A Guide to Heimerdinger
Intro
There weren't any Heim guides listed on the great big list o' guides so I thought I'd throw one out there. Especially since he took a lot of flak for coming into the fields of justice late and with glasses, but they turned out to be goggles so everything’s pretty much ok now. Heimerdinger is a great pusher and support hero. With his turrets he offers a very unique play style from any other hero on the board and played right, can be a great asset to the team.
=================================
Basics - Skills
Abilities
Q: H-28G Evolution Turret – Heimerdinger constructs a machine gun turret with (240 + 14xLevel) health and 20/26/32/38/44 (+0.25 ability power) damage. Max of 2/3/4/5/6 turrets.
About – Turrets are Heimerdinger’s defining characteristic. They provide the majority of his damage, act as rooted pets and can make a huge difference in pushing, defending and covering when you have to return to base. If Heimerdinger dies, all of his current turrets are destroyed and if you place more than your allotted amount of turrets, the oldest turret is destroyed. Turrets also gain exp on hits which can increase their damage slightly.
W: Hextech Micro-Rockets – Heimerdinger fires 1/2/3/4/5 Champion-seeking missiles. Each rocket does 80 (+0.2 ability power) magic damage hitting random champions within its range.
About – This is Heimerdinger’s finisher. At low levels, they are piteously weak and when dealing with 2 or more champions tend to spread out become even more worthless. However, they are instant click with no targeting required, fairly cheap mana wise and long ranged (1,000?) which makes them great for nailing a solo hero hiding behind a tower or trying to run away.
E: CH-1 Concussion Grenade – Heimerdinger lobs a grenade dealing 80/135/190/245/300 (+0.7 ability power) magic damage to enemy units, towers and turrets as well as stunning anyone directly hit for 1/1.5/2/2.5/3 seconds.
About – Concussion Grenades are fitting along with Heimerdinger’s style as a pusher. When cast, they move piteously slow allowing enemy heroes to easily dodge both the grenade and it’s radius. However, the grenades to decent area effect damage with stun that allows you to take down minions and throw in some added damage on towers at range. Against enemy heroes, they are primarily useful in three situations. 1) In group battles when people are massed and too fully engaged to run away. 2) On an enemy melee hero attacking a tower or turret to get them to move back or stun them if they’re staying for the kill. 3) As a tactical retreat device, if running from enemy heroes, the slow speed of the grenade can actually be used to your benefit by quickly firing it behind you in the run path that your pursuers have no choice but to run through.
R: Upgrade!! – Passively increases cooldown reduction by %10/15/20. On activation fully heals an Evolution Turret and doubles the turret’s attack speed for 10 seconds. Each upgrade adds 200hp, 10 damage and 10 armor and upgrades the turret to:
Level 2 with Uranium rounds that stack -1 armor -1 magic resist per hit
Level 3 with explosive area effect cartridges.
About – This skill is really just a part of your turret skills. Turrets really are Heimerdinger’s primary concern with all other skills being secondary. This skill allows you to increase the potency of your turrets, heal your turrets and generally just be more beastly. One thing to remember when you get to upgrades, is to always know the build order of your turrets. In order to really be effective, Heimerdinger needs to set up ambushes, and keep laning with turrets, so often old turrets need to be rebuilt in a new location. It’s rather disappointing to take any time, especially early on, to upgrade a turret to level three, only to have it sit all lonely and unused as non-upgrade turrets in another lane get pushed or moved forward.
Passive: Techmaturgical Repair Bots – Gives nearby allies and turrets 6/12/16/22 health regen per 5 seconds.
About – Regen is snazzy, stay close to your turrets when possible and allies when possible too. It’ll help to keep you in your lane, especially early when coupled with a healing pot, but that’s pretty much it.
