Guild Wars 2

After 4 – 5 months playing GW 2 wrong I discovered today that, in order for runes to work with all their bonuses, you need to have 6 identical runes equipped in your armor set. Sigh.
This was not on the tutorial!!!
Would someone explain me what is the logic behind it? Why can’t each rune provide the described bonus without having to look for its additional 5 evil twins?

Each rune alone provides the first bonus. Two of the same the first two, three of the same the first three and so on. If each rune gave all the six, we’d all be overpowered.

Would you like one piece of armor to give the stats of all 6 slots and all the rings and amulets and accessories too?

If a single rune provided all the benefits the current display is extremely silly. Why is there a “(1) +25”, “(3) +50”, “(5) +100”? It would be a single +175. Then there is the highlighting based on the number of runes equipped.

Runes are GW2’s answer to armor set bonuses from some other games. I suspect they were mainly inspired by Dragon Age but only because the blog post announcing them came not long after DA came out and the way they work is fairly similar.

In most games each armor piece you wear gives you a boost to some stats, and in some games wearing a full set of matching pieces also gives you bonus effects, either an additional stat boost or a different effect.

If I remember correctly (I can’t find the blog post now) Anet liked the idea of encouraging players to collect a full set and the trade-off between wearing a full set with one type of stat to get the bonus effects or mixing and matching for different stats which may be more useful, but didn’t like the idea of restricting players to wearing one set of armor because it didn’t fit with their goal of allowing players to customise their character. This was long before launch so I’m not sure how the transmutation system was working at the time or if it had even been created/announced.

Anyway their solution was to shift the extra bonuses from the armor itself to runes, so you could make a DIY armor set by applying matching runes to any armor you wanted to wear.

The description on the runes themselves is supposed to explain this, active bonuses are highlighted, inactive ones are greyed out and the number at the top tells you how many you’ve got equipped and how many you need for all the bonuses.

As other people have said it would be massively over-powered if 1 rune provided all 6 bonuses. Especially because then you could have 6 full sets at once.

I have a question about runes too
“(1) 25”, “(3) +50”, “(5) +100’’ is it going to be 10050+25 if you have 5 of the same rune?
if it’s power 1 rune give +25power 3 runes give +75power and 5runes give 175power?

Yes, Alex, the bonuses granted are cumulative.

ty for the answer ^^