We need to talk about runes

Wicked Feedback
1

Dear Moon Studio, fellow Cerim,
today I want to talk about the rune system and highlight some issues current iteration has. There are 3 main topics to discuss: Rune UI & Tooltips, Rune Management and lastly Overall Rune Balance.

Rune UI & Tooltips

I want to start this passage with a question to the players: Do you know you can actually charge a Fireball rune? What about the equivalent runes from other elements? Or do you know you can charge Fire Wave/Fire Nova as well as its elemental equivalents?
Personally I found out about the Fireball charge mechanic only after the most recent update, with the addition of rune descriptions. The same goes for the elemental Nova runes, their description also mentions a possible charge mechanic. Fire Wave on the other hand does not mention a charge mechanic in its tooltip.
Incomplete tooltips aside, it took me so long to figure it out, because the most natural state of any rune is on a weapon and in this state there are no tooltips available at all. In other words, players need to extract a rune to be able to read a tooltip. This is not player friendly. Players must have access to rune descriptions while the runes are on weapons, not only when they are in their inventory.
Furthermore, the already existing tooltips must contain more information, namely the damage multipliers assigned to runes. This is critical in order to do the best informed decissions, but even more so, to provide precise feedback or bug reports. Here is an example: there are 2 runes Slashing Flurry and Crushing Flurry; they both are very similar (more on that later) yet Slashing Flurry does half the damage. Since I as a player do not know the intended values, I cannot give proper feedback.

Rune Management

The game already features a high number of individual runes, with even more to come. Yet already at this stage rune management happens to be tiresome.

  • Runes cannot be stacked so that duplicates require their own storage space. The sheer number of individual runes alone can fill several storage containers.
  • Using the Enchantress’ service does not allow to search all stored runes, so that we still have to carry them in our inventory to be able to select them.
  • Rune icons are similar looking

I do not have a tangible solution, all I can say that there is room for improvement. Several points that I adress in the next passage will however alleviate this issue.

Overall Rune Balance

This will be the most radical part. I will be blunt and state my conclusion right here - there are too many runes.

I clearly see the influence of Elden Ring as there is an effort to outfit each individual weapon with its signature rune, just like Elden Ring did it with Ashes of War(AoW). However, this approach did not work there and it works even less here.
The problems of this design choice is, that it creates a large number of runes. Ideally, each of those runes should have a reason to be used; in reality 80-90% are ignored. Elden Ring devided its AoW in many isolated groups, so that each individual AoW had less competition and thus inflated their value artificially. Nevertheless, they could not make all AoW worth using. In NRFTW runes are devided in less groups so that the competition for precious rune slots is more fierce.

This high number of individual runes left an impact in their quality. There are many copy and past runes, clones, especially noticable with mage/staff group, as I already explained here: on magic.
Martial runes have the same problems. Here I will provide a lot of examples and direct comparisons:

  • A simple example to start of: Slamdown a simple overhead strike with 400% damage for 100 Focus. The competitor is Thrust, a simple thrust attack with 400% damage for 100 Focus but it has a guaranteed knock down on an enemy or can interrupt bosses. No reason to use Slamdown over Thrust.
  • There is a series of “Flurry” runes for 1H weapons. Atm I have 6, namely - Advancing Flurry(AF) , Crushing Flurry(CF), Slashing Flurry(SF), Piercing Flurry(PF), Lightning Flurry(LF) & Fire Flurry(FF). 4 of those have the exact same animation. PF is destintcly different, while AF has a slightly different attack animation (copy of running attack combo from Nith Blade). The only difference between CF and SF is, that SF deals half the damage of CF. The 2 elemental runes just deal elemental damage instead of physical, this is nothing truly special since gems and/or weapon enchantments can add elemental damage to physical runes. I can also imagine there are plague/cold versions. CF, PF and AF deal the same damage, but PF has the fastest animation.
    From this group of similar runes PF is objectively the best one, while the elemental variants come afterwards simply because they are elementals.
    Does the game really need this many Flurry runes, where 4 out 6 are copies of each other with negligible differences.
  • Then there are Piercing Dash(PD) and Fierce Dash(FD). In both cases there is a short charge with differently animated dash followed by a strike that deals 400% damage. Both runes cost 100 Focus. However, FD goes slightly further and has a guaranteed knock down. As such, there is no reason to ever use PD over FD.
    Unfortunatelly, we are not done yet, as there is also Slashing Dash(SD). The same cost, the same damage, no knock down, but more of a slashing animation. Next entry is Charge Strike(CS), which just has a different animation, but the same functionality, costs & damage. Surge Slash(SS) short charge with a dash attack that causes a knock down :slightly_smiling_face:…but only deals 200% damage :disappointed: (the desctiption says 2 attacks but it is in fact only 1 attack). FD is a clear winner in this group.
    There are of course elemental variants called [insert element here] Dash. Each one costs the same, deals the same damage, borrows the animatin either from PD or SD…but Lightning Dash wins, because it has a guaranteed knock down.
  • There is a series of runes that perform 2x 360° attacks with minor differences in animations. The runes are Double Spin, Circular, Whirlstep Strike, Twirl Spin. There is also Piercing Spin, it deals less damage, but has a knock down effect and costs only 50 Focus.
  • Dual Daggers already have a narrow rune selection, yet there is hardly any choice. Dual Breaker and Piercing Dodge is the same attack with minor animation changes. Dashing Stab and Dual Flurry are full clones, but DF costs only 50 Focus.

