I went to try frost and had to change my rune forge and I was surprised to see new enchants for our weapon. I’m curious why people aren’t really talking about them. I decided to try some of them and here are my thoughts.
Rune of hysteria - Seems to proc about 2x per minute which increases your rune generation by 20% for 8 secs. Actually not that bad, it was definitely noticeable and allowed me to spam my moves more often than what it was. 20% doesn’t sound like much but it’s all your runes. Remember, people say haste is so good because it helps with rune generation and this does exactly just that.
Rune of Sanguination - I was actually kind of excited about this one thinking in terms of pvp. Death strike does more dmg based on enemy health but mainly because when you fall below 35% you heal for 48% of your max health over 6 seconds. I went to test it and unfortunately the heal has a 5 min cd shown by a debuff icon, also the increase in death strike damage isn’t much. It was hitting for 350ish normal and when the enemy was almost dead it hit for ~450. So I’m still on the fence on this because a cheat death thing might be good for arena.
Rune of spell warding - Didn’t really test it because it’s a bit tough to test. But basically you deflect 3% of magic dmg taken and you have a chance to to create a shield for 10% of your health that absorbs magic damage. If caster hits you with a spell while you have shield their cast speed reduced by 10%. I can imagine it’d be good for mage cleaves, but you can’t change enchants before the fight so I don’t think I’ll be using this one ever.
Rune of Apocalypse - Interesting one with a pretty high proc rate. Pet attacks put a debuff for either making the target take reduced healing or slow movement with a dot on them or they deal reduced damage to you or you deal more damage to them. Each stack of all but the slow = 1% and the debuff is pretty short, like 6 seconds and they can stack with the debuff timer resetting. It may be pretty good but I need more testing with it - the slow and dot with 1 stack was around 350 dmg over 6 seconds and the dot dmg increases with more stacks.
Hit the target dummy for 2 mins doing a full rotation as unholy and the dot did 2% of my damage and increased damage taken was up for 50% of the fight meaning the enemy took 1-4% increased damage for half the fight. I’ll test this one out some more.
So have you guys been messing around with them? What are your guys’ opinions?
They’re not being talked about because ultimately I believe players are going to use the runes that maximize damage, not slightly mitigate mechanics. Spell Warding is completely underwhelming, Sanguination is only useful as Blood, Hysteria would only make sense to even fathom using if you’re running DW Frost because 2H is either going to run RI or FC, and Apocalypse is only useful in Unholy but I am pretty sure Unholy will always be running Fallen Crusader in the end.
All that would do is cause the people trying to eek out that 1% more damage to take the next best thing. And hten in a few months people will demand that THAT be made baseline so they “Can have more options” and the cycle repeats. I will probably use apocalypse because its fun and I know I am good enough at my class that the 1-4% damage difference won’t matter. As long as you do good damage while not dying it doesn’t matter. If your one of the top dps in your group and people are trying to say you should change to make your dps higher or your grp would fail they should instead be telling the lowest dps to improve.
I think the biggest issue is there isn’t enough versatile options. I would have loved to see the movement speed/haste buff one not be a kill proc. Like having the movement speed just base from having that would be great for heavy movement fights.
Remember that you can keep multiples of the same weapon with different runeforge enchants to quickly swap, so you actually could switch for arenas if you can get more than one of your weapon.
Spell warding and sanguination are situational in pvp. But razor ice or fallen crusader maximize damage output which is most important to stay competitive. I just wished they made rune of apocalypse more appealing instead basing it off unholy ghouls exclusively and having the RNG between 4 debuffs when 2 are really good. They should just make it based on auto attack procs and limit it to two procs at 25% healing reduction or like 5-10% extra damage for all dk abilities to make it competitive with razor ice or fallen crusader for pvp.
No talknig cuz not using.
Hysteria is really nice for blood though. More Death Strikes.
Apocalypse really needs a buff though. Like big buff. Then it’d be GREAT.
Or like make using Apocalypse apply all four debuffs when you burst 4 wounds. Like Max on the ability to get debuffs.
in pvp our spells actually do enough damage to secure a kill, our issue is survival. in that sense, SSG>FC, and it has been this way for some time, at least since bfa launch. the 5% stats is up 100% of the time, and the 5% armor while small, does take the edge off of warrior’s physical attacks.
spellwarding is nice if there is a lot of magic damage, but im not sold on the idea of using it over SSG, mainly because you get a swap CD on the ability any time you swap weapons, the downtime of effectively no active rune means you would be starting an arena match off gimped. swapping weapons works in a epic bg because you can swap after running back from the GY and it will be active by the time you reach the fight.
sanguination had its fun moment with blood dks doing 5 figure deathstrikes, but i think even that is in the gutter atm.
apocalypse is broken, only your main pet ghoul procs it, not apoc and army ghouls, without the ability to max out all 4 debuffs at once during burst, its complete trash.
tbh, after playing torhast with the anima power that lets you collect all the runes, i would rather see something like a socket system, let us have 3-4 slots where we can fill them with different runes to make different combos.
That would be great. Is it sad that I still use Apocalypse on training dummies hoping to make something happen? It seems to only proc reliably at very, very high haste levels (monstrosity legendary buff, bloodlust and assault talent)… gross
Its like they’ve been serving the same 2 items in the cafeteria for years. Then they said hey guys, we’re gonna give you a few new options. You get excited for the new options then see its Spam(imitation meat) chicken feet, green bean salad.
That’s great, but we’re just gonna stick with the pizza and tacos thanks.
spam is just salted pork and ham. get good with cooking with it and its an amazing thing to have in your kitchen.
speaking of pizza, i just moved and the new place i get pizza is a small town business where they are still made by hand with raw ingredients purchased at the local famers market. easily the best pizza i have ever had, they even take the time to make sure all the toppings are evenly spread and are of good quality. while its take and bake, they even have specific cooking directions for my altitude. im spoiled now and dont think i can go back to any of the major chains.