=================================
Basics - Character
Base Statistics
Health: 420 Start (+72 per level)
Mana: 305 Start (+65 per level)
Movespeed: 300
Armor: 10 (+3 per level)
Spellresist: 30
Critical Strike: 1 (+0.4 per level)
Health Regen: 0 (+0.2 per level)
Mana Regen: 0 (+0.2 per level)
Attack Range: 550
Character Story
It is unusual to see yordles outside of Bandle City, but the lure of science was something Heimerdinger could not resist. The great academies of Piltdown called to him; daring him to make his mark in the City of Progress. Knowing he would never thrive away from his own kind, Heimerdinger gathered like-minded yordles to join him in his quest, thus forming the backbone of the now famous Yordle Academy of Science & Progress. Since then, he has become one of the most respected minds of the modern age. The state of war on Valoran, however, is unacceptable, and Heimerdinger believes that science is the key to saving the world. Much more, he is out to prove this as a member of the League of Legends.
''Science is on the march. Don't get in its way.''
=================================
Builds
Ability Path
The build listed below is best used for pushing. It maximizes your turret use and gives you the most bang for the buck pushing towers and minions. It won’t give you hero kills. My preferred build (although probably not as useful as the one below) is to just get one level of Conc Grenade and replace the others with Micro Rockets. Micro Rockets while never powerful akin to Veigar or Ryze nukes, scale damage pretty rapidly and can be great for getting that <1 hp bar kill on fleeing champions.
Items
There are two primary paths you can run for Heim, AP builds and Survivability builds. This guide focuses more on being a pusher with Heim so this item section will focus mostly on survivability. AP builds can also help push since turret damage scales somewhat with AP, and it’s certainly more fun for slightly more effective grenades and rockets that do a little more damage than people would expect, but for the average player, that’s not the smartest option.
For Survivability builds, your primary focuses are on HP, Cooldown Reduction and Mana Regeneration or Mana Pool. Usually starting out, I will either go for a meki pendant or a sapphire crystal building a Fiendish Codex or Catalyst the Protector. Depending on your masteries/runes if you can get the innate +15% cooldown reduction you should focus on getting a soul shroud for the regen and max cooldown along with a Fiendish Codex. If not, or if you’re facing a heavy physical damage team, Frozen Heart is a great choice.
With the Passive on Heim's Ultimate and runes/masteries it is easily possible to only need one cooldown reduction item in order to maximize your cooldown to the %40 hard cap. If you're at that point, take this into consideration early on. A Fiendish Codex might be great for an early push, but if you're planning on getting a Soul Shroud or Frozen Heart later, the Codex is taking up an item slot and reducing the value on the excess Cooldown Reduction.
From Catalyst the Protector, if you’re facing heavy casters go straight to Banshee Veil, for more AP usually I’ll build to Rod of Ages although they aren’t mutually exclusive. Also take a look at Rylai’s Scepter which is great for snaring with rockets as well as adding HP. Finally, most builds for end game all include a Guardian Angel. It covers you on both ends from magic and physical as well as the whole resurrection buff which can be essential for saving your towers.
Good boots are also essential, aside from the marginal use of Grenades and Summoner Abilities, Heim has no real escape tactics. At the basic level, Ninja Tabi or Mercury Treads are good choices if the enemy team is heavily physical or magic damage. Boots of Swiftness are also a good choice just for the added speed bonus. Boots of Mobility really aren’t a great choice here since Heim doesn’t really need to quickly cross the map to gank and his turrets both provide a place to portal back to and can help hold the lane for the time it would take him to return.
Another item to consider is the Innervating Locket. It adds a nice bonus to HP and Mana and Mana Regen as well as an activatable AE heal that can hit your turrets.
Masteries
I usually go 9/0/21 with offense and utility, to max out cooldowns and support caster and summoner abilities, but many of the adjustments in masteries are so small that you can really set this up to whatever play style fits you best, be it more offensive or a need for greater defenses instead of mostly utility.
Runes
Heim didn’t spend a whole lot of time in beta before runes got nixed, so going to wait on this section for now. Basically though, cooldown reductions, mana regen and hp would still be the focuses.
