>>499517494TL;DR—items more important so long as you just pick most common positive-WR runes. Item choice and order is often based on runes, so don't fuck the sequencing up unless you know what you're doing. Which leads to below: LEARNING.
You shouldn't need in-depth rune knowledge to start, though you should learn at least the general gist of what they do ASAP—this page has a quick reference of every current rune with mouse-hover descriptions.
https://wiki.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/RuneAnother thing that helps get an idea of different rune-choice strengths and archetypes is to look-up your champion on
u.gg, which will often show more than one common rune+item load-out to compare. Otherwise change the specific region to see if there are different common builds. These are NOT objective recommendations, more just to see what runes MIGHT get built on your champ and for you to put the critical thinking into WHY they might. It's a good way to familiarize with certain rune archetypes/options.
Item choice is more important. With the runes you can often take the most commonly-used runes in D2+ from
Lolalytics.com or
u.gg and figure out how to play around their strengths, but it's easy to fuck-up the sequencing of your items, which are often chosen based on your rune loadout. For now a good idea is to just start with what's most commonly built at relatively higher levels (compare
u.gg versus lolalytics item orders versus watching high-level VODs on youtube channels like DomisumReplays.)
Learn shit over time and don't worry about front-loading it all, but actually put the effort in by referencing the wiki to get an in-depth understanding of items, runes and of course your champions (try and default to
wiki.leagueoflegends.com and not fandom because fandom is falling out of date after the switch.) Don't just lazily try to learn by osmosis.
Rank placement and climbing is RNG in some ways so don't worry about it, worry about being a better player. You will climb then.
