So I've been checking out a lot of high ELO player's profiles, and it seems that a lot of them pick up dodge seals. I was curious about why people pick dodge over a more versatile stat, like HP or HP/lvl. Dodge only works against auto-attacks, but magic damage is far more common in LoL. Even if dodge provides a larger bonus to effective HP than straight HP does, is it actually worth it?

Is it primarily to activate Nimbleness? How would this be helpful for 9/0/21 builds then?

I was just curious to see other people's opinions before stocking up on the T2.5 dodge runes.

dodge is sexy, and is the best defensive stat atm

not to mention a small amount of HP compared to negating 100% of the would-be damage because of a dodge. In the oh-so-pivotal level 1 team fights, a dodge can honestly mean the difference between winning or losing the entire thing.

Not to mention you can get lucky and dodge things like Shaco's out-of-stealth crit.

there's a lot of reasons.

1. magic resist's main area is glyph, not seal. and glyphs are better used for cd reduction and other runes.
2. some people use dodge mastery for the 10% speed boost for dodging. there arent many items that give dodge so they use runes.
3. dodge runes are relatively strong.

personally, i mix a few mp/level seals in there. most people don't agree with me.

few other reasons:

before runes came out, the defense mastery was the strongest due to the 60 hp at start which helped a lot. now it's no longer important. but people kept the defensive mastery for a long while. as a result, they chose the dodge runes to augment the dodge mastery.