Runecrafting Guide

This guide is intended to help players understand the intricacies of Runecrafting, Cloth Weaving, and soon Affix Warding. This is not a beginner's guide, it is intended to be a 'tips and tricks' guide for players wanting to make the most out of runecrafting.

Note: this guide has been split into 4 sections, one for general gear and the runecrafting dungeon, and one for each part of the Runecrafting skill. I felt this was necessary as runecrafting, cloth weaving, and affix warding are very different yet all under the runecrafting skill.

Another Note: Obtaining essence requires you to utilize almost every other skill in the game. I will be going over some of these briefly.

Gear and Enchants

Generally speaking, there are a lot of items you must have for peak runecrafting efficiency:

• A piece of jewelry with Haste. Ideally you would use a Prismatic Necklace due to the fact it adds effective runecrafting levels (also don't put haste on a ring you'll get bullied).

• One of every Talisman (to increase passive essence gain).
• The full Runecrafter's Robe set: Runcrafter's Robe Hood, Runecrafter's Robe Top, Runecrafter's Robe Bottoms.
  • As runecrafting only has 6 relevant enchants, and you'll only ever be using at most 3 at once, you can leave the enchantments alone on these.

• Ancient Runic Chisel with Fibrous Fabrication, Runecrafting, or Engraving (try to get the legendary chisel for 8 slots; it's worth it).
  • Swapping out Fibrous Fabrication for Runecrafting or Engraving depending on what you want to do can save you lots of fiber, essence or rune slates.
• Runecrafting on your boots/gloves if you choose to use engraving on your chisel (try to get to 7 slots; it's worth it).

• Essence Concentration on your boots/gloves (try to get to 7 slots; it's worth it).
• Efficiency on your boots/gloves (try to get to 7 slots; it's worth it).

• A Cloak of the Void.
• Enlightenment on your boots/gloves (optional but recommended sometimes).
• Dwarven Manufacturing Pendant or Elven Logistics Pendant (optional).
• A good mining set (optional, for mining rune slates).
• A good fishing set (optional, for fishing up fibers).

Interestingly enough, unless you want to use Scholar for more mastery XP, you don't need a ring at all for anything in this skill, as the Prismatic Ring does not give you runecrafting levels like its necklace counterpart does.

General Priority List

From most important to least important:

1. 1 of every Talisman.
2. The best Chisel you can get
3. Runecrafting on gloves/boots: Conserving essence early is very important.
4. Fibrous Fabrication on chisel: for conserving fibers.
5. Necklace with Haste: buy it if you can't craft it, it's more than worth it.
6. Enlightenment: for use during other tasks if you have a free slot or want to grind essence.
7. Runecrafter's Robe Top: as it's the only Runecrafting Robe piece with an enchantment we don't already have.
8. Bottoms and Hood: For the set bonus.
9. Cloak of the Void: You'll probably get a Void Portal Anchor while you try and grind the armor, but if not don't sweat it and move on.
10. Ancient Runic Chisel: By now, you should, in theory, have your legendary Chisel, and can start swapping out enchants.
11. Essence Concentration: for more runes.
12. Essence Concentration Master: You may not have it at this step, but from here on it should be your #1 after Essence Concentration as you gain mastery levels.
13. Elven and Dwarven Pendants.

Priority for Augmenting

Aside from the Runecrafter's Robe set and Ancient Runic Chisel, augmentation doesn't do much for Runecrafting.

You should augment your Robes until you run out of Academy Wards, as it is twice as cost effective to augment per Runecrafting level than the Chisel.

Augmenting your Dwarven Manufacturing Pendant, Elven Logistics Pendant, Cloak of the Void, and Prismatic Necklace all increase your effective runecrafting level as well, and I would augment them in the order presented.

Leveling

I'll keep it real someone double check my work

The fastest way to gain Runecrafting XP is through runecrafting (lol). You gain 25 XP per rune created, so if you make 8 runes per action then you get 200XP per action. For the highest XP/hr, you need the highest effective level of runecrafting you can get, a max of 8 levels of Essence concentration on your chisel, 6 levels of haste on your Necklace, a dwarven pendant, and Cloak of the Void. With 200 effective levels, this gets you 19 runes per action and an action speed of almost 2.5 seconds, equaling an estimated 27,360 runes an hour and 684,000 XP/hr. This can be doubled to 1,368,000 with 5 levels of Scholar. Wow. More on this in the runecrafting section.

Cloth weaving is a close second in the XP/hr race. With the same loadout, swapping Essence Concentration for Efficiency, we get about 642,000 XP/hr when weaving Elder Cloth.

I've made a theory on a decently fast and cheap way to level that also works in Ironman and NGIM utilizing affixing: grinding the Enchanted Armory for Golem Rings, Defenders Bands, Defenders Pendants, and Prime Runic Dust, researching the rings and pendants to gain more prime runic dust, and finally affixing said rings and pendants. This nets 70 XP per Prime Runic Dust through affixing, and an average of 9 Runic Dust per ring/pendant through researching. This also gets you Blood, Death, and Chaos essence, to make more runes out of.

Runecrafting Dungeon

The Runecrafting dungeon is very useful in progressing through the runecrafting levels, and can make you some money from the dungeon's rare drops

The Academy drops three major things that we care about:

1. Academy Wards: This is the material used to make the Runecrafter's Robe set, also sells for not bad amounts of money.
2. Void Portal Anchor: This is used to make the Cloak of the Void and sells for an absurd amount of money.
3. Dwarven Manufacturing Pendant: Surprisingly, this doesn't drop from the Dwarven Key dungeon, and increases your speed at the cost of increased material cost. Also sells for not bad.

Each key also drops 25 shards, which is equal to about 2 hours of Runecrafting. Since shards are time-gated, this should be used when you want to push for an extra level on your Chisel or get your Runecrafting gear up to the max.

Talents

When it comes to talents, if you are not going to go all in on Runecrafting, you can narrow down your options to these few:

• Runecrafting Master: an increase in Runecrafting (Enchantment) levels is always good and this one is decently cheap.
• Runecrafting Grandmaster: the exact same as Runecrafting Master, cheap 5% essence cost reduction.
• Fantastic Fiber Finder: 3 levels of Fiber Finder for an extra 75% chance to get fibers can really help fish for fibers.
• Essence Concentration Expert: This fully counteracts the negative effects one level of Essence Concentration and a bit of a 2nd level, more on the calculations of this in the runecrafting section.

I would NOT recommend Essence Concentration Master if you are not fully specializing in runecrafting, as it provides less Essence Concentration reduction than its Expert counterpart (1.5x less) for 12 talent points (2x more).

You can visit the Talents page to see more on what each of these talents do.

Extra Tips and Advice

Runecrafting is not a skill that will get you rich quick, but comes in slow waves, as most of your money from this skill will come from selling runes and cloth in mass and runecrafting dungeon drops. Affix Warding is more for personal upgrades (at least until people stockpile Runic Dust and start taking warding item requests). Therefore, I would not recommend going all in on Runecrafting as your main source of income, but rather as a side income/passive income that you come back to every week to get rid of all your essence from doing other activities and sell it. If you want, you can supplement your thirst for runecrafting content by doing combat, as it seems like the easiest way to get Runic Dust, and high levels of essence.

Affix Warding

- guide written by Tongs19, a man who buys his runes and cloth, with data contributions from ChingChangg