Boards›Gameplay

Runaan's Hurricane shouldn't build out of Zeal.

SquirrellyOtter·4/11/2017, 11:30:49 PM·1 votes·958 views

Crossposting from reddit.

TL,DR: The PBE changes are going to make the problems around Runaan's worse: it's overvalued and overpowered on crit-based ADCs and doesn't help on-hit ADCs.

A little late to the changes, but I have long had a problem with Runaan's since the AD "everything crits" update from preseason 6. So the old Runaan's (Recurve + 2 Daggers) provided a niche for certain ADCs, mostly Kalista and Twitch and maybe Caitlyn and Varus, to apply on-hit effects to multiple targets, which obviously helps their teamfighting and waveclear. The downside to this is that Runaan's didn't provide any crit, but when you're Twitch or Kalista, most of your damage isn't coming from crit, it's coming from pressing E after a few auto's and having a couple of massive AD items provide the base for the E to nuke for the stacks of passives applied to the targets.

Interestingly, I think one of the low-key reasons Kalista hasn't been meta despite Runaan's current dominance is precisely because crit chance is actually a thematically bad stat on her. On Kalista, you need to count on your auto's being the same damage; if one of her auto's crits and kills a minion you needed to get the E reset, then you lose out on having more follow-up damage in the fight.

It was super important for Kalista and Twitch to have a viable on-hit build like BotRK, Runaan's, and Bloodthirster to compete with the crit ADCs, and when Runaan's went crit, both Kalista and Twitch fell right out of the meta until the recent BotRK buffs.

The weird thing to me is that crit ADCs already have a waveclear/teamfighting attack speed item that was dominant until Runaan's got Zeal. Statikk Shiv was built in literally any game by any crit-based ADC to the point where Riot was trying to buff the heck out of old Phantom Dancer to make it a comparable buy, but the value of AOE damage and crit was simply too valuable to ADCs.

In fact, I think adding Zeal to Runaan's build is the sole reason Caitlyn is so bloody oppressive right now. Her passive benefits from both crit and on-hit effects, which gives here a lot of teamfight threat and lane presence even before considering her traps, which just make her nigh impossible to defend against her siege.

Adding Zeal to Runaan's made AOE damage more accessible to ADCs (every auto!) without penalizing their crit builds. That's a massive buff to crit users and a hard, if unintentional, nerf to on-hitters. So for Riot to finally notice "huh, Runaan's seems a tad overpowered" is about as newsworthy as discovering that water is wet.

So seeing that Runaan's is losing Recurve Bow and its on-hit damage on the PBE makes me sad because I don't think Riot is noticing this pattern. If anything, it's going to make the problems around Runaan's worse: it's overvalued and overpowered on crit-based ADCs and doesn't help on-hit ADCs.

6 Comments

raaar4/24/2017, 12:53:34 AM2 votes

I agree with the OP that runaan's hurricane is overpowered at the moment on crit based builds, and not good enough to make AS/on-hit builds viable, and that the proposed PBE changes, which atm is removing the +15 on-hit damage and increasing the secondary damage from 25% to 40% AD, will relatively hurt on-hit builds even more compared to ad/as/crit builds.

Runaan's is also better than the other AS/crit items overall. It provides the ability to poke enemies with the bolts outside normal AA range, spread on-hit effects and at the same time clear minion waves faster (which also helps to get rid of minions that would otherwise block skill shots).

I think the problem with high AS/on-hit builds is that there's no cheap on-hit damage item that builds into later items and can be built early. increasing damage is important for people to be able to last-hit minions effectively with their auto attacks.

There could be a new item that'd provide 25 on-hit physical damage for 650 (on-hit damage is worth less than normal damage) and be used as a component for most of the other on-hit items.

I'd remove the 30% crit from runaan's, increase the AS bonus from 40% to 50% and add 40 on-hit physical damage instead, using the new on-hit item as a component.

Nick Da Chip4/11/2017, 11:54:44 PM1 votes

I agree with this post. What could it have instead though? I like the idea of it having as, Ms, and maybe CD reduction. That might be too useless on too many champs to make it worth it though.