The true illusion of choice and inevitable outcome of the new mastery system
Yes, I'm calling them masteries, because it's misleading to refer to them by the system that they're most dissimilar of the two. Though honestly, I don't hold to that and just use the term rune, because people have already become acclimated to the name.
There are at least two simultaneously held goals of the new mastery system which function in a mutually exclusive manner. There is another, simplicity, but it's kinda hard to say that adding in 50+ mechanics to the game makes for a more simplistic system than numerical stat boosts, but I digress.
The two other goals, which are relevant to this are
- Freedom to choose your rune
- The runes to have a meaningful impact on play
These two long term goals that riot has for the rune system are incompatible. This is because the runes have mechanics of their own, this results in runes having a more exaggerated range of impact, based on how the champion accomplishes different tasks. This would be fine, except for the fact that they do have an impact on the game, which means that the runes with the most exaggerated impact on the champion that you're picked. Effectively making your champion pick, the determining factor for your rune selection, not your preference.
Now, about the inevitable outcome, because these two goals are functionally mutually exclusive, outside of the aforementioned extreme case, then the only way to achieve something close to a balanced design would be the extreme cases where you forego one of the goals all together. Case 1: You make the runes have no noticeable impact, giving players the freedom to pick which ever they find most appealing. Case 2: They take away the choice from the decision and simply give the champion, and make the runes have impact to the point that the champions feel dysfunctional without the additional mechanics.
The thing is, and I know this is an old trope on the lol forums/boards, we've seen this kind of system play out before in WoW, but most interestingly we've see it play out BOTH ways.
Case 1, occurred with the glyph system (effectively the same as the current rune system where you got to pick 3 major and 3 minor glyphs, initially with the major glyphs causing a mechanical change to the class), after some time the solution was to make them all cosmetic and nature. They removed all impact from the glyphs.
Case 2, is currently occurring with their talent system (effectively, you get X talent tiers and you pick 1 of 3 per tier, each causes a change in the classes mechanics or provides additional abilities), yet one of the major complaints about BfA, and has actually been a bit of an issue since the new system was introduced, is that the classes feel incomplete without the talents. The talents aren't being used to make a choice, they're being used to fill out a kit with holes. Mind you, this case does become less significant the more the system becomes classless (e.g. you pick every mechanic or skill for your character). Tabula Rasa.
Now, there's technically no complete solution to this problem, because not only do these exist as simultaneous goals for the rune system, these both exist as goals for the game itself. That said, there are ways to dampen the way in which these two goals conflict. The most notable of those are generality of choice and granularity of choice.
These systems function by inherently providing one of the goals, but then work towards providing as much of the other as possible. A purely generality approach could be accomplished by adding the thunderlords mechanic to all champions in the game, but then giving people choices over roughly equivalent values of the numerical aspects of the mechanic and augmenting the effect. E.g. CD, Scaling, Flat damage, or AoE. At the cost of not benefiting from the other values.
The granularity approach would be more akin to either providing an inordinate number of runes or fragmented version of the existing runes with numerous incremental choices to achieve the complete mechanic (this is actually something i proposed in the comments of another thread after riot first described how the system would work). Effectively, it'd be like providing players access to all runes, but only a set number of points to invest in them, while each point gives you a portion of the maximum power of the rune. E.g. it takes 5 mastery points to see the full effect of the existing lethal tempo rune, but now you no longer need to invest each of them into lethal tempo, instead you could go 2 lethal tempo + 3 conquer (3/5 the power of current version).
Neither generality or granularity necessarily work as a standalone solution, the better approach would be to approach the problem with a combination of the two, in which you can see a generally applicable benefit that doesn't require mechanical synergy and provides a granular approach to increases in power allowing for more precise tailoring of how much you feel you'd better benefit from things that aren't the clearly best option based on your champion choice.