Summoner Abilities
At least one person on your team should have Fortify, it can be game saving and if nothing else is a nice way to say “hey screw off my tower” to the other team. Heim isn’t really a front line hero and as such doesn’t necessarily need to have summoner escapes available and is a good person to take fortify. Flash and Ghost are good escapes, if you don’t need to take fortify. Teleport and Cleanse are useful skills to have, teleport just lets you lane faster or portal to save a push from a minion wave and cleanse might save your butt if you’re 1v1 or 1v2 against a disabler, although I would say it’s more limited than Flash or Ghost. Everything else is pretty much a wash.
=================================
Tactics
Turret Placement
Turret placement is Heim, bad turret placement means you’re doing less damage, burning mana replacing towers and generally just being ineffective. At the most basic, you want to keep your towers close together. Especially at the start of the game when they are beefier than the opposing teams abilities and damage, it’s a great way to add a little bit of force. If you’re facing a whole lot of AE’s (Nasus, Morgana, etc.) as the game progresses you’ll want to start spreading out your turrets in a way that they can fire on the same target but not be in the same radius of the AE attack. Some basic formations are:
Point – Hard node, turrets are basically placed on top of each other. Can do a lot of damage in a small area.
V – Either a forward V or an Inverted /\ allows you to focus the towers but still have some outside of an AE range.
Half Moon – Sort of like the V formation this is intended to create a bowl for enemies to run into and get focused on. You want it close enough that turrets can hit the same unit, but not so concave that they’re all within an AE circle.
Dual Point – Create two point nodes far enough from each other to be just outside of an enemy’s AE range. Can also be helpful for heroes like Sivir or Katarina with unfocused AE’s that will hit one node but can’t bounce to the other.
Laning
PUSH! A lot of Heim players feel the need to turtle next to a tower. Certainly in conjunction with towers and turrets you can make a decent fort, but you can also do that with cardboard boxes (which if you’re going to sit back and basically make your team run 4v5 is really what you should be playing with instead anyway). Your Conc grenades do AE damage and temporarily halt minion attacks allowing you to build up a wave. When you get to a tower you can throw up turrets and fire your range attack and Conc grenade again allowing you to do some decent damage even early in the game. If you’ve got the movement speed and mana pool, you can even set up forward observation posts in more than one lane allowing a solo or even a duo to have a safe place to fall back to in front of your towers.
Ganking
Ganking with Heim is pretty much a group effort. Without burst DPS you really can’t blow heroes away. Early game you can get lucky with good turret placement or a dull enemy who stands there wondering what the humming ball of electricity slowly making it’s way towards them is for, but for the most part, you are there as an assist and you need other champions to get kills. Tall Grass is your friend here. Set up multi turret ambushes in the enemy forest, or along the grass lanes. Ally with Singe, Tristana or Blitz for someone that can use your turrets like Towers for added damage. Watch for heroes that run away at low health or think they’re safe behind a tower and fire off some rockets.
A Survivable Heim with a decent hp pool and armor or magic resist tailored to the enemy team can even be a decent ganker despite the lack of burst dps. As long as you stay with your towers, a well played heim can even 1v1 heroes that normally terrorize solo like Ryze. That said, don’t try to take someone late game who has decent lifesteal (Warwick, well itemed Twitch, etc.) since you can’t do burst dps a large hp pool just acts as a qfont of healing for them while they continue to beat you senseless until your towers explode along with your newly decaying corpse.
=================================
Game Strategy
Early Game
Get towers down as soon as possible, they’re added damage that the enemy doesn’t have (unless they also have Heim, and then…well… just be better). Utilize the Tall Grass to keep your turrets stealthed and protected. Do not put one tower by itself in the middle of the lane, it’s going to get killed and you just wasted mana. Remember even the first level of turret gets you 2 turrets, so get both up near each other and where you can cover them. If you’ve got Conc Grenade, save it to protect your towers, it doesn’t do enough damage now to push creeps anyway. Keep last hitting with your range. If you’ve got Rockets, harass with your range attack and fire when they start to run.
