Post about your first live Runes Reforged game

As the number of threads about specific aspects of the new rune system spirals towards infinity, I thought it would be useful/cathartic/fun/'fun' to have a thread about our first in-game experiences with it. I imagine this will heavily lean towards people talking about the differences they noticed, but it can be about anything.

With that, let's begin.

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I get into the pre-game lobby, and our jungler is asking what runes he should take. Of course a lot of people are going to dive right into games, but having rolled out of bed and immediately spent almost an hour fiddling with the new pages, this made me slightly grumpy. But I asked what he would play—he hadn't hovered yet—he said Rengar, and we told him to get bounty hunter stuff. Beyond that, I had no idea what to suggest, so hopefully his runes would work out ok.

I take Sona, in a lane with Vayne. It wasn't a great combo before, and I could have made a different matchup (I picked last), but I main Sona and I wanted to try her out. We were against a Jhin/Nami lane.

It went poorly.

The beginning of the clusterfk that was this game was my fault. I went Sorcery (Aery)/Inspiration, with biscuits, and bought a faerie charm instead of pots because I wanted to see if biscuits plus extra mana regen was enough sustain. I also wanted to test how effective the new Spellthief's is. So there was a lot of experimentation going on, with the basic concept being that I would stay just aggressive enough to keep Spellthief's on CD and hopefully give Vayne extra room to work early.

I still don't know if this is viable because Jhin and Nami beat my ass at level 1. I slid in to Q/aa, at around 80% hp, and they simultaneously turned on me for bubble/Jhin W/first blood. Pre-patch, that kind of thing would be dangerous but relatively survivable with sustain-focused runes and masteries. This time I didn't even get my flash off.

First blood to Jhin is bad but manageable. Unfortunately, Vayne got herself killed shortly after, and when we were both back in lane, down two kills and a bunch of CS, Rengar decided to gank when they had blasted us both below half HP while we were turret hugging. Rengar got Nami, but Vayne chased Rengar and I chased both of them in a desperate attempt to save them with almost no mana, and Jhin got all three of us.

From there it was pretty much over. It got so bad Jhin was one-shotting Rengar with his auto-crit aa. Somehow we managed to fail three surrender votes, including one after twenty minutes, so it was a deeply painful start to something I've been looking forward to for a while.

But for all that, having all the runes available is like a Final Fantasy-esque rabbit hole of character building. I'm going to spend way too much time theorizing.