Change to Heimerdinger’s turrets

is in an awkward state right now; he is one of the only champions that falls into the “win lane, lose game” category. In the laning phase, his turrets do sufficiently high damage and are durable enough that their zoning ability is so strong that save intervention from a teammate, excellent AoE damage, or a Faker-esque outplay, laning against a Heimerdinger means losing your turret. However, once past the laning phase Heimerdinger is really underwhelming since a single AoE ability can destroy several of his turrets effectively eliminating his threat (since his other abilities have such long cooldowns). In order to flatten the usefulness of Heimerdinger’s turrets so that he can remain more useful after the laning phase but less oppressive during it, I propose adoption of changing his turrets to have a health bar like a ward or ’s plants which requires 2 unique spell procs, 3 auto-attacks, or 1 spell and 2 autos to deplete

As an illustrative example of the effect of this change in the laning phase, consider an laning against a at level 3 when Heimerdingers’s turrets will have the most relative health due to hp/level scaling. Currently, assuming Annie has 1 point in her Q, 30 AP, and 8 flat magic pen from runes, her Q will do 89 damage (after resistances) and her autos will do 49 damage (once again after resistances). Assuming Heimerdinger also has 1 point in his Q and 30 AP, his turrets will have 203 health and due to his passive regenerate 2 hp/sec. In the proposed scenario Annie can kill one Heimerdinger turret in 8 seconds with 2 Q’s and an auto or 3 autos and a Q; meanwhile, will take 22 seconds to replace the turret. By implementing the proposed change, the Annie player would either save 1 auto or the mana from 1 Q and reduce Heimerdingers ’s lane presence significantly for 14+ seconds.

As compensation for the effective nerf to his laning phase, in teamfights Heimerdinger will be a more reliable sustained damage source. As someone who enjoys Heimerdinger’s highly flexible and strategic playstyle, the most frustrating part about playing him is having your turrets take incidental AoE damage in a teamfight completely eliminating his damage and turning him into an impotent bobblehead (dat walking animation).

Heimerdinger is a champion defined by being an uniquely flexible controller/disruptor mage with his kit making him into a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none. His Q gives him sustained multi-target magic damage like Azir but at a reduced overall rate. His W makes him a passable but slightly below average (due to the long cooldown) siege and poke mage. His E combined with a Rylai’s crystal scepter gives him crowd control abilities in the vein of but not to the extent of Zyra. Even his ultimate serves to situationally increase his kit’s sustained damage, burst potential, or crowd control abilities. Despite the great flexibility of his kit, Heimerdinger’s pick rate, especially at higher elos remains low (at the time of this post in gold and above his pick rate is less than 2%); a fact which I attribute to the current design of his turrets. By changing the health of his turrets to a charge system, the power of his turrets could be more equitably divided between the laning phase and mid-game making him into a healthier, more viable champion.