Let's Talk: Scaling pen runes.

ChickenWrap·Sep 21, 2014·2 votes·559 views

What are your thoughts/opinions on the idea?

Pros? Cons?

Who would benefit? What should the scaling ratio be to make them worthwhile?

4 Comments

SyllinSep 21, 20142 votes

im not 100% sure about this, but i think pen runes are considered late game runes anyway. they provide more damage per rune than AP/AD scaling runes after a certain point in the game. one could argue that they are already "scaling" runes.

again im not totally sure about this. this is stuff that i read somewhere. but lets assume the idea of magic pen per level runes were created. in what situation would you want to take flat pen over scaling pen? when you take a full set of all pen runes you are already saying "yeah my early scaling is going to not be so hot, but late game im gunna rip through that enemy adc." if you were to take pen per level runes, your early game would be even worse, for a late game where you are going to have an extra 1-.5 pen per rune. while yes you are going to shred the enemy adc/support even harder, it doesn't hold a TON of relevance towards any non squishy champion.

i could see it being really well on late game AP carries (cass, karth, veiger) Pen scales really well on assassins, but assassins typically have a large focus on the their early/mid game potential to pick people off, which is counter intuitive to what pen/level runes would accomplish.

even on late game ADCs, their lategame is already incredibly powerful anyway. that is what their entire role exists for is late game. so they dont need the extra power. they already have a TON to work with.

In all: i doubt Pen/level runes would hurt the game balance in any way, i just highly doubt that they would contribute anything more than flat runes already do.

ChickenWrapSep 21, 20141 votes

Flat pen are best for early-game where people have the lowest amount of armour/MR. That's why assassins love rushing Brutalizer.

Personally I think it leads to some characters who really love building pen to become stronger. Kha, Zed, Veigar would be crazy, Cass yes, champs like that.

Maybe it would lead to some assassins being able to actually assassinate ADCs again.

SyllinSep 21, 20141 votes

i dont really think assassins have any issue in the damage department when it comes to assassinating a squishy target, i think the real problem comes from the fact that the common picked adcs are so safe. the escapes from lucian, cait, trist, etc make it much harder to get ontop of them. but when someone DOES get them, they die pretty fast. i dont think damage is an issue.

MrBuffingtonSep 21, 20141 votes

So this is just reverse-engineering/reasoning from what I see a lot on Probuilds (I think I pretty much exclusively see flat pen runes); flat pen runes work really well for early game where you can't get a last whisper or void staff. Late game you'll probably buy one of the two (if it fits in your build) for pen anyways (otherwise other pen items, for example, brutalizer, haunting guise, sorc boots, etc), so I don't know if the slight late game benefit outweighs the early game benefit, since you can get more pen from items anyways.

As Kenny said, pen runes seem to work better late game in general (additional source:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPsz9kVLMRI)

I think it really depends on at what point the scaling runes become better than the flat runes. I remember hearing pros talk about scaling health runes (I think), and how they were better than flat health runes especially because they surpass flat health runes at lvl 6 or so, which means that you're not at such a huge disadvantage since you'll usually mostly be farming pre-6 anyways; an early game advantage won't help too much. If pen runes surpass flat runes too late into the game, then it's simply not worth it since some games might not even run that long.