Originally Posted by
iDANglin
My suggestion to help this issue would be that the runestone always effects just the attacking troops, or you can decide that it effects attacking and defending troops (neutral effect). With that in mind, the risk would not be who it effects (attacker or defender), but whether or not the effect is good or bad! I'm not suggesting what I'm about to say next necessarily, but let's pretend play each current spell except for the jump spell. Let's also assume for now that the spells are neutral.
Let's say the attacker lures the cc and heroes towards the rune. Once the defender's troops approach said rune, the rune turns out to be a lighting spell! The defender's tier 1 and other low health troops are gone and the stronger troops are damaged. Yay, the attacker got lucky and now has a small advantage.
Same situation, but instead of the defenders' troops activating a lightning spell, a healing spell emerged! Sure a smart attacker would either wait for the healing spell to deplete (resulting in the heroes returning to their alters though) or the attacker could lure the troops away from the spell, but either way it causes the attacker to exhaust more troops and effort in many cases.
Same situation but this time there's a rage spell! At a first glance one might think "Well this will just make the fight between the two armies go by quicker because both armies are buffed!" This would more than likely not be the case considering the stat boosts, but I won't bother blabbering on about that. The attacker could lure the defenders past the rage, in which case the rage helped the attacker prepare to take the enemy troops out faster. In short there are situations in which this spell could help either side.
Freeze spell! Let's assume that the attacker was smart and didn't place his troops near the rune but let the defending troops take on the cold. Result? Easy kills for the attacker! If the attacker instead dumps his troops into a freeze rune, well, hopefully it doesn't result in another broken device from being thrown across the room in a nerdy rage!
If we assume that the rune only effects the attacker's troops, the attacker will more than likely just send in a barb every time to see what effect it receives. If it is a helpful spell the attacker has the option to utilize it or to ignore it due to poor location. I find this idea a bit more boring compared to neutral effects, but these are my thoughts for now :) Hope this idea takes off!
EDIT: I said at the beginning that I wasn't suggesting anything. Looking back though, I guess I did ;)