the new rune designs

I just want to say that I like the new rune designs. Though I haven't yet learned how to read them (and so to tell apart minor from superior w/out the description) it still makes them look much more ... rune-ish... good move Anet.

they look great to me but i haven't noticed any difference in anything other than class

yea real smooth looking runes

Unfortunately the update didn't effect all of the existing runes.. ergo all of your older runes will still all look like minors.. any new ones you salvage should have the new icons.

The point is that now, when you find unidentified armor, you expert salvage it PRIOR to idetifying it. You then end up with an unidentified rune (hopefully). The rune name will tell the Class (Monk, Warrior, Ele., etc.[if no class is identified then it is a Viggor rune]). In addition to the class the quality is told by the new graphic...

Minor=Wrinkled Paper
Major=Square Box
Superior=Detailed Scroll (havent seen one yet but this is what Im told)

So now you have an unidentified rune of a known profession and a known quality. If you are not in the need of that profession/quality rune it is of greater advantage to others to aquire the runes prior to identification. This way players who buy/aquire runes can unlock the rune, giving them the ability to now have that rune available to them when building PVP chars.

Prior to this, if a rune was purchased, it had already been identified/unlocked by someone else. The new owner could use the rune on his/her armor, but, when creating a PVP char the rune was not unlocked for the new owner.

-Nim

I have a superior vitality & yesterday I found a purple armor. I salvaged it un-ID'd and a rune came out which looked *exactly* like my superior vitality.

Absolutely identical. There is no way anyone could tell those two apart.

Well, I then identified the rune, and it was a _minor_ vitality rune.

I then found a minor swordsmanship rune. It looked completely different.

My conclusion:
1) Old runes in your inventory HAS changed.
2) You can tell what type of rune it is you find (e.g. all vitality runes have a runic W on them), but not if it's minor, major, superior.

From left to right: minor, major and superior elementalist rune.

Actually you can visually tell the type of runes apart before they are identified. The reason your old superior vigor and your new minor vigor ended up looking the same is old identified runes from your inventory were all converted to the rune graphics, albeit they all look like the minors for some reason (ie major and superior runes you had in inventory took on the new minor rune graphics). Here are the new graphics for vigors (left to right, superior major and minor) so you can tell the quality fairly easily, profession specific runes have the same shapes, just different symbols/colours on them:

Does this mean that you need to salvage the armor first to get the rune and then ID because if you ID first and then salvage you lose the rune?

No.

If you ID before you salvage, you still unlock whether or not you get the rune out. The previously-mentioned method is what you do to help guildies or sell unidentified runes.

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It is a very messy period right now, so take a good look before you click "accept" button. I have at least two versions of major marksmanship, one wrinkled paper version, one square paper version.

That's rather odd... I noticed that after the patch, every single one of my runes had changed.

Yes this is true, because ALL OLD style runes have the NEW minor rune graphics. Only the new runes will show the different major and superior graphics. (to the best of my knowlege this is true)