Plans for League of Legends Before and After Runes Go Live

The new runes have made their first steps towards going live in League of Legends, but the development of the Runes Reforged system won’t end even after they’re fully available.

With 60 new runes currently on the PBE and ready to be tested, there’s plenty for players with PBE accounts to dig through and experiment with. The runes won’t go live for everyone else until November, but Riot says that’s part of the plan seeing how the changes are so significant, especially with champions receiving base stat changes to accommodate the loss of the current runes.

“We wanted to get as much time as possible for bug fixing, polishing, and feedback from you,” Riot Fearless said in a Dev Corner update. “A quick warning: this changelist is going to be massive. Along with Runes Reforged, we’ve made a significant number of changes to some foundational elements of the game to make sure League still feels like League, even without the base stats we could generally assume from old runes.”

Before the runes go live for everyone, improvements are planned for both the visual and sound effects. Specifics on what will be changed weren’t revealed just yet, but everything is expected to be “as awesome as possible” come preseason.

But after the runes go live during the preseason, there’s still plenty to do. With so many different effects offered by the new runes, there’s bound to be a series of bugs that need fixing along the way. For the bugs that don’t get caught during the PBE phase, Riot will continue to work on ironing out these issues. Balance changes will also continue to come for the new runes, and some of the parts of Runes Reforged that have been put on the back burner, such as how the Keystone Runes will look during Spectator Mode, will be revisited.

Looking even further ahead, there’s the chance that additions to the runes will come in the form of new runes or entirely new rune paths. All of those changes will come based on how the current runes on the PBE work out, so expect quite a few updates and balance changes from Riot leading up the runes’ Nov. 8 release.