Taking Weekend Snapshot of Runes Reforged

Pre-Season 8 is here, and now we're going to be pushed out of the rolling train of Riot changes. As we make our violent tumble, it's important to take several quick 360 looks at what we have to look forward to.

I specifically want to take a look at the latest change to one of League's oldest systems, Runes.

What changes: Rune Cost Rune Type Rune Effects

What stays: Rune Pages Rune Diversification

Rune Cost: Runes are free! Although, retroactively looking at runes, they now take the place of masteries of past systems. Runes have become masteries, and the title of masteries has moved to keystones, and keystones are now out.

Opinion: Masteries were always free. Runes weren't. Personally I feel that Runes was just a Pay2Progress system that left new players at a disadvantage. Getting rid of that was a good on Riot. I remember a Red complained about losing out on money, but hey, loot boxes and gambling is what is making to most money nowadays, so why not just capitalize on that this season.

Rune Type: Rune Types now aren't the basic 3 tier setup as they were in previous seasons. There are now up to 6 different tiers. You can think of the 6 different tiers being the addition of 3 mastery tiers, and 3 rune tiers for a total of six tiers. In the old system, you could be knee deep into up to 6 total tiers. The new systems simplifies that down to two tiers out of 6. Having to look up what the best combination was over 6 different tiers has now been simplified into looking into just two tiers.

Opinion: I never had a hard time selecting the best set up for my play style. This hurts stat based building. I don't get a total stat readout from the rune system. I have legit no idea what is in there, and I have to trust that I set it up right and that the title I set isn't misleading me. Ultimately, the biggest benefit is going to be balancing Runes and Masteries, now that there's less potential for balancing issues to arise.

Rune Effects: A lot of changes to the rune system now is per level, or "adaptive". Most runes have more than one effect. Anything from bonus damage, to tenacity. This means that one rune is good enough for about 3-9 runes and three mastery points.

Opinion: It's great that runes aren't so basic anymore, however, I lost a lot of flexibility in the way I want to play. If I wanted to play Jungle Teemo, I had a mastery page named Jungle Teemo specifically set up, along with an Attack Speed rune page that allowed me to farm the Jungle and surprisingly decimate teams. I lost those crazy builds, and now I have to be all in for whatever branch I choose.

Rune Pages: Rune pages now cost 6300 BE instead of 6300 IP

Opinion: All the mastery pages I had created for AD Evelyn, ADC Twisted Fate, Jungle Teemo, and AP Pantheon are now gone. I had 5 Rune pages before the changes, and now I can only create 5 different rune setups. This is my biggest gripe with this system. If I can change Runes on the fly, why would I ever need more pages? That theory is flawed completely, I want to have the right set-up at the right time. Champion select is a time for creating strategy, not reorganizing rune pages. Riot, you're holding onto Rune Pages, you have to let it go. You got rid of mastery pages in the hope that we would buy Rune Pages. If you had not given 5 PRESET pages, you understand that you would've had a major player fallout.

Rune Diversification Runes still can include any number of things from Tenacity, to Lifesteal, and still even Ability Power.

Opinion: The new changes mean that you are now using runes you may not have ever needed to use. I don't care for CDR on my Ult if I'm Graves. I didn't need Tenacity to play Soraka. What I want has really been reshuffled, and most players are going to have to learn better than me what the optimal builds are for the champions they play.

So that's my spiel. Throughout the Pre-Season, lots of people are going to chime in about their thoughts about the changes, as we do every Pre-Season. I think it's important for the player base to express their concerns with the game. Communities can make games bigger, like in the Halo Universe, and they can completely sink a game, like CoD: Infinite Warfare. Riot wouldn't want to ever alienate their players (we can talk about what happened the time they did) so feel free to continually express your opinions.