There aren't viable early tank options in the new runes.

In the old rune system, you could maximize damage resistance for the particular type of your lane opponent for a hard matchup.

Against an AD bully like , that could be armor in reds, golds, and quints, and against AP, Magic resist reds, quints, and blues with health golds.

The new system has virtually nothing in the way of avoiding early poke or burst, even by going resolve as the main path. The closest is Aftershock's resistance boost, gated by a lengthy cooldown, lasting a short period, requiring hard cc on your character's kit, and, against ranged opponents as a melee, requires taking heavy poke just to be able to proc it in the first place.

Base armor was increased in general to match armor yellows, but the new options don't come close to comparing to a page of armor reds and quints. Tanks going into hard matchups are missing out on 18 potential armor or ~ 12 MR (after magic pen reds), and even the health boost from their rune tree is a paltry comparison to the gold value of the AD/AP aggressive characters get.

The amount of resistance offered by Iron Skin and Mirror Shell are a pittance, and it's telling that conditioning is taken 99% of the time over either, because defense is so abysmal early that 10 minutes of being worthless seems worth it to get at least a semblance of actual tankiness.

Even assuming old rune pages of AD reds, armor yellow, and health quints with veteran's scars (approximating the value of health gained from resolve as the main path), the old masteries were even better in this regard. There was a persistent 5% bonus to resistances with no strings attached, and the fearless mastery that specifically protected from hard burst and was put in the 12 point slot for its use as a secondary path. On top of that, there was an option to gain bonus resistances under tower to facilitate playing safe in hard matchups and mount a potential comeback or to take reduced auto attack damage to create better trades against fast hitting opponents.

In addition, besides taking the 50 health from veteran's scars, you could opt for increased healing/shielding by 8% unconditionally.

The new runes are weaker than not just the older straight stat runes in defense, but in many regards weaker than even old MASTERIES.

Aftershock itself offers partial damage reduction from the same requirements that the prior courage of the colossus did, while the latter granted full damage prevention through its shield.

5 + sometimes 5% armor is much weaker than that which could be gained from Unyileding and armor runes, and the same goes for Mirror Shell's magic resist. Hell even going with the WORSE of the two 17 point slots in resolve mastery tree granted an extra 3 armor and magic resist both at minimum, up to 15 each. Mirror Shell and Iron Skin need substantial increases to be worth picking at all, not just a bump of 1 or 2 resistance.

Revitalize offers a portion of Runic Armor's bonus healing and shield power, and can be increased even higher than it when you're a single poke away from death anyway so... yay sometimes?

Second Wind is clearly meant to be the anti-poke option, but by only recovering the minuscule amount of 4% missing health makes it much, much weaker than fearless while being completely useless against all-in burst.

And of the final options, the second tier of the resolve tree, only a single one offers any sort of "live forever" fantasy -- Font of Life recovers 1% +5 life over 2 seconds. The other two being cc reduction for the engage-y types, and tower taking because we've all been asking for towers to be more fragile.

Simply put, the new resolve runes are weaker than both resolve masteries and older defensive runes individually, let alone together. It affects not just tanks majoring in resolve, but anyone that might want some dueling and surviving power in general.