Tree of Savior Forum

Re:Build Rune Caster. Still a Failure

Class and Rank Wizard
#1

I had hopes that re:build would actually manage to put this classs in line but the sad truth is that the class still has no purpose (and no, being able to craft scroll doesn’t fix the class)

Reminder that this class is supposed to be a class with high cast times (although it’s easy to get close to instant cast now) and spells with relatively long cd but great power per cast. Let’s look at those skills:

Rune of Ice: 2s cast time, 15s cd, does two hits in a ridiculous area and the freeze actually manages to be conditional. Excuse me but where is the powerful ability in there? Let’s look at another 15s cd skill shall we, it’s called “Op tiger that wipes the entire screen and provide a burst of speed”. Yeah, i think i got my point across. Next!

Rune of Giant: It’s a buff that you can maintain forever that makes you walk faster, add a whatever damage on stomp (which even got nerfed because jumping eats stamina now, why the hell is that even a thing now?) and some extra hp. Oh and it also only allow you to use your rune caster skill so obviously those should be absolutely bonkers with such a huge drawback, no? Woops. Shoggoth buffer. Next!

Rune of Protection: You’ll cast your spells instantly so that damage reduction is meaningless and the duration is where you want it to be at level 1, it’s a one point wonder. Until 350 this skill doesn’t even do anything is a better way to word it, afterward it gets a good attribute. What the hell? Next!

Rune of Justice: Small AOE, 30s cd, mediocre damage. Again let’s pick some other laser type skills at random. Oh hey it’s Rubric! Don’t think i need to say more, but let’s keep the humiliation going shall we, remeber Omnyouji and that tiger skill? Well for 20s cd you also have a skill with the same amount of multi hits than Justice, with slightly more damage per hits and that wipes the entire screen! Next!

Rune of Destruction: Honestly that one is somewhat decent but that’s about it

Rune of Rock: Again it’s alright but that’s about it, nothing impressive or that would make you want to even bother with the class. TIger still thousand of times better than this.

And that’s it, that’s all the skill you get, 2 terrible attack skills, one buff that doesn’t even do anything until 350, one that only purpose is moving around the map faster, cosmetic and picking the class as a necro slave, and 2 okish abilities you don’t really want to begin with.
Still needs a rework, actual strong skills, anything, this class is just not good in it’s current state.

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#2

yes my dude, come here for a friendly hug and let’s drink at what RC was supposed to be

#3

I never tried RC after the re build patch but I tried it before and it was fairly good for my play style. So how would you go around and improve it? Any suggestion? :thinking:

#4

It is indeed very lackluster… I feel like Rune of Ice should turn back into an ice buff, at least we would have synergies with Cryo, Ele and Onmy, all three good classes overall. This “buffed Freezing Sphere” version is not that good…

I love the class concept and costume, but I think I’ll end up changing it for something else…

#5

at least before Rebuild it had a decent amount of overheat, was good with cryo, was possible to make a full giant build (it was my farmer, rest in peace best giant EU) and it had a great buff to share.
Now it’s just a class that takes a full circle without offering almost nothing compared to other regular classes

it’s not up to us to suggest things for this class, we are not the devs and even if we wanted it’s completely useless to do so

p.s. yes i’m mad

1 Like
#6

IIRC at least on the full re:build patch RC is a skill scroll crafting class, but we won’t get to test that prior the free class reset event ends.
Imho they rushed this partial re:build release, it’s poorly planned and there are way too many bugs.

#7

you can craft scroll already, just sit down and you’ll have an extra action to do so

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#8

Oh, didn’t manage to test it as I changed RC to WL as soon as I realized they nerfed it to death (1 dgn run), thanks for the heads-up!

Edit: well, take it as a crafting class, still better than miko :joy:

#9

At this point my fear is that “skill scroll crafting class” means the death of the class, historically RC was a high risk high reward, single trick pony, with the ice wall + PP + Rune of Ice being an “I win button” but not even that the class has anymore, with Onmyoji doing what defined Rune Casters as the highest damage burst in the game better, easier, and with no penalties (casting can’t be canceled and no need for rune of ice 5 min CD)

The new Rune of Rock is decent, but Rune caster remains a 3 skill class (justice, destruction and rock) with 1 joke skill, a reasonable 1 point buff (no one will spend time casting with the rod attribute tbh) and a skill that goes all against the fantasy of a high cooldown, high casting time, resource consuming, flashy with huge damage class.

