Choice in runes went from goal oriented preference to being reductive
When the old runes became free, I was having a lot of fun experimenting with all kinds of builds to achieve very specific goals:
- Full attack speed fervor and W lvl1 Darius cheese? Possible.
- Mana regen hecarim W live forever in lane? Absolutely.
- How about E till nuclear holocaust Nasus? Naturally.
- Optimizing off meta picks for Jungle? Viable.
- As much armor and magic resist for ARAM? Solid.
I don't have these choices with the new system, because I can't choose how to supplement my base stats, and the base stats you end up with completely mandate what you can and cannot do with your champion, there is no way to alleviate stat based flaws to open up new avenues of strategy. Your builds are optimized around what your stats will allow you to do and are directly tied to them as well.
**Ironically choice has been removed, they are no longer preferential but reductive. It's no longer what do I want to do, but what is my champion allowed to do. **
Before I could take fervor on darius and have tanky runes and I could define the exact kind of tanky I wanted: mr/hp/armor. I cannot do that now. Before I could go colossus and have full hp for a ridiculous shield early. Jesus where the fuck is colossus, that was an excellent play pattern defining keystone. If I wanted to build offensively on Darius (which you should not now sadly) I have to pick a keystone that has no synergy with my kit simply because it just does more damage overall than the ones that do, and that feels horrible.
The saddest part is that reductively I think this can't change, this would mean reintroducing a similar system to the old runes and turning masteries into major and minor keystones, Riot cannot bring back such systems because:
(a) sunk cost fallacy (b) the new infrastructure has taken over (c) taking a step back on a huge change that cannot fail
Now we're stuck with a system that is too rigid to allow the change that is needed, and too big to take a step back on. Though this is a win for some, there are those who weren't so keen on such meta levels of customization, as the new system is more transparent and straightforward, maybe that was the plan all along, but that begs the questions what is the point of having customization if its impact is so low.
This has been a game design lesson for sure, if nothing else I've learned a lot from this transition.
