Runes just aren't what they used to be. Dark Harvest and Conqueror's reworks were temporarily exciting before the nerfs, but now they seem fairly well-tuned to benefit some champions nicely without being generally overbearing. And those brief instances aside, I have found no other runes so far in Season 9 really lead to exciting numbers, or that seem to obviously push the meta in one direction or another on their own. There is, however, one general rune path that I think is quietly good overall at the moment, and is extremely potent on a select few champions. In this article, we'll be taking a look at the Resolve primary/Precision secondary path, with a closer look at champions who utilize Overheal (with Shield Bash) particularly well. Finally, we'll round out the discussion by looking at why these apparent benefits may not be enough to push these tree and rune combinations into the limelight just yet.

A Brief History of the Behemoth

For those unaware, the name "Imperious Behemoth" was assigned to the Resolve/Precision combination back at the outset of Runes Reforged. As implied by the name, this setup offers some great options for becoming a lumbering, tanky threat that plows through enemies. Now more than ever, I think this combination is very powerful. But it wasn't always this way. There were a number of meaningful changes that had to happen in order to open up this tree combo. Let's run through them.

At the outset of Runes Reforged in Patch 7.22, your primary rune tree entirely decided your stat bonuses. For Resolve, this used to be quite a hefty tank bonus, granting a flat 130 health. At this point in time, you could feasibly run Resolve/Precision without much of a penalty stat-wise. However, Celestial Body (an additional 100 health at the cost of 10% damage for the first 10 minutes) and a plethora of other strong runes (e.g. 6-minute Stopwatch) probably crowded out this tree pairing via opportunity cost.

At any rate, this flexibility was short-lived. In Patch 8.1, running Resolve, in particular, was changed so that it would give split stat bonuses for all tree pairings except Inspiration. For Resolve/Precision, this meant you gained 65 health and 9% attack speed, which is an awkward stat combination for a lot of champions and roles. Resolve and Inspiration, conversely, still granted 130 flat health from going Resolve primary, or even 145 health and 20% bonus potion/elixir time from going Inspiration primary.

In Patch 8.7, Resolve's stat bonuses were tinkered with again, going from a flat 65/130/145 health bonus to a scaling 15-135/30-270/35-300 bonus. This was an interesting tweak, bringing in some of the health that went missing from 8.1 onward (Celestial Body was removed, by the way, in Patch 8.4) but the stat splitting remained the same. And finally, in Patch 8.23, stat bonuses were entirely decoupled from tree paths and instead replaced with stat shards. The main point here is that for the majority of last season, from Patch 8.1 to 8.23, the state of stat bonuses disincentivized speccing into Resolve/Precision.

The other point is the opportunity cost, which we touched on a bit already. In my opinion, the other trees were just comparatively better than they are now. Aside from Resolve, we've also been looking a bit at the Inspiration tree. This has been--and still is--one of the most potent and popular tank combinations (Resolve/Inspiration or sometimes vice versa.) Free potions, a stopwatch, hexflash, and dematerializer are all very strong and consistent runes across a number of roles and positions. Sorcery doesn't have much to offer (certainly not for sustain or tank stats), but it did have the ubiquitously strong rune Celerity until just recently when it was reworked in Patch 8.23.

We also need to consider Domination. Notably, Ravenous Hunter has historically been able to easily grant healing numbers in the thousands on a lot of champions. Through Season 8, this rune offered 2.5% healing + 2.5% per bounty hunter stack on all ability damage, which is both very flexible and substantial. Again in Patch 8.23, however, it was nerfed to a base healing of 1.5%, making it a bit less easy to pick up on any old champion for some big healing. Taste of Blood is also a great pickup for early sustain (as are the free potions in Inspiration), but it doesn't scale into the game incredibly well.

Let's now turn our gaze to the current state of the Behemoth. At the same time that Ravenous Hunter was nerfed, Shield Bash was added in the Resolve tree. This is a nice pickup that passively increases your resistances whenever you're shielded (by any means) and also grants some bonus damage when you attack shortly after receiving a new shield. This rune is currently the only one in its row that offers any sort of additional combat stats for yourself, and it gives you 79% of the value that Conditioning's flat resistance bonuses grant by the time you reach level 11. Of course, there are other tradeoffs to be considered when comparing these runes to each other, but the point is that this rune gives a sizeable boost to your own defensive stats if you can get some shields rolling--and you can take both.

A little later in Patch 9.2, Overheal received a significant buff for self-healers, going from a flat 40% conversion rate to a scaling 40-100% conversion. This is massive for some champions and has automatic synergy with the new Shield Bash rune. For champions that can stack it up efficiently, they have the opportunity to gain an extra 10% health, which is further amplified by the bonus resistances from Shield Bash (resistances apply to shields.) So this is one of the main angles in going Resolve/Precision: find users that can efficiently make use of Overheal, and splash Precision secondary for it to reap the benefits.

