Purple war runes are such an essential part to having a complete character, that I refuse to play my alts that don't have them. I have ran so many solo zones I have lost count. I recommend going back to the way the old war runes worked. You looted once, which unlocked for that character, so that you may purchase again or transfer to an alt. Another option would be to include all the purple war runes on merchant but for a higher etyma cost.
I agree. Maybe not exactly like this but some sort of alternate avenue seems needed if the drop rate isn't increased outright. I can see why the devs wouldn't want the obvious, best ones to be buyable, but doesn't seem unreasonable for ones like magnitude, onslaught and cyclical battering.
Solo zones were always a pita to get war runes from. Why not run the heroic zones on a geared char and roll for alts? The drop rate in there got upped slightly on the 7th May, from 8% to 15%.
Definitely support this thread. I'm sick and tired of running solo zones and getting nothing, and watching someone else literally get them on every other run and then bragging about how many rune patterns they have in their bank. Yes, I'm jealous.
+1. Make them buyable if you've 'unlocked' them. Even if its for stupid prices like 200 Etyma, it beats facing the RNG.
Unfortunately, it's a completely different implementation. Setting them up so that once you have looted them you can buy them is a very large amount of work. We will look at it and see what else can be done. We will also try to make sure that they have a better system for the expansion this year.
I actually enjoyed the DoV 1.0 implementation of yellow/red runes, and once they were unlocked on a character, they were purchasable for alts. Not sure why I didn't notice this during ToV beta and feedback it, but after playing through it, I would like a mix implementation for the next expansion. Please allow them to drop as patterns, but then once unlocked let them be purchasable on a vendor for the currency of the year.
How do you feel about the token system allowing you to buy any purple rune if you've completed every heroic zone? Something that would encourage heroics, somewhat encourage farming, etc... Is this a case where we could provide useful ideas or have you great folks already come up with something?
Imagine over 1,000 hidden quests to make this War Rune Unlock system work. Your head may not have exploded reading that, but the EQ2 designer who had to build all those is still in a rubber room with one of those funny shirts with the sleeves that run round the back. Personally, I think a much easier solution would be that War Runes always drop in a stack of 5. Most War Runes won't stack. The way they are awarded in solo and heroic zones is as an auto-consuming mystery crate so they are only good for alts. Why not just award 5 of them instead of having to deal with unlocks and character flags?
I'm not following what you mean by this... must be the after lunch coma I'm in, but I'm assuming it has to do with the coding of that system? I'm not asking for a nightmare workload but that system was excellent to me.
On our end while seeming very streamlined the implementation was less than elegant to put it lightly. I'm a big believer that nothing except for the EXTREMELY rare or very common shouldn't be left purely to RNG. Anything that seems to have a confirmed drop rate less than 25% seems to be met with much frustration. I still remember back in TSO when I was helping my brother farm for the bard drums. We never got it to drop in our countless runs but he did get enough tokens to simply buy the item. The price was high but it put a definite 'cap' on how much we would have to farm, something the RNG does not have. I wonder if they could do something like a recipe where the adornment itself is a component to make more. For example a recipe that calls for 'winds of obol' and 100 draconic incense that would make 2 'winds of obol' the net result being just one extra 'winds of obol.' It would be like unlocking it without all the quest/NPC shenanigans. I do believe shenanigans is the proper technical term here iirc.
Maybe something has changed for the solos instances as well. I have been running solo instances on two toons like mad to try to get the war runes to drop. I have only seen 1 (one!!) drop. Between last night and today two have dropped for me after running about 8 zones. 8 zones (2 drops) vs 100 + zones (1 drop). I am still amazed and figured the drop rate must have been upped.
Even though the current system isn't ideal it's still 1,000 times better then the last xpac where gear was pre-adorned. I'm still a fan of the DoV unlocking system. It was the easiest all around do deal with. Even with some runes being really rare. From what I've seen the problem with the current system is one pattern (windtorn) has three of the most wanted adorns and for some reason drops the least. I know I have multiple extra of the other patterns but never got a single windtorn doing solo's. I ended up getting the three adorn buying them with DKP for raid drops. If all the adorns were on a single pattern to choose off and the drop rate was the same there'd be a lot less unhappy people.
Here's another point of view to consider. Although getting needed war runes on a main is a bit of effort, getting ideal war runes on alts is insanely hard. I know a quite a few people who have been discouraged altogether about playing alts this expansion due to that fact. This means people are less motivated to be in game outside of designated activities, and less interested in running zones multiple times. This simply further reduces the player pool for pugs ect. I personally have 4-5 characters decked to the teeth in tov raid gear,avatar loot, rare drops from heroic,,,,,and I cannot get simple runes for them. I fully support a return to the DoV system of rune unlocks for future expansions.
Couldn't agree more and quoted for emphasis. I played between November 2013 and May 2014 and saw 1 windtorn pattern drop in all that time despite doing solo's and heroic's daily. Winds of Obol, Screams of Battle and whatever the Damage Reduction/Proc increase rune is called... all on one pattern? Crazy. The only other runes that are worth anything are Bolstered Endurance/Attributes and maybe the priest HP/CB rune and group potency rune. Something else that would make a lot of people happy is if the "useless" runes (wards etc) scaled appropriately to ToV.. at least then you wouldn't roll your eyes when you see a pattern full of runes that are pointless. I ended up having to trio Fabled Djinn Master just because it was a guaranteed purple rune and at least one of us could probably use it on an alt if nothing else (there's several 30 min's of my life per boss that i'll never get back)
Couldn't agree more. I used to love playing my alts and I had 3-4 I played regularly. Now I almost never log any of them. Mostly it's a carry over from the last xpac (worst loot / adornment method ever imagined). The whole destroy gear to get adornments ruined my fun of playing my alts. The current system isn't near as bad but it's still a pain and I've yet to regain that interest in playing any of my alts.
