New to the game & I have a question.
Is it better/easier/smarter to use scaling runes or flat ones?
(AP/AD/Health/Mana/Cooldown/Speed)
I mainly use 
, 
& 
.
I'm level 26 now, I'll be 30 in 4 days.
Thanks for your help. d(-_-)b
Just like phreak recommends in the video MrBuffington posted, it's a good idea to have 2 basic rune pages at the start. They'll cost some 15k IP in total.
AD page: AS quints, flat AD marks, flat armor seals, flat mr glyphs
AP page: flat AP quints, magic pen marks, flat armor seals, flat mr glyphs
The flat armor and flat mr are the safest to buy because you'll need them in a lot of matchups. MR can be needed in every lane but especially against leblanc in midlane and poke supports in botlane. Armor is essential for jungling, playing adc and in most toplane matchups. The choice for AS quints in the ad page is because it's better on junglers and toplane carries and because it also offers the most dps value throughout the gamef or adc's.
It depends on your champ and your playstyle. For example, if you're an early-ish game champ, flat might be better. If you're much better late game, scaling might be better. It's important to find out at what level do they even out. For example, the scaling health seals are about even with the flat health seals at level 6. So I know that if I get the scaling ones, starting at level 7, they're stronger than the flat.
Usually, I use scaling MR or scaling AP Glyphs. Flat damage, magic pen, or armor pen marks. If I'm playing a tank, i'll use scaling health seals. Anything else I use flat Armor. My quints are all flat.
Phreak made some pretty good videos over here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmURKwijs1jChS_z5bGTYTh2j8EQyGAeo
I agree with Frank327 (though I hit 30 long back and wound up with AD quints rather than AS, it's otherwise the same path I took). The reason these are good tier3 buys while leveling to 30 is that they're universal. On some champs a more specialized page will be stronger, but not enormously so.
IMO in the vast majority of cases flat > scaling. As the game goes on, itemization will trump anything runes are giving you. Even with scaling runes, the relative utility in gold difference early from flats is stronger than the late game advantage scaling gets because at the 2:00 mark, almost all of your stats are from 1st item and runes...but at 30:00, items/small global gold lead on your team will CRUSH the difference that scaling has over flat.
So if you want 2 decent-good rune pages before focusing on champ pool, that's the way to go. I run AD quint over AS because I favor champs that are more burst-oriented (Sivir is my favorite ADC for example) and am less likely to jungle.
Flat runes are generally better. You take runes to help you in lane, not really to scale into the late game.
Regular scaling runes (mainly blues/yellows) are okay if you are passive and smart about early laning phase, but you might want to avoid scaling quints.
While regular scaling runes balance out at level 6-7, scaling quints won't balance out until level 9, and the overall bonus they give at late game is (for the majority of the time) not worth sacrificing the huge bonus at the beginning in favor of a bit more stats at the end-game.
