How to balance the game in 3 steps
1 Get rid of runes (or whatever you want to call them). What is the point of giving champions weaknesses and strengths if they can use the rune system to cover up those weaknesses or exacerbate their strengths? If the champion developers make a balanced champ kit it often times can become unbalanced with a few rune choices. An example from this season is someone like Tristana taking fleet footwork to make her laning phase safe which is suppose to be a major weakness for her. There are enough champions in the game now that in each position there are a plethora of different play styles, so if you want to play a different play style you can choose a different champion, not just pimp out your champion like you're putting a body kit on a Honda Civic.
The rune system just adds too many more variables with a game that already has enough to try and balance. You have to balance champion kits, champion ratios, items, and the map (monster exp, dmg, towers, ect.) Those are hard enough to balance without throwing a system in that allows summoners playing well-designed champions to usurp the developers intent through runes. Get rid of them.
2 Get items and map to a place that you believe is balanced (not the game, read on). The game won't be balanced at this point, but get the item stats, abilities and costs to a point that you think will be balanced with the right champion ratios. Also, get the exp and dmg of the NPCs somewhere where you think all junglers would be viable.
3 This will be the step that upsets people, but you need to have specific roles for champions. Brand has to be either a support or mid laner and balanced in that manner. I know people like playing off meta things, but if you like playing a certain champion in an oddball role there is probably a champion designed for that role that is similar to what you were trying to do. There have to be some sacrifices made to balance the game, and this one I believe is noble. Once you determine where a champion will be played then it is time to finally start balancing the champion ratio numbers and other stats so that the champions are more balanced. While you are doing this you are not coming out with new champs or changing anything else in the game, you are just messing with the champions.
After you get champions in a pretty balanced state you can go back and make some minor tweaks to the items or map to round the game out.
I believe this is a simple set of steps to get the game in a good place. I also think LCS would be more interesting. I enjoy watching the LCS but it gets boring seeing the same champs being played throughout the day but just by a different player on a different team. I usually just end up clicking on the match "player builds & game analysis" to see if there were any interesting team comps played and just watch those games. I don't need to watch the same 10 champs being played six times in one day.
