Item Preview: Runaan’s Hurricane - Ranged AOE Item

In his most recent post, Xypherous gives us a sneak peak of a new ranged item coming out in Season 3: Essentially a ranged Tiamat.

Personally this item seems like a massive hit or miss item, and I can't see it being very balanced at all. I feel like it might bring Caitlyn back into the spotlight along with some more Graves complaining...Riot will definitely have their hands full with this one! But hey, you can form your own opinions based on Xypherous' post!

Ranged AOE damage? What a novel idea...

Hey guys. If you haven’t already, check out my initial post about the itemization changes you’ll be seeing during the preseason. Today I thought I’d reveal a new item we can’t wait for you to get your hands on.

Ranged Carries traditionally have had the role of completely and utterly dominating a single target through high-capacity damage. However, many of our AD carries also have a substantial amount of Area of Effect damage that they currently are unable to specialize into. This leads them to an interesting paradox – I am a carry with strong Area of Effect damage, but I must itemize single target damage to stay relevant.

What if we could give you an alternative?

Quote:

Runaan’s Hurricane (Ranged Only) +60% Attack Speed UNIQUE Passive: Your basic attacks fire minor bolts at 2 nearby targets, each dealing (50% of Total Attack Damage) physical damage. These apply on-hit effects.

First of all, let’s examine what this item actually does:



Hurricane allows your ranged basic attacks to fire secondary bolts at nearby targets. These bolts cannot critically strike but can trigger your other on-hit effects, such as Varus’ Blighted Quiver in the above example. This allows characters like Varus or Miss Fortune, already strong Area of Effect damage dealers, to specialize into Area of Effect damage if they’d like to do so.

Let’s delve further into specifics:

1. Hurricane triggers each time you attack.
2. Hurricane is not an on-hit proc, nor does it trigger off of spells or abilities like Mystic Shot or Double Up that apply on-hit effects.
3. Hurricane deals 50% of your total attack damage.
4. Hurricane applies the full effect of on-hit effects with each bolt.

Taking this further, let’s explore how Hurricane interacts with various champion abilities:

Varus – Applies Blighted Quiver on everyone hit, which can then get triggered by his other spells.
Caitlyn – Gains one stack of Headshot for each target hit. Fires Headshot only at the primary target.
Graves – Reduces the cooldown of Quickdraw for 1 second for each target hit. (Edit: Whoops, got the wrong number here, thanks guys.)
Miss Fortune – Applies and stacks Impure Shots on every target hit. Activating Impure Shots will apply Grievous wounds to every target hit.

Champions that synergize poorly with Hurricane would be:

Ezreal – Doesn’t really have any effects that synergize with Hurricane.
Vayne – Silver bolts only applies on the primary target and requires consecutive hits to proc, thus Hurricane is mostly wasted.

We hope that Hurricane opens up some interesting build paths for AD carries looking to specialize in area of effect damage. While Hurricane certainly isn’t for every ranged character, we do hope that Hurricane allows carries to diverge from the standard path of single target damage in favor of a more AoE centric build they can use to gun down multiple opponents at the same time.

-Xypherous

• Preseason Itemization Preview
• Item Preview – Tons of Mana, just one Tear
• Item Preview – Dust Sweeping
• Item Preview – It’s Tuesday