RoI isn’t flashy anymore, I can barely see the skill animation, the damage is … meh? Only the first casted skill has any noticeable casting time and it has the lowest cooldown of all RC skills, at this point the only thing left from the original idea is the resource cost.

Honestly the old cryo > kino > RC is more fun to play than before… but that is a consequence of the general rebalance not because of synergy, since RC has none, bar shoggoth and bonus damage on slowed enemies and from what I know people didn’t make necro > RC very often and chrono > RC was never very useful as support since RoG was always very limited.

It is kinda sad that maybe one of the oldest synergies in the game was thrown away, playing cryo > kino > RC from before rank 8 was introduced was hard, you had no damage outside rune caster skills, that had 40 sec+ cooldowns, you had to hold yourself with crowd control and chip damage, managing cooldowns so that when a rune caster skill was available you could freeze everything and then wipe the map or once every 5 minutes, vaporize bosses, so hard in so many ways, but so rewarding I can’t even attempt to explain. Players asking WTF just happened after a boss was vaporized with ice was priceless and made the hell of leveling up worth it.

I have almost no hope of ever having that experience again, undoubtedly it was the best class I ever played on a mmorpg, maybe on any game.

However as I have nothing to lose I’m going to make a list of sugestions for “fixing” Rune Caster, as simple as possible so that maybe a dev might be able to understand and evaluate the proposal

Rune caster suggestions

  • Class fantasy: Long cooldowns, cast times, needs runes, extremely high damage and flashy skills, needs to setup

  • Skills:
    Rune of Destruction: Keep as it is, maybe synergies with deployables, destroy them and increases even more the skill damage (Ice wall releases shards, fire balls explode, taoist charms explodes etc)

    Rune of Justice: Mostly equal, add synergy with ice wall, when hitting an ice wall tile the laser is multiplied and re-released on multiple directions, but with smaller rays, not moving during cast increases the laser width and length but not the damage.

    Rune of Giants: Either remove it, make it work with all skills or change it so it increases the size of players summoned entities instead of player characters, it makes necromancer summons bigger, Ice wall tiles bigger, taoist charms bigger, quarrel shooter shield bigger etc, it doesn’t increase the AoE ratio nor damage, only make them target more enemies.

    Rune of Protection: Knockdown protection is nice, but otherwise the skill does nothing anymore, maybe change the effect based on weapon type, rods get the current effect while staffs make a small version of paladin barrier

    Rune of Rock: Add atribute to leave some shards on the floor after casting, hitting them with Rune of Justice charges them, while Destruction Explodes them for damage

    Rune of Ice: Freezes the whole screen floor increasing the power of Ice spells and make the floor slippery for all entities, rune of rock shards get covered with ice and become able to reflect the Rune of Justice laser, Ice wall damage gets a reasonable boost different effects happens based on spells casted after:
    Fire spells: melts the ice around them and deal additional ice property damage.
    Lightning spells: have the AoE attack ratio increased.
    Earth spells: deal extra ice damage but doesn’t melt the ice.
    Psychokinesis spells: makes the ice vibrate increasing their range.
    Ice spells: huge damage boost.

  • Attributes:

    Rune Caster: Staff Mastery: Increases all Rune Caster skills base casting time to 3 seconds, reduce cooldown of all rune caster skills, modify the skill factor increase per level of all skills (Longer casting time, lower cooldown, huge damage increase)

    Rune Caster: Rod Mastery: Reduces all Rune Caster skills cooldown, modify the skill factor increase per level of all skills, rune caster skills can be interrupted(Almost no casting time, lower cooldown, a little lower damage, lower safety)

    Rune Caster: Skilled Casting: Remains the same, with some alterations for the staff mastery.

    Rune of Rock: Shards: Some rocks remains on the floor for synergy with other skills.

    Rune of Ice: Flash Freeze: Enemies get frozen for 1 sec after the skill is casted.

    Rune of Protection: Safety Step: Allies doesn’t slide on the ice made by Rune of Ice.

