I wasn’t expect­ing to write Vol­ume 4 of this col­umn so soon, but the XP curve change bumped me up a cou­ple of lev­els. Sev­eral quests later I found myself at Level 30. I fig­ured this was a good time for an update.

As you may or may not know, Rune-keepers have seen a bit of a bump in their dam­age out­put. Some of this was spe­cific to the class, but some of this is related to a change in melee/ranged DPS that left tac­ti­cal dam­age alone. While I’m sure there are those with other classes that aren’t too pleased, as a Rune-keeper I’ve been pretty happy with the change. Are we over­pow­ered now? I’m not quite sure, but as I was get­ting closer to 30 it was obvi­ous that we were def­i­nitely under­pow­ered. It was dif­fi­cult to even take out a cou­ple of ene­mies below my level simul­ta­ne­ously, which seemed kind of odd for a class with so many attack skills and even a cou­ple of area of effect abilities.

Book 7 also saw the addi­tion of two new Rune-keeper based items. Chis­els are crafted by met­al­work­ers and can be equipped in the Rune-keepers ranged item slot to give increased dam­age. Schol­ars can make con­sum­able inlays and enam­els that tem­poraril­ity enhance a Rune-keeper’s abil­i­ties. I’ve not per­son­ally had a chance to try either of these out, but I’m look­ing for­ward to it. My Rune-keeper is a Scholar which winds up work­ing out more than I had antic­i­pated .… Buy­ing a chisel a cou­ple of times is one thing, but being able to make my own inlays and enam­els seems very beneficial.

Another big change came to Cease­less Argu­ment. This is a light­ning based spell that’s mostly notable for hav­ing no cooldown. Pre­vi­ously it required a few points of bat­tle attune­ment to be acces­si­ble. It now requires no bat­tle attune­ment what­so­ever and is given to new Rune-keepers at a very early level. Cease­less Argu­ment does less dam­age than pretty much any other attack skill, but it’s def­i­nitely help­ful in get­ting your bat­tle attune­ment up quickly or for tak­ing out super low level mobs for Deeds.

I usu­ally start off with a longer induc­tion attack (Fiery Ridicule, for exam­ple), hit my stronger attacks and then hit Cease­less Argu­ment while those cooldown. You can spam it like crazy if you want, but I’ve not really found this to be effec­tive on ene­mies around my level … You still have to deal with Tac­ti­cal resis­tance to these skills and the higher the level of the enemy, the more likely they are to resist the some of these attacks entirely.

I’ve also gained sev­eral new abil­i­ties since the last time I wrote a Rune-keeper Rumi­na­tion update. Most of them are for The Mid­dle Path, which had largely been ignored previously.

Wrath of Flame

Scathing Mock­ery: This is one of a hand­ful of area of attack skills for the Rune-keeper. It requires a rel­a­tively high bat­tle attune­ment, but it def­i­nitely comes in handy when sur­rounded by a crowd. Its 3 sec­ond induc­tion gen­er­ally means that your ene­mies have to be slowed down or focused on a friend, unfor­tu­nately. It also has a pretty cool animation.

The Mid­dle Path

Calm­ing Verse: This mostly skill has a slightly higher ben­e­fit for heal­ers, but it’s not bad for attack­ers either. It low­ers dam­age and heal­ing threat by 10% and raises heal­ing out­put by 10%.

Word of Exal­ta­tion: This skill greatly reduces your target’s incom­ing dam­age. This can be a huge help in Fel­low­ships. The more heal­ing attune­ment you have, the longer it lasts.

Abrupt Words: Although you can use Shock­ing Touch to stun an enemy, Abrupt Words is the first skill a Rune-keeper gains that specif­i­cally is made to inter­rupt induc­tions. Insanely help­ful, par­tic­u­larly against ene­mies that heal them­selves or others.

Dis­tract­ing Words: The tooltip makes it sound like this skill causes ene­mies to lose some inter­est in you, but it doesn’t specif­i­cally spec­ify how much threat you lose. It also low­ers your target’s run speed by 50%, which can be use­ful for those ene­mies run­ning at you from a dis­tance or attempt­ing to run away.

Words of Grace

Rous­ing Words: This skill is a huge help to those who are look­ing to focus on heal­ing. While active, heal­ing gen­er­ates no threat. It also gen­er­ates an addi­tional two points of heal­ing attunement.

I focus mostly on attack­ing since I tend to solo, so I’ve not put too many of these into real prac­tice yet. Still, it is nice to see that I have some use in Fel­low­ships, par­tic­u­larly now that my dam­age has gone up.

I’m also far less likely to annoy peo­ple now that the light­ning skills have had their sound effects changed. Instead of long, obnox­ious crack­les, you just get a short *boom* for the quicker light­ning attacks. It’s a heck of a lot less annoy­ing.

Related posts

• Runekeeper Rumination: Volume 1 (5)
• Rune-keeper Rumination: Volume 3 (2)
• Rune-keeper Rumination: Volume 2 (0)
• Rune-keeper Rumination: The Return and My Love of Lightning (4)
• Upcoming Rune-keeper Changes in Testing (0)