Superior Runes. When are they worth it?

If you want some credibility, can you name which other Strength skills you use that justify -75hp?

The only real person with a sup rune should be the MM as the lvl of minions are higher.I don't see a Fire Ele who goes up to where the Warriors are don't need sup runes for an Air Ele who stands back I can see this.Monks should be using only minors you can try using a sup for bonding while standing back way out of the red dots.I use all minors except on my Air/Ele but I can switch to a minor.

The reason for using superior runes is strict mathematical efficiency. You're making a trade-off between your margin for error (character health) for, generally, one of two things: either a straight buff to a main power attribute, moving it from 14 to 16; or to gain a lot of extra attribute points in second and third attributes by letting you lower your base attributes to less costly levels.

Mathematically, you're giving up about 13% of your margin for error (the amount of damage you can take before you get away / a monk intervenes / everything dies, etc) - a number that increases if you make further trade-offs or pick up DP - for that boost to efficiency. What you gain from that depends on what skills you want to look at, and how many dimensions scale on them. If you're looking at getting a straight, 14-16 attribute boost:

Minion armies gain a 50% increase in potency from the superior rune, between minion durability, minion damage, and the extra minion on the cap. No character benefits nearly as much going from 14 to 16 as a Minion Master.

Spiteful Spirit and Insidious Parasite do about 25% more damage if they last their full durations. At the same time Enfeebling Blood gains very little from the extra attribute, and Reckless Haste literally gains nothing. If things die before those hexes expire naturally, you get a damage bonus on par with what you get from Barbs, 14%.

Elementalist damage skills get 10 and 13% more damage when you put on the superior. With the exception of Mind Blast and Glowing Gaze, secondary effects from your skills rarely gain anything from the attribute boost. All linearly scaling damage skills perform the same way. Defensive enchantments from Earth gain a lot of potency however, particularly Stoneflesh Aura, in addition to extra seconds that might be necessary to maintain them.

Healing skills gain between 7% (small heals) and 12% (party heals) from putting on a superior. Protection skills gain virtually nothing, usually a second or two tacked onto the end that doesn't matter that much.

Physical attackers gain about 10% extra weapon damage from putting on a superior, between base damage, extra criticals, and better skills.

---

The argument against taking superiors stems from the value of simplified gameplay. A common argument for taking a superior is that it makes you do more damage or heal for more, and the health loss isn't a big deal because you can play around it. Well, turn that on its head. If I don't take a superior rune, I don't have to play around my fragile HP total. My mistakes are less likely to be fatal; risky moves are less risky, aggressive plays less likely to go wrong.

If the primary measuring stick of PvE is time, how much time do you save when fatal mistakes become nonfatal? How much faster can you go when methodical play can be less methodical and more aggressive? How much easier does everything become when you start playing with a larger margin for error - when instead of having to do everything right to avoid death, you can play poorly more often and still come out successful?

This is part of a larger picture on the approach to the game and problems in general, and I really can't understate it - the game is easier with minors.

Mmhmm, and while nearly everyone on Page 4 is at it, perhaps they could take their debate on whether Tanks are good elsewhere? This thread is not about whether Defy Pain is a good or bad elite, it is about whether losing 75 health is worth the difference in a skills effect, and the way a team opperates.

Keeping a thread on-track ftw?

I run a Superior rune on my Elementalist for whatever element she is in. I choose to maximize the Ele's damage output, because that's what is usually expected of Ele's in PvE.

This is where your post breaks down. It's possible to play conservatively even if you have a superior. Take your average warrior. He probably has a major vigor rune on his armor if not sup. His shield (assuming sword/axe) probably has +hp. And even his weapon might have +hp. So chances are he probably has enough HP to cover for the sup. And considering how warriors only need 2-3 class runes on their armor at any given time, they can bring along some of the stackable +hp runes or the ones that reduce the legnth of certain status effects. And between his available skills in tactics and strength, he has other ways of protecting himself. Or take a protect monk with 16 in protection prayers. He could keep PS up on someone for an extra 3 seconds, meaning that rune saves him 4 energy in maintaining it. RoF gets a nearly 20% boost in effectiveness meaning you could take a single large hit non-boss pretty easily and come out ahead. A boss would have to hit you for over 160 damage instead of 140 to damage you which could make all the difference in the world. Likewise ZB gets a 30 HP healing boost.

It really comes down to personal choice and knowing how to adapt. If you can properly adapt your playstyle and/or equipment, having only 1 sup rune can be benefitial in the long run.

You cannot play as aggressively with a superior as without it without getting punished for it. This is obvious. If the chances you take and the limits you push never take you below 75 health when not wearing any superiors, you are never pushing it far enough.


