high damage leads to boring LCS + frustrated player base.
Riot you increased damage significantly with the new runes quite significantly
You probably don't notice how big a change it is because win rates don't care about damage, if everyone gets a damage spike, win rates stay relatively normal. Further, the damage changes are less meaningful in the higher elos beyond gold/plat for your dev members who use that to help balance damage, and unnoticeable too in the PBE as PBE balance has always been harder to see.
But what high-damage does is it punishes mistakes much greater!
Which means that LCS players are discouraged from taking risks. They'll farm safe for 15-20 minutes with nothing happening - and then group and stare at each other rotating for nothing for several minutes, then suddenly one team wins, based off who makes fewer mistakes over the course of 5-15 second team fight. Every game will be summarized by a 5-15 second clip. one clip. We saw something similar early last season I believe - or was it two seasons ago? Much unhappy viewers.
And it means that the large majority of your solo-queue/normals player base feel less in-control of their matches, leading to high-snowball games as well as high-mayhem swingy games. Neither of these is fun for most folk - a large feeling of no control over the game.
So, please nerf damage across the board! You want it, we want it. Just do it.
important! don't forget to buff defenses first! with stripping off the old runes system, you removed over 50% of all defensiveness from champs due to rune loss - and compensated it by increasing AD gains from runes by 50-100% and keystone damage by even morefold!
- All champs lost the ability to adapt to their lane matchups. Iron Skin and Mirror Shell are nigh unpickable right now. I highly recommend buffing the flat stats to 8-10. Perhaps consider delaying Conditioning to 12/15 min, and/or removing the on-heal buff from Skin/Shell. This will help all champs have defensive options, for hard lane matchups, in lieu of damage, allowing for meaningful rune decions to be encouraged during champ select. This change is most important, as it gives meaningful defensive options to all champs.
- Mages, Fighters, ADC, Sup lost ALL flat MR. They should get 5-10 to compensate for the loss. Additionally, fighters and mages lost ALL armor. They should get 5-10 to compensate. Finally, tanks lost ALL scaling MR that they took - 27 at level 18. With Conditioning, they probably don't need 27 anymore - but they need some amount. Your choice if you give 10-15 flat, or 10-20 scaling, probably depends on the tank. For example, Maokai feels wonderful late-game now, he probs don't need MR at all in fact, and Cho'Gath also seems to be very tanky as well, and a few other tanks. But many other tanks feel very squishy right now in general and aren't getting picked.
- Either change the flat AD/MR from adaptive from dom/sorc trees to scaling, or reduce their numbers (especially the AD) you gave all AD champs 10 AD - AND 16 if they took Sorc/Dom tree. This is a HUGE buff to AD damage. Probably making it scale or otherwise curb it, in combination with the prior two suggestions, is a good start to checking if damage gets normalized.
- an alternative to #3 to consider would be to remove all flat AD buffs to champs that came in the last patch - and change the Precision tree interactions so that less damage is given if they take Sorc/Dom, with less attack speed to those two pairings, likewise they can take either pairing of Sorc/Dom with Precision second for the same effect.
TLDR / to summarize -
- Damage is too high, mistakes too easy to punish, makes solo queue feel worse and less in-control, makes LCS boring. While this does make runes meaningful, is what's sacrificed worth it? no.
- Highly recomended that: Iron Skin + Mirror Shell is looked at for buffs/adjustments; Mages and Fighters get some armor returned; all champs get a little MR; and flat damage stat buffs from the last patch are curbed in some way especially AD champs who double-dipped.