Riot Game Designer Weighs In On Dark Harvest Rune

As they continue to try and create the best balance possible for League of Legends, Riot Games has on occasion made some changes that may have swung too far in one direction or another. While this is usually corrected with other changes surrounding the issue, sometimes the player-base can find the wait for a change to be unbearable, causing threads and posts to appear online asking for drastic changes in one form or another.

Dark Harvest should be reverted from r/leagueoflegends

In the above thread, Reddit user Famyos posits that the Dark Harvest Rune needs to once again undergo some kind of rework, due to the recent nerfs pushing it into a very niche position that fails to benefit the wider player-base. While many of the comments talk about ways in which it can be changed, Riot Rovient took the time to chime in and explain some of the difficulties in balancing the Rune, as well as the other Runes that were a part of the “Runes Reforged” update some time ago.

“Just so you don't think I'm just a super positive, faceless company puppet for Riot, here's an honesty bomb for you all. When DH launched and I watched Tyler1 wreck his enemies in a ranked game for preseason 9 without even trying I sat back in my chair and said "Oh fuck". It truly was an oh fuck moment. I knew immediately that I'd made a mistake and the early win-rate data showed us that DH was too strong,” wrote Rovient in his post. “After the first micro-patch landed it's win-rate dropped, but not by enough to allow me to rest easy. We needed to nuke it's early game damage to ensure it was never comparable to Electrocute. We nerfed it again in 9.24, perhaps a little harder than we should (I'd have liked to up damage per stack to 6 when we applied the nerf, but we certainly needed that win-rate to come down).”

Rovient goes on to explain that the Rune is currently in a place where it is technically not overly strong or overly weak, according to win rates across the various skill ranks. However, it is clear that neither Rovient nor the rest of the balance team are entirely happy with the current situation, both for Dark Harvest and the rest of the Runes. Regardless of the issues however, it is clear that Riot Games does pay very close attention to the complaints and discussions that appear on Reddit and other sites. Hopefully a change will come sometime soon to fix Dark Harvest, or at least mix things up enough that it feels like a viable pick in the future.