Regardless Of Your Position of Old Runes and Masteries...

There was greater access to defensive stats and masteries, and there was less access to offensive stats and masteries.

I would use scaling Armor Yellows (27 at level 18), scaling Magic Resist Blues (27 at level 18), and 14 armor penetration reds, with 4.5% lifesteal, and/or 1.5% lifesteal + 10% scaling CDR quints. The background defenses in conjunction to lower damage coming at me, meant I lasted WAY longer in lane and through mid-game. This had clear benefits which I would outline below.

Tanks could actually survive a rotation. They could do their function, be it through crowd control, harassing with damage, or just meat shielding for the team.

ADC's had targets to actually do sustained damage against, be it through crit, attack speed on-hit damage, lethality hits. They actually had time through which to push out sustained dps on a target that took time to kill.

Lifesteal builds actually worked because champions could attack over and over, doing steady damage and healing back against incoming damage. Crowd Control was the most accessible way to stop lifesteal strategies from working.

And then we get to assassins, probably the ONLY weak class of the past.

Why did we bust every single build just to reveal assassin power again? We could have literally just buffed up assassins in the old meta and been fine, as long as they had accessible counterplay. Instead, everyone is an assassin now because you just opened up assassin play by reducing the defenses and releasing tons of damage runes. Now, not only are assassins great, but every non-assassin is overlapping into the assassin role as well. Bard blowing people up, mages blowing people up, EVERYONE is literally killing eachother inside 1 rotation.

I propose releasing access to the same degree of defensive stats we used to have access to in runes (up to 27 MR, 27 armor), rebalancing the runes reforged to have WAY less damage, and then, in order to prevent assassins from falling off, we buff them in this future meta in fair ways. We need to go back to a meta that is familiar with past metas, and then find a fair place for assassins in that version of the game.

The simplest way is to bring back old Runes as they were (they were fine), where everybody has access to max level runes at no cost. You can still make money by selling Runes Reforged pages. Runes Reforged can remain as the Talent Tree System in parallel with the old runes you're bringing back. You should probably rename one of the two systems if you do it. Then, you could have MUCH more relief being able to balance just the Runes Reforged Talent system, as the rune stats would help normalize this terrible burst meta.

Do you agree or disagree?