There is no such thing as 'covering for the sup'. Every character starts with 670 HP. Everything else is a tradeoff against that.


Which are a tradeoff against his damage output and utility that are unlikely to counterbalance what he lost taking the superior.


The skill does not work the way you think it does.


I don't understand how you could possibly get that figure. If Reversal of Fortune triggered for max EVERY SINGLE TIME and you didn't have Divine Favor, you're looking at a 10% boost in swing (84/76) from taking a superior. But in practice it doesn't trigger for the full swing every time, the higher the value the less often it hits for full. Reversal of Fortune in practice gains *very little* from your protection spec.


20, from 170 to 190 base, ~200 to 220 in practice. An even 10% boost that is largely inconsequential on a protted target.


Actually, no, it doesn't. There are actual mathematical, strategic, and tactical concerns that make some choices better than others. You can only dismiss it all as personal choice if you are not concerned at all with effectiveness, a viewpoint that is entirely counter to the purpose of this thread.

In PvE it doesn't really matter to be honest. Only at 50% or more DP do you really start to feel the sting of those runes and if you're running a competent build you shouldn't hit that point.

Other than monks, I always run superior/major runes in the headpieces. Honestly, even with -75 health, I never die outside of the rare spike or overaggro. Those situations, 75 health would not have made a difference. I suppose if you find that you or your heroes die too often, sure, go minor. Otherwise, I don't really see the problem with superiors.

As they say - PvE is easy - efficiency and speed are the factors here, not safety (save for survivor titles). Obviously, if you can go through a zone in 30 minutes without dying, why would you drop down your efficiency and damage output as a group just to ensure you won't die?

3 monks are usually overkill, too. Seriously, be a little daring and "aggressive" as Ensign puts it - and go with less health. Remember, the best defense is a good offense.

nothing to argue about monks IMO. you should NEVER take any sup runes on a 60 armor except maybe fire ele (savannah heat=30 more damage with sup)

with 60 AL, you get hit for 40-70 by an axe warrior if you don't have any prot. so the -75 health you loss from the rune means that you'll be kill one hit before than normal. if somoene drop to 50 HP, you infuse, but with a sup rune, he'll be dead already. casters already have a shitty armor and you're giving them shitty HP with the sup runes? GL in PVP lol



for Warriors, I think a sup weapon rune is very good. you have 80 armor + sup absorbtion+ atleast one knight's insignia. that'S -6 damage reduce almost every time + highest AL in the game. who cares if you have 515 life?

and stop saying that the damage difference with a sup weapon is not enough to loose 75HP. what you forgot is that every point in your weapon mastery increase the chance of getting a critical hit. so with 16 instead of 14, you'll have alot more chance of getting a critical hit. so if you get the crit on excecutioner's strike, you hit for ~130 on 60 armor because of the crit and the 4 extra dmaage of the skill.

personnaly, I think an axe warrior should always have a sup runes because he's goal is to spike wich is 10 times better with a sup. if you use a sword, you don't really need a sup because your goal is to pressure.




as for PVE......PVE=easy, I succeed guardian of elona+tyria+cantha with a sup axe rune always on.

I believe you've missed ensign's point. You can be more aggressive without a superior rune because you have more health and thus a larger margin for error.

The only time I even consider using a superior is on a MM, as the difference between 14 and 15 death magic is huge. Otherwise it's minors all the way.

i thought warmos died.

i guess not.

/sigh

I completely understand his point, I just disagree with it. Having an extra 75 health does not entitle people to be a little more reckless. A "margin for error," aside from lag and D/C, is based entirely on how reckless a team is. Being careful and strategic with less health takes up little to no extra time.

People here are saying 'if you're kiting, you're not doing damage.' Here's some news, if everyone has minor runes to get the most amount of health as possible, well, the mobs have to attack someone. They're not going to look at the group and say "Oh, they're all high in health, f** 'em." No, they will still attack the lowest health, even if that means someone with 590 health. That person will still have to kite, hero or otherwise.

Of course there is always a point where that 75 health does make a difference. That's why I said "I suppose if you find that you or your heroes die too often, sure, go minor." Certain areas, such as some areas of Torment and elite missions, that -75 might just be too much health loss. Fine, go major or minor. Some heroes that appear to be dying too much, like eles specifically, they might be better off with minor. Of course, monks should probably never use anything but minor except for 55's.

i don't know if it has been said, but for necromancers, the -75 health is actually preferible in many cases.. specificly when you are carrying around sacrifice spells. when palying as a MM, the +3 increases the lvl of your minnions while reduceing how much life you sac with Blood of the Master.

and while a superior rune is only a couple of points of dmg to a blood or curse necro - putting a soul reaping one on is good for 3 extra points of energy when things die - and that might make the difference between haveing enough energy to cast a spell when you raely need it or not.

