About runes and masteries

Like... could you not?

Dumbing down games kills games. Look at the planetside series. Planetside 1 was hugely popular despite little advertising. Planetside 2 was as well but lost many of the players due to it being far too dumbed down by comparison. For those of you who don't know, planetside 2 is a persistent world fps base capturing game. It used to be you could take connected bases freely. They changed that implementing a rail system that limited choices from each base you captured to an average of 2 or 3 locations. Well over half the player base quit because it made it too simple with no added strategy. Or look at the comparative popularity of elder scrolls online vs any of the non-multiplayer versions. ESO is dumbed down and restricts you to a class system like every other cash cow wow-clone. Where as literally every other game in the elder scrolls series gives you freedom to do whatever. How many people play ESO with its frequently updated content vs skyrim? Yeah, small gap and it's newer. Another game that went downhill, albeit much smaller, was arcanists, a funorb game. It's a worms clone basically. People didn't know how to counter flight/shield so they added an ability that did no damage but basically turned the game into a stalemate. Why? Some people just couldn't figure out how to counter a single ability combo.

In summary, you can make this game more accessible to the lowest intellectual tier. But then only they would want to play it. Or, like... you could not.