Diablo 4 - These New Runes are CRACKED transcript

Everyone, so season 15 brought us some new runes and they are pretty good to make fancy items such as the Enigma for example a lot of people are hunting for. However, you can also equip them. So I figured it would be a good to talk about this and see maybe there's something that you want to put in your setup because some of them are actually pretty strong and more impactful than some of the older ones that we already had in the past.

So let's get into it. We have total of five ritual runes which give you offering and seven invocation runes that use offering that have effect. Let's start from the rituals here. So we have M which says deal thorns damage gain four offering. That can be kind of interesting. We don't have that many thorns like meta builds right now. And what you need to kind of keep in mind as like a rule of thumb is you want to generate roughly 100 offering per second for ritual rune to be competitive.

It can be a little bit less like that for example a bunch of builds that don't have really good ways of getting offering usually just use Igni and that is like I think 83 per second. If you like master this out. So that is like sort of like the minimum threshold that you want to hit. And this means that if you want to use something like an M you need to deal 20 times or more thorns damage per second. So that can be kind of tough but at least in AOE scenarios relatively easily achievable.

And we have a bunch of the other ritual runes here that have like a bit of a similar effect. For example Ort with the deal non-physical direct damage gain one offering and the Tal with deal damage over time gain three offering. So [snorts] again all of these have sort of like a big AOE scaling potential. However, this is Diablo 4 and we don't care about AOE damage. We only care about single target damage most of the time.

Bosses are the name of the game. You have to do lair bosses. You have to do you know bail runs. You have to do tower pushing all this kind of stuff. It's usually single target fights. And this means that having an AoE scaling rune like this doesn't necessarily help you if you don't get at least pretty close to the regular value of another ritual rune already on single target and then maybe you can like hyper scale a little bit in AoE.

So, that is sort of the main thing to to think about. However, there could definitely be builds that could use stuff like so Spiritbond has a bunch of bonds builds that trigger quite often. And in particular Paladins as well, Shield of Retribution, if it not works with every single tick of Shield of Retribution, maybe you could kind of go there. If you shoot like three times per second, it hits six times each time. So, you're kind of getting to that like 20 hits a second or so with like the 80 plus offering per second.

So, there is potential here, but I think it really is worth checking out for your particular build if that is enough. Um while we're at it, let's talk about Ord as well. I think Ord is sort of in the same boat here. It is only a quarter of this, but it works on any non-physical damage. So, you need to have a lot of damage instances and there is one class in particular that does that extremely well, which is Sorc. So, in particular we have, you know, lightning Sorcs with stuff like ball lightning, charged bolts, unstable currents just like proccing a lot of stuff, lightning spears flying everywhere.

So, I think there's a lot of potential here on the Sorc to use something like Ord and getting like 100 hits per second on a single target does sound realistic on some builds. And again, in AoE combat obviously a lot more, so this could be pretty crazy in those cases. There might be other classes and builds out there that could do even more, but I'm not 100% sure about that. And while we're at it, a similar rune, the Tal rune here.

So, we have the damage over time with gain free offering. Now, I haven't tested this yet, but I think this is probably one of the weaker ones. It's also one of the lowest runes that exist in the game, so I would not be surprised if that is not really great. And the thing about damage over time is that it takes twice a second per target. So, it's not really that high potential. It depends on how you can stack dots, but I don't think this will actually stack at all.

And this means this should be by far the weakest out of these three offering generation runes here. Then we have F. This is a kind of interesting one. Avoid spending primary resources while fighting for 5 seconds, and then you get 600 offering. So, this is like Nago level good. So, Nago is like the same thing. Actually, it was nerfed. It was it's actually like It used to be 600 as well every 5 seconds, but now it's 500 every 5.

So, it's actually better than Nago. Uh so, yeah, this is like more than the average of 100 per second basically. You get 120, but in big bursts every 5 seconds. This can be good and bad. You know, sometimes you want to trigger stuff more often than that, but sometimes you want to overflow your runes to entirely get a good bigger effect. Uh so, something like Vex Rune comes to mind. You want to over- flow it so that you get your plus three skills if you use a Vex.

Or there could be other cases where you want to generate exactly that much offering in one go sometimes. However, there's not that many builds that can actually run this. Uh so, this would have to be like a basic attack build, or I don't know, some sort of companion build on a druid or on on the sorc maybe with conjurations that doesn't actually really use any resources and just presses some cool down here and there.

We don't have that many builds, and even the basic builds usually use something like Shard of Veridian and actually do spend their resources. So, I don't see that many potential use cases, but it is kind of good. It's definitely above average in terms of power. And then we have the Mal, which is kind of interesting. You gain 666 offering for invoking your prime evil power. And that is a lot. However, these prime evil powers don't really trigger that all that often.