    Rune of Destruction: Annihilation: Destroy all deployables in the area and deal additional damage based on what was destroyed.

  • Playstyle: Setup mage, needs to position deployables (Ice wall, charms, spirits, fire balls etc), enemies, and use sequences of skills with cast time to deal huge amounts of damage.

  • Notes: Rune Caster is often looked down for having no identity, however all skills can thematically chain with each other if one look at the class as a setup mage.

@STAFF_Bob

Or at least make that gravity pole can make the Ice wall shards without the Fire fox shikigami

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#10

The only reason I played a Runecaster was because I wanted to collect all classes. Or else I would have gotten Pyro or Kino instead. Onmyoji’s AOE wipes this class. Even as mediocre elementalist (without Pyro) is, it is still better than Runecaster.

Is Rune of Destruction actually good? I don’t know if its because of me playing it wrongly or other reasons but the AOE is pretty small? The damage isn’t very high as well and it has such a high CD? Meteor is like so much better.

#11

Are they still going to be making changes to classes post re:build? It seems like not only rune caster, but a lot of classes are weak/lack synergy after the rebuild update. I hope rune caster will get reworked asap to at least revert rune of ice’s ability.

#12

Every enemy hit releases a projectile that hits another enemy, so the more enemies you can group up the higher the damage

#14

Since the release of this hidden class, i found it unfortunate that his rôle was limited to a combination with Cryoomancer and Prychokino around the use of a single skill of these three classes (Rune of Ice / Ice Wall / Psychic Pressure). Or in complement to the Thaumaturge, Linker and Enchanter around the Rune of Giant skill wich didn’t bring much (the use of the jump + basic attack being qhuickly pretty boring). The class ended up having no flavor and his skills being too slow and constraining in comparison with other wizard classes, but it wasn’t dramatic since this class occupied only one rank of the ten available at the end. In re:Build the players are forced to take three classes and in this case, Rune Caster becomes really useless, even more by losing Rune of Ice wich becomes a simple weak ice attack, and with the transfer of the three support classes that with the Rune Caster composed the only viable basic attack wizard (the only reason to use Rune of Giant) to the Scout tree, left Rune Caster with almots nothing. Quite sad.

I’m totally agree with the conclusion of Umbriel. I think focusing the gameplay of this class around the risk and reward, with long charging but very effective and powerful skills is a good idea. Also, making this class more static, but to compensate the fact that the character is rooted when charging his skills, allowing him to reach almots the entire screen with large sized skills, would make Rune Caster a class very different from the others wizard class.

I will try to suggest ways to modify this class, trying to avoid making it too powerfull but at least a little more attractive and easily combinable and strategic.

Rune of Rock [15lvl] [40sec] [Cast: 6sec] Installation / Offensive / Buff
Menhir duration [5+lvl sec => 20sec] [Width: Five installations on a medium size area. One in the center, in front of the caster, the other four equidistant from the one in the center.] [High damage when the installations appear]
Five menhirs come out of the ground, hit, repel and knock down the monsters in the collision area.
Cinq menhirs sortent du sol, blessent, repoussent et font tomber les monstres présents dans la zone d’impact.
Menhirs can take several hits before being destroyed and grant to the the Rune Caster while he’s near a menhir a [20xlvl => 300] block bonus (halved for the allies).
Increases the power of Rune Caster Earth property skills by [10+2xlvl => 40%] while he is in themenhirs area of effect.
Attribute : Increases the Rune Caster’s resistance to Earth element by 20% while he stand in the area of effect.

Rune of Ice [15lvl] [30sec] [Cast: 4sec] Magic circle / Offensive
Circle duration [10sec] [Width: Medium sized circle around the caster] [Low damages but occuring every second]
A frozen lake is formed on the ground and hits every second the monsters while inflicts the slow and chill alteration as lons as they stay on the circle. At each hit, monsters have 25% chance of being frozen for 2sec.
Increases the power of Rune Caster Ice property skills by [10+2xlvl => 40%] while he’s on the frozen lake.
If menhirs are installed when Rune of Ice is casted, they become covered with ice. Monsters who hit the iced menhirs have 50% chance of being frozen for 4sec. These installations react the same way as Ice Wall, producing ice shards when attacked.
Attribute : Increases the Rune Caster’s resistance to Ice element by 20% while he stand in the area of effect.

