I had a nine-game winning streak going just the other day. Nine games. It was great to look at my summoner profile and see so much green. Unfortunately the tenth game I drew a 20-minute 0-6 Taric. You can imagine how things went from there. I decided to end my quest for the elusive ten-game streak and go on a Heimerdinger bender. Here’s what I found out.

As great as Heimer used to be in mid, he was always easily shut down. The old turret system required too much time to be effective and was easy to counter. You were also dead if you left those turrets for any reason. Now things are different. The ability to drop red turrets at will gives you great DPS if you’re in a pinch and allows you to set up lanes much more quickly.

I like to start off mid by alternating turrets and rockets. I’ve had a little trouble with some of the ranged DPS, but once you get to level four you can push minions back easily and place turrets as you will. I tend to bury mine in creeps to make them a little harder to target and keep them close enough to attack as many enemy creeps as possible. By level five you should be pressing your opponent to his tower with little trouble. Start watching for ganks – they’ll be coming if the other team is intelligent.

From there you’re just trying to burn down that mid turret. I can easily take a turret before the ten minute mark. If your opponent leaves you alone, keep pushing. Encourage your teammates to join you if you can. I recently had a game in which I had aegis by the eight minute mark. We were knocking down the nexus before 19. It was insane.

For teamfights you should be trying to stay out of the mix. You want to be dropping as many turrets as possible for both the damage and the MR/AR reduction and the potential slow. Whatever you do, do not underestimate that slow. It will save your ass. It will save your team. It will get you kills.

As it stands, Heimer is an excellent pusher. I think he’s a great candidate for heavy AP builds, but I really prefer to run around blowing up turrets at level 5. If you were a Heimer fan in the past, give the new version a shot. I’d be shocked if you didn’t like it.

I’ll admit, this one snuck up on me. I woke up this morning to find patch notes in the Announcements forums for the Shen release. Yes, Shen went live today, along with a Heimerdinger rework I can hopefully try at some point this afternoon.

From the looks of things (and some time on the test realm), Heimer could be quite strong. His new ultimate not only allows him to heal his turrets to full but gives those turrets a slow as well. There is still the fact that he relies on stationary targets for much of his damage output, but those targets take less time to set up and hit harder than before. I’m actually interested in trying a strange kind of support build, something potentially including Stark’s and maybe even some attack damage. It’s obviously not a high-tier build, but it could be kinda fun.

I’ve already covered my thoughts on Shen. I’ll wait to pass much more judgement than that until we’ve actually seen him in action, but for now I still think he’s underwhelming.

The rest of the patch is fairly minor – Udyr got a small mana buff, Ezreal got small buffs to each of his skills, including a much need 20% duration increase for Rising Spell Force. We also get Red Baron Corki in this batch, along with a new Mundo skin and two Shen skins that appear to be a tribute to Sub-Zero and Scorpion from Mortal Kombat.

The one thing I’m shocked to see is no further Jax nerf. He’s still far too strong at every stage of the game.