League of Legends

[Ashe]

Dude. Listen to yourself.

Runes are nerfed, so YES a character is effectively weaker in that area than otherwise. If you pay for a particular set-up, you should be refunded if that set-up is no longer viable, or no longer recognizable.

Seriously. Defending the mainstream (and the only thing keeping Riot from being fully mainstream is that they are even MORE incompetent) in this particular scenario is an easy and pleasant thing to do, but the situation is quite clear.

Period.

Oh wow, I see it now. If I had 5mp5 before, and I have 5mp5 afterwards, I absolutely am weaker. I'm obviously just defending the mainstream as usual and not rebelling and doing the cool thing against an obviously incompetent company, like most of the others out there, that just herp derp their way to successful products without a clue what they are doing. I should clearly just go with posters on forums who know that the answer to everything is so simple and these companies are morons that just have downs.

-_- Let's not even waste our time with the "zomg fanboi" vs "zomg everythingsux" crap.

I stated that contextually, yes, you aren't as far ahead of your opponent as you were previously, so in that perspective it is absolutely a nerf, as the percentage of advantage you had has been reduced. In the perspective of "what I am capable of now" vs "what my capabilities will become", however, it isn't. You can still cast the same number of spells afterwards that you have before and poke just as much. You just can't take advantage of your opponents inability to respond due to being oom quite as often as you were.

Going to what Kaden said, yeah, I absolutely agree. Its actually buffing the poking early game and making it stronger, while also buffing burst. Some characters are shit as far as abilities go early game because they use them twice and are oom, and since they tend to be melee oriented, they are just fucked and have very little base mana regen. This, in conjunction with the the health reduction, will absolutely reward harassing more often during laning as well as further strengthen zoning your opponents (especially when bringing in the xp/gold distance from creeps nerf that happened) out of their waves. Being aggressive will absolutely be the way to go, but it also puts a lot more focus on playing truly defensive and less of this hybrid passive role of just coming in, farming, then stepping out of range after a hit or two.

Reduced health and increased mana regen (while reducing mana regen runes) will probably lead to more offensive rune setups, leaving players hitting harder and more often than they were before. Consequently, fragile characters may consider defense tree more to get through early game rather than defaulting to 9/0/21 with health quints every game. I also expect (sadly) games to go into roaming/ganking mode much earlier on average and farming to reduce greatly, which has already become a bit of a trend, but also appears preferable to many of the players who prefer hyper aggressive fast paced adrenaline rush action over super laid back casual relaxed mode.