Runes Corner: Runas centradas en el late game

Gathering Storm heavily concentrates its power into the late-game. Taking it is substantial risk, but with a big reward coming as the game goes on. Beyond normal linear scaling it actually accelerates its power growth as time passes. However, this rune doesn’t just grant its power gradually, you only get its bonus at each 10 minute interval. This makes some extremely powerful late-game spikes (30, 40, 50 minutes) particularly meaningful. The stats from Gathering Storm after 30 minutes can absolutely look scary, and we’re going to be keeping a close eye on its tuning. In general, scaling runes need to be balanced carefully and be fairly rare within the system. Their ability to be cool and powerful is proportionate to the risk you undertake in bypassing other options granting immediate and more reliable power.

Ever played a champion and wished you could just get some more time off their ult cooldown? Vi, Karthus, Amumu certainly come to mind. Ultimore lets you get just that. Instead of broad power or cooldown reduction across the entire kit, this is focused purely on your champion’s ultimate. We’ve seen uses on both ends of the cooldown spectrum. Some players take this to get access to their long cooldown ultimates more often, while others use it to try and reach a point where they can use their ultimate twice in a fight. Overall, we hope it creates some creative uses and different feeling builds for you try out.

As an aside, we actually tried this mechanic as a keystone in its early iterations. Balancing delayed power in the keystone slot proved pretty hard, however. Giving enough power to make it worth the wait proved too pattern warping. When Lux starts ulting 3+ times per teamfight things get a bit scary. Moving this rune out of the keystone slot let us provide the ultimate-only cooldown effect at a more reasonable power level that everyone can still get excited about.