Rune of Justice [15lvl] [10sec] [Cast: 2sec] Beam / Offensive
Damage [2sec] [Width: Tight and long axis un front of the caster] [Low damage but repeated and could be amplified]
Fires a ray of light with 10% chance to blind per hit during 4sec.
This laser can interact with several installations such as Rune of Rock, Fire Ball, Evil Spirit, Ice Wall, Fire Wall, Hallucination, Blink, etc. wich modifies the element of Rune of Justice as well as its shape and range and increases a little its power.

Rune of Giants [10lvl] [30sec] [Cast: 4sec] Magic Circle / Buff
Circle duration [10sec] [Width: Medium sized circle in front of the caster]
Increases the size of the magic circles by [1+lvl/20 => 1.5] for the Rune Caster (max x1,2 for the allies).
Increases the duration of the magic circles and installations in the area by [1+lvl/2sec => 6sec] (max 3sec for the allies).
Increases the size of monsters entering the area as well as their collision / damage box by 1.2.
Attribute : Concentrates the effect of the rune on one monster doubling its size and the range of its attacks, but reducing its resistance to magic attacks by 50%.
Attribute : Concentrates the effect of the rune on one summon making it 1.5x bigger and increasing ils physical power by 30%.

Rune of Protection [10lvl] [30sec] [Cast: 2sec] Aura / Buff
Buff duration [10+5xlvl sec => 60sec] [Width: Tight area around the caster]
Decreases physical and magical damage recieved by [20+3xlvl% => 50%] while a skill is casted or a stance maintained (max 30% for the allies).
Increases by [5xlvl => 50] the HP of the installations around the caster.
Attribute : Increases resistance to the 8 elements by 10%.

Rune of Destruction [5lvl] [50sec] [Cast: 6sec] Wide Area / Offensive
Instant damage [Width: Very large area taking almost the entire screen] [Very high damage]
A wave of destruction is emitted from the caster that hits everything in his path and causes heavy damage to the installations surrounding. enemy
If installations are destroyed by the wave, an explosion occurs around the installations causing
Attribute : Increases the Rune Caster’s resistance to Dark element by 20% for 10sec after Rune of Destruction activation.
Attribute : Don’t destroy the installations of the allies.
Attribute : Don’t destroy the installations of the Rune Caster.

Just my small contribution, hoping that IMC decides to enrich this class with new concepts (and do the same for many other classes, such as Featherfoot, Chronomancer, Appraiser, Dragoon, Kabbalist, Pardoner, Monk, Enchanter and Squire <= The ones, i think, who need a little love). But the developers are on the right path.

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#15

Other than Runecaster, I honestly would like to see rework to Featherfoot, Shadowmancer, Chronomancer and Sage. For now Featherfoot and Shadowmancer is suppose to be single target DPS oriented but at the moment it does not actually do quite enough to justify it. Chronomancer is OK but I do have a few suggestions which I think might make Chrono more fun and have more synergy with other classes.

Forward circle: Create a magic circle (maybe slightly bigger than the AOE of pass) for a set duration that increases the duration of magic circles in the area. This allows synergy with skills such as Flame Ground/Heavy Gravity/Fire Pillar/Toyou/Ultimate Dimension etc etc.

Also, it would be nice for Slow to be a magic circle that slows enemies that enters the magic circle area. Ideally having it the size of Stop/Pass. I think these changes could really help Chronomancer to be much better in parties.

Also, instead of Pass being a 1 time cast, make it a magic circle that stays on the ground. Allies who step into the AOE will have their skills cd shortened for 1 time, meaning it cannot be triggered multiple times. One problem with Pass in the party is that sometimes it might not affect all party members.

Some rework for Sage would probably be some changes to the enlarge or duplicate attribute. Also, since Sage skills do more damage when enemies are slowed, it would work better with the new Chronomancer changes.

Not sure about summon based classes. Some people seem to like it some don’t. I personally think summoning 5 skeletons just takes too much time.

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#16

Rune of Ice seems ok to me (skill factor is quite high and cooldown is short). The only thing I want back is the ability to cast it while running (like Rune of Justice… and like it was for Freezing Sphere).

