This preseason patch has proven how grossly incompetent the current riot balance team is

#1. Runes

Shards The replacement of the somewhat limiting path bonuses for the current shard system initially appeared to be a godsend for the game, but they are not. the CDR and health shards are noob traps, being completely useless for the majority of the game. The adaptive force and attack speed choices provide double the gold value in stats than the defensive ones do. This is one of the major themes that this patch contains, defense and supportive choices are nerfed while damaging ones are buffed.

Celerity Celerity has become another noob trap. It's old form provided a nice MS buff and a nice damage buff. Now it provides a garbage bonus MS buff which, even on it's best users like provide an incredibly measly amount of movement speed. Although the removal of more free damage stats from the game was nice, the rune was reduced to a shell of it's former self and is now garbage on even it's best users.

Dark Harvest What is there for me to say? It's now a rune that provides absurd amounts of damage for getting an enemy low health. It is completely busted and dominating the game. It is not unlikely to see 4 or more people taking this rune in game.

Shield Bash An extremely niche rune that only works on a select few champions and provides a garbage amount of resistances in favor of more damage.

Bone Plating It has been moved the second row in the defensive tree because riot does not like people taking 3 defensive runes.

Chrysalis The rune that allowed squishier champions such as enchanters to survive laning phase has been completely removed from the game, getting replaced by the niche, damage focused rune that Shield Bash is. Yet another example of riot prioritizing damage over defensive stats.

Overgrowth Changed so that it is better for non tanks, worse for actual tanks. I do not understand the idea behind this change. Is the resolve tree not for champions who are tanks?

Kleptomancy Worse on everyone except those who could already abuse it.

#2. Turret changes The new playing makes turrets last longer, but it also gives the winning lane a major injection of gold. In the past a winning lane would be ahead because of CS advantage and a possible kill advantage. This was usually enough to let them snowball out the game, but riot decided it wasn't enough. Now a winning player has an extra almost 1k gold to smack other players around with. If you have the misfortune of having a poor top laner facing a good one, you will now have to deal with a ridiculously fed champion steamrolling through the rest of the game.

The addition of plating on the outer turrets, for some unknown reason, made riot think it was perfectly fine to remove all other resistances from those turrets. After 14 minutes in the game pass, the outer turrets are literally wet tissue paper. They have no resistances whatsoever.

The increase in damage that turrets do is one of the few things riot did right in this entire patch. It now makes tower dives far, far riskier, which I greatly appreciate.

#3. Minion changes Minions now get to lane far faster than before and push harder than before. This speeds up games and closes up any breathing room you would get for killing a wave. Most minions, aside from the super minions, were buffed in this patch, causing turrets to be easier to take than ever before.

#4. Champion changes. Ezreal For some reason, riot buffed both regular ezreal and AP ezreal at the same time, despite regular ezreal not requiring any buffs. He was already an extremely dominant bot laner. The base damage on his W was increased as well as the AP scaling. His ultimate was buffed in fights against champions and against larger minion waves, thoguh it was nerfed against smaller ones.

Taliyah Her signature ability, her waveclear, was completely gutted.

The changes that are even more indicative of riot's incompetence are the ones that are not listed. Akali, Irelia, Graves, and more are all still extremely dominating picks that have not been touched.

Plus, mordekaiser still hasn't gotten any bug fixes, but who's surprised?

#5. Changes to warding I understand that the idea behind the changes to warding are to increase the risk taking people do in high elo and especially in worlds, but these changes have been made without thinking about the average player. Forcing ward scaling to be on the average level of the game holds back players who are able to press advantages. The duration of wards has been gutted. For some ungodly reason, you can now only carry two control wards at a time. One person can barely provide any ward coverage anymore with all of the different sources of ward clearing, whether it be Duskblade or trinkets.

In summary, riot doesn't know what they're doing anymore. They refuse to address the communities issues with mobility creep, damage creep, and shorter, less satisfying games, instead pushing forward with their removal of defensive sources, disgusting buffs to damaging runes, and constantly nerfing turrets while claiming that they're buffing them.

The balance team needs to change.

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EDIT: loads of downvotes, but no one refuting what I'm saying? If you're going to downvote me, explain your reasoning. And no, saying "BUT THE GAME IS GOOD NOW LOL" is not reasoning.

EDIT2: Old Runes

In season 7 and season 6 we had access to both the masteries (which were very similar to the runes we have now) and access to the old runepages. These old rune pages could be set up to specialize into certain stats, such as armor. A classic counter to champions like Pantheon would be to run a 27 armor runepage (I had one of these, affectionately named "pantheon suck my ..."). 27 armor at level 1. The measly 10 armor you can now get from the shards is POCKET CHANGE compared to what you could get.