Planning your IP purchases

I got to talking to a couple guys last night, one of whom is a few levels behind me and one of whom has already hit 30. I was looking at picking up LeBlanc for a fairly reasonable 3150 IP and am sitting on about 11.5k IP. I've been saving my IP for lvl 20 and the "good" runes that you can buy at that point. I wasn't sure exactly what that would cost, however. He estimated roughly 9k for a full rune page but I realized that at 20, I can't do a rune page. So I did a little bit of quick research this morning and came up with the following.

At lvl 20, you have 6 mark/seal/glyph slots and 2 quint slots. If you want a "generic" AP page, you would have something that looks like this:

6 Glyphs of Scaling Mana regen: 205 each
6 Marks of Flat Magic Pen: 410 each
6 Seals of Flat Armor: 205 each
2 Quints of Flat AP: 1025 each

Grand total cost of 6970 IP.

If you're like me, you're probably earning XP at roughly a 1 : 1.1 ratio of XP : IP. I think generally it's a 1 : 1 earn rate modified by the first win of the day bonus. So if you play a bit less frequently, you actually will end up unlocking people faster (relative to your level gain). Lvl 20 is achieved at 15676xp so that's ~17243 IP that you should expect to earn in that time. If you just want to fill out an AP rune page, you're looking at about 7k. If you want to fill out both an AD and AP, it's more like 15k (AD oriented quints are a little more expensive then the flat AP quint). conveniently, you'll probably share your armor Seal (either flat or scaling) for both.

So MOST people can probably get away with spending anywhere from 3 - 9k in IP before they hit 20 without causing themselves problems once they get there. Thought it would be useful to have a goal.

So I'm going to probably buy LeBlanc tonight. She's the cheapest (IP wise) champ on my "definitely want to get" list. That will leave me with sufficient IP to fill out two rune pages at 20. Not bad.

Now to grind out these last 40 summoner's rift games... yeesh!