SHHHHHHHT DAMMIT!!! You’re gonna get us nerfed the best skill wizards get atm :smiley:

Yes, Rune of Giants is complete garbage. It has no synergy with anything else except for necro now that Enchanter is gone to Scout. Putting more than 1 point only increases duration, so you’re stuck in giant form longer without being able to use any skill except runes and having no other benefit than a meagre 20% extra hps and defense. This is stupid… Duration should be fixed (30sec) and extra hp/defense should increase with skill level (4% per point).

Yes, this is one point skill just for the attribute. Divide the skill factor by 2 and remove “while casting” and you would be good to go…

You have Warlock in your build, this is 14 points. You don’t have Warlock in your build, this is zero point. But in that case, where the hell do you put your points as Rune Caster??? At least, bring back the 2 overheat!

Invaluable in Uphill Defense, Earth Tower or Challenge Mode. This skill shines when there are packed mobs, because it propagates to nearby mobs like a snowball effect. And not only the skill factor is very high, but the main feature of the skill is to lower magic defense… so this is probably one of the most powerful skill in the whole game and I would even consider taking RC only for this.

It’s not alright, the skill simply suxx. The skill factor is WAY to low for something you’re supposed to get at class level 31 and can only put 5 points into it. When I look at similar class 31 skills of other classes in the Wizard tree, those skills usually have a skill factor around 600%, while Rune of Rock is only half that. It’s supposed to be **** STONE METEORS dammit!

So yeah, the class is still good, but would clearly need a bit rebuffing to be great.

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#17

I thought Rune was a class that’s supposed to have long casts in order to user powerful runes with destructive power but in reality it just has long casting times for okay damage while classes like Pyro (with no cast time at all) deals twice the damage twice as faster

#18

It makes me glad that at least one person read my wall of text :slight_smile:

I think that a setup mage would fit rune caster perfectly, right now most people only get rune caster for the costume, or for what the class could be.

I concede that remaking all skills would take a huge amount of time, but honestly if I ever see a “we want to do this with RC” from IMC I’m happy, even if they go on reworking each skill individually for a whole year, I just don’t want to be reduced to a skill scroll crafter, hell even sage makes more sense for that, by class name only.

@draconis

Since 2 years ago I have been saying that RoD is on paper one of, if not, the strongest skill in the game, it is nice to see that people eventually noticed, however having a single skill class sounds truly boring IMO, even more when it is on a 40 sec cooldown and requires methods to gather enemies for it to truly shine

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#19

@draconis: correct me if I am wrong but I believe Rune of rock does the same amount of damage as meteor just over 5 hits instead of one burst skill. So the skill factor is really 300% x 5.

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#20

I don’t really understand. I’m playing Rc/Pyro/Warlock and while it was supposed to just be a scroll crafter, it feels really powerful, especially Runecaster’s Rune of Destruction which just seems to destroy groups of enemies already afflicted by my dots.

#21

From what i see the current version was shipped only to be playable in the new system and the large Shoggoth thing was a quick gimmick they managed to ship and make more interesting.

The issue with cast time is that IMC uses it as binary (full charge = cast, partial charge = nothing) or to draw power from skill level, increasing the cast time won’t do that much if the mechanic itself works on this basis. I do like the idea of long cast fantasy but it doesn’t seem it will ever work in ToS without adding several exceptions and in the worst case can lead to a complete power shift due the class damage output. It would be more interesting and fun to play with if they changed casting as a whole to a minimum cast time to deploy the skill and additional cast time to increase the skill efficiency (not in damage but in additional effects such as more targets, larger hitbox or higher debuff chance) and have Rune Caster to make use of this mechanic as one of its core elements.

A did a post quite some time ago (that has to be updated) about Rune Caster class design and how it was too gimmicky and lacked a cohesive element to tie it out. One interesting possibility for the class is to have two effects per skill that can’t be used together, you can only use one at time depending on the rune reading (since runes have horizontal and vertical reading) being more of a versatile class with based on improvise than a dps caster. With this system all skills take effect A as default and using the “reading skill” will change it to other effect, it can also have attributes to change the default state to B (thus if you have Rune of Ice A and Rune of Destruction B they’ll be changed to B and A respectively when “reading skill” is used).

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