New Dark Harvest Ruins The Late Game Fantasy (Among Other Things)
I played with it on PBE. It's awful. There is no late game fantasy anymore and that's what attracted me to it. it's my favorite rune in the game and I have so many little tricks with it. The games you're strong in are mainly games you'd autowin so it's silly. It's a pure snowball rune with no fall back pattern. In the remaining games, it's just a worse version with far less flexibility and outplay potential (no double applications from camps in a fight or any other clever tricks). You can't internally snowball teamfights in the same way. Its identity is really narrow now and there is virtually zero thinking/planning behind it.
The current DH has snowball elements too but it doesn't force you into a single style or a single type of champion/build. Hell, you can go DH Sona and do fine with it. You can go DH Yi or Graves. You can itemize tanky or burst and still get something out of it. It's not purely for one type of champion. It's more about how you want to play the game and knowing what part of the power curve you want to emphasize as well. The idea behind it is to optimize both smart routes and being at the right place for fights. You don't maximize stacks doing just one of these. Sometimes it's not even about raw power but more about team comps (DH is good vs squishies).
Junglers generally fall off and this was the ONE keystone that was supposed to reward more calculated and patient players who are willing to play a cat and mouse game early. You can think about it as a sort of survival game and even then you're not guaranteed a great late game but you have a chance to shine on a role that is unfortunately quite weak late game as a whole. It gives junglers a way to not be totally lane dependent when a game is going badly and let's not pretend every game lost early is due to the jungler. Since the electrocute nerf, things shifted to this just being better in most cases but the concept of it is entirely different from this new iteration. Why should laners have inherent and obvious advantages for these kinds of keystones when we will have literally 0 jungle oriented scaling runes? It's literally just punishing every DH jungler whether meta or not, strong or not and I doubt we'll see compensation buffs. More importantly though, it's removing an important skill element and making jungle pathing a bit less relevant than before. It's making games more coin flip and less in your control. I don't like this at all. It's just not a fair replacement and should never be considered as such. I'm very dissatisfied with the direction of this rune. Even if DH is to be tweaked from the live version, it should be far more similar and certainly shouldn't get rid of the way stacking works (especially if it means ruining jungle champions and removing come back tools when lanes go poorly).
