Ideas for Runes and Itemization
Had a question for Riot and some ideas for anyone else to think about. Are you ever planning on continuing starting item testing? Having some more starting (Doran's) items would be really cool. Doran's dagger looked like an amazing, cost-efficient source of attack speed early, and I already know a lot of champions that it could be used on. I would personally love this for Jax, but I could also see this being good for say, Vayne, or even some mages like Orianna, Azir, or Twisted Fate because part of their kits and damage revolve around auto attacks. Also, some items that could provide armor or magic resist could be cool too as a starting item to help counter a hard lane, or even as a secondary source of damage for champions that scale off of those kits.
As for runes, are there any other old masteries you have looked at that might be good for the new system to add later? For example, one of my favorite old masteries was Spell Weaving and Blade Weaving, and I think could be an interesting fit for the Sorcery or Precision tree. Also, with the testing to splitting the stats between Resolve and another tree, have you considered doing that for other tree combinations? An idea I had would be a slider bar for you stats, in increments of say 5 or 10. So if you were playing an ADC or fighter that wants a Precision keystone, they could go into the Domination or Sorcery trees second and get an optional mix of the stats the want. So if those were the two paths you wanted, you could choose either all Attack Speed or all Attack Damage, 60% AD and 40% AS, or vice versa, or half and half. This way you can much more creativity with Runes builds without feeling gated by certain starting stats that you may not want. I know as a Top laner who plays fighters, sometimes I don't always want 18%, and I'd rather trade in some of that for a little extra AD to help with last hitting or trading. Of course, doing this with Domination and Sorcery together or Inspiration with any other tree would be kind of weird, but for the former, being able to choose a split between AD AND AP would be cool as a mage who wants AP, but also a little AD for poking or last hitting. These are just idea's I've had for Runes to make them more fun and interactive. Let me know what you think.