no niche builds what are you talking about you just have to look for new ones because the new runes give you plenty of new opportunities like going the rune that heals you when you cc allows me to go ardent censor shaco support which is tons of fun. And uh where have you been the last few months there is this great build abusing transcendence which is full black cleaver zed or talon or riven. Full movement speed hecarim became viable.
The runes price were reduced because since they were getting rid of them anyway they decided to let people try plenty of them out which i did have fun with because going full crit chance yasuo lvl 1 is fun but before the reduced price i had 2 rune pages sharing a lot of the same runes and one was ad shaco and the other was ap champions that's it i didn't have the ip to spend on runes that barely did anything unless you bought the good ones which were like 2k ip EACH. Also the fact that some people who have been playing for longer get a big stat boost just because they used all their ip on runes while you used yours to try new champions out.
And let's be honest the old runes and masteries were a pretty boring system that change on the game to game while now i make a new runepage for every game because it affects you're every game.
Starting out in league was pretty awful because when you start out you struggled to get a 450 champ so what makes you think people would even bother to look at runes when they are counting on f2p every week to see what there playing but now they are free and accessible to all which is a definitive improvement
and the individual runes vary based on each champ which is another improvement, teemo can really abuse aery, ultimate hat, and scorch while someone like vi may not but but vi will use press the attack and alacrity to help her own jungle clear. I have seen others with similar thoughts on the subject but you are a very small minority of players who actually enjoed the runes probably because you already owned every champ so you all the runes available and could actually think about what runes you bringing.
The one thing i miss from that system is the 1% crit rune. That rune was byfar the funeest rune in both systems to date just because of how good it makes you feel when you kill someone with it