Mid Game
You’ve got more turrets now, start watching out for AE attacks and monitoring your turret placement even harder. If you’re trying to gank or protect against ganks, keep your turrets in the Tall Grass far enough back from the minions so they don’t auto attack and reveal themselves. Upgrade your newest turrets and hopefully your mana pool is big enough now that you don’t have to worry about dumping old turrets in favor of new pushing turrets. If you’re laning with a partner and they get a stun or a snare off on an attack, try to drop a turret in between the enemy hero and their tower, you’ll get more hits in and it’s kinda scary (kinda). Start using Conc Grenades to push lanes and last hit. Your Rockets if you have them now, are most effective at this point. If you have a solo hero running or hiding, fire them off, they’re cheap and do decent damage. If they have AE heroes, make sure you’re using turret formations that are a little more spread out, if not, focus up.
Late Game
You should have enough mana and cooldown to regularly push and upgrade your turrets. Start building ambushes or get a hard point setup to continually control a lane if you’re winning. If one of your allies needs help, maybe run over and toss them a turret or two for added support. Your Conc Grenades should pretty much be able to stop a minion push by now. Generally at this point your team should be running around together to gank and protect from ganks. You need to stay near the back of this group. Team battles should hopefully be taking place near your turrets. If not, make sure you try to set something up and communicate to your team about the effectiveness of fighting with 6 additional turrets. Fire your Conc Grenade from the rear lines once people are engaged, target casters with your stuns, keep firing off your rockets on the runners, but they aren’t as effective at this point. You want to keep upgrading your turrets as fast as possible if you are creating gank points, but the enemy wises up pretty fast so you’ll have to continually move them around to stay effective. Alternatively, you can also set them up throughout the enemy forest as warning beacons akin to Teemo mushrooms (note do not do this if you have Teemo, if you need that explained, check out The Idiots Guide to Life, ISBN 0-4637-6298-x). Your primary focus at this point is getting towers in the right spot, and then not dying.
Intro
There weren't any Heim guides listed on the great big list o' guides so I thought I'd throw one out there. Especially since he took a lot of flak for coming into the fields of justice late and with glasses, but they turned out to be goggles so everything’s pretty much ok now. Heimerdinger is a great pusher and support hero. With his turrets he offers a very unique play style from any other hero on the board and played right, can be a great asset to the team.
=================================
Basics - Skills
Abilities
Q: H-28G Evolution Turret – Heimerdinger constructs a machine gun turret with (240 + 14xLevel) health and 20/26/32/38/44 (+0.25 ability power) damage. Max of 2/3/4/5/6 turrets.
About – Turrets are Heimerdinger’s defining characteristic. They provide the majority of his damage, act as rooted pets and can make a huge difference in pushing, defending and covering when you have to return to base. If Heimerdinger dies, all of his current turrets are destroyed and if you place more than your allotted amount of turrets, the oldest turret is destroyed. Turrets also gain exp on hits which can increase their damage slightly.
W: Hextech Micro-Rockets – Heimerdinger fires 1/2/3/4/5 Champion-seeking missiles. Each rocket does 80 (+0.2 ability power) magic damage hitting random champions within its range.
About – This is Heimerdinger’s finisher. At low levels, they are piteously weak and when dealing with 2 or more champions tend to spread out become even more worthless. However, they are instant click with no targeting required, fairly cheap mana wise and long ranged (1,000?) which makes them great for nailing a solo hero hiding behind a tower or trying to run away.
E: CH-1 Concussion Grenade – Heimerdinger lobs a grenade dealing 80/135/190/245/300 (+0.7 ability power) magic damage to enemy units, towers and turrets as well as stunning anyone directly hit for 1/1.5/2/2.5/3 seconds.
About – Concussion Grenades are fitting along with Heimerdinger’s style as a pusher. When cast, they move piteously slow allowing enemy heroes to easily dodge both the grenade and it’s radius. However, the grenades to decent area effect damage with stun that allows you to take down minions and throw in some added damage on towers at range. Against enemy heroes, they are primarily useful in three situations. 1) In group battles when people are massed and too fully engaged to run away. 2) On an enemy melee hero attacking a tower or turret to get them to move back or stun them if they’re staying for the kill. 3) As a tactical retreat device, if running from enemy heroes, the slow speed of the grenade can actually be used to your benefit by quickly firing it behind you in the run path that your pursuers have no choice but to run through.