Playing too agressively is what Leeroy's do. Many PvE encounters fail because someone rushes or pulls a mob too many that they couldn't handle even with the extra HP. If having 75 hp less to work with makes people play better, then perhaps having a Sup Rune would be the best thing for the game.


Fixed that for you.


He's got 200 attribute points to work with, that's plenty to have 16 in one stat and 10 in the other two once runes are accounted for. Or he could be 16/13/4. Anyways you have enough leeway that you don't have to put all your points in swords and be able to do nothing else. If that were the case, it'd be nearly impossible to solo farm.


Actually it's simple math. That's 3 extra seconds of protection or what have you.


I wasn't assuming +1 +1 for base... my bad.


There's more than one way to be effective in a lot of circumstances. Just because one tactic works well doesn't mean that's the only one that can, save for some specific instances. That's when personal choice comes into play. If you can do either one, play whichever one you want to. BTW, don't put too much faith in numbers alone... there is such a thing as a paper champoin in the NFL and people like Akili Smith can put up big workout numbers and turn out to be duds.

When I run as a MM (not an MM hero) I use two Superior runes: DM and SR, in addition to a Superior Vigor. The reduction in HP makes it much easier to run both BotM and OoU together, as well as giving me the full 10 minions while also allowing me to spread several points to other attributes.

16 DM
11 SR
4 Blood
9 Healing (or whatever)

That's a pretty good attribute spread leaving the MM at 380hp. For defense, you have Dark Bond, 10 minions, and a Prot Monk or two.

The only other situation where Superior runes excel is in Smiting (vs Undead) since any small gain would be doubled yet again.

By starting with 670hp he meant 60hp gear and full health runes (no excuse not to run those). Every different rune (energy or whatnot) you put on is sacrificing hp for whatever you feel you want instead. Running a minor sacrifices 10hp for +1 attribute, etc.

Superior Runes are for people who like playing Juggernauts in pve's normal mode.

I have a major protection rune headpiece. It allows me to squeek out an extra 1 second on Aegis on certain builds, and that's the only reason I have it.

Ensign brought up something I was going to post as well.
Superior runes for me mean extra attribute points to spread around.
If my build has certain break points that I just can't quite reach, I can use a sup rune on the attribute that is the highest and get a whack of attribute points to meet the rest of the builds requirements.

Playing aggressively is what good players do, because killing the enemy is your priority. If you go within 1hp of dying on every character but kill the enemy, you win. Your objective is to break them first, and you do that faster by punching them in the face. If you aggro too much, that is something a poor player will do regardless of their runes.

Wrong. A character, by default, should have as much health as possible. Any change of rune/inscription/weaponry is a trade-off of health for effect. You don't think of 'how much health do I gain from this setup', you consider 'how much below my maximum health am I?', the same way many monks consider their energy always out of 72, the swaps determining how little they have available in favor of defense/effect.

... (This is short-form for 'this statement is too stupid to reply to')

You usually are better off with two majors if you want to spread atts.

The more health you have around PvE monsters, the less likely they are to attack you. And the less health the more likely they are to come after you.

My great revelation came when Factions first came out, leveling up an Assassin. All the time, evil monsters were ganging up on me, and I was the favorite target of ranged casters! Then a friend suggested going all minor runes. I did and the difference was like night and day.

HP is overrated.

I'll just give the observation I have made during alliance battles. Playing as an Assassin, if I attack someone with a superior rune on, they are pretty much dead, and dead quick. Someone with a major or minor rune at least may get a spell off with like 20 health remaining.

With the ease of this game, I can't see anyone even needing a Superior Rune unless they are doing top end PvP, and I say that only because I don't know what they do. For all I know, they might not use them either.

o ok.



They don't.

My PVE mesmers Signet of Illusions builds always have a +4 for illusion.

I use superiors in PvE, because I don't have any reason not to. I know how to kite, when to retreat, etc. so why not be as usefull as possible? I even use superiors on my monk, tho he has a head piece with minor rune, if I play Hard Mode or something that isn't NM. But in PvP, it's minor runes all the way (expect on my ranger in AB, he needs both high expertise and marksmanship, while having descent wildreness survival )

Health like energy should be managed.

If you start out in a fight with full health, then continuously loose health and hope to kill the other party right before your own health runs out, you're doing something wrong IMO. As simple as that.

