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Why Nurf Your Own PreSeason Major Game Change?

Illydth·11/11/2017, 2:18:54 AM·3 votes·331 views

I'm not an old time player, i'm not a high elo player, i'm not a guy swimming in hundreds of thousands of unspent IP that got converted into 5 blue essence and a random skin shard or something. This isn't a post about that.

This is a post praising a really rather significantly well done system, but wondering why Riot nurffed it right out the gate.

I am talking about the changes to "Runes and Masteries"...the new Runes system.

Without a question in my mind, the Runes system is the first time we've had a "configuration" system for extra abilities for characters that isn't "one size fits all." Runes feels like a system that was designed with as many possibilities as differences in the champion pool...a system that can stand up to the uniqueness of 130+ champions and can take into account each individual champion's strengths and weaknesses. The new runes system has boiled out the cruft, combined the best of breed abilities from the old masteries system with the minor stat buffs of the old runes system, and created a consolidated system by which you feel like EVERY choice you make has some significant benefit to the champion you're assigning it to. They've taken almost a hundred different masteries and hundreds of different rune configurations and boiled it down into a handful of choices...and it WORKS. And works well.

For the first time since I started playing in Season 5, I feel like I can uniquely tailor MY champion's personal strengths and weaknesses and tune the choices to provide a notable power spike tailored to the unique abilities and qwerks of the champion I'm playing. No more "well, you want one of these three top end abilities, so you're pretty much going to take these other 5 abilities by default because they're the only ones with any meaning".

And then, with a system so configurable, I go to the Runes page to start creating unique packages tailored to the specific characteristics of the champions I like...

And am immediately shown that while the system was DESIGNED to allow infinite tweak-ability and specificity to the champion of my choice...really, I'm still just supposed to group 130+ unique champions into 10 big overarching blocks and be happy with it. Oh sure, there's a specific rune that gives benefits to champions that have mobility spells, but you can't really use it because not every champion you're going to block in with that page has mobility spells on them. Yes, there's a rune that is awesome if you have a CC Spell, but...well, yea, not every champion has a CC spell.

Go to any of the sites recommending Rune builds at this point and you'll see that pretty much no champion has the exact same build as any other champion...there might be a FEW that get close and even fewer that are dead on, but by and large every posted build is mostly unique to the champion.

10 Rune pages. That's all you get. This is possibly the largest nurf to the Runes system you could have POSSIBLY put in place. Individual hits to individual abilities would only affect those champions. The limitation to 10 pages nurfs EVERYONE. EVERY CHAMPION takes a hit because no matter what you build, any "generic" rune page to support more than a single character will have flaws in it for EVERY champion that uses that page.

You've designed a system that, to be used to full effect, requires that every champion be configured uniquely, and then only given us 10 pages to do that with.

Is this a hint that we should only buy 10 characters? Only play 10 champions ever?

Does no one at riot play anything but Blind Pick Summoner's Rift or Twisted Tree Line? Because that is the ONLY game mode in the entire game that IS NOT affected.

  • Ranked and Draft Summoner's Rift/Twisted Tree Line? Hello Bans! "Oh I've got this great Leona Page!!!..wait, she's Banned? NOW WHAT?!?!"
  • ARAM? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL Go F*** yourself ARAM Players...or get used to rebuilding rune pages in 20 seconds after you've secured your champion...GO!

If you're going to create a Runes system that is infinitely configurable and benefits from individual champion tuning, THEN YOU NEED TO ALLOW EVERY CHAMPION TO HAVE IT'S OWN RUNE PAGE.

Otherwise, you've literally taken away a poorly designed but working system and replaced it with a well designed but completely unusable system.

If you disagree, explain, please, how I should properly build my rune pages for ARAM play? Don't like ARAM? Ok, how do I build a rune page for playing Support, Jungle and ADC without potentially being banned out of characters with produced rune pages.

Are we really all supposed to build our rune pages on the fly all the time?

6 Comments

GigglesO11/11/2017, 2:43:31 AM2 votes

I feel completely unsupported in the champions I play. The old rune system, not masteries, but runes felt like I could customize what stats I wanted/needed. I do however feel like the new system is a better mastery system, just not a good replacement for both.

Rewt11/11/2017, 2:40:27 AM1 votes

a lot of high elo players are talking about how the runes are super well optimized for like 1/4 of the roster. another 1/2 can at least make some use of them. and the other 1/4 have basically become useless due to how important the new runes are and how those champs cant utilize them so they are fucked.

Dyrus did a lot of testing with rumble and came to the conclusion that he is pretty much fucked by the new runes.

Tenth Leper11/11/2017, 2:44:15 AM1 votes

Um... they are configurable in champ select.

Mysticman8911/11/2017, 2:58:36 AM1 votes

25 rune pages max, it sounds like you'd just bought 8 previously.

Theres only 20 combinations of primary/secondary paths, so get a page for each of those, and pick the page based on your champ to have the rough foundations already in place without the need to build from scratch, and then adjust the runes within it. Maybe use the other 5 pages as dedicated ones you don't change at all for your mains so you don't have to rebuild them each time.

They upped champ select time by ~15 seconds, so as you get familiarity with the various new runes, adjusting them in champ select becomes increasing reasonable. Consider that some people would build their mastery pages from scratch during champ select for whatever champs they were playing, so this isn't all that much different, it'll just take some time to really internalize what all the options are.