Runes Reforged First Impressions: These things might actually work

One complaint that people always had with the old mastery system and other systems of that kind is that it would always eventually get figured out. In short, players would always figure out what the best build is on each and every champion, and then pre-game becomes nothing more but copy what this Korean built rather than a system for you to customize your playstyle. I've been on this new Rune page for about 2 hours figuring out what the optimal rune page is for Kayn, and I was unable to find a perfect page for him. Maybe because I'm an idiot, but I've been feeling like these runes actually give you a flexibility to try out what you want depending on your playstyle. Taking it off from the start, me and some friend in my discord determined that the domination rune path is the best for Kayn. But we got stuck when it came to determining what was the best keystone. We crossed off electrocute (im going to call it tld cuz fuk it.) and decided that the best options were going to be either Dark Harvest or Predator. And this is where things got interesting. I am a player who really likes to move around the map quickly so I automatically gravitated towards predator for the insane map movement. However we decided that since Kayn is the kind of champion that clears incredibly quickly, Dark Harvest would also be a good choice for him because of the damage that you get passively just from clearing. In the end, your playstyle would determine what rune you would want to take. And that carried across for a lot of choices we had to make. Another example. In the resolve tree there's a keystone that is extremely good at taking out towers. My friend wanted to take that page really bad but I opted for a rune that gives me more defense since my playstyle on Kayn relies a lot on teamfighting where as that keystone seems much better for split pushing and tower taking. But if I wanted to play a game focused on split-pushing, I would definitely take that keystone.

Now, I do think there are some problems with the current runes, and some runes seem really, really good/bad on paper so I'm just going to point out all of the flaws I see so far

##Zombie Ward seems really good. This is just first impressions but that Zombie Ward looks super-strong if there's no CD on it. Basically if you are sweeping and you find 3 wards, you suddenly gain an incredible amount of vision for your team. You can carry super hard in vision now just by clearing everything with sweeper and buying a pink ward every once in a while. Just seems like a ridiculous amount of vision but seeing as how vision has been getting weaker for a while now, I think this'll be fine ##Sudden Impact It seems a bit better than the alternatives of cheap shot and taste of blood any day of the week. Particularly for the Assassins that this slot is made for, the amount of damage that you'd get out of this would be far greater than 30 true damage from cheap shot. Taste of blood may be good for lane but Sudden Impact would also be good for lane. Just seems like this one will crowd out the alternatives. ##Why does Lethal Tempo exist First of all, it looks like it rewards exactly the same kind of playstyle that Press the Attack does. Simply rewarding you for attacking more and more often. But Lethal Tempo looks way better as of right now. This is going to lead into that same problem that we've all had where one of the two runes are a better choice so you always pick that rune. Right now, Lethal Tempo looks better. But another problem that I have with it is that it breaks the rule of not breaking the attack speed cap. Remember the last time we broke the attack speed cap? On-hit items became hyper broken and had to be nerfed into the ground making them garbage for any champ that isn't named Kog'maw. Now we're giving the ability to Kog'maw to every champion? Well, good bye building any on-hit item on a champion without this rune then. It'll become super mandatory on all on-hit builds which I thought was the opposite of what riot was going for. ##Inspiration: Genius or Garbage? The Inspiration tree is an odd one. None of the runes seem targeted towards one role and instead the whole page seems like a collection of insane mechanics that break the fundimentals of the game with Summoner Specialist being the big boi in this tree. Honestly, I don't know if this is terrible design or genius design. On one hand, we could have a problem where this path ends up being either garbage that no champion ever gets or super must pick that everyone has to get. On the other hand, this could be a great niche option for players who want to manipulate and play with the game mechanics and try out super cheesy korean strats. Tilterella will love this page is what I'm going to say. Summoner Specialist is the culmination of this. Getting to swap summoners seems op af but giving up something like Lethal Tempo or Electrocute for it will be crippling for some champions. But if you develop an op cheese strat that uses this, like maybe going something like ignite exhaust early for a first blood cheese in toplane and then while your snowballing you swap out your runes for teleport and flash for more map control and safety.

So that's all I have to say for runes right now. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more updates on this and I'll definitely be testing this on the pbe when it comes out. In case any of you were wondering, these are the rune pages that I came up for Kayn SA: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/featured/preseason-update/8100-8124?build=11022018 Rhaast: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/featured/preseason-update/8100-8124?build=11020256