Guild Wars 2

There has been quite amount of condition runes available for condition-spec builds. Two most recent ones – Scavenging and Noble – got me curious about their other bonuses besides condition damage.

Rune of Scavenging
Rune set grants 5% chance for next attack to steal health (15 sec cooldown), next attack causes lifesteal after using a healing skill, and 7% of vitality goes to condition damage. The 6th bonus is really nice if you have a lot of vitality. I’m not sure how much health you gain from lifesteal. From a glance, this looks good for any condition builds, but more valued by tanky specs. However, since it’s still new, it needs some testing.

Rune of Noble
Rune set grants +40% might duration and 3 stacks of might for 10 secs. Add +10 boon duration (either by 10 Chaos points, Signet of Midnight, or food) to increase the duration to 15 secs, allowing the Mirror healing skill to be useful for granting constant might. Shattered Strength, Bountiful Interruption, GS and staff can grant might. I can see this used in any build, but testing is needed.

Has anyone tried these rune sets out and how good they are?

The Runeset of Scavenging has no consistency. It basically adds random things. Nothing for me.

The Runeset of Noble looks nice at first, but two runes of altruism give you AoE 3 might on heal. While malice might be preferred by most (over healing power), the difference in secondary effects is just too great. Better use four runes of altruism and two runes of traveller.
3 AoE might on heal
+ 30% boon duration

But I just remembered, that I don’t know the duration of the altruisms aoe might.

Yeah altruism is far superior in this case. You only need to go 2 deep there to get 3 stacks of might for base 10 seconds, AoE. Noble you have to go 6 deep to get the same might but only on yourself. I think they are nice for another option to go 2 deep to get 20% might duration but there are other runes for that, plus it’s generally better to go 2 deep to take a rune with boon duration increases instead.

I almost forgot about altruism runes. Did they fix the bug for might and fury? It’s currently now have a 15 sec cooldown instead of 10 sec. Both of you made valid points and other runes (or even have combination of them) would provide more bonuses.

Runes of Scavenging may become useful to bunker builds, especially the ones that are bound to come out soon thanks to Dire armor (Once I get a set I will be making a Bunker build too.)

As for the Noble runes I see them having a place on the more support oriented builds, or builds that focus on building might for extra damage. Otherwise there are runes you could argue that do a better job than these.

Of the two, I’m thinking more that the Noble runes may benefit with my Flowing Images builds more than the other (although Perplexity runes are too good to pass up). I’ll have to do some testing once I complete a few runs of CM.