Runes Corner: Hunt of the Blood Moon Sneak Peek

Hey all! Welcome to another Runes Corner, this time brought to you by Riot Stashu. This week, I’m here to preview of a new keystone rune, Hunt of the Blood Moon (temp name)!

I’ll get into the details in just a sec, but first, a bit of a primer on the high-level direction for this rune:

Hunt of the Blood Moon comes from the path of Domination (also temp name) -- a style geared towards snowballing a lead by hunting down and taking out priority targets with a burst of damage. When designing the suite of three domination keystones, we wanted each one to highlight a different one of these three defining Domination aspects (‘snowball,’ ‘hunt,’ and ‘burst’). Hunt of the Blood Moon focuses on the ‘hunt’ aspect of the style, while its neighbors excel at the other two (stay tuned for more info on those!).

So without further ado, here is Hunt of the Blood Moon:

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                                          http://i.imgur.com/gG7flg8.png

Enchants your boots with the active effect 'Blood Moon's Call.'

Channel for 3 seconds to activate Blood Moon's Call. Gain 35% movement speed for 15 seconds. Damaging attacks or abilities end Blood Moon's Call, dealing 60 - 140 based on level (+0.2 bonus AD)(+0.3 AP) bonus damage.

Cooldown: 180 seconds. Starts the game on cooldown and goes on cooldown if damaged or interrupted while channeling. http://i.imgur.com/bZCoxUA.gifv (Typical W.I.P. note here: numbers are tentative and likely to change before release. Temp icon courtesy of Warwick W.)

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So there you have it: a high cooldown, long duration haste with a touch of damage all neatly packed into whatever boots you’re currently wearing (apologies, Cassiopeia). This rune/item combo works a lot like Edge of Night: a cast-while-moving channel that’s easily interrupted, so it is best used while out of combat. This mechanism is to solidify it as a ‘hunt’ rune, instead of an in-combat dodging or burst rune.

You can cover some SERIOUS ground with this thing active (15s of a 35% haste!), which can be difficult for opponents to account for, so while the hunt is on some sound and visual effects (think Warwick W) will play on enemies within about a screen’s range of you. The effect will be on cooldown until 180 seconds into the game, partly to sidestep some potentially degenerate level one shenanigans, but also to enable junglers to take this keystone and start with a jungle item without feeling like they’re missing out on too much. Laners can still opt to start boots, but will have to lane for a few minutes before going out on their first hunt.

With that all said, you may be wondering how we got to putting an active effect on boots. It’s a bit of a story, so gather ‘round and listen up for some Rune history:

‘Hunting power’ generally means ‘power to impact other lanes,’ and in League of Legends, that can be very oppressive. So, starting from early on in development, we knew we had to limit the frequency of this sort of rune. Early attempted iterations included: requiring a number of unique champion takedowns before getting access to it, swapping or augmenting one of your summoner spells to it, and lastly, putting it on a fixed global timer that automatically activated the hunt for all with the rune every 5 minutes.

That last one (fixed timer) had some real promise, but it would activate at useless times (while dead) and often pressured the user into using it at all costs, leading to some questionable tower dives. While this was its own sort of fun, it became apparent that we had to put more agency in the players’s hands. We experimented with many triggers to let the player choose when to use it (both here and in other runes), but to little success - nothing quite felt as satisfying or natural as pressing a button. Part of the struggle here was our desire to hook into existing systems rather than layering on new runes-specific buttons (a slippery slope of complexity). So, when someone suggested adding an active to the item that almost every champion buys, we had to try it. It was an immediate hit and got us what we wanted - hunt power, a long cooldown, and an intentional trigger. We have some worries and are playing close attention to negative side effects (such as sheer number of active items, especially on supports), but it looks like active boots will be here to stay!

Now that we have some Keystones out there (Meteor, Perxie etc), hopefully the system is starting to take shape for you. We’ll be around to answer questions and meme, so let us know what you think of this latest rune!

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You can check the previous Runes Corner posts here: Runes Corner: Runes Content Development Peek Runes Corner: Meteor Sneak Peek