In a continuously updated game like League of Legends, it’s necessary for Riot to revamp and adjust outdated items and champions. Currently, the item Runaan’s Hurricane is in this situation with only a 1.3% purchase rate (statistics from LeagueofGraphs). This is a disappointing statistic and shows that Runaan’s Hurricane is being “ignored” by players.
Riot Games is surely aware of this, so they have taken steps to upgrade Runaan’s Hurricane. It has even been tested on the PBE server and is expected to be implemented in the upcoming patch 14.5. However, the “super bizarre” adjustments from Riot Games received an immense amount of mixed reactions from the League of Legends community.
Specifically, instead of enhancing the power for Marksmen, Riot chose to allow melee champions to purchase Runaan’s Hurricane. Furthermore, they enabled the item’s activation effects to work with some incredibly strong features. As a result, certain champions suddenly gained extremely “unreasonable” power with Runaan’s Hurricane.
Take Master Yi as an example; the aforementioned item allows this champion to continuously activate his passive and reduce the cooldown of his Q ability. This lets Master Yi, even in normal mode, operate as if playing in URF mode. This champion can repeatedly use his Q ability, take down opponents, reset his ultimate, and repeat the combo chain all with just Runaan’s Hurricane.
Not stopping there, a slew of other melee champions like Katarina, Illaoi, Pantheon… also have extremely strong interactions with this item. This led to significant frustration within the League of Legends community as Riot introduced a change that felt extremely “game-breaking.” Just a few days after testing, the Lead Designer of League of Legends – Riot Phroxzon spoke out to retract this modification to appease the community.
On the official server, Runaan’s Hurricane is in quite a poor state with a very low purchase rate. The reason is that many Marksmen champions are no longer suitable for using this item. Perhaps Riot should find ways to make Runaan’s Hurricane stronger for Marksmen instead of resorting to the idea of giving it to melee champions and throwing League of Legends out of balance.