R: Upgrade!! – Passively increases cooldown reduction by %10/15/20. On activation fully heals an Evolution Turret and doubles the turret’s attack speed for 10 seconds. Each upgrade adds 200hp, 10 damage and 10 armor and upgrades the turret to:
Level 2 with Uranium rounds that stack -1 armor -1 magic resist per hit
Level 3 with explosive area effect cartridges.
About – This skill is really just a part of your turret skills. Turrets really are Heimerdinger’s primary concern with all other skills being secondary. This skill allows you to increase the potency of your turrets, heal your turrets and generally just be more beastly. One thing to remember when you get to upgrades, is to always know the build order of your turrets. In order to really be effective, Heimerdinger needs to set up ambushes, and keep laning with turrets, so often old turrets need to be rebuilt in a new location. It’s rather disappointing to take any time, especially early on, to upgrade a turret to level three, only to have it sit all lonely and unused as non-upgrade turrets in another lane get pushed or moved forward.
Passive: Techmaturgical Repair Bots – Gives nearby allies and turrets 6/12/16/22 health regen per 5 seconds.
About – Regen is snazzy, stay close to your turrets when possible and allies when possible too. It’ll help to keep you in your lane, especially early when coupled with a healing pot, but that’s pretty much it.
=================================
Basics - Character
Base Statistics
Health: 420 Start (+72 per level)
Mana: 305 Start (+65 per level)
Movespeed: 300
Armor: 10 (+3 per level)
Spellresist: 30
Critical Strike: 1 (+0.4 per level)
Health Regen: 0 (+0.2 per level)
Mana Regen: 0 (+0.2 per level)
Attack Range: 550
Character Story
It is unusual to see yordles outside of Bandle City, but the lure of science was something Heimerdinger could not resist. The great academies of Piltdown called to him; daring him to make his mark in the City of Progress. Knowing he would never thrive away from his own kind, Heimerdinger gathered like-minded yordles to join him in his quest, thus forming the backbone of the now famous Yordle Academy of Science & Progress. Since then, he has become one of the most respected minds of the modern age. The state of war on Valoran, however, is unacceptable, and Heimerdinger believes that science is the key to saving the world. Much more, he is out to prove this as a member of the League of Legends.
''Science is on the march. Don't get in its way.''
=================================
Builds
Ability Path
The build listed below is best used for pushing. It maximizes your turret use and gives you the most bang for the buck pushing towers and minions. It won’t give you hero kills. My preferred build (although probably not as useful as the one below) is to just get one level of Conc Grenade and replace the others with Micro Rockets. Micro Rockets while never powerful akin to Veigar or Ryze nukes, scale damage pretty rapidly and can be great for getting that <1 hp bar kill on fleeing champions.
- 1. Evolution Turret
- 2. Conc Grenade
- 3. Evolution Turret
- 4. Conc Grenade
- 5. Evolution Turret
- 6. Upgrade
- 7. Evolution Turret
- 8. Evolution Turret
- 9. Conc Grenade
- 10. Conc Grenade
- 11. Upgrade
- 12. Conc Grenade
- 13. Rocket
- 14. Rocket
- 15. Rocket
- 17. Upgrade
- 18. Rocket
Items
There are two primary paths you can run for Heim, AP builds and Survivability builds. This guide focuses more on being a pusher with Heim so this item section will focus mostly on survivability. AP builds can also help push since turret damage scales somewhat with AP, and it’s certainly more fun for slightly more effective grenades and rockets that do a little more damage than people would expect, but for the average player, that’s not the smartest option.
For Survivability builds, your primary focuses are on HP, Cooldown Reduction and Mana Regeneration or Mana Pool. Usually starting out, I will either go for a meki pendant or a sapphire crystal building a Fiendish Codex or Catalyst the Protector. Depending on your masteries/runes if you can get the innate +15% cooldown reduction you should focus on getting a soul shroud for the regen and max cooldown along with a Fiendish Codex. If not, or if you’re facing a heavy physical damage team, Frozen Heart is a great choice.
