Originally Posted by
cocacobra
i love playing this game......................................
do you guys think the new runes make doing nonmeta builds even harder?
Nonmeta picks don't happen in League, new runes or not.
Let's be very frank about how League is structured. There is always a clearly defined champion meta at this point in the game's life. There is always the flavor of the season that Riot decides to support and structures all of their balancing around. Offmeta originates when the flavor of the season is less defined.
I'll compare to Dota to explain this. Dota has clearly defined "strong" characters, like League does, but Dota also has clearly defined hard counters, something League does not really have. There are bad matchups in League, but there's very few hard counters to any champion, and the champions that do have these hard counters rarely see play because they don't bring anything to make up for it. This is the critical difference that results in offmeta not happening in League. In Dota, if they pick some "strong" character, you can literally just pick the hard counter and laugh to the bank. Cancer lancer can be the strongest character in the game, but he still gets dunked when Earthshaker ults. This means champion select is not about jockeying to assemble a team with the strongest meta characters, but trying to read team strategy to draft an effective counter. Meanwhile, when League has a powerful character, often your best bet is to pick a champion with the hardest amount of consistent cc available as a "counter". This is why Malzahar is so prevalent in high level play, since he's the closest to a hard counter you will ever get in League. It also means that picks and bans in League are not as intricate as Dota's are, since it's more focused on securing the power picks of the patch while denying them to your opponent. It's why you'll see very similar bans in matches, and the first 3 to 5 picks will have very large overlaps between matches.
Ultimately, League's balancing means that there is no offmeta, only an abnormal power curve that hasn't been discovered yet. When you see a surprise pick, it's almost never optimal, and relies on hoping your opponent is not prepared for it. It's why when you see a surprise pick you'll see a guaranteed one of two results: total domination or total annihilation. Either it succeeds in surprising, and can snowball into a point where meta doesn't matter (that Nocturne pick in Worlds), or it falls flat and proceeds to suck for the remainder of the match (that Rammus pick in All-Stars).
Unless you aren't talking about high level play, in which case Spellbook Minion Dematerializer Proxy Singed is top kek.