Do runes really matter?

[Ichifails]

try it. make a smurf.
and cry at the difference it makes.
CSing is harder, trading is harder, locking down kills gets harder, but only in the early game really.
Once you get in the double digits things start feeling back to normal-ish.

Welp, you're supposed to practice a bit without runes/masteries/items either way to improve your CSing. I can tell you for a fact even LCS pro players do that if not daily at least a few times a week. Early game CSing is so important but for some reason people ignore it.

I started playing ADC this season (5 years of support with very few jungle/top/mid games and close to 0 as ADC) so I had the mechanics of a potato. I could CS though because I trained for ~50 games(trying to get perfect CS in the first 10 mins) in custom games. Getting a BF sword at 6 minutes while the other guy has a pickaxe or vamp scepter simply made me auto win the lane because a kill would come shortly after. Not to mention it makes CSing 100 times easier because even if you fuck up your wave manipulation (custom game practice helps with this as well) you can simply kill a creep from half health.

The whole idea behind this kind of training is that you'll be consistent so you'll have close to perfect CS even if you are behind, equal or ahead.


On topic, yes runes are the most important thing in the game to get. If you're a good player you can get Challenger with 2 rune pages but you pretty much can't do shit without them.

[Deleted]

Hey man. Runes are quite important, masteries as well. Try to google some builds to your fav champ. I don't know why but i can't post link, just google it and u will find out!

[Jackielope]

I'm a new player (level 6 through the tutorial battlefield of all things), and looking at the stats runes offer compared to various end game items... Yeah, runes are needed. They're worth another item slot right from the start of the match.

The advice I've mostly seen to deal with the runes' IP costs is to get a few cheap but solid heroes like Annie and play the hell out of them while stockpiling IP for runes that'll either work with them or work with another more expensive champion you're going to swap over to.

[Deleted]

I'm a new player (level 6 through the tutorial battlefield of all things), and looking at the stats runes offer compared to various end game items... Yeah, runes are needed. They're worth another item slot right from the start of the match.

The advice I've mostly seen to deal with the runes' IP costs is to get a few cheap but solid heroes like Annie and play the hell out of them while stockpiling IP for runes that'll either work with them or work with another more expensive champion you're going to swap over to.

not sure if this i still the best cause of action since it's some years ago i did this
but when i started back in season 1 the best thing to do was saving up as much IP as possible till lvl 20 as the best runes in the game doesn't unlock till lvl 20

then get a standard AP and AD runepage for overall use, runes are important but not THAT important that they need to be made specifically for a certain champion.


from there you can buy champs and slowly expand on your runes

[LuciferTheIV]

Runes for the most part are all early game. they become less meaningful later in the game.

The short answer is Yes there very important since the early game can determine how the rest of the game will go for you.