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The defensive stat shards that you can choose feel worthless

Regality·1/5/2019, 5:24:44 AM·58 votes·16,209 views

In comparison to their offensive couterparts. 10 Adaptive vs 5 Armour/6 AP is a joke.

Old runes gave more defense stats than offense stats. This is important because armour/mr/health do not scale as well as AD or AP. It absolutely makes sense that damage outscales tankiness, but at this point damage is already better than defenses in the early game. It doesn't help that tank items suck in terms of gold efficiency either, but I digress.

I know that base armour and mr got adjusted with the new system, but it simply doesn't feel like enough, especially when many runes give flat offensive stats such as Conqueror, Absolute focus, Gathering storm, Legend: Alacrity, Eyeball Collection, Coup De Grace's AD on kill, or defensive stats that scale with offense such as Legend: Bloodline, Taste of Blood, Ravenous hunter, etc. Moreover, the adaptive shard actually gives more AD than old runes used to. I also think that the prevalence of lethality (item 3147 item 3147 item 3147) compared to arpen back in the day (post black cleaver stacking) makes defensive options less attractive to squishier champions against AD assassins, so at this point you'd rather spec into offence and try to one shot the Khazix first (and probably unsuccesfully) if you're a mage, or roll over and die if you're an ADC and got caught.

In addition, old masteries made you choose between offence/utility, defense/utility or offence/defence, instead of current runes which offer NINE different versions of offence/offence tree combinations. I even felt that old runes were good in that to gain the most efficiency out of their stats, you had to spec into both defence and offence.

There are way too many strong offensive options already in the game compared to defensive/utility, and they crowd out all the other options

Now I do feel Riot has taken a good step towards balance with the stat choices - you have to spec into some sort of defence. However, these defensive bonuses feel incredibly weak. 10-90 HP especially does fuck all for you - early game that 10 adaptive already nullifies it with with 1 auto or 1 spell, and late game like I said damage scales much better so that extra 90 hp isn't doing shit for you.

I think the defensive "stat shard" choices need a buff, especially the awful health shard. Thoughts?

91 Comments

iiGazeii1/5/2019, 5:52:17 AM57 votes

10 AP is worth 217.5 gold

5 armor is worth 100 gold.

By picking the offensive option in the same tier, you are more than doubling the effective value of the stats you're getting compared to the defensive options.

The defensive shards absolutely need to be buffed.

Bronze GOAT1/5/2019, 6:28:46 AM17 votes

I don't get why they aren't all 10... Especially, since the only harm is that damage will be a bit lower. Which is something everyone complains about, at least on these boards ig.

Warlord Rhinark1/5/2019, 7:29:55 AM17 votes

Buff the Armor rune to 10 and buff the scaling Health rune to 50 - 300 250.

EDIT: Lowered it from 50 - 300 to 50 - 250.

Z3Sleeper1/5/2019, 2:28:02 PM9 votes

Nah fam squishy champs don't build defense whatsoever, they build "defense".

item 3026 item 3157 the only "defensive" items they touch. No point in building damage reduction, they just build death negation since reducing damage does jack shit rn.

Moonscourge1/5/2019, 10:54:04 AM8 votes

The resist shards aren't as effective because they buffed base stats when they introduced the new runes. They are as strong as runes before, just that everybody has part of them already baked into their kit. The offensive options are laughable compared to before, where you would have up to 30 AP PLUS other masteries. Now you have to choose to start with 20 or 10.