Rune Words Are Awful

PC General Discussion
1

I just did my own testing with rune words and they are not good. I did not enjoy tinkering with them at all, but more importantly, they are just a huge missed opportunity

The concept of having rune rarities in this system is about as half baked as their magic glyphs in the paragon board. They barely have any runes to begin with, with VERY specific effects that may or may not be relevant to a given build. Magic and Rare invocations will require more offerings and/or have worse effects than legendary runes. Legendary rituals are easier to proc and/or generate more offerings. The net effect on the player is that even if you can find some runes that you like and can take advantage of in your build, they might be the ā€˜crapā€™ runes that arenā€™t very effective or too costly to proc/donā€™t produce enough offering. More on the build/spend system later.

For some builds, the runes offered have some VERY powerful interactions. For a lot of builds, for example my minion necro, I struggled to find anything that was more valuable than just slotting 4x150 main stat (a ton of damage without all this nonsense).

Tinkering with your runes is such a pain. Put two runes in, test at dummy, go back to Jeweler, repeat ad nauseam. A super unapproachable system as it is implemented now.

I completely loathe this builder/spender method. You have basically zero control over when things activate, and some builds will have no problem triggering the ritual of the most powerful runes (like a lightning spear sorc popping cooldown after cooldown) while others actually have to, ya know, wait for the cooldown to pop it again. If you need survivability on your character, having to build up 800 offerings to proc a damage reduction shout at a completely random time is not very useful.

This is such a missed opportunity.
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My Suggestion/Wish/Desperate Plea

Change runes to have base socketable effects, like in Diablo 2, and even perhaps more interesting bonuses.

Why: This makes runes potentially useful in Jewelery or simply as powerful items to socket into uniques, legendaries, and mythic uniques.

Change magic items to roll one affix only, at 50% higher value compared to an affix from a Rare item. Rare Items should roll two affixes at normal values. Both items should be able to roll Ancestral and have GA.

Why: Some builds will want as much of a particular thing as they can get. For example, a minion necro. I want Skeleton Mage Mastery on my pants, and there is a valuable armor rune word I want to craft - so I find a magic item that has, instead of +2, +3 to mage master, and it rolled with a greater affix, so now it has +4, compared to a rare item that would only have +3, and another affix. Then I can craft my rune word, and try and hit +Skeleton Mage Mastery and end up with an even higher bonus compared to a rare item. This gives me agency to choose the extra +1 vs having more life/intelligence/whatever. This gives itemization depth without complexity.

Allow One Handed weapons to have two sockets (so you can make rune words in them), and do the thing they do with aspects where gems are upscaled in a two hander vs in a one hander, and rebalance the weapon benefits so that the net stats from gems is similar to what it is now (cut the benefit of gems in a one hander in half, and have it scale back to normal value in a two hander).

Now, add Rune Words akin to Diablo 2, where if you put X and Y rune into a magic or rare item of type Z in the right order, you get a new unique item that has the affix(es) from the base item, the socketable effects from the runes, plus the effects of the Rune Word item itself. The affix values on the created rune word should have variance, and rune words should be tradeable.

Make it such that runes are destroyed when you unsocket an item.

Consider removing the limit of 2 rune words.

Then trickle in new rune words every season.

WOW!!! What an awesome, improved version of rune words compared to Diablo 2! This would feel like a sequel to that game!
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I thoroughly enjoyed the PTR besides this rune word update with some minor gripes here and there, but after tinkering with rune words all night and watching some videos about other peopleā€™s experiences, the wind has completely left my sails and I am having a hard time even being excited about Season 6 and the Expansion.

I know it is a PTR and the point is to give feedback/it is not perfect yet, but this rune word system is so far from perfect, that I am not sure they have the time to fix it into something more compelling.

This is going to be such a major part of the game and I just hate it completely, especially when I think about what, IMO, we should have gotten instead.

14 Likes
2

First I would ask myself what would these changes clash with?

3

If you ask yourself that question, what is your answer?

I canā€™t think of anything.

4

Well I havenā€™t asked myself yet gimme a minute jeez

1 Like
5

Another ā€œnthing goodā€ whiner.

Im curious why you all play this game if its so bad ???
Glyphs- bad.
Runes - badā€¦

No i mean, cmon - go play better games ! Seriously, stop torturing yourself with this terrible product !

I just wanna say in exactly this topic, from myself -
Blizzard, thank you for another great game ! Didnt play so much from Lich King times !
Runes are fine ! Keep going ! You go just right way.
Dont listen to this whiners, watever they say !

2 Likes
6

What did the op say? I didnā€™t actually read itā€¦.lifes to short

1 Like
7

Why are blue glyphs in the game? I remmeber some people were so bored they were leveling those up too. Gotta do something fun i guess

8

Donā€™t get me wrong, any new system is welcome in my eyes, but I feel this could of been called something else and everyone would be happy.

As for runewords, I get it canā€™t be like D2, but the current system seems needlessly ā€œcomplexā€ and does not allow for an economy.

