To those League fans (of which I am one) who come here to tell us how runes are good and stuff, allow me to try to convince you of the contrary.

As has been said already amongst these comments, runes are a fake-strategy tool. Runes are a strategic tease that certainly aren't worth the IP grind, and *almost* certainly aren't worth the complexity they add to the game. The bottom-line is that they don't offer a meaningful decision for players to make. Okay, it *feels* like a cool decision that you're making, going into a game, but it's really not.

The problem with criticising the rune system as a fake-decision system is is that it could be said about all **decision-making** in the game. There's always a mathematically-optimal route to take: whether it be an **item-build path** (i.e. "Do I take armour to mitigate their damage because their Zed is a little fed, or do I continue with my damage to burst him down?"); a **literal path**, in the walking sense ("Do I go through this bush or walk all the way around?" time vs safety etc.); or **runes** ( "Do I take movement speed quints to get around the jungle faster, or AD ones to kill stuff faster?).

The thing that really separates these kinds of decisions is the player. More specifically, the player's ability to calculate the best solution on-the-fly. That's a lot of what is fun about video games. In competitive games (*loosely speaking*) the player that makes the best or most-correct decisions in the shortest time, will win, and it's satisfying to do so.

Runes are different. Runes are set-up before and outside of the game, and in your own time. You can easily search for the optimal solution online because somebody has already done the math before you. In other words, you don't make the decision, some pro/challenger/diamond/plat player has made the decision for you, and where's the fun in that?

Then there's the argument that people can innovate with runes, and/or tailor them to their own particular play-style. E.g. *"I work better with characters that move faster, so I'm going to put some movement-speed runes on. Then I'll be able to play better than Bob, over here, who works better with slow characters that do more damage, but not as well as I do with faster ones".* The problem with this is that runes aren't significant enough to alter play to such an extent. They *are* significant, but only *just* enough to *tease* you into thinking that you've made some meaningful change to your character.

The thing I find myself asking at this point is: "Why not allow runes to be more *powerful*? How about **super-runes** where I can have Nasus running around at twice his normal speed? Because it would mess things up? Because it would make the game imbalanced? Why don't normal runes do that already?" The only things I can think of to answer that question are:

**A:** Everyone has runes, so the playing field is even, and nobody is overpowered.

**B:** The design teams carefully balance the game around runes.

**C:** Runes are insignificant.

If **A** is true, then I could say, "Everyone would have super-runes, so the playing field would still be even." But I admit, it would probably break the game if you could focus all your power into one thing like that. They would have to do a lot of work in order to balance the game for that. It might even be impossible to balance a game like that, without making the runes, y'know, really insignificant (See **C**).

Which kinda moves us onto **B**. Do they really balance around runes? *Really*? Do you think that if they took runes out, the game would be much different? Do you think that if suddenly nobody had any runes, the meta would change at all? I really don't think so. I mean, I guess it would be tough to fight the jungle monsters with less armour or whatever at the beginning, so let's say the jungle camps also lost their "runes". If everything was lowered proportionally like that, things would be exactly the same. So please allow me to direct you to **C:** Runes are insignificant.

And finally, if **C** is true first, then yeah, see what I mean?

The same could be said about masteries, as well. I mean there are a few game-changing ones like reflect/reduce jungle monster damage, and health-gain on-kill, but for the most part they are as bad as the old WoW talents. Just a few stat boosts that *everyone* pretty much *needs* in order to be competitive/viable late-game.