Why do people sometimes have only one crit rune?

SleepinGhostFace·3/25/2015, 5:31:47 PM·1 votes·1,684 views

I was watching a youtube video about MadLife's thresh support to get some idea of how to improve my accuracy with his hooks. When the rune page came up, I saw only one crit rune in it. Mathematically with his .25% (1% since its rounded up) crit rune he will get 1 crit out of 100 auto attacks. Since this guy is a pro he wouldn't add it to his rune page unless there was some meaning behind it. So I'm here to ask, why have one crit rune in the first place? I read online that crit chance scales for each auto attack until u crit, then it resets back to your current crit chance; but even so does this really make a difference?

15 Comments

TehNACHO3/25/2015, 5:55:39 PM2 votes

It is not actually rounded up btw. It only shows up as rounded up, but it is calculated as is.

It's a fun way to cheese the hell out of the opponent's for minimal effort. Don't ever crit when it counts? No problem, you only devoted one rune slot to it anyway. Manage to cheese your opponent with a random crit that you would've never got otherwise? Proceed to abuse sudden burst of damage.

EndlessSorcerer3/25/2015, 6:06:28 PM2 votes

It's a minimal loss of AD so it doesn't really affect your trading or last hitting negatively. However, if you happen to get a luck crit when trading with your opponent, so can greatly win that trade and possible transition that to a kill.

Zarxis3/25/2015, 6:09:57 PM1 votes

I use one crit rune so I can [very rarely] get to see crit animations on champions that never build crit. Velkoz That, and I occasionally get to screw over my lane opponent with a lucky crit, or perhaps get a minion kill that I otherwise wouldn't have done quite enough damage to finish off.

mvargus3/25/2015, 6:24:52 PM1 votes

It's about giving yourself that tiny chance to get an early crit and swing the lane into your favor. The loss of damage tends to be so small as to be unnoticeable, but the bonus damage from one crit more than makes up for it.

Rawrful3/25/2015, 6:26:57 PM1 votes

Yeeeup. Other people have it right. It is the random lucky crit that makes you insta-win factor.

Also, I'm 90% sure I remember an old, old patch where they changed to the pseudo-random crit stuff, where every time you miss a crit your crit chance goes up slightly, (And when it hits it goes down slightly?) so it tries to soft push you to your crit strike chance. This is to make two carries that auto each other or the opposing tank line have a higher chance of landing the same number of crits in the same amount of time. After looking at the wiki, it doesn't mention this so it might have been removed at some point.

Also, I can distinctly remember losing top to a Riven with a single crit chance rune. We all-inned and I was going to win easy, then she got a crit and I exploded. Sucked bad, because Riven snowballs so hard.

DrCyanide3/25/2015, 6:28:42 PM1 votes

In addition to what the others have said, Crit is based on a psudo-random number generator. The way I remember it is for every time you didn't crit, you're more likely to crit. So while Riot reports it as 0.25%, it's actually much higher.

Raxicor3/25/2015, 6:34:17 PM1 votes

I first did it with Nasus and found that the early game crit is actually really helpful. No I run one on all my AD champs.

GaleWinUnleashed3/25/2015, 6:35:55 PM1 votes

It's a tiny sacrifice that has the potential to swing your lane for you. One random crit from an unexpected source can make a very big difference in a close fight, particularly early in the game.

Drunk Rummate3/25/2015, 7:25:53 PM1 votes

every now and then you get a crit in lane when trading with your opponent and it's satisfying as hell. it basically just straight wins the lane for you if you get lucky.

Kazaashi3/25/2015, 10:30:40 PM1 votes

Riot removed the RNG associated with Critical Strikes by basically altering the calculation to guarantee that if you have a 50% crit chance, 5 out of 10 AA will be crits.

Sona Ping3/26/2015, 1:21:51 AM1 votes

It's one of those cheep-o lottery tickets. Same thinking; That's basically it.

AwesomeChad3/26/2015, 5:05:59 AM1 votes

Players take 1 crit rune for the gamble: If they get a lucky crit off in the early levels before they're able to buy crit chance, then the rune pays off.

LoRdJeSuS69694203/26/2015, 6:50:21 AM1 votes

It's a fairly similar amount of addition damage compared to other offensive runes, but it also has a RNG component that you can take advantage of--when that one crit does happen, you can all in them afterwards if you're in a good enough position.

It makes less sense to me on a support, but whatever. I wouldn't make too much of it--I'm sure many other pros don't run it.

FantasySniper3/27/2015, 1:14:16 AM1 votes

It's like 1% more damage with autos instead of 0.95 additively. Once you get a BF Sword, this is actually more beneficial.

It's more useful the less one means to use AD scaling on their spells, and becomes better as you get more crit benefits. Then there's Frenzy, which only gets some use that early on because of the rune, and it also makes the lucky crit even more beneficial.

On a support, there's no reason whatsoever to use it. You'd be better off with Hybrid Pen.