Additionally, as other rune trees have been nerfed, parts of Precision has been slowly buffed over time. Legend: Tenacity, for instance, is a very natural choice for tanky frontline champions. On release, it granted 1.5% tenacity per stack, and as of Patch 8.7 it now grants 2.5% per stack (up to a total of 30% tenacity.) You can also pair this with Unflinching in Resolve to rack up a ton of tenacity from runes alone. Cut Down has also received some love recently. In Patch 9.2, Cut Down was changed to make it more relevant in the early game, and in Patch 9.5 it was buffed from 4-10% potential bonus damage to 5-12% potential bonus damage. This rune (to me) feels a lot better now on champions who may want to run Resolve/Precision for the survivability but still dish out some poke. And finally, despite being repeatedly nerfed, Triumph and Coup de Grace remain solid options for Resolve/Precision users like Pyke, who are trying to maximize their potential to get their kill quickly and still get out alive.

To sum up, other rune trees have received various nerfs, and Precision has lately received small buffs and a nice little Resolve tree synergy with Overheal/Shield Bash (as well as some runes that have stood the test of time despite nerfs.) In the section below, I'll show you some of my top champion picks for the Overheal/Shield Bash combo, as well as some sample numbers from real games.

League's Agents of Shield

Nunu is our first, and perhaps most powerful user of this combo. With a massive self-heal, he can easily store a large amount of excess healing in his Shield Bash-empowered Overheal shield, gaining a ton of tankiness for jungle clearing and teamfights. The rest of the runes and items I opt into are pretty standard. Overheal is the star of the show for Nunu, but I'm fairly confident Shield Bash is pulling its weight too; it just won't put out high damage numbers, since you're not getting to proc it fights too frequently.

Taric is another fantastic user of Overheal. Whereas Nunu makes use of this rune with massive heals on a long cooldown, Taric gains value by getting to spam small heals virtually at will. Shield Bash also has good synergy with his kit, contributing to the Armor scaling on Bastion, Dazzle, and Bravado. His numbers may not look as staggering as Nunu's, but he feels like an unkillable monster with this build. In this game, I opted into Legend: Bloodline to try and get as much healing as possible off of Bravado, but Legend: Tenacity is probably the sounder choice. Also, I recommend picking the third row of the Resolve tree depending on the matchup, but with a preference towards conditioning in order to capitalize on all your armor scaling.

Sona is probably the most surprising inclusion of the three. She is not a tank, and she makes use of Sorcery/Resolve with Aery quite well. This build, however, will give you much more survivability, something that I have often heard players say she really needs. Additionally, thanks to her spammable poke and low base health, she recoups a lot of the damage lost by foregoing Sorcery via the buffed version of Cut Down in Precision. Overheal and Shield Bash both look great on her, with both runes benefiting again from her spammable nature, similar to Taric. I opt to go for Barrier for maximum tankiness (and an extra proc on Shield Bash), and Archangel's for similar reasons (early Tear of the Goddess also helps max out on faceroll potential.)

Meta's Advocate and Other Considerations

While there are reasons that these runes should work well on these sorts of champions (and some anecdotal evidence that they do), there are also reasons why we might not see them being picked--at least for now. For one, these champions are successful in solo queue already, but with different runes, so players may not be inclined to try and "fix what ain't broke" even if these setups turn out to be better. Another reason is that these champions are not super popular, with mid to low pickrates in solo queue and low to non-existent pickrates in pro play (for Season 9 at the bare minimum.) Thus, even if players do end up running these runes on the aforementioned champions, you still may not really see it while watching pro play or in your own solo queue games.

There's also certainly not strong data, so far, to support that this tree combo really yields the best results. For one thing, I have only presented anecdotal data, and popular stat websites don't track the numbers associated with each rune as displayed in the end-game LoL screen; thus, while we might see that some particular rune has some associated winrate, we don't see what sort of healing, damage, etc., it actually grants (averaged over some large quantity of games.) I would love to give you data on what two-rune specific combos yield what average numbers over many iterations of play, but it's out of reach for me at the moment. Of course, we can rely on general winrates as indicative of success to some extent, but there is both a lot of detail and explanatory power lacking when confined to considering these simple stats alone.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the options in Inspiration seem quite popular and effective, especially in pro play. Free boots, free potions, a stopwatch, and a dematerializer are all very good pickups. Nerfing or changing these Inspiration runes to make them less generally consistent and valuable could incentivize splashing into Precision more often. For now, though, it might be fair to say that Inspiration is at least equally valuable as Precision, even on the aforementioned champions who can boast good numbers by going for the Behemoth.

Lastly, Patch 9.6 came out just today (at the time of writing), and it features nerfs to Overheal and Minion Dematerializer! This means that the numbers which I presented on Overheal may be a fair bit lower, moving forward, and also that Inspiration has taken a hit to one of its generally powerful runes. We must monitor what these changes mean moving forward, and be at least aware that these numbers and claims are pre-9.6.

I hope you learned something new about these great runes, and wish you luck in trampling through your enemies as an Imperious Behemoth!

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