mr shred and AoE as your ranked them up... Weird.

I would say so. I can safely ignore his turrets most of the time unless he lands a grenade on me

i just played him earlier today an was locking down top an fighting jungle and top at level 6 an winning so...no

Well I haven't played against one recently, but if we're talking about how he used to be a few seasons ago, I'd say he is at least not more oppressive against melees. If you were melee he'd take both you and your jungler out if you tried to kill him.

Nop not all. Especially if you are an immobile fighter you pretty much cannot do anything against him. If you move in to his turret nest to kill them and he lands a stun + rockets on you, you will at least lose half of your health or even just flat out die.

But I doubt they can make him less oppressive without reworking a good chunk of his kit. Maybe if they updated him to be a scaling sustained fighter (Deals more damage the longer the fight goes on) he could become a lot less oppressive for melees, as they can dip in kill a turret or two and get out before Heimers damage start to really hurt. It will most likely murder his Mid lane viability though.

Over 51% win rate in every ELO, good job Riot :^)

He's more cancerous than teemo... same like pre change... but now he scale [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

I'm not sure about Heimer's actual balance now as opposed to then, but the way I see it, the way you deal with heimer is probably going to be the same melee or ranged- Heimer can kind of outrange most ranged champions and even is comfortable trying to do so, which is half of how he works. His trick is, unlike artillery mages like Xerath or Lux, his turrets make him very dangerous to all-in dive him as well, as he'll just use the turrets to shred you. The trade off, and htere is a trade-off, is that while he can push into you relentlessly, he can't actually dive the tower effectively, and his ranged poke isn't as reliable, so he's forced to sit beyond tower range trying to plink you down, with no answer to you just walking further away and recalling if you get low. So an answer to Heimer, is to farm under tower-he can't actually punish this unless you fail to dodge his skillshots.

Why are we complaining about heimer when gankplank does the exact same thing but worse. At least you can build Mr vs heimer. Gankplank deals true damage and then the barrels might as well be true damage because they ignore 80% armor anyway.

Man, I'm glad I play Kayle whenever I see that guy. Laning with Aatrox kinda sucks versus donger, though rushing hexdrinker and mercs helps a bit.

Some real truth up in here: he isn't oppressive enough. New turret cap is 5 and they have a slowing aura.

Really? With how much Zoning, poke and CC he has, I thought he was set up to counter melee champs. Sure he can't exactly run away very fast, but why run when you can just hide between 3 turrets and stun the enemy when they try to engage you?