Rather you should start out with a certain ammount, loose some, get some prot, get some healing and your health stops going down, and even starts to go up again *during* the fight. Then it goes down again and up again etc. Thats what monks, ritualists, paragons, self prot and self healing etc are for. If that 75HP made the difference between dying and staying alive, sure your better off with than without, but your team did 'manage' your health badly.

You should be at >75% full health after a fight, not at <75 health.

Each and all proffession has ways to help himself/others out defensively. The new PVE only skills have added a few more options for everyone as well. There are actually loads of ways any character can increase his own and his teams survivability on the battle field that have way more impact on your health than the pure HP you start with.

I'm not saying sup runes are better than minor ones. Most of the time it doesn't make one bit of differense one way or the other in PvE. I'm saying that in general you shouldn't need those +75hp so you can take a sup rune if you want. I hate the general tendency in these forums where people say that maxing your HP is the best if not the only thing to avoid death. In the end if you don't have the necessary defenses, then your health will start dropping, continue to drop and then you die. unless the foes die faster off course, which in PvE is usually the case anyway.

A good offense is the best defense, but that doesn't mean you cannot have both.

That's why you dont use PvE monks but bring heroes and manually prot spirit..

Btw, apart from the fact that spirit bond isn't very useful in PvE (You try to get all aggro one 1 or 2 people and it only triggers on 10 hits) prot spirit and spirit bond work together regardless of the amount of health you have. The ' 600hp monk' didn't in fact need 600hp.

In most PvE areas you can get by with prot spirit shield of absorption lod and dwaynas kiss as only heals and prots, you just got to use them well, something that has proven to be quite difficult for PvE monks..

That's what many pro-minors seem to forget here.
Health is an easy way to cheat AI, to make it attack highly armored characters and leave alone the softies.
Worst, pro-minors seem to forget that you can switch to your minor set when you want, especially if you have a PvP ready character. When things tend to go wild, you just switch end of story.
And sorry for yesitsrob, but 480 or 600 Hp doesn't make any difference against thorn wolfs/Aatxes. They hit for 300-400, so either you're dead in two hits or you're dead in two hits. At this rate of damage, 75 HP won't make any difference. What will make difference is your ability to block/prot/blind/weakness them before they can tear you apart.

Bah, people play like they want.

I don't go under 75 hp enough to justify not using a superior in all cases except for DoA and some hard mode zones.

I have a question that's sort of related to this topic...

Why is there a health penalty for Superior Runes in the first place? Is ANet so fearful of having some kind of "l33t" super-build that gives you a whopping 10-15% more damage/healing on skills? What the heck would it affect by removing all health penalty from all runes? Just unlock all Superiors automatically for PvP and wouldn't everybody be on the same table?

I guess that I'm just really surprised that Guild Wars implemented such a confusing rune system, because it only encourages min-maxing more than ever. I can understand that ANet wants to keep things level. But at the same time, this makes it probably the only RPG that I know where people actually feel extreme disappointment when they get a rare.

That is, many rare, Superior Runes are often less valuable (and even trash) compared to common, Minor Runes of the same attribute. For instance, I'd say that for half of the professions, getting a Superior Rune in your profession's primary attribute is only useful in gimmick builds and that's it.

Warriors don't benefit as much from high strength as they do from tactics skills (other than Sentinel Armor, which is NOT the "uber-l33t" armor for warriors). Elementalists would do better with high damage versus high energy storage. Monks should just put their points in healing/protection (or heck, smiting) versus divine favor. Necromancers aren't going to make soul reaping their highest stat; what good is awesome energy management if you're not killing anything.

The only changes that I would see is that suddenly the market would shift and commons would be really cheap, major runes would actually be used, and superiors suddenly command high prices. Well, shouldn't it be that way in the first place? Why should rare and uncommon items be less useful (and have lower value) than common items?

lolwut.

12 chars

I laughed, just a little

Well, this thread has been nicely derailed by (admittedly hillarious) picture spam, but I'll go ahead and try to get a post in. Ensign pretty well covered the technical analysis, so I'll just go with my personal experience.

On most of my characters, I prefer minor runes, because it improves my survival rate, and I rarely find it any more difficult to push through PvE enemies with 14 in my offensive attributes. The main exception to this is obviously my Minion Master. As the math pretty clearly shows, those two extra attribute points make a world of difference to her effectiveness.

I'm also currently wearing a Superior Illusion on my Mesmer, who is greatly enjoying how Signet of Illusion allows me to bypass the silly title grind stuff while throwing around Mursaat summons and Vanguard assassinations. Having two fairly powerful level 21 minions on demand while still throwing around some of the better illusion spells while they do their thing has been very effective for me.

Sure, then threads stating how imbalanced Chromatic Drakes and how hard GWEN is will continue to be created.