What I would of done:
Give items 3 sockets (Balance gems accordingly).
Create various runes, tier 1 to 30 each proving a passive buff that scales in power the rarer the rune (similar to D2).
Make the rarest of runes low drop chance, but allow the 3 to 1 trade conservation to go up 1 tier.
Examples:
Tier 1 rune (el) = +5% movement speed
Tier 15 rune (vex) = + 10% damage
Tier 30 rune (zod) = immune to freeze & slow effects

These get socketed into your existing gear to provide the passive buff.

Combine certain 2 or 3 runes together to not only provide the passives those runes give, but also if a Runeword is created, provide additional benefits.

Vex, el, zod = zephyr Runeword
+5% movement
10% damage
Immune to freeze and chill effects
Any time you would of been frozen, instead gain the Zephyr buff, further increasing movement speed by 10%, damage by 15%, and creates a gust of wind around you causing enemies to have a 50% chance to miss there attacks for 30 seconds.

Yes similar in base principles to D2, but fixes the problem of the items themselves being the Runeword, and instead provides passive buffs to existing items. Simple to understand and although simpler concept, I actually feel providers more depth and provide an economy.
Also allows you to plug gaps in weaknessā€¦other runewords could cause vulnerable, allow overpower, armour buff, thorns increase, etc.

This also allows for an easy drip feed of new runes/runewords to be added each season, that further help plug gaps and provide interesting benefits.

Thoughts?

9

Overall I kind of agree.
I think they are not as impactful.

But not completely useless either. I like the paring that frees me from flicker step based on me using skill with cooldowns. This gives me another Aspect and a easier to find Ancestral legendary plus tempers.

10

lol.

Magic Glyphs are bad. Thats why Blizzard deleted them.

Maybe sometimes people who complain about stuff are right.

11

I was able to get a set up that took me from being stuck on pit 81 to clearing pit 84. Thereā€™s a lot of options but you have to look at more than just what the runes do but what skills and such can go with them to really take it up a notch.

1 Like
12

I didnā€™t say they do nothing.

I didnt say they arent very strong for some builds.

I said the design is awful and the entire feature is hit or miss depending on your build.

13

I wish the runes worked like d2. We would be looking for a really powerful base and then it was fun hunting for the runes alongside other legendary gear. I knew I was working towards something if I had a base or a few parts of a runeword put together. I really hope that ethereal items make a comeback someday too.

2 Likes
14

the diablo 4 dev team is like a train wreck

2 Likes
15

I think this is a good idea and helps expand the value of sockets.

I assume this is to make them bases for runewords? The problem is that no one wants to look at all the magic and rare items. I think a better setup would be:

  1. Have magic items have a small chance to roll with a GA version of one of the special affixes from a mythic unique in the same slot.
  2. Have special rare items that have a UI icon and roll with 4 normal affixes but they canā€™t be tempered. Allow ancestral versions that have at least 1 GA and can be tempered once.
  3. Require a rare or magic item of the appropriate type as part of the runeword recipes for mythics. If you use a magic item with a mythic GA from the mythic you are crafting, you get that GA on the mythic guaranteed.

I think they should just let you have a runeword spread across two one-handers

They already have this with the recipes that make a mythic. They just need a way to have your base mean something for the mythic created, like the suggestion I made above.

I doesnā€™t need to be perfect. They need to just buff some of the underperforming ones and allow you find tempering manuals for other classes so you can buff the off-class runewords without having to level an alt.

D2 runewords are far less interesting. This system has way more potential, they just have to stop poisoning good systems with boring implementations that just use the system to give damage buffs of every type.

The runes are way more ambitious than the tempering manuals were (outside of weapon tempers) and the tempering manuals were way better than the paragon nodes and the old affixes. The new uniques are way more rule-breaking than the old ones. The new aspects are breaking more rules. The Spiritborn is very different from other classes. I think in general, the designers in the ā€œdevelopmentā€ role of trying to craft the list of effects generated by a system and then balance them are doing a much better job of stretching for an interesting list of effects. Launch D4 would have had all the invocations doing additive damage to an element or an enemy type.

16

This system sounds way more boring to me. So you farm to level up your runes, then combine them in specific ways to get a few extra affixes onto a piece of gear? The ritual-invocation system is way more fun. And the recipes for mythics are basically the same as farming up runes to get a runeword. The only thing missing is farming bases for crafting.

17

so far only OHM and YOM worth playing, others runes are garbage tradeoff for few hundreds main stats.

18

Well theres a good reason why they did not add full Runewords to the Game.

Unfortenaly you are right, the runes arent good atm.

But its just because 1 or 2 Runes will make the game in every Build, the rest will be fungame or very special. (Shout / Petrify?!?)

19

Oh my lantaā€¦ Had to pause here. They donā€™t have base effects? :upside_down_face: Keeeeeeeeeeek.

Back to reading.

1 Like
20

Runes and Runewords would be fixed if they moved it off gear like Season 2 Blood Powers. Get rid of the whole builder/spender system. Giving you other class abilities is stupid AF also. It should be a combination of Season 2 Blood Powers and stones from Season 3.

Or they could just make it like Grim Dawnā€™s Rune system where they had a ton of Unique Runes for classes and builds you could upgrade and Runes all gave a modifier to Movement, whether that was engaging, disengaged, blink, charge, Elemental Damage or debuff etc.