[Autumn]

Snip

A bunch of hypotheticals and yet you'll find any runemage who tries to employ these strategies will get opened up and spread out over a field by round 2. Also ignoring the fact that you can play stat pad with any class.

1: Ranger. A massive ranged combatant with a 90% chance of having invested in smasher that can outrange the runes and deal damage to face while you set them up.

2: Pretty much any curate promotion. Big, sudden damage does nothing when you're extremely limited on range and cooldowns yourself. They'll out heal your damage and either snipe you from a distance or just whittle you down if you don't have any self heal.

3: Monk. Body of isesip and step onto the rune that you just lovingly crafted.

4: Funny rock. Budget body of isesip.

5: Void assassin. You're dead well before round 3 if your plan is to wait until round 3 to do meaningful damage.

The list does go on.

The problem with the idea that a lack of play means a lack of power is that it's almost always untrue. The real statement is a 'lack of play usually means that people will only take the character or build out when it's safe to do so, such as when they know their enemies or can make a team composition to build around their strengths. Otherwise, builds that don't see a lot of general use are usually highly circumstantial and easily countered.'

And so many of Runemages counters got buffed and are more common while runemage itself got nerfed. It wasn't scary before its nerf, but it was a win condition if the enemy didn't have those counters. Now it's neither scary nor a win condition.

• Currently Ranger doesn't really matter since smoke rune places smoke on top of the rune from the moment you summon the rune, not slotting in magnet rune until the very end and using focus tuning with chronos rune correctly allows you to completely safeguard a rune during it's construction, that is the common complaint right now, given that Focus Tuning costs 1m now its nearly completely free to just use.
  

• Healing does seem like it'd probably be a pretty good check to rune mage in general, but speaking in a teamfight scenario, your rune mage's big damage isn't gonna be the only damage going around in that fight.
  

• As for monk and funny rock, Razor Rune can be attached to the rune to give it the multi hitting property before the big damage goes off, this argument is almost entirely invalidated by Razor Rune.
  

• As for Void Assassin, this has been it's weakness since it's conception, and Void Assassin being able to stuff out and incapacitate a mage before it can set up and do it's damage has been the class' core identity since forever ago. The biggest weakness of Void Assassin in this scenario is that the Rune Mage can safely set up on one side of the arena and cannot simply just walk up and 2 turn it without facing some opposition from the Rune Mage's teammates, Void Assassin will also need to set up a good angle to kidnap with vanishing strike, and even then the Void Assassin can be met with Anchor Rune to make their life just a bit more hellish.
  

Rune Mage in it's current state is very frustrating to play against, its scary now because it can pump out very good damage from the other side of the map still, while inflicting everyone on the enemy team with a -60 evade debuff/immobilize/obstructing the battlefield/slowing enemies etc. and I'm not really sure what you would do to adjust this right now, I'm not going to make any suggestions as to what I think Rune Mage should be doing, because quite frankly as someone who will almost never play this class, I don't know what it should be doing. But I will acknowledge people's frustrations with the class, both from those who are playing it and playing against it. Currently, my main issue is haste rune, I don't care about anything else the class does at this moment.

[caliaca]

This probably has some bearing on the conversation but I'd say the majority of rangers aren't running smasher these days in exchange for using Kiss mutated or crossbows. I can't give hard stats but 4 of the rangers I know use those and only 1 uses str.