New tank runes help you break turrets

For this week’s Rune Corner, Riot Gregab showed up on the forums to give us a taste of some of the new, delightful tank runes. Based on some of these new designs, it looks like Riot is really trying to make playing tanks more interesting than before.

One of these runes increases your stats after you cast a Summoner Spell and when you Summoner Spells are on cooldown, while another helps you blow up towers. This more active tank play style plays into their tank designs from this last mid-season.

Perseverance

After casting a Summoner Spell, gain 25% Tenacity and 25% Slow Resistance for 10 seconds. Increase your bonus Armor and Magic resist by 10% for each Summoner Spell on cooldown.

This rune is actually really interesting, as it makes marking a tank for ganks after they have blown Summoners in the early game far less useful. Similarly, it will be a lot harder to catch up to and kill slow moving characters when they flash away from near death, due to the slow resist and tenacity. All of that being said, the way that this will impact the use of Teleport is far more interesting. Being able to go from top to bottom and have nearly no slow for 10 seconds is very powerful, while teleporting to lane just got a whole lot less efficient.

Demolish

Charge up a powerful attack against a tower over 4 seconds, while within 600 range of it. The charged attack deals 375 (+20% of your max health) bonus physical damage.

Cooldown: 60 seconds

Have you ever been playing a really beefy top laner like Maokai and lamented the fact that no matter how hard you destroy you will be hard pressed to take the enemy tower? Well, looks like Riot made a rune for you. For top laners that don’t expect jungle help them take towers and want to start roaming early, Demolish seems like a great option. Not only will it allow you to take towers faster during laning, but you will hit late game towers like a truck once you have a ton of max health. But if you had hoped that full tank Tryndamere wasn’t ever going to be a thing, bad news.

Font of Life

Impairing the movement of an enemy champion marks them for 4 seconds. Ally champions who attack marked enemies heal for 5 + 1.0% of your max health.

(Healing values are reduced to a third for your own attacks.)

Font of life seems to fill some weird gap between Grasp of the Undying and Courage of the Colossus. This rune seems ripe for crowd control heavy, tanky supports like Thresh and Leona. However, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see it pop up on Maokai top or jungle, considering that adding even more healing to the Terrible Tree would just make him even harder to deal with.

As with all of the runes up to this point, any and all of these things could change before they release onto live servers in November.