Rune paths won’t decide what bonus stats you get in season 9

The relationship between League of Legends’ new rune system, introduced at the beginning of season 8, and stats has never quite been clear. In order to help grant champions that need some addition help in the early game the assistance they need, Riot gave each combination of rune paths a few small stats. However, Riot has had to alter these stats frequently because they were too powerful, or simply weren’t doing anything.

Thankfully, this is all set to change in the upcoming season, according to a recent preseason developer update post from Riot. Instead of granting stats based on the runes you choose, season 9 will simply have players select their own stats independently of their rune set up.

In this new stat tree there will be three types of stats that players can select.

• One slot is offensive stats only
• One slot is defensive stats only
• One slot is “free” choice of offense or defensive stats

Riot elaborated on each of these by giving us a list of which stats fall into which categories.

• Offensive - attack damage, ability power, attack speed, scaling cooldown reduction
• Defensive - armor, magic resist, scaling health

Riot also mentioned that it would not be considering stats like flat CDR, health regen or scaling resistances. What this means is that these stats will all be highly focused on the early game, and will even help some champions climb outside of their traditional roles.

As always with posts like these, the changes are in the earlier stages of development and are always subject to change.