runes are possibly the worst feature of that game, which is a pretty prestigious title

Sometimes.

And sometimes it's Kalista.

Why boosts make no sense in LOL

Exp Boosts - The benefits of leveling up in LOL are outweighed by the downsides of leveling up. Basically, the difficulty curve rises faster than the benefits curve, so using exp boosts to speed this up hurts you in the long run. You also get less ip per game in some modes at higher levels.

Word of Warning: It is also possible for a per wins exp boost to get stuck on your account if you hit level 30. Sometimes.

Per Win Ip Boosts - 1 ip is about 6.3 IP (roughly)? Ignoring sales. If you win all 50 games in ranked, the most efficient IP Boost gives you a little more than 1 champ's ip cost at the cost of about 2.5 champ's worth of rp. Ignoring sales.

Timed IP Boosts

1 day - The only one I have ever made efficient use out of (once out of the 3 times I have gotten one). You have to play 20 games or win 10 to break even.

30 day - You have to play an average of 11 games per day or win an average of 5.5 games per day to break even. This is the most efficient you can get.

So...... that's an unreasonable amount either way.

Why get ip boosts at all? Well runes. But what's better? Spending that rp on champs instead of the ip and just spending ip on the runes.

Someone played Kalista last game....

It turns out that throwing me as an AP Carry Amumu into a group of enemy champions is not the worst strategy in the world.

sounds like a really lame version of Tiny

Unless Amumu is the LoL version of techies, I'm inclined to agree.

Amumu is an ability power carry who can do hundreds of damage per second with his normal abilities. 2/3 of which are AOE. His ultimate does 150 to 350 (depending on level) + 80% of his ability power to all enemies hit by it. It also prevents them from attacking or moving for 2 seconds.

We are ignoring all the passives and actives you can have on him.

Basically, late game it's the equivalent of throwing an aoe nuke into the enemy team followed by running in and smacking the people who aren't dead yet.

amumu is pretty close to Tidehunter in playstyle, but his ult is more like Treant's. he also has a mini-Hookshot as one of his basic abilities. he is a pretty fun character actually



I like AP amumu as well, but if it's actually the meta way to play him then the game has changed even more than I thought

Yeah. That's a thing.

Rylai's + Liandry's makes his W stupidly good. Then you can get a Rabaddon's and have yourself a party. Build a Will of the Ancients at some point for the spell vamp and cdr. And then round out the build with a morell and some boots or a couple of defensive items.


Edit: the meta way to play him is still jungle aoe tank

Shrimp, would you be interested in playing at all at some point in time? It sounds like you are at least invested enough (or were at some point) to have favorite characters, strats, and so on.

Amumu is played with more AP than he was in season 2 and 3. He's a tank with high damage output, its not unusual to see him competing with carries on damage charts. Full AP amumu is usually not done though, I think he still builds primarily defensive items.

I like scaling CDR runes too. Runes are a fun part of league of legends because of the way they let you customize champions, but they are a bad part of league of legends because they are gated by a combination of massive grinding and spending money on the game. They also make matchups feel a little rock-paper-scissory sometimes in that you can't see your opponents runes when you are counterpicking them, but that doesn't usually impact the game a lot.

It is true that if you are playing an ADC or an APC you can usually afford to build the same 6 items on every champ.

It takes 3 games to earn one 205 ip rune.

18 of the 39 runes that are recommended for you to buy first fall into this category.

It takes about 6 games to earn one 410 ip rune.

18 of the 39 runes that are recommended for you to buy first fall into this category.

And it takes a heck of a lot of games to earn a single 2000+ ip Quintessence. Any ones recommended for you to get fall into this category.

So...... getting 2/3 of a rune page (not counting quintessences) will take you about 64 games?

Getting the last 3rd will take you another 64 games, and that only counts for half your champs.

Getting the quintessences is stupidly bad.




This is, of course, assuming you lose every single game. If you win, it counts as if you had played 2 games for this metric. And this is an on average metric, so it can be better or worse.




To be blunt though....... you don't need runes to play for fun. At all. They are only necessary if you want to be stupidly competitive at a very high level, and then you will get that ip naturally anyways.




People tend to take Amumu jungle with 1 or 2 AP items and items designed to make him tanky.

a full set of quints costs between 1500 and 6000 ip and a full set of reds, blues, or yellows costs between 1800 and 7200 ip. There are only 3 quint slots, and there are 27 non-quint slots. I think quints are about half as ip efficient as other runes are, so it's not terrible, although they are noticeably more expensive. I'd recommend picking up a set of either AD or armor quints for your first runepage if you're worried about spending. They're both useful on pretty much every champion and aren't in the highest price tier like some of the more popular ones are.

If I were to design a budget runepage I'd probably do something like this:

ad reds
scaling magic resist blues
flat armor yellows
AD or armor quints, depending on which type of champs you prefer to play.

If you very rarely play ad champs, you should substitute the reds for flat armor (205 IP) or magic pen (410 IP).

Runes can make a pretty noticeable difference in the laning phase and most players who play ranked for fun or otherwise will probably say they are crucial to success, although I think a lot of people over-exaggerate that. I play with people who have runes and people who don't
and its not like you can see a visual correlation between that and their contributions in game.

@lilan, would you like to play sometime as well?

sure

For a starting player's first runepage, I'd generally suggest:
Flat AD reds
Flat Armor yellows
Scaling or flat MR blues
Flat AD quints
(even on an AP champ, the added AD will still help a new player last hit and harass with auto attacks)

From there I would suggest that they branch out and make an AP page
Mpen reds
Flat Armor yellows
Flat MR blues
Flat AP quints

Then, after that you can role specialize a bit.

AD carries generally optimally use the below rune-page or something similar. Many junglers use a similar page, but with scaling MR blues instead.
Flat AD reds
Flat Armor yellows
Flat MR blues
Attack speed quints

After getting that out of the way you can start building pages tailored to less broad categories of champions.

Whether or not you use flat or scaling blues generally depends on who you are laning against, so having pages with both options is often useful when you play draft mode. There are also some people who prefer to use health yellows instead of armor when matched against an AP champ. Hybrid penetration runes can be effective on hybrid damage champs and AP champs that heavily rely on auto-attacking for harass in lane. Armor penetration runes only really make sense on champions that don't scale hard with ad, but have good base damage on physical abilities. Movement speed quints are okay, but generally not worth the loss in stats in my opinion. I'd personally never run more than one crit chance rune (because landing that rare crit can have a big impact on the game) and I'd never suggest running crit damage runes. Depending on what champions you mostly play, there are a lot of weird rune pages that you might end up using that you might only use for that one champion.

even if I still enjoyed the game, my account wouldn't be on the same server as yours

I'm starting to notice a pattern. Every single champion has something they do that's inherently borked and/or broken and that's why you play them..... It's like magic.

That being said, I need Akali's explained to me. Anyone here want to explain what I'm doing wrong?

LOL is getting ready to release an ult skin for SONA. So excited.

isn't it basically just an alternate version of arcade sona? and sona is already the most boring character in league which is a pretty prestigious title