My only real issue with Runes: Reforged

DarkSoul1994·Nov 19, 2017·6 votes·576 views

So way back when Riot announced that they were reworking Runes, they said they would be compensating champions with Base Stat buffs.

Naturally, and especially as a Jungle main, I was quite apprehensive. Pretty much every Jungler that I play had some level of dependency on super-specific Rune Pages. Elise needed Attack Speed Marks. I ran scaling HP seals on all of my Tank Junglers. There were a few slightly gimped Tank junglers that needed Armor Seals and Quints. The list goes on and on.

Fast-forward to the 7.21 (PBE was on 7.22) and my scepticism turned out to be valid. It turned out that Riot had made very blanketed base stat buffs. They did little-to-no research into the champions they were changing. Elise didn't get any base AS. Gragas didn't get any Health or AP. And none of my tank junglers apart from Nunu got any HP or HP growth changes.

Runes reforged really hurt a lot of junglers.

14 Comments

ModKnightsKemplarNov 19, 20174 votes

They're aware of this, and they warned everyone ahead of time. They wanted to see what happened before they just sleepily buffed them to be the same as they were before the Runes rework.

They want to see what the champion actually needs in the new environment, not just buff to keep the status quo. The whole point of the change was to upset the status quo, because the status quo sucked with all those required runes for certain champs.

Preaseason is never balanced, because the goal of the first preseason patch isn't balance. They'll get to it when the dust settles a bit.

DarkSoul1994Nov 19, 20171 votes

If Riot wanted a good baseline, they should have taken the most common rune page for each champion from X% of the Top players (information I'm sure Riot has easy access too), and put those stats directly onto the champions' kits. From there, Runes: Reforged really only needed to be a glorified Mastery System with a fancy new title.

Riot can re-balance from there.

ModKnightsKemplarNov 19, 20171 votes

They didn't want a good baseline. The goal of this patch wasn't balance.

I think letting the chips fall first allows interesting things to happen. If all Riot wanted to do here was keep the game as similar as possible, that would have been an option. What they did is, imo, more intelligent and better for the game. They want the game to evolve a bit here, so giving it room to do that makes sense.

CavemanteroNov 19, 20172 votes

My only concern with the new rune pages is it seems it has made overloaded kits Ekko Yasuo Orianna Janna Lulu LeeSin Jayce Gnar Rakan even stronger than focused kits because of the flat 'balance' you're talking about...I don't think it has anything to do with the jungle role but more with the non-reasearch you are talking about which really seems like typical Ghostcrawler-led Riot.

DarkSoul1994Nov 19, 20171 votes

Oh, yeah I totally agree but I don't really like your reasoning behind it. Base Armor and MR is way lower than it ever was ( also, RIP scaling MR Glyphs). To make things worse, the new runes basically fit into one of two categories - Damage or Utility. Very little was added in terms of tankiness unless you fully invest in the Resolve tree (and even then you get a maximum of a whopping 5 armor or MR lvl 1).

As a result, games snowball a lot more because snowballing champions like the ones you've listed tend to snowball a lot more because raw damage lvl 1 has never been higher and base defensive stats, on the other hand, have never been lower.

Dorans PantsNov 19, 20172 votes

That's the problem when you remove an entire system like this but are not determined enough to face the imbalances that come with it, so you throw out some random stats, favor some champs over others, promise to keep an eye on it ( and we all know for a fact that people always deliver on their promises especially in game development ) until everyone forgets about it. then overshadow your past "efforts" by breaking the game even more with the next big innovation which then pulls all the attention away from your fuck ups prior to that rinse and repeat.

people might call it controlled chaos; I call it short-sightedness and laziness.

RogueWillNov 19, 20171 votes

Coming from another player that play tanks (I don't know about elise) You can change HP for AD runes on tanks, the end benefit is the same as you clear slighly faster and thus lose less HP, most other tanks did got a slight AD change. Also, tanks usually had a armor heavy page which also got compensation from.

DarkSoul1994Nov 19, 20171 votes

No Jungle main above silver ran Armor Seals on Tanks unless the champion's clear was so weak that it actually required them.

As for running AD on Tanks - it was never about the clear health/speed (in fact not running armor typically made clears less healthy/take longer depending on how much you wanted to kite the camps around. Tank junglers ran scaling HP for higher effective HP in the mid-to-late game. A pair of Ninja Tabi more than made up for the slightly lower base Armor.

RogueWillNov 20, 20171 votes

I said you could change them not that they were the most effective choice. You could adapt what you were given or you can keep complaining, one works and the other doesn't, your choice.