League of Legends’ newly crowned balance lead David “Phreak” Turley has responded to player concerns revolving around a raft of rune nerfs coming in Patch 13.20 next week.
The next League update, Patch 13.20, is expected to make several sweeping rune changes for nearly a dozen different picks as Riot Games looks to slow down snowballing in the game, with Dark Harvest, Electrocute, and more on the block.
After reading Matt “RiotPhroxzon” Leung-Harrison’s patch preview on Oct. 3, many League fans were left confused about why there would be rune changes at all, especially because the changes are targeting runes like Dark Harvest and Electrocute that many consider relatively well-balanced right now in Season 13.
In response, Phreak has spoken out about the changes, explaining exactly why these eleven runes were chosen by Riot’s balance team.
According to Phreak, Riot initially wanted to change the runes from gold scaling to level scaling to, help curb their snowballing effects. Instead, the League devs eventually decided to ship minor power nerfs instead, to ensure there would be no cross-class rune poaching.
Phreak also mentioned Electrocute’s damage in the lategame may be reduced up to 25 percent, which many players fear isn’t a minor power nerf at all.
The dev’s goal with the power nerfs across several runes is to create balance and, of course, curb snowballing. However, League players are finding it hard to see how this is balanced or minor. Many of the best-performing runes were hit with minimal nerfs, while others were hit with significant nerfs despite supposedly being “minor” targets.
Phreak did admit Riot isn’t 100 percent sure how these changes will perform and so they’ll be keeping an eye on them as closely as possible once Patch 13.20 ships on Wednesday, Oct. 11; ready to prepare more changes quickly.
These changes are still tentative, of course, but if they make it through to live League servers I suspect we’ll see far fewer Electrocute rune pages from then on.
Published: Oct 3, 2023 06:30 pm