Guild Wars 2

The upcoming changes to runes are problematic. I understand why it’s being done, but there are much better ways to go about improving them.
In particular, placing emphasis on the need to use a full set of all the same runes defeats the purpose of even having multiple runes. At that point you may as well just have the rune be a single item with its own slot. Except then, you lose the fun of improving and “customizing” your armor to an extent.
I’m sure most people have played Diablo 2 or 3. Gems in that game work in a similar manner to runes in this, but provide a different bonus depending on which piece of equipment you slot them into.
I believe it would be better for runes to work in this manner; instead offering a different one of their possible bonuses depending on which piece of armor you slot them into.
They could then be set up such that either different pieces of armor are weighted to have stronger rune bonuses than others, just like how more pieces provide stronger bonuses today, or the bonuses could all just be averaged out to be even with each other.
This would mostly maintain the current effects of runes, while allowing proper customization and great reason for them to be placed on each piece of armor individually.

Let’s take the Traveller’s runes for example.
Placing one on the feet would increase movement speed, placing one on the head would increase boon duration, placing one on the hands would increase condition duration, and placing one on the chest or legs would increase all stats.
In order to prevent overlap, like how Divinity also provides an increase to all stats, some effects could be replaced here and there; mostly though you could simply provide the same effect with different runes on different pieces of armor.
Traveller on the chest for example could be changed to something like Vigor granted on heal to not conflict with Divinity. Whereas Might could boost Might duration on the head, and Hoelbrek could boost Might duration on the hands, and so on.

Don’t you think that’s unecessary overly complicated?

You’d have to create a pretty complex system to deal with all the overlapping of all the rune sets and in the end you’d have to spend months fixing bugs and balance issues everywhere.

The reason they’re keeping it separated in 6 instead of 1 is so you can progress, get one then another, this for new players obviously that couldn’t afford the cost of 1 (the combined price or the current 6) and there you have another problem, turning the 6 into 1 would mean a return for everyone listed on the TP.

Considering the work is done and ready to be rolled out in the update, I think you’re a little late on this one OP.

Everything in-game right now is done. By that logic they should never change/update anything, only adding new stuff.

Grimwolf.7163:

Everything in-game right now is done. By that logic they should never change/update anything, only adding new stuff.

I was leaning more along the lines of the work they wanted to do for their revamp is done, ready to be rolled out. Beyond minor tweaks at this point, they aren’t going to look at overhauling it again. Not until it actually sees the light of day and goes through the rigors of mass testing of our poking, prodding, and nit picking.

If it weren’t in a deployable, or near deployable state they wouldn’t have said anything about it. Sort of how they work. They keep theirs lips sealed until their plans are basically ready to fruit, because the player base tends to be a little… uh, volatile.