I hope those examples showcase how much overlap, redundance and unbalance there is within the rune system.
Obviously there are runes that do stand out more than others, like Jump Cut with its i-frames, Spin with its fast execution and low costs or Slashing Dodge with an evasive maneuver. Unfortunetely ~80% cannot compete and are simply inferior in all regards. A slight variation in animation is not enough to make a rune worth using.

It is time to repeat my initial statement - there are too many runes. I do not see how you can balance so many items against each other. In the end it would be a futile endeavor.
As the game is still in its early development stage, I would sugggest to dismiss the idea that each individual weapon must have a signature rune. Remove cheap clone runes, throw away the baggage that slows you down. Focus on quality, not quantity.
If there are less runes in the game, they are easier to manage, easier to balance, easier to make them special or competitive. You will save development time and resources, because there are less items to balance; there would be no need to design a rune for each new weapon that is going to be released.
From player perspective there would be less strain, as rune management would become easier. Players would not feel bad for picking an inferior rune due to overabundance of choice.
This is a win-win situation.

Sorry for the long post, here is a potato.
potato

2

Thank Shortcat! If you don’t mind I’d like to take few point you mention and adds some meat around it.

  • Rune UI & Tooltips : How the devs want to deliver this experience.
    a) They want the game to keep a certain level of mystery “you never know until you try it”
    b) They want to eventually have tooltips that are more exhaustive. (It take time)
    Also, the current description is sometime very precise and specify if it’s 3 or 4 hit combo with the damage type so it could be a matter of revising and be more consistent on the pattern. (what info to include)

  • Rune Management: It’s a work in progress.
    We currently have access to rune that are in a chest from our house so what don’t have to carry them around… but should we:
    a) Stack them
    b) Have a specialize rune chest
    c) Enchantress T6 has a spellbook and let you permanently extract rune & store them
    d) All of the above

  • Then come the balance part.
    Personally I’d start with adjusting focus cost. I’d like to see more 25-50-75 focus rune for melee or 150 for the more impactful one. Cone shot up to 125 and generally have rune that is easily punishable to be more rewarded.

Anyway, cheers !

3

Hey,

Of course this is all work in progress and there will be further changes. What bothers me is the heavy influence of Elden Ring in this game. While Elden Ring is a fantastic gaming experiance, the inventory UI and menus there are total garbage. One of the reason is vacuous item desctiptions and cryptic scaling tooltips.
I do not think mystery components do any contribution, if we are talking about rune mechanics specifically. All it does is obscure imortant information, like damage multipliers.

This is brilliant.

Unfortunately this won’t fix the problems I described, namely clone runes and too much mechanical overlap.
Another problem I did not discuss in this thread is Focus generation. When you can easely generate 50 Focus with one hit rune costs barely matter and cannot act as a balancing factor.

4

I’d like to disagree, while I understand many rune overlap and in a perfect world… they are all very unique and distinct but it is very time consuming doing such thing.

As we know, time is our limiting factor here plus the fact that it’s very time consuming make it less likely. Witch come back to my point.

  • Lets take CF and SF. You said SF deals half the damage of CF witch make CF the better rune and SF is pointless. Of course in a ideal world they would change the animation but id rather have them have different utility for the skill. One is more spammy (does less, cost less but same poise dmg) and the other is the damage oriented that will require more investment into the focus generation to make it work.

In the endgame, I know we could make 150 focus rune work but it take time to get there and along the way… there a place to use those rune that right now is just not being used at all. (after doing few test)

5

Saving time is exactly what my suggestion would achieve, because there would be no need to compare and balance 1 rune against hundreds. Many runes could be deleted without doing any harm to the game.

Even if the energy costs for one rune in the Flurry familiy get reduces, there are still 5 other runes that do a similar thing. Furthermore, up to this point I was only comparing runes within their own “family”; when I start comparing all of them you get new tiers.
Here is one “cross-family” example: Thrust and Fierce Dash. Both do the same damage, cost the same, both deal a knock down effect; yet FD has a dash utility advantage.
There might be a difference in poise damage, however I am not insane enough to test this stat for each rune. This information should also be included in rune description next to the damage multiplier.

I am not against more varying rune costs, in fact I support this idea. The costs alone won’t be enough to balance the runes.