Rune-keeper Rumi­na­tion has been out of com­mis­sion for a while. Pre­vi­ously I wrote about my expe­ri­ences play­ing as a Dwarf Rune-keeper named Risalin. Now I play as Elu­veril, an Elf Rune-keeper. In addi­tion to the race and gen­der change, I’m also on a new server. You can find me on Brandy­wine now.

Elu­veril recently passed Risalin in level and is cur­rently in the high 40s. This has meant some new skills com­pared to Risalin, which has been great. I really love the class. It was fun when it was first intro­duced, but direct and indi­rect (specif­i­cally the com­bat change recently, which has sped things up for her) patches have made a greater difference.

It also means I’ve been work­ing on my Level 45 class quests, none of which I have actu­ally man­aged to fin­ish yet. As with every class, you’re stuck col­lect­ing some rel­a­tively hard to find mate­ri­als for new weapons and armour. I was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that, at least at this point, the weapon you receive is frost-based and not lightning-based.

I’m a big fan of the light­ning based rune-stones in the game.  While frost and fire­based attacks include more debuffs, light­ning skills are instan­ta­neous, which is a plus. Any enhance­ments a lightning-based rune-stone could offer are help­ful in this case. In addi­tion to this, a few Rune-keeper skills change based upon your cur­rently equipped rune-stone.

This actu­ally winds up mak­ing the Rune-keeper a some­what effec­tive crowd-controller on a small basis. No one is going to claim you’ll be able to match a Lore–mas­ter in this regard, but in smaller bat­tles (and par­tic­u­larly on a solo-scale), it can be a lifesaver.

With any rune-stone, Rune-keepers have access to two use­ful skills for this pur­pose: [Shock­ing Touch] and [Shock­ing Words]. Shock­ing Touch is your stan­dard stun skill, which comes in handy. It requires you to be within arms’ length of your tar­get, which can be a pain. Using it often enough will unlock a trait that extends the stun’s length, which makes a huge difference.

Shock­ing Words is, first and fore-most, an attack skill; how­ever, one of its ben­e­fits is that it has a chance to stun the tar­get. Elu­veril cur­rently as a 52% chance of stun­ning the tar­get of this skill, which is quite good. It also can deal some seri­ous dam­age when it man­ages to make a crit­i­cal hit.

With a light­ning rune-stone, you get access to another skill: [Armour of Storm]. I pre­fer this to the Fire and Frost based armour skills. It doesn’t offer any seri­ous armour upgrades, but it does offer a 5-second stun that can affect any attack­ing tar­gets. I find this espe­cially use­ful when I have more than one enemy try­ing to gut me, espe­cially when it man­ages to stun mul­ti­ple tar­gets (or even the same one more than once).

Shock­ing Words and Armour of Storm are not as likely to work as Shock­ing Touch. Even Shock­ing Touch can fail, from time to time. Even so, the like­li­hood of one of these stun­ning your tar­get is pretty high. I com­bine these three abil­i­ties to keep things under control.

Rune-keepers are effec­tive at deal­ing dam­age, but they’re not nec­es­sar­ily effec­tive at tak­ing it …  par­tic­u­larly when focus­ing on attacks. When under assault by mul­ti­ple attack­ers, being able to stun one in place with Shock­ing Touch and then poten­tially stun­ning the other one while you attach it is a big advan­tage. It can mean the dif­fer­ence between dying (or, if you’re lucky, run­ning away — even flee­ing can be helped by Armour of Storm) and fin­ish­ing a fight alive.

For a Rune-keeper, par­tic­u­larly when play­ing on your own, stuns can offer you enough time to switch between heal­ing and attack­ing attune­ment. Even bet­ter, Shock­ing Touch attunes 2 points toward neu­tral on its own. When I find my morale is slip­ping while deal­ing heavy dam­age, I can stun my tar­get (or try my best to). At this point, I have more free­dom to use skills that neu­tral­ize attunement.

Even if I don’t specif­i­cally need any­thing these skills do (although, you likely could use power from [Self-motivation], which adds 3 neu­tral points to your attune­ment), this will get you over to the heal­ing side very quickly. I find that I can usu­ally throw down a Rune of Restora­tion and Mend­ing Verses, effec­tively get­ting my health back up before I would have oth­er­wise dropped dead. It’s pretty easy to get attacks going again (more are avail­able while attuned to heal­ing, but you’ll likely have more neu­tral­iz­ing skills you can use).

I’ve done this pretty often and it has allowed me to effec­tively dou­ble my life-span dur­ing bat­tles. Some­times focus­ing on one end of the spec­trum or the other won’t do you much good.

Does any­one else have a dif­fer­ent strat­egy that’s been effec­tive for them?

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• Rune-keeper Rumination: Volume 4 (4)
• Rune-keeper Rumination: Volume 2 (0)
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