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Let's talk about the new Master- I mean runes.

Mannblu··2 votes·226 views

So I've been playing league since Thresh was released. I got hooked (pun intended) onto the game and I've been playing ever since. I remember the original masteries, before the keystone. And the importance of runes for whatever you wanted to play. I never had specific runes for champs, just general all around pages that worked for whatever position i was playing. Preseason 8 showed new "runes" that would combine masteries and runes together. Before League, I played WoW. And i stopped that because they started to over-simplify everything. I feel Riot is following in the footsteps of Blizzard. The new "runes" that were introduced this preseason are just stronger masteries, while adding in SOME of what the original runes did. The old runes is what made this game so unique. No one would have the same runes for the same champions. Sure higher elo's probably had the same runes because of the meta. But the unique individuality was awesome.

These new Masteries (because ultimately that's what they are) took away the uniqueness of the game. IM not sure about other people, but i have won maybe one game in ARAM. I'm sure it's because im not understanding how these runes work, but when someone has the same runes as you, and then proceed to completely shred you while you MAYBE deal a nick of damage, is stupid. Im considering uninstalling. Not because these new masteries suck, but because i feel the fun being drained from me every. single. game. I'm still in bronze, but i feel like i cant do anything with these new "runes"

Im curious as to how everyone else feels about them. Mainly because they have ruined League of Legends for me.

2 Comments

Sarutobi1 votes

I feel like it's still too early to think like this. People are still new to it and trying to see what works and what doesn't. Just give it time for people to work out the links and possible change their ideas. As of right now though I do agree with you. But again I think it's because it's something new.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

The new masteries are a big step in the right direction. (I'm not talking balance here, fuck that.)

It's sad to see the old runes get killed off but its what's best for the game.

Please realize that stats don't make a game unique or make for interesting gameplay, and that was truly what runes where, they where pure stats, stats that form a static system you need to learn in order to be competitive. While it is possible to run with whatever rune page you like for whatever champion you like in whatever role you like, the fact remains that there simply are optimal builds that should always be run except for edge cases. All this system does is add to the knowledge pool you need to learn in order to play this game competitively, but runes also had a cost involved, which made the game pay to win, its not as bad as some other games but this element was there.

The old masteries had another kind of problem, their problem was lore-wise, in that they made absolutely no sense in the gameworld what-so-ever. You see, we as players are supposed to be summoners, we summon people and monsters to control and fight for us, that the in-game logic of it. Masteries have no place in this world for two simple reasons. Think of what a masteries actually is and think about who it ought to apply to. Its a skill, but who has the skill? Is the champion we control supposed to posses the skill? That's impossible, all the champions already have back-stories and such, they are their own complete character, we can't just decide to change something about their life just to give them some mastery skills. So do the masteries apply to us as summoners? That also makes absolutely no sense when you look at what masteries actually do. Me as a summoner having veteran scars that give me more heaths doesn't exactly help the character I summoned right?

Masteries as a name had to go, runes make more sense, runes are magical, don't involve backstory changes to characters, it makes sense for summoners to use runes, runes give some leeway for lore friendliness in terms of both summoners and champions. It's not perfect but its better when what we had. Again I'm not talking balance here. It's just too bad riot once again completely fucked up the UI and riot wouldn't be riot if they didn't fuck up the whole system by still having us have to buy rune pages.

Killing off old runes and naming the new mastery system as runes is the right way to go no matter how stupid it sounds or how poorly riot communicated it.

Don't think of the game getting simpler (thats not a incorrect way to see it btw because that is true) but, think of it as getting rid of useless clutter that never should have existed in the first place.

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