With the Passive on Heim's Ultimate and runes/masteries it is easily possible to only need one cooldown reduction item in order to maximize your cooldown to the %40 hard cap. If you're at that point, take this into consideration early on. A Fiendish Codex might be great for an early push, but if you're planning on getting a Soul Shroud or Frozen Heart later, the Codex is taking up an item slot and reducing the value on the excess Cooldown Reduction.
From Catalyst the Protector, if you’re facing heavy casters go straight to Banshee Veil, for more AP usually I’ll build to Rod of Ages although they aren’t mutually exclusive. Also take a look at Rylai’s Scepter which is great for snaring with rockets as well as adding HP. Finally, most builds for end game all include a Guardian Angel. It covers you on both ends from magic and physical as well as the whole resurrection buff which can be essential for saving your towers.
Good boots are also essential, aside from the marginal use of Grenades and Summoner Abilities, Heim has no real escape tactics. At the basic level, Ninja Tabi or Mercury Treads are good choices if the enemy team is heavily physical or magic damage. Boots of Swiftness are also a good choice just for the added speed bonus. Boots of Mobility really aren’t a great choice here since Heim doesn’t really need to quickly cross the map to gank and his turrets both provide a place to portal back to and can help hold the lane for the time it would take him to return.
Another item to consider is the Innervating Locket. It adds a nice bonus to HP and Mana and Mana Regen as well as an activatable AE heal that can hit your turrets.
Masteries
I usually go 9/0/21 with offense and utility, to max out cooldowns and support caster and summoner abilities, but many of the adjustments in masteries are so small that you can really set this up to whatever play style fits you best, be it more offensive or a need for greater defenses instead of mostly utility.
Runes
Heim didn’t spend a whole lot of time in beta before runes got nixed, so going to wait on this section for now. Basically though, cooldown reductions, mana regen and hp would still be the focuses.
Summoner Abilities
At least one person on your team should have Fortify, it can be game saving and if nothing else is a nice way to say “hey screw off my tower” to the other team. Heim isn’t really a front line hero and as such doesn’t necessarily need to have summoner escapes available and is a good person to take fortify. Flash and Ghost are good escapes, if you don’t need to take fortify. Teleport and Cleanse are useful skills to have, teleport just lets you lane faster or portal to save a push from a minion wave and cleanse might save your butt if you’re 1v1 or 1v2 against a disabler, although I would say it’s more limited than Flash or Ghost. Everything else is pretty much a wash.
=================================
Tactics
Turret Placement
Turret placement is Heim, bad turret placement means you’re doing less damage, burning mana replacing towers and generally just being ineffective. At the most basic, you want to keep your towers close together. Especially at the start of the game when they are beefier than the opposing teams abilities and damage, it’s a great way to add a little bit of force. If you’re facing a whole lot of AE’s (Nasus, Morgana, etc.) as the game progresses you’ll want to start spreading out your turrets in a way that they can fire on the same target but not be in the same radius of the AE attack. Some basic formations are:
Point – Hard node, turrets are basically placed on top of each other. Can do a lot of damage in a small area.
V – Either a forward V or an Inverted /\ allows you to focus the towers but still have some outside of an AE range.
Half Moon – Sort of like the V formation this is intended to create a bowl for enemies to run into and get focused on. You want it close enough that turrets can hit the same unit, but not so concave that they’re all within an AE circle.
Dual Point – Create two point nodes far enough from each other to be just outside of an enemy’s AE range. Can also be helpful for heroes like Sivir or Katarina with unfocused AE’s that will hit one node but can’t bounce to the other.
