If you were scouring the League of Legends PBE back in late 2019, you might have stumbled across a weird, experimental Keystone that felt like a fever dream. It was called Hail of the Thief. It didn't last long. Honestly, it barely made it out of the internal testing phase before Riot Games realized they were playing with fire.
The rune was a strange, Frankenstein-like hybrid of Kleptomancy and Hail of Blades.
League of Legends has a long history of "breaking" the game with gold-generation mechanics. We’ve seen it with Heart of Gold (RIP), the original Philosopher's Stone, and the absolute chaos that was Kleptomancy on Ezreal or Karma. But Hail of the Thief was something different. It wasn't just about poking for a few extra gold coins. It was about aggressive, high-velocity theft.
What Was Hail of the Thief Actually Supposed to Do?
The mechanic was relatively straightforward on paper but a nightmare in practice. When you triggered the rune by attacking an enemy champion, it granted you a massive burst of attack speed for your next three autos—just like Hail of Blades. However, there was a catch. Each of those three empowered attacks would also "steal" gold or items from the opponent.
It was greedy. It was fast. It was incredibly tilting.
Unlike Kleptomancy, which relied on casting a spell and then landing a basic attack, Hail of the Thief rewarded pure aggression. If you were a Draven player or a Lucian main, this rune basically promised to catapult you an entire item ahead of your opponent by the ten-minute mark just for doing what you were already doing: trading.
Riot’s internal design team, including developers like Riot Jag and others who have spoken about experimental runes in dev blogs, often look for ways to make "utility" runes viable for carries. They wanted something that felt more active than just waiting for a timer. But the "theft" part of the name was literal. You weren't just generating gold out of thin air; you were actively reducing the enemy’s agency.
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Why the Design Flunked
Balance is a delicate thing. When you look at the math of League, even a 300-gold lead is significant. Now imagine a bot lane where the enemy Caitlyn hits you three times and suddenly you can't afford your Boots of Speed on your first back.
That’s where the "Thief" part became a problem.
The game designers realized that "negative fun" is a real metric. While it feels amazing to steal, it feels twice as bad to have something taken away. Most players don't mind if an enemy gets rich, but they lose their minds if they themselves get poorer through no fault of their own other than being in range of a basic attack.
The Legacy of Kleptomancy and the Shift to First Strike
You can’t talk about Hail of the Thief without looking at what came before and after. Kleptomancy was the predecessor that proved the concept was viable but dangerous. Kleptomancy allowed champions like Illaoi or Ezreal to farm consumables—biscuits, wards, and the occasional Sack of Gold. It was RNG-heavy.
Eventually, Riot scrapped the "thievery" aspect entirely.
They moved toward "First Strike," which is what we have now. First Strike is the "healthy" version of what Hail of the Thief tried to be. It gives you a damage amp and grants gold based on damage dealt. It rewards the "thief" without actually robbing the victim's pockets. It’s a subtle distinction, but in terms of game health, it’s the difference between a fun mechanic and a reason to uninstall.
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Some veteran players still argue that the game needs more "disruptive" runes. They miss the days when you could take weird setups and cheese your way to a victory. But if you've ever played against a top-lane Kalista or Vayne, you know that giving those champions a way to steal your gold while kiting you to death is a recipe for a toxic meta.
Technical Breakdown: The Attack Speed Paradox
One of the biggest technical hurdles with Hail of the Thief was the attack speed interaction. Hail of Blades works because it temporarily breaks the attack speed cap. This allows for rapid-fire combos.
When you attach a "loot" table to that speed, the game’s engine has to process multiple "theft" events in a fraction of a second. Back in 2019 and early 2020, there were reported issues on the PBE with "ghost" procs where the gold wouldn't register, or worse, it would trigger twice.
Riot's code is famously "spaghetti" at times—just look at Mordekaiser's old bugs. Trying to sync a high-speed attack buff with a complex gold-looting script was a recipe for server-side lag and client desyncs.
The Comparison to Modern Runes
| Feature | Hail of Blades | First Strike | Hail of the Thief (Scrapped) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Goal | Burst Damage | Gold/Scaling | Aggressive Snowballing |
| Trigger | Attack Champion | Damage First | Attack Champion |
| Reward | 110% Attack Speed | 9% Bonus Damage + Gold | Speed + Item/Gold Theft |
| Game Health | High | Moderate | Very Low |
The "Very Low" health rating for Hail of the Thief comes from the snowball potential. In League, if you get ahead, you get more stats. If you get more stats, you kill the enemy faster. If you kill the enemy faster, you get more gold. Hail of the Thief added a fourth layer: if you attack the enemy, they get less gold. It creates a gap that is mathematically impossible to close.
What This Means for the Future of League
Riot has gotten a lot more conservative with their rune designs lately. You’ll notice that most new additions, like the reworked Lethal Tempo or the adjustments to Fleet Footwork, focus on "sustaining" or "scaling" rather than "disrupting."
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The experiment with Hail of the Thief taught the balance team a valuable lesson: keep the economy of the game sacred. You can mess with damage, you can mess with movement speed, and you can even mess with cooldowns. But the moment you start letting players reach into each other's wallets, the competitive integrity of the match falls apart.
Interestingly, some of the code for this "theft" mechanic didn't just vanish. If you look at certain PvE modes or the "Arena" augmentations, you can see remnants of these greedy mechanics. In Arena, there are augments that grant gold on hit, which is basically the spiritual successor to this failed experiment, just in a controlled, "for-fun" environment.
Why You Won't See It Again
Don't hold your breath for a return of Hail of the Thief. Riot Meddler and other lead designers have been pretty vocal about the fact that they want to reduce "invisible power" and "frustration mechanics."
A rune that steals gold is the definition of a frustration mechanic.
Instead, expect more runes like "Cash Back," which gives you a rebate on items you buy. It fulfills the "gold-related" fantasy without making the lane opponent want to throw their monitor out a window. It’s boring, maybe, but it’s fair.
Actionable Takeaways for Current Players
Even though the rune is a ghost of League’s past, the lessons it left behind are still relevant for how you should play the game today:
- Focus on Economic Disruption: You don't need a rune to "steal" gold. Forcing an enemy to back at a bad time so they miss a cannon wave is effectively the same as stealing 60-100 gold from them.
- Prioritize First Strike in Easy Lanes: If you’re in a matchup where you can safely proc First Strike (like a long-range mage vs. a melee tank), you are essentially playing a balanced version of Hail of the Thief. Use that gold lead to hit your power spikes an entire item early.
- Watch the Patch Notes for "Experimental" Tags: Riot often hides these weird mechanics in the PBE during the pre-season. If you see something that looks like it messes with gold generation, it’s going to be the most broken thing in the game for exactly two weeks before it gets gutted.
- Understand Attack Speed Scaling: Runes like Hail of Blades are still elite on champions like Xin Zhao or Pyke because they front-load their utility. If you can’t steal their gold, at least steal their life bar as quickly as possible.
The story of this rune is a reminder that League of Legends is a game of constant evolution. Some ideas are just too "out there" to work in a competitive environment. While Hail of the Thief might be a fun "what if" for a chaotic Saturday night game mode, it has no place in a world where rank and LP are on the line.
Keep an eye on the Arena mode updates, as that's where Riot usually dumps their "too crazy for Summoner's Rift" ideas. You might just find a version of it there.