I'm sorry, but I went up against players with full rune pages when I was leveling up in LOL (I was playing with Gold players at the time) and this was nothing like that. Runes give you a small amount of extra power in the first few levels of a game, but not that much of an advantage. This guy had an item that gave crazy regen and power levels. I just kept getting chunked when I wasn't even behind. His mana regen was also ridiculous.
A full runepage gives a massive advantage early game, one that would make you automatically lose an even lane. A runepage is about 1000g worth of stats right from the start of the game, saying it's small is underselling it quite a bit. Also while I mentionned runes, it's not the only system in place, masteries also make a huge difference overall, lvl 1 vs lvl 30 is not even close to a fair match.
From the looks of it, crafting works like this, you have a common, a rare and a legendary modifier. Crafting something gives between common and rare depending on your luck and costs a flat 40 ores per craft(you get about 6-8ores per game, regardless of winning or losing). So crafting for rare mods seem fairly viable. The common bonus is a bonus that further increase the value given by the item but by a fairly small amount. Say you have an item recipe that gives +10power, the common bonus would make it give 12 instead(it is a 20% increase, but still only 2power and that's only the bonus of the item, not the total value which is base items+bonus). Numbers seem to be random so recrafting might get you more or less. The rare bonus is a bonus that is the same on every item, there's a pool of general bonus like +1-5% power, +1-5% health regen and so on. You need to roll the one you want but these bonuses seem to offer a fair amount of power in the lategame if you have multiple items and stack the related stats. These are similar to masteries. Then you have the legendary effect, which tends to put a new effect or change the existing effect of items, these have varying strength depending on the item. These also require tempering apparently(might be able to craft a legendary directly not sure) and tempering is the shitty one. Still the effect aren't stuff that would make the item suddenly overpowered.
In terms of time spent to craft basic items, it's probably less than it takes to reach lvl 30 in LoL without IP boosts. If anything, it's the same. It takes a fairly large amount of games to reach 30(or did last time I played but doubt they changed that), about 200 or so iirc. The redeeming feature is you play people at the same level(roughly) as you do.
Not saying it's not worse in terms of monetization/P2W stuff, but in terms of relative power, I hardly see how it's any different other than the fact the current matchmaking in this doesn't take into account your item level at all so it's like playing russian roulette. Saying you played against people with full runes cause you queued with gold 5 players doesn't really help your case either, sounds like being carried by much better players stomping newb tier due to queuing with a low level so the difference wouldn't be necessarily obvious. But take one friend that you know isn't too much worse than you, make a new account and 1vs1 him with your blank account with an even lane. See how it turns out.
