I was looking to make one of my characters more flexible in build variety. I have a pure faith build that primarily uses the Fetid Club unique weapon; a “bonk build.”
I eventually found a good looking cursed (plagued rarity) two-handed staff called the “Caretaker’s Ruined Staff” which scales off of faith, so I scrounged around my inventories to gather items and enchantments I can use to make a caster build with this staff.
This staff in particular came with 2 “default” runes equipped: the “Rotwheel” rune, and the “Pestilence” rune. As I was testing damage potential and field testing in general with these runes, I at first felt that the “Gain 24 focus on fatality” enchantment on my staff was never triggering with the Rotwheel rune.
A “fatality” I think is a kill with either a rune attack or a charged attack.
Here are a couple of links to recordings of this lack of “fatality” trigger:
It can be observed that the kills with the rotwheel rune attack somehow did not count as fatalities, as can be evidenced by the lack of a gain of 24 Focus per kill (would be from the enchantment: “Gain 24 focus on fatality” on the staff). when they should each be a fatality because “rotwheel” is a rune attack. However, for some reason, I still gained Focus, but not because of the kill(s), but because the rotwheel made hit(s). I seem to gain ~17-18 Focus for every rotwheel hit. More on that later.
This was the case for a while, until it wasn’t. I’ve attached a couple more links to recordings here:
Based off of my testing, if there is somewhat precise positioning/timing, the rotwheel on kill will register as a fatality and properly award the 24 Focus per fatality (from the enchantment “Gain 24 focus on fatality” on the staff). But this does not seem to be the case when casting either too close to the enemy or at a distance. Rotwheel currently may require to be casted in a “sweet spot” in order for it’s kill to be counted as a fatality.
But what about the Pestilence rune? From what I’ve seen, it works just as intended. Here is a recording below where the fatality enchantment triggers accordingly based off of the number of kills I got with said rune attack:
As I mentioned earlier in this post, I noticed that I was still receiving focus for landing hits with the rotwheel rune attack. This is not the case for the pestilence rune attack (I only got focus via the fatality enchantment with the pestilence rune attack). The amount of focus that I gained from the rotwheel rune attacks appear to scale based off of my weapon’s focus gain and my characters focus gain percentage. This may have other implications.
I went to the test dummy in Sacrament to see if the rune attacks I have aren’t being recognized as rune attacks.
The rune ring that I have should increase my rune damage by ~30% at the cost of ~14% lower “normal” melee damage.
I tested my rune ring with the Pestilence rune, and it functions normally (~25% more damage as opposed to ~30%, but that may be because the test dummy in Sacrament has some level of armor rating)
But when I tested my damage potential with and without the rune ring on the rotwheel rune attack, the “Rune ring” actually lowers my damage with the Rotwheel rune rather than increase it. I calculated the damage difference with(lower damage) and without(higher damage) the rune ring, and it had a difference of ~14%. The amount that “normal” melee attacks are weakened.
Seeing as how the rotwheel rune attack is weakened by the rune ring rather than strengthened, and that the rotwheel has issues in triggering fatalities, I suspect that the rotwheel rune, and perhaps maybe some other runes that I have not tested, may not be consistently (or possibly acknowledged at all) as rune attacks.
If I had to infer, the game may be thinking that the rotwheel rune attack, and maybe others, is not actually a rune attack, but a melee attack in certain cases(?), thus making said rune attack(s) inconsistent.
I’ve attached the requested files below. Please be careful as they can get easily mixed with previous files provided for other bug reports.
If possible, I ask that whoever needs these files to please save them and store them safely, as I can’t store them myself forever.