Riot Announces Revolutionary New Rune System for League of Legends

Check one more thing off the 'things Riot promised but never delivered on' list, because today [...]

By James Bates

Rune System
(Photo: Riot Games)

Check one more thing off the "things Riot promised but never delivered on" list, because today Riot has, at long last, announced the upcoming rework of the rune system, and it's a doozy. For years players have been clamoring for changes to the, honestly, quite boring rune system in League of Legends. While the system does, technically, offer a lot of variety, it devolved into simple arithmetic years ago, as it's pretty well established at this point what runes work for what roles and champions. Yeah, you could run respawn timer reduction runes of Karthus to get back into the action faster, but why would you when that 15 AP will get you a free kill earlier in the game?

Well, the new system is going to be nothing like that, and why I say nothing, I mean nothing. Riot released the first details of the new system in a dev video this morning, and it looks like they're going in a similar direction with the new rune system as they previously did with the mastery system. Instead of your run book being a collection of 30 individual slots that all have a relatively minor effect, the new rune book seems to only have seven slots, and now is based on "Keystone runes" which are similar in function to the Keystone masteries that were introduced back in Season Five. Some of the examples for the new keystones that were shown in the video are truly revolutionary, like a mini-pix that you can equip onto any champion or a crazy attack speed steroid that activates after you spend a bit of time attacking a target. While we have nearly no specifics at this time, it's clear that the new system will be nothing like its predecessor and the effects of your rune choices will soon be felt in places other than your stat line.

However, the effects of the new runes aren't the only things that are revolutionary! Two other announcements about the rune system were offhandedly dumped into the video. The first is one that will come as a relief to all players who haven't managed to fill their rune books yet, and that's the announcement that the new rune system will be entirely free. No more having to grind a champions worth of IP just to get a new set of Glyphs. Players will no longer be separated based upon how much IP they can grind. The second announcement is topical for players both new and old and is that Riot has finally implemented what is, perhaps, the most requested system in the entire game. The ability to edit your rune pages in champion select. Now you can tailor your build specifically to the lane and team that you're facing. No more realizing at the last moment that you don't have a rune page that's appropriate for this game. Now you can simply cook one up on a whim!

There's still a lot more information about the new runes that will be coming out in the new couple days, so stay tuned here at WWG, as we'll get you the new information as it is revealed!

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