Welcome again to the empire of victors, Playing to Win!
After learning the ways of the ninja last week, we are ready to once again revisit the twilight zone of winning before the game even starts. It’s time to dive into the arcane depths. Are you ready, Gandalf?

Content Index
1. The great myth, Riot says Nay!
2. Trip down MOBA lane
3. Customise, silly
4. Ocelote is my homie
5. Gratitude and treasure

1. The great myth, Riot says Nay!

This week Playing to Win begins by dispelling a big misconception that’s been floating around the community, even at the highest level. There is only visual rounding in League of Legends. Riot Games player support was kind enough to confirm that the information in the link above is correct.



So dear summoners, dear professional players, there’s no sense in putting one flat AD glyph instead of an MR one to get 16 damage instead of 15, or any other similar shenanigans. The rounding up to the full number once you get over point 5 is only visual, and you’re in fact replacing a primary rune bonus for a secondary rune bonus, which is suboptimal. Oh Lamia, oh Wickd, don’t let your eyes deceive you. Oh Dyrus, you trolled only yourself.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s have a look at what runes and masteries are and what they do. The definition from the League of Legends Wiki page is as follows:


So, runes and masteries provides stat bonuses to champions before the game even starts. Many have tried quantifying these stat bonuses, peering at them through a statistical looking glass, and capturing their soul in graphs. I will not be doing that. Instead, I will look at how the Playing to Win philosophy applies to pre-game strategy.

2. Trip down MOBA lane

Now, people who do not have MOBA experience prior to League of Legends, might not credit a lot of importance to the part of the MOBA game that’s happening before you even summon your Champion. People who come from a DotA or HoN background do. See, in Defense of the Ancients a lot of higher level play was reserved for so-called inhouse games, some of which later turned into fullblown inhouse leagues or IHLs. Most of these leagues were administrated and run by bots, typically ircbots or battle.net bots. In many IHLs, these bots sported a drafting mode feature, much like the system that’s currently in place for League of Legends draft modes.

One key difference: only the team Captains drafted the heroes. This mode is known as Captains Mode, and eventually became so popular that IceFrog implemented it as one of the standard game modes in the DotA map, and that it took over from –teampick as the preferred tournament mode. It was commonly accepted long before League of Legends came around that picks are a big part of the strategy for the entire game, and at times even decisive of the outcomes.
When the people with a MOBA background made the jump to League of Legends, the reactions upon finding out about runes and masteries all shared the same adjective: strong.

For certain people this system was way too much, and aimed at making the game easier for noobs. If people wanted talent trees and gems, they should go play World of Warcraft. Other players marveled at this combination of elements from their beloved DotA and WoW, present in League of Legends. Any addition to complexity makes for a better game. These people stacked their runebooks and theorycrafted their mastery pages, and began crushing games. Fast forward to mid Season One and suddenly the entire community is begging for toprated players to share their rune and mastery setup.

3. Customize, silly

What professional players do to determine the optimal rune and mastery setup is looking at the total package of their champion. Base stats, stat growth, abilities, itembuild, and finally, how do runes and masteries fit in there. All while keeping the enemy champion setup in mind.

First you determine the role that your champion will fulfill in the game at hand. As a carry, you’ll want to do more damage, and as a support you want increased utility. The path to reach these goals may be different for champions that fulfill the same role. Next, will your champion be at their most influential point early in the game, do they grow stronger as the game progresses, or do they just need a few core items to become extremely powerful in the mid game? Which champion are you laning against? Do they counter you, or do you counter them? Does your team’s strategy rely on farming until the lategame comes around, or do you need to take towers early on to allow for easier ganking?.You have to ask yourself all of these questions and more if you want to Play to Win.

Now, how can we configure our rune books and mastery pages to answer all of these questions? Let’s look at some concrete examples.

You’re playing Nocturne as a jungler, and the enemy jungler is playing Amumu. How to take advantage? The bold answer would be, go for his red buff. Amumu is a slow jungler and very weak early on. He’s very dependant on the blue golem buff to get through the first few levels. Nocturne on the other hand is very powerful in the early and mid game. We decide on clearing wolves, blue golem buff and then invading the enemy jungle and stealing Amumu’s red lizard buff, hitting level 3 before any other lane in doing so.

If we take 21/0/9 masteries, we deal a lot of extra damage, resulting in an even faster jungling speed, and we get 20% increased buff duration on the double buff. Add on boots and 3 health potions to minimize the travel time between our own blue golem and the enemy red lizard, and the chance of success further increases. This leaves us only missing some defense against the jungle minions’ auto attacks. That’s why we need armor. In this case, it’s perfectly fine to get armor glyphs in addition to armor seals, to make up for the 6 points of armor lost not taking 9 points in defensive masteries.

The marks and quintessences should have about 6 armor penetration on them, which combined with the 6 armor penetration from the offensive mastery tree gives a total of 12 armor penetration. This is the amount of armor most jungle monsters have, and allows for true damage. The remaining quintessence and mark slots can be filled with attack damage or attack speed, according to preference. Some players prefer attack speed for more consistent damage, while others grab attack damage for increased burst damage.

At the same time, while facing an enemy Shaco, and a team with heavy burst, one might start more defensively, and grab a dorans blade or a cloth armor with 5 potions. One could additionally opt for a 9/21/0 mastery page taking points in health regen and damage return to jungle monsters. Supplemented by attack speed runes for increased clearing speed and sustain through Nocturne’s passive, and standard flat armor seals with magic resist per level glyphs.

