Patch 8.23: All of the preseason rune changes, explained

There are plenty of changes in this year’s preseason and among them is a overhaul to how a lot of the game’s runes, and even the system as a whole, function.

The biggest change to the rune system is the removal of the secondary stats that used to be tied to each tree. Now, instead of getting bonus attack speed if you went into the Precision tree, you can simply select the attack speed bonus from the list of available stats in the rune page creation screen.

While this opens things up for more unconventional and more interesting builds, especially on champions who may not have been playing roles they were initially designed for, it isn’t the only rune change that’s coming this preseason. There are also changes in this patch to 10 different runes.

So, in order to get a better understand of what Riot’s doing with runes this preseason let’s take a look at all of the changes being made.

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Fleet Footwork

The only thing that’s changing here is that the heal ratio is being taken down from 50 percent AP to 30 percent. According to Riot, this extra AP was mostly for mages that were taking this tree but couldn’t make use of the extra attack speed it offered. Now that the attack speed second stat is gone, so too is the extra incentive to make up for it.

Celerity

This rune will no longer convert bonus speed into movement, instead it will increase all speed bonuses by eight percent. So, fast champions get to go faster, but they won’t do any extra damage anymore.

Dark Harvest

This rune got a complete overhaul and was already hotfixed, thanks to releasing a little stronger than intended. The new Dark Harvest grants players slightly more damage when they attack a champion. This takes into account both AD and AP as well as the number of souls a player has collected, which you can get by attacking enemy champions that are below 50 percent health. This extra damaging attack can only happen once every 45 seconds, but the cooldown is reduced to 1.5 seconds when the player gets an enemy takedown.

Ravenous Hunter

Ravenous Hunter may have gotten the most straight forward nerf of the bunch. Instead of starting the game with 2.5 percent base healing, the rune will now start with 1.5 percent, simply making its early healing a little less effective.

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Demolish

Demolish is getting a bit easier to proc, with its activation time going from four seconds to three, but it’s also getting a slight damage nerf going from 175 extra damage, along with the 30 percent max turret health, to 100 extra damage. This should prevent the rune from being an absolute must pick option for players now that turret plating means more gold is up for the taking.

Bone Plating

This one might not even be a preseason change. The fact is, Bone Plating was simply way too strong at the end of the season, so this nerf was always on the way no matter what else changed about the game. The defensive buff that the rune grants now lasts half the time, just 1.5 seconds instead of three, while the amount of damage blocked has gone up slightly and the rune has changed positions from the first tier of runes to the second.

Chrysalis

This rune was taken out of the game. That’s all.

Overgrowth

This rune also received a full rework and now grants additional max health once a player reaches 120 minion and monster deaths, while still giving a little bit of stacking health for each nearby minion that dies.

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Kleptomancy

Kleptomancy now has the chance to proc off of the next two auto attacks used after an ability, making it a significantly better rune for almost everyone. The drop rate itself was reduced slightly, since more auto attacks have a chance to activate it now, but the truth is that the rune still procs a bit more than it used to. As far as other changes go, you’ll also now get 5 gold for every auto attack that hits a champion if you don’t get an item and wards can no longer drop from a proc after the 20 minute mark of a game.