Dark Harvest's thoughts

So, when Dark Harvest was first revealed. It scaled monstrously fast, I remember Vandiril videos with something close to 400+ stacks complete destroying people in one shot. Fast forward to release and its scaling was brought to a manageable level.

Now, it has gone through a rework. While every person is claiming that it is busted, and probably won't ever make it to live servers in its current PBE form. I want to discuss my thoughts for Dark Harvest's future.

From an online dictionary, "harvest" is a noun meaning 'the process or period of gathering in crops'. So, it makes sense that Dark Harvest should ideally be a farming rune.

The current PBE iteration removes that side of Dark Harvest for junglers. I have seen a Dark Harvest Rengar or Graves coming out of jungle to one shot people dozens of times. So, I can understand the frustration and desire to remove that.

However, IF Dark Harvest goes live in its current state, and IF junglers decide to take Dark Harvest. I can see games becoming far more gank intensive, junglers will probably either have to take hextech flash, or have some sort of movement to transverse the jungle quicker, so as to quickly gather stacks for Dark Harvest. Currently, I think that the raw damage is too high at the start of game and that half health is too easy to get ADCs and mid laners within range of during late game. Personally, I feel that this will pave the way for tanks to meander through the enemy teams lines while providing the chance to execute ADCs and mid laners. These tanks include Leona and Nautilus among others.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Change the PBE version to only trigger on auto attacks. Currently, there are up to 5 ways, depending on champion, to trigger Dark Harvest. Auto attacks, and four abilities. (Reminder that Sona would only have 3, auto attack, Q, and Ult). Additionally, Caitlyn's Ult would not be a possible long range execute.

2. Dark Harvest instead grants soul shards, similar to how overgrowth in the Resolve tree works, for every enemy minions or monsters slain. Every 100 soul shards, grants an additional +5% AD or AP adaptive.

3. Remove Dark Harvest entirely, this is my most extreme suggestion, but there are reasons to bring it up. First of all, Dark Harvest in the live state is disheartening. Either the enemy is ahead and can pop out and kill you with 1200 damage crits, or they are behind and cannot provide much to team fights except for the occasional bits of massive burst damage.

As a burst rune, I don't feel that it would be true to its name. "Harvest" implies time commitment, honestly, that was Dark Harvest's original selling point for me. I feel like League should have more runes, items, and champions that promote the long run. Ryze has his mana bar interactions. Vladimir has the HP/AP bonus on his passive. Muramana, Seraph's Embrace, and Rod of Ages have the "power up sequence" feel. Sion has the bonus HP for killing minions, I personally just go into bots to see how much bonus HP I can get in a single game. The downside of all these champs, items, and runes is that they take time to gather those bonuses, and some of them (Sion for instance), can perform well without stacking extensively.

Final thing to note, is that Dark Harvest lies in the Domination tree which is described as "Burst damage and target access". If they decide to change it to a burst rune, this description would fit. However, we would lose the only stacking rune that visibly impacts the game. Overgrowth and Gathering Storm are not as noticeable.