The point I’m trying to make here is: customize. You get a significant chance to increase your advantage and chance of success through careful consideration of rune and mastery pages. Grab it with both hands. You don’t need other players to tell you how to build your champions. Just think logically and use your own head. Get a feel for the champions you play, and learn about their intricacies.

For example, look at what Froggen did. He decided that, since mid lane is now about farming and pushing rather than killing my enemy, why do I need to run magic penetration marks? So he swapped them out for magic resist marks, threw flat mp5 instead of scaling mp5 seals in, and there you go. Using this type of rune page, he could safely push and farm the lane early on, forcing the enemy mid player to lasthit under his tower. Thanks to the extra 9 magic resist, he didn’t have to worry so much about taking some harassment damage while pushing. He owned Reginald so hard that the poor guy copied Froggen’s entire rune book, adapted part of his play style, and went on to win IPL4. Now Riot are nerfing magic resist runes and buffing ability power runes. Go figure.

Sometimes you just have to question old habits or common ways, and see if they are still completely relevant. The times that everyone runed for full armor penetration on their AD’s and always rushed a deathcap on ap carries are long gone. A new trend is rising up, and customization is its middle name. I can’t put any more clearly than this: think about everything you do in League of Legends. Always make sure that you have a plan for what you’re doing, and that the logic behind it is sound. Let’s put that advice to use and and evaluate each type of stat available through runes.

Attack Damage

Ability Power

Armor

Magic Resist

Health

Health regen

Mana

Mana regen

Energy

Energy regen

Critical chance

Critical damage

Attack speed

Armor penetration

Magic penetration

Cooldown reduction


Life steal

Spell Vamp

Movement speed

Gold over time

Increased experience gain


With this in mind, look at your champion and plug in the stats that it needs. It's that simple. There's two points that I want to touch on though.

Flat versus per level scaling versus percentage
Flat bonuses are better early game. Scaling bonuses are better from the moment they start outperforming the equivalent flat bonuses. Percentage bonuses scale all game long and get extremely strong late game. Think 3% reduced aoe damage taken from a 200 damage Ziggs ultimate or 3% reduced aoe damage taken from a 1000 damage Ziggs ultimate.

However, due to the extreme snowballing off earlygame that's currently part of the way League of Legends works, flat bonuses are super strong. Overpower once early on and reap the benefits all game long.

Double dipping
Double dipping is an extremely dangerous mechanic. It occurs when one stat increases both your defense and offense. Percentage max health or bonus health into damage conversion is probably the most toxic one of them all. This is why everyone hates playing against Shen. Build health to get more damage. Toxic to the game and simply asking for trouble. The same thing happens with Malphite's Ground Slam and Galio's Runic Skin, where one stat both increases your damage and buffs your defenses. One of the biggest parts of MOBA game strategy is to carefully consider the damage versus survivability trade-off when making build choices. Throw in an Atmas Impaler and a Maw of Malmortius however, and yippee, you don't have to chose anymore. It doesn't look like Riot is through with this type of mechanic, either, the recent release of Nautilus who also has hp into damage scaling, and the upcoming emergence into the League of Hecarim, who will convert movement speed into damage, are testament to that.

4. Ocelote is my homie

As an extra, let's have a quick look at the upcoming changes to ability power, magic penetration and magic resist runes.

So, Riot decided that it's time for us to stop turtling and blow things up instead. All magic resist runes are getting nerfed, and all ability power and magic penetration runes are getting buffed. While the individual changes aren't that great, the total offset will be. For aggressive AP players like Ocelote, Reginald and myself this is fantastic news. Finally scaling ability power glyphs are a strong option again! Finally middle lane will be host to mortal combat once more! Tons of damage will be dealt!

I think this much needed change will open up a number of avenues in terms of build paths. Firstly, I think Mobility Boots will become viable and strong on AP carries that are built to blow enemies up in a single combo (almost all of them hehehehe). Since you can get a lot of magic penetration from runes now, Sorc shoes aren't so much of a no-brainer any longer. Run a rune page with magic penetration marks and quintessences, mana regeneration seals and ability power glyphs. Buy Mobility boots and go blow sidelaners and junglers up all the freaking time.

Conversely, people might opt for running merc threads all the time, since getting damage from runes and magic resistance from boots might be a mathematically superior option now. Whatever the new best strategy turns out to be, one thing is certain, AP carries will make a hell of an impact from next patch onwards.

5. Gratitude and treasure

This is the fifth installment of playing to win. Hours upon hours, thousands of words, and over 250k views later, I want to thank some important people and give some hardware in addition to words to the community.

First of all: A huge thanks to Jamie, Scott, and Bjoern for giving me a chance with SK, supporting me, teaching me and helping me grow so much. Lots of manlove.

Next, I'll tip my hat to probably the wisest man in eSports, Duncan "Thorin" Shields.

I also want to thank Reddit for their continued support, viewership, feedback and upvotes. Thank you guys, I love you all!

I feel very strongly about giving a huge shout out to The Rain Man. He was and still is an amazing player, he was a big part of TSM and more often than not carried his weight. I'm quite positive that the change in attitude in TSM had a lot more to do with their recent IPL4 victory than Rainman getting replaced by Dyrus. I'm still a huge fan and wish Christian all the best in the future, he deserves it.

Finally, I'm giving away one Steelseries Ikari Laser Mouse.
The contest is an easy one: like my Facebook page and/or follow my Twitter. Leave a comment or a personal message saying what you learned from any of the first five Playing to Win articles, and I will pick the most deserving one. The winner will be announced in the next Playing to Win.