Laning
PUSH! A lot of Heim players feel the need to turtle next to a tower. Certainly in conjunction with towers and turrets you can make a decent fort, but you can also do that with cardboard boxes (which if you’re going to sit back and basically make your team run 4v5 is really what you should be playing with instead anyway). Your Conc grenades do AE damage and temporarily halt minion attacks allowing you to build up a wave. When you get to a tower you can throw up turrets and fire your range attack and Conc grenade again allowing you to do some decent damage even early in the game. If you’ve got the movement speed and mana pool, you can even set up forward observation posts in more than one lane allowing a solo or even a duo to have a safe place to fall back to in front of your towers.
Ganking
Ganking with Heim is pretty much a group effort. Without burst DPS you really can’t blow heroes away. Early game you can get lucky with good turret placement or a dull enemy who stands there wondering what the humming ball of electricity slowly making it’s way towards them is for, but for the most part, you are there as an assist and you need other champions to get kills. Tall Grass is your friend here. Set up multi turret ambushes in the enemy forest, or along the grass lanes. Ally with Singe, Tristana or Blitz for someone that can use your turrets like Towers for added damage. Watch for heroes that run away at low health or think they’re safe behind a tower and fire off some rockets.
A Survivable Heim with a decent hp pool and armor or magic resist tailored to the enemy team can even be a decent ganker despite the lack of burst dps. As long as you stay with your towers, a well played heim can even 1v1 heroes that normally terrorize solo like Ryze. That said, don’t try to take someone late game who has decent lifesteal (Warwick, well itemed Twitch, etc.) since you can’t do burst dps a large hp pool just acts as a qfont of healing for them while they continue to beat you senseless until your towers explode along with your newly decaying corpse.
=================================
Game Strategy
Early Game
Get towers down as soon as possible, they’re added damage that the enemy doesn’t have (unless they also have Heim, and then…well… just be better). Utilize the Tall Grass to keep your turrets stealthed and protected. Do not put one tower by itself in the middle of the lane, it’s going to get killed and you just wasted mana. Remember even the first level of turret gets you 2 turrets, so get both up near each other and where you can cover them. If you’ve got Conc Grenade, save it to protect your towers, it doesn’t do enough damage now to push creeps anyway. Keep last hitting with your range. If you’ve got Rockets, harass with your range attack and fire when they start to run.
Mid Game
You’ve got more turrets now, start watching out for AE attacks and monitoring your turret placement even harder. If you’re trying to gank or protect against ganks, keep your turrets in the Tall Grass far enough back from the minions so they don’t auto attack and reveal themselves. Upgrade your newest turrets and hopefully your mana pool is big enough now that you don’t have to worry about dumping old turrets in favor of new pushing turrets. If you’re laning with a partner and they get a stun or a snare off on an attack, try to drop a turret in between the enemy hero and their tower, you’ll get more hits in and it’s kinda scary (kinda). Start using Conc Grenades to push lanes and last hit. Your Rockets if you have them now, are most effective at this point. If you have a solo hero running or hiding, fire them off, they’re cheap and do decent damage. If they have AE heroes, make sure you’re using turret formations that are a little more spread out, if not, focus up.
Late Game
You should have enough mana and cooldown to regularly push and upgrade your turrets. Start building ambushes or get a hard point setup to continually control a lane if you’re winning. If one of your allies needs help, maybe run over and toss them a turret or two for added support. Your Conc Grenades should pretty much be able to stop a minion push by now. Generally at this point your team should be running around together to gank and protect from ganks. You need to stay near the back of this group. Team battles should hopefully be taking place near your turrets. If not, make sure you try to set something up and communicate to your team about the effectiveness of fighting with 6 additional turrets. Fire your Conc Grenade from the rear lines once people are engaged, target casters with your stuns, keep firing off your rockets on the runners, but they aren’t as effective at this point. You want to keep upgrading your turrets as fast as possible if you are creating gank points, but the enemy wises up pretty fast so you’ll have to continually move them around to stay effective. Alternatively, you can also set them up throughout the enemy forest as warning beacons akin to Teemo mushrooms (note do not do this if you have Teemo, if you need that explained, check out The Idiots Guide to Life, ISBN 0-4637-6298-x). Your primary focus at this point is getting towers in the right spot, and then not dying.
