Formerly OP #13: Old Heimerdinger

Six turrets. They levelled themselves up, they cost no gold, and they kept shooting after he died.

Old Heimerdinger didn't hold a lane. He annexed it, and then he charged you rent in the form of a three and a half second blind.

Formerly OP

Old Heimerdinger

Beta & Season 1 · Ended Patch 3.13

Six turrets. They levelled themselves up, they cost no gold, and they kept shooting after he died.

Old Heimerdinger didn't hold a lane. He annexed it, and then he charged you rent in the form of a three and a half second blind.

Every League player has a mental model of what a champion is: a unit that walks around, presses buttons, and stops mattering when it dies. The original Heimerdinger broke that model on day one. He built a static defensive line out of nothing, in a game that had almost no reliable way to clear one, and the line got stronger on its own as it farmed. If you walked into it you got blinded and shredded. If you waited for him to leave, the turrets stayed. If you killed him, for the first few months of the game's life, the turrets still stayed. There wasn't a wrong answer so much as a set of equally bad ones.

When, And For How Long

Heimerdinger arrived on October 10, 2009, in Patch V0.9.25.34, which puts him among the game's earliest additions, back when League was still in beta and the roster was small enough to memorise. His most absurd version lasted from that release through the following spring.

This entry has two fall dates, and they're five months and three and a half years apart respectively. Patch V1.0.0.81 on March 24, 2010 ended the turret farm outright. The rest of the old kit, blind and all, survived until the full rework in Patch 3.13 on October 29, 2013.

The Old Kit

The icons below are the archived art from the pre-rework kit. Two of these abilities don't exist in any form today.

Passive: Techmaturgical Repair Bots

An aura. Techmaturgical Repair Bots [Passive] handed health regeneration to Heimerdinger, to nearby allied champions, to his turrets, and, in the original version, to allied structures. That last clause is the interesting one: a champion who passively repaired your towers, standing next to towers he was also defending with turrets he'd built himself. Riot cut structures out of the aura in the 3.13 rework.

Q: H-28G Evolution Turret

The famous one. H-28G Evolution Turret [Q] placed a machine gun turret, and at release the cap scaled from two turrets at rank one all the way to six at rank five. They weren't disposable either. Each turret gained experience from attacking things and grew stronger on its own, and his ultimate could promote one to a higher tier with better attacks. He was, functionally, the only champion in the game who got scaling without spending gold on it.

W: Hextech Micro-Rockets

Homing missiles that picked their own targets. Hextech Micro-Rockets [W] fired at visible enemy champions at random, with no aiming involved at all, and for the game's first months it could hit champions sitting in fog of war. There was no skillshot to dodge because there was no skillshot. You were simply in range or you weren't.

E: CH-1 Concussion Grenade

The one people forget, and by a distance the most oppressive thing in the kit. CH-1 Concussion Grenade [E] stunned anyone caught by the center and blinded everything in the blast radius, for up to three and a half seconds at release. It also damaged structures. In an era where the win condition on most teams was a marksman right-clicking, an unmissable area blind of that length simply switched off the enemy carry, and it did it from a long way away.

R: UPGRADE!!!

Not a teamfight ultimate. UPGRADE!!! [R] targeted one of his own turrets and healed it to full, doubled its attack speed for ten seconds, and permanently added health, damage and armor to it while promoting it a tier. It also passively gave him cooldown reduction. His ultimate was a construction upgrade, spent on a unit that was already free.

Why It Was OP

Heimerdinger's damage numbers were never the story. What made him miserable was that he changed the rules of the map rather than the outcome of a fight.

Six free units that scaled without gold. Every other champion converted farm into items into power. H-28G Evolution Turret [Q] converted time into power, because the turrets gained their own experience from shooting things and got stronger doing it. A Heimerdinger who did nothing but hold a lane still got stronger by holding it.

The blind was a hard counter to entire champion classes. Three and a half seconds is a very long time to be unable to land a basic attack. CH-1 Concussion Grenade [E] didn't care whether you were a marksman, an on-hit bruiser or a jungler mid-gank, and it hit an area rather than a target. Blind as a mechanic barely exists in the modern game precisely because of how badly it reads as "your champion doesn't work now."

Killing him didn't clear the lane. For the first stretch of the game's life, his turrets survived his death and kept shooting. Riot patched that in V1.0.0.32 by making them detonate when he died, but for a while the standard punish for winning a fight against a Heimerdinger was to then lose the tower anyway.

He hit structures with a spell. CH-1 Concussion Grenade [E] originally dealt full damage to towers, cut to half in V1.0.0.96 and removed entirely in V1.0.0.99. Combined with turrets that also hit towers, he pushed lanes without walking into them, which in a game with no jungle pressure to speak of yet was very close to free map control.

Nothing he did required aim. Hextech Micro-Rockets [W] chose its own targets. The turrets chose theirs. The grenade covered an area. Heimerdinger's skill expression was about where to put things, not whether you could hit anything, and that made his floor extremely high in a playerbase that was still learning the game.

The Fall

The first cut was the deep one. Patch V1.0.0.81, on March 24, 2010, removed turret experience and turret upgrades entirely and dropped the maximum turret count from two through six down to one, two, two, three, three. That single patch took away both the turret farm and the free scaling in one move, and it's the moment old Heimerdinger stopped being a structural problem.

Everything after that was maintenance. The blind duration came down in V1.0.0.32 and again later. Grenade damage to structures was halved in V1.0.0.96 and removed in V1.0.0.99. Turret counts and health were adjusted repeatedly across 2010 and 2011.

The kit itself finally went in Patch 3.13 on October 29, 2013. Turret tiers and their on-hit effects were deleted and replaced with the single turret with a pass-through laser beam he has today. Hextech Micro-Rockets [W] lost random targeting and became an aimed barrage that converges where you point it. The grenade lost its blind, gained a slow, and was renamed. And UPGRADE!!! [R] stopped being a turret buff and became the empowerment system it's now, where it upgrades whichever of his next three spells he casts.

Where He Stands Now

Modern Heimerdinger is a genuine specialist rather than a lane tyrant. He's a mid and support pick who a small number of players are frightening on and everyone else isn't, which is roughly what Riot was aiming for. The turret is a real skillshot placement decision now, the rockets have to be aimed, and the grenade rewards you for landing the center rather than for existing.

What's genuinely gone is the blind, and it isn't coming back. Riot has spent the last decade moving away from mechanics that switch an entire class of champion off, and a multi-second area blind on a low cooldown is about as pure an example of that as the game ever shipped. The turret cap is gone too. Nobody is putting six of anything down anymore.

Nominate The Next One

Heimerdinger belongs to the oldest chapter of this series, the beta-era designs where Riot was still working out what a champion was allowed to be. Six self-levelling turrets and a three second blind weren't overtuned numbers. They were an idea that turned out not to work. Look through the rest of the run below and tell us who should be next in the comments.