I know there’s a rune catchup system in the works, but I wanted to provide feedback on that idea. My hope or goal is for it to become easier to acquire the runes AND still have an incentive to do the rune discoveries and their questlines.
First, add a rune vendor option at our class trainers that sells the runes for a reasonable gold price similar to class spells for the appropriate level. So, for early level runes in starting zones they should have no level requirement and are cheap, but maybe other runes require level 25, 40, 50 or 60 and have spell costs associated to that level. There’s level requirements for spells and talents, there should still remain some level requirements for runes.
The second thing is to still have a reason to do the discovery if you want to. Many discoveries are awesome, I loved the rogue ones, but some are just a headache and others are too challenging or impossible to do solo. The group required runes are the most common annoyance especially once you’re “behind the curve” of the majority of players. So separate the runes from the discovery and provide a new additional reward to the discovery. It’s always been more enjoyable when the discoveries also provided gear.
Instead of runes as the reward, the discoveries should provide great gear, gold, and a good amount of XP (15-20% of a level). If rewarding gear, use random gear from the level up raids or existing dungeon items. Another bonus is to start providing a few reals while leveling for each rune discovery completion, maybe for the higher levels. Can consider having the level up raids drop reals too.
This method would require adding some type of quest where you need to complete the XYZ rune discovery. This can be quests from a class trainer, the rune vendor npc or it could be a breadcrumb quest after you buy the rune to lead to the discovery. So once you buy and learn the rune from the vendor, you receive an item to start a quest to do the discovery and get rewarded some gold, xp, and gear. The requirement being to complete the discovery giving little to no details or turn in the rune that you are meant to discover, so the actual discovery method still provides a rune that’s used as a quest requirement instead.
The alternative to creating a rune vendor + discovery incentive approach is going in and improving the individual rune discoveries that are annoying for whatever reason. Such as the dark riders, turning that BoA so you can purchase and send it to alts after completing it once. Runes that require groups to be soloable and so on. Still, this will be more tedious for players than having the ability to purchase the rune and doing the discovery for an additional reward whenever.