So, if you look at this here, this is like these powers here like the Bale and Mephisto and stuff like that that you can choose here. The Eyes of Xidium, for example, and then the other two bosses have their own powers. I think they trigger at relatively similar rates, and that is usually kind of rare. I didn't really pay attention exactly how often, but I don't see it often enough. This would mean you need to have one of these procs every like 6-7 seconds, roughly.

However, there is another room that allows you to trigger it directly. There's actually this one here, the Ist. That takes 1,000 offering and invokes a primal power. And there's actually a combo here. So, you can kind of like cycle it back and forth, and that could be interesting. So, it might be worth trying this out if you have like some insane primeval generation, basically, or like an offering generation, and then you can kind of like, you know, cycle it back and forth.

I don't think I would combine Mal and Ist necessarily together, because you probably still have this cool down in the middle. So, you want to use another, you know, offering generation, and you could maybe then think about stuff like Ord when you have like a very high like number of hits in AoE combat, and then just kind of like trigger your in your power all the time. The thing is that I don't really expect these powers to really do much when it comes to like serious high-end content.

Again, we have the single-target problem. So, on single target, it's very hard to use these offering runes and get a lot of out of them, but uh maybe for like tower pushing, there is a bit of potential here. Like, the the base damage values on these powers are relatively high, and if you trigger them multiple times per second or so, then maybe we can slowly get somewhere. There's also a bunch of stuff like generate primary resource here.

So, if you have like a super resource-hungry build, this could help. Um there's stuff like this here where you just like take off terms and life over 4 seconds, but again, in a push scenario, you kind of expect this to just naturally happen. I wouldn't really waste a rune slot on this. Uh but yeah, there there is maybe a bit of potential there to actually deal damage with this stuff. But uh so far I haven't really tried.

Then uh while we're at it, the invocation runes, um here's the bear rune. So, this is like the hardest rune to get. A lot of people want this for the Enigma, which needs the bear, for example. Uh so, usually it goes there. However, it does give you crushing blow. And crushing blow is a pretty strong mechanic, at least in Diablo II. So, if you don't know what it does, is it takes a percentage of the current HP of the enemy uh when you hit them with a crushing blow.

Uh so, I believe in Diablo II it's like 8% or so. So, when a target has 100% HP, a crushing blow triggers, boom, it goes to 92%. And if it has 50% HP, boom, it goes to 46%. It takes 8% off the remaining HP. Now, I don't know exactly how it works in Diablo IV yet. This is something that is kind of hard to test, but it seems to do a similar thing, maybe with like nerfed values. And I heard that it ends at 20%, where in Diablo II, basically the way this works is you take crushing blows, you get a target that from like 100% down to 1% in like 10 seconds, and then you just kind of whack them until you deal the last 1%, you know?

So, that's how it works in D2. In D4, it seems like you have to try a little bit harder than that, especially since we have infinite HP scaling, you know, it kind of makes sense that there is sort of a cap here. But, for high tower pushing, this might be like a mainstay, like an every build. There are other ways of crushing blowing as well, which are some of the rune words here. I'm not sure if you can search this, uh but um there are uh I think um Insight has that or so.

Uh so, you can check this here. There's like a few items that actually have crushing blow on them. Here, Infinity, sorry. So, this one has 40% lucky hit chance, and this works all the time for all of your attacks. And I can definitely see that being used at the very least in groups of like a support character. You know, a support character like a paladin or you know, some barb or something can literally just equip this thing and crushing blow everything down to low HP.

So, that's kind of crazy, but even in solo pushing I can see this being used in some cases even if the item itself is not super crazy. And I think that's also the one-handed like strength somewhere here. This one also has crushing blow, 25%. So, yeah, in in some cases you can even combine this like on a barb. You can actually wear both of these if you really want. So, it can be kind of wild. Uh either way, I think bear is definitely something worth considering for the higher end of pushing.

And gives you a 10% chance to do a crushing blow. So, at the very least on the boss fight it might really take off a lot of HP really fast, and then you kind of finish it on your own. Then we have the if. If is 125 weapon damage fully stacked. That is something kind of good for like all leveling or so. You just kind of like throw those in there, and you don't have to replace your weapon like every five levels or so. But in end game this is relatively worthless.

Most items most weapons have a lot more damage than that. If you look at this two-handed bow here, the average is like 4K damage per shot or so. So, plus 175 plus 125 that's like nothing. So, it is like you know, 3% or something in this case. This is definitely on the weak side of offensive runes. So, forget about this one. However, oh boy, the Lo rune. So, that is a big one. This is like by far the best offensive rune in the entire game now.

So, some people like to use something like Ohm with 7 and 1/2% and this thing is three and 1/2 times better than Ohm if you can use it for your build. So, deadly strike if you don't know what this is is it again a Diablo II mechanic. It is something like crit chance, but not really. So, a deadly strike deals double the damage, but it works for stuff that it normally doesn't work for with crit, like thorns. If you play a thorn spiritborn, you can use this, and your thorns can now kind of crit.

