VIT Perkz fined for using banned Ryze rune combo

Team Vitality’s mid laner Luka “Perkz” Perkovic has been fined for using a banned Ryze rune in LEC play despite not getting any advantage from it.

VIT Perkz was targeted by a LEC fine for using a prohibited champion and rune combination in his match against Fnatic. The combination in question allows Ryze to theoretically regenerate near-infinite mana due to a set of unintended interactions. For this reason, anybody playing Ryze was prohibited from selecting Waterwalking as one of their runes at the start of the LEC 2023 Winter split. Despite this ban, Perkz selected Waterwalking as one of his runes in Vitality’s match against Fnatic. As a result, he has had punitive action taken against him by the European league.

Perkz fined for banned Ryze rune

Professional League of Legends circuits sometimes has to soft-ban certain combinations in professional play. In situations where certain runes only have problems with specific champions, it’s often an honor rule. This means that players aren’t prevented from taking the action, but are asked not to by the league. This can lead to unfortunate circumstances where players accidentally break the rules. This happened in Vitality’s match against Fnatic.

Waterwalking is banned for use with Ryze due to Ryze’s passive. Ryze’s passive gives him maximum mana that scales with his Ability Power. The Waterwalking rune gives bonus Ability Power when inside of the river. The problem comes from the fact that when Ryze’s passive gives him maximum mana, it also gives him current mana. This presents an issue where Ryze can repeatedly step in and out of the river in order to gain a chunk of mana. This can be abused in order to grant Ryze effectively infinite mana regeneration and was thus banned from pro play.

#LEC Update:

You may have noticed that Perkz picked Waterwalking on Ryze yesterday which is currently prohibited in pro play.

Our Competitive Operations team assessed Perkz did not gain a significant advantage via the rune.

Vitality will be fined in line with past precedent.

— Maximilian Peter Schmidt (@RiotMAXtheX) January 22, 2023

The Director of EMEA Operations for League of Legends announced that while the Competitive Operations team determined Perkz had not abused the bug, he would still be fined. This was in order to keep the ruling in precedent with past decisions where unabused interactions that were nonetheless banned still received fines. The silver lining to this is that Perkz clearly didn’t try to subvert the league’s interactions, and no bug was abused.

It’s unlikely that we will see another instance of this forbidden interaction being picked since Perkz has already had a competitive ruling levied against him for it.