I don't like the new runes dictating how I have to play

If you haven't realized it yet, one of the worst type of toxic players is the type who tells everyone else what they should be building. But it's 10 times worse when the devs do it.

Trigger Warning: the old runes were better. Poor balancing made flat damage and defense stats virtually mandatory, but at least bold players had options in how we played the game. On old runes I had options. And I mean real options, not troll OP stuff like full move speed hecarim that you're going to nerf away in a couple patches.

If I wanted, I could take scaling mana regen seals, flat MR reds, then scaling CDR quints/glyphs on mages. Especially with Viktor, this enabled me to go for archangel's (which he could NEVER sanely buy otherwise) and be a truly matched late game powerhouse like intended. The Glorious Spamvolution was my favorite solution.

In tank metas I could put on move speed quints, get Luden's and Lichbane to kite. I could do It without sacrificing the Riot-dictated Thunderlords Decree to not get smashed in lane. It was really a great build.

Ziggs with mag pen reds and scaling mana regen everything else could sustain non-stop Qs on cooldown if a player was bold enough to make that early damage sacrifice and rely on champion skill to keep high pressure lanes like Zed under wraps. It even let us mage players have an option for competing with AD assassins after you gave them 100 bonus MR with no sacrifices to make through mercs, hexdrinker and that edge of night.

Or better yet, jungle Braum with armor seals and flat attack speed everything else could do an on-hit offtank build that's quite a bit better than people realize (and even more fun than it sounds).

But what about even the more conventional 24 lethality on caster marksman, or 20 flat mag pen on damage mage supports for when you JUST wanna hurt people but autofill hates you?

All of those things are gone. Now we're stuck slaving to whatever meta the rune abuse cases hand us until you nerf the whole system into insignificance like we all know you will. And then we'll still be stuck with even less options.