And the same thing goes for dots. Dots normally cannot crit, and deadly strike works for dots for each individual tick. So, the TLDR is if you have 25% deadly strike chance, you get a 25% damage multi. That is kind of big. And not just that, with uh stuff like the splinters that we have in uh season 15 here with like the hellfire splinter, for example, you can get a 50% damage multi, but lose all of your crit chance.

And personally, I'm running this on my warlock, for example, on blazing screen right now. I have not actually even started trying to stack any crit chance, which you could do with anguish, for example, but I just went for the hellfire because it just frees up so many affixes across all of your entire gear. And the typical non-rogue, non-barb crit build that reaches 100% crit chance gets somewhere in the range of like a times three and a half to maybe times four and a half damage multi from having 100% crit chance and no, according like, you know, like stacked crit multi.

Whereas here, you get a 50% multi and then a 25% multi with that um a rune here, plus you free up like 10 affixes on your gear that could be, you know, all damage multi, elemental multi, bone multi, you know, main stat, and so on. So, you can actually get a reasonably close with a zero crit build using the hellfire splinter and the low rune and just like having a lot more affixes on your stuff. So, this is actually what I've been doing lately, and uh that is really good.

So, yeah, for any dot build, this is huge because you already have the hellfire splinter and you can't crit anyway. And in some cases, you can get even more out of this. For example, on um on like a druid or spiritborn, you can use the Arax Needle as well to buff your deadly strike even further. So, we can do this here. There is a rune word here. Uh not a rune word, actually. It's an polearm. Uh that is the only way to increase the damage of deadly strikes.

And that can get kind of crazy as well because you have 50% extra chance with the rune, you can get 75% chance, and then 100% extra damage. So, your deadly strikes deal a times 3.3, which gets pretty close to what a typical crit build achieves. And all you need is this thing and the rune. So, there is a bit of potential there, and it works with dots, which is kind of the big thing here. So, yeah. Lo rune, pretty good even for hit builds that are not pawns and not dots.

It can be useful. Then you have the Ral rune. Yeah, whatever. Gold is infinite basically in this season, especially with this 100% like charms that we get. So, just farm a bunch of like wire splinter dungeons, and you're going to be fine. But I guess you can throw them in there if you really want. Then we have the Sol rune, 50% DR for 6 seconds. It's relatively easily procced and kept up all the time. It only costs 350, so it needs like 60 offering per second.

Like this is extremely easy to achieve. However, Luck rune exists, which is kind of the same thing, just better. So, this one is 400 offering. The tooltip is wrong. It's an 8-second timer. So, yeah, 50 offering per second to get the 20% damage reduction buff. If you play a barb, you can even invest into it for even more. So, Luck is just kind of the better one, basically. But you can combine them. If you really want to be tanky, you can do both.

Most of the time though, you don't do that, and you would rather do stuff like the Bul-Kathos or so to really get some more defense. And lastly, we have Tir. Kind of interesting. So, this can solve your resources in pretty big ways, especially for war dogs right now. With blazing screen, for example, this counts every single demon kill, including the blazing screen itself, which just gives you tons of kills all the time.

There's other synergies down on the wall like as well with like killing your own demons and stuff like that. And the black soul stone from the soul binders right now, for example. But tier can just single-handedly take care of resources. Especially if any player in the mix, it can be kind of tough to keep up with resources. And usually I do something like uh Tibault's Will for this. And even then you have to invest into a bit of like resource cost reduction or resource generation rolls and these kind of things.

But if you have a tier, then uh at least on the warlocks this is easy peasy. But even for other classes, this is something that at least gets you started really easily because eight primary resource on kill when you go kind of fast and just one-shot packs and packs and packs, it will usually mean that you have primal full resources at least until you reach the boss. And if you have something to take down the boss more quickly, like an ultimate you can press like unstable currents on a sorc, or worst case you just throw in a basic skill that is a backup, then [snorts] yeah, you can kind of get started on the tier run and maybe fix your resources later with something like Tibault's.

So yeah, these are all of the runes and what to know. I'm not going to talk about the existing ones because they didn't really change. But overall, I think there's a lot of potential here for cool new combos and stuff to try. Uh especially I'm kind of interested to see if we're going to see something like the prime evil invocation stuff here. And yeah, some of this stuff like the crushing blow, the low rune isn't really good for sure.

And uh yeah, tier is also like something definitely keep an eye on. So yeah, this is what I got here on the new runes so far. I have a bunch of other videos, for example, talking about the rune words if you're looking for that. So go check those out. And otherwise, I'll keep you guys posted. Hope everyone is having a blast in season 15. And I'll see you guys next time.