Support/Heals: Forgotten about in Rune Presets while Levelling

Dannii Darkness·12/10/2017, 5:59:41 PM·2 votes·500 views

Finally, I get access to make my own rune set at level 11, or so I thought.

Turns out that you can only choose the keystone. Of your primary set. That is all.

Basically, this means that to even be able to get any kind of healing rune other than Guardian (which only shields) you have to wait until you reach level 13, and then devote your entire Primary rune-set to it so that you can choose the healing bonuses from tiers 1 & 3.

I'm not really sure why the choices are level-locked. I can only assume it's to work as a reward system. It should be noted, however, that one champion's reward of choice is another champion's basic level handicap, especially for champions that synergise well with the Rune Presets.

People say that nobody wants to play support... I wonder why.

4 Comments

Kats Pajamas12/10/2017, 6:21:37 PM2 votes

The leveling scheme in general is garbage.

There is a fundamental difference in forcing new players to take runes over nothing, and allowing them to choose their own. The game needs it's own tutorial for runes, it's just as simple as that, they need to be more highlighted as a part of the game.

The idea they have to be level 8 before they can even change 1 thing is pretty bizarre, un-interactive, and unrewarding. By level 8, people have played, what, 30-40 games of League of Legends? Not only is this an insane amount of time to limit access, they will be lucky to even know what the hell it is by then without the ability to experiment with it. They will end up playing 40 games, before they even know they have Electrocute, not only can they not select their runes, they cannot even look at them in Matchscreen, as if it is not even part of the game.

The default selections blow my mind too for some champions. Katarina has a super annoying Ghost Poro always trying to channel, while she's trying to focus on other things. This is somehow superior to Eyeball collection, on an AP Assassin, my assumption is Riot thinks new players are too stupid to ward and this will help them, even though it won't at all in reality, and in the microchance they actually get ward kills or real kills, the player isn't rewarded additionally at all instead.

BubblyRainbows12/15/2017, 9:30:32 PM1 votes

Yeah. I had a friend join at the start of preseason. She wanted to start about a week before that, but I advised she wait because it would be a big change and would be better to learn one system than to learn the old one, and then the new one after a week.

I was appalled at how much of what I would consider basic content was level-gated for new players. I forget the exact level thresholds, but it was bad. Something like...

Until level 9, you get preassigned runes. You can't even choose from different preset pages. You get whatever Riot assigned to your champ. At level 11 you can finally create your own page, but you only get to choose the main tree. Everything else is locked in. And you can't choose Inspiration. At 13 you get to change the keystone for your main rune path. At 15 you can choose your whole main path, but the secondary path is preset. At 17 you can pick different keystones for your secondary path, and can finally choose inspiration. At 19 you finally get to fully customize your runes.

Something like that. It was insane. My friend had her own personal favorite runes and abilities by the time she was level 10. Earlier, I think. But somehow she doesn't have full customization until in the neighborhood of level 20? And that's not even counting that various summoner spells are also level-gated, game modes are level-gated (some rightly so... you don't want a complete beginner in ranked, but... why is the PRACTICE tool locked until like level 12? THE PRACTICE TOOL! Who needs more practice than new players?) No wonder she got tired of the game and stopped playing before she even hit level 30. It was such a restrictive experience.