Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred's new runewords system will let barbarians teleport like loud, massively muscled sorcerers (2024)

With Diablo 4's runewords, sorcerers won't be the only class who can teleport across the screen. Barbarians won't be the only ones who can shout so loud their skin turns to iron. Stealth? Not just for rogues anymore either. Runewords break the rules of Sanctuary and they're coming with the Vessel of Hatred expansion in October.

Runewords have existed in the series since Diablo 1, but in Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred they've been simplified. Runes are a new type of item that drop from monsters (or are traded from other players) that let you essentially create your own skills. Ritual runes build up a new resource called offering, and invocation runes spend offering to trigger a unique skill, some of which are borrowed from other classes.

Take a legendary Yul and Jah rune for example. You can socket both runes into a piece of gear to form a runeword. Every time you use a skill with a cooldown you gain a chunk of offering from the Yul rune, and once you have enough, your evade will turn into a sorcerer's teleport via the Jah rune.

And that's just one of many combinations. A Cem rune builds offering just for evading and an Ur rune activates whenever one of your minions kills a monster. Every single build in Diablo 4 can benefit from runewords and it's going to dramatically change how you play your character.

Here are a few examples of the kind of runes you can find:

• Zan ritual rune: gain offering every time you use your ultimate skill
• Yax ritual rune: gain offering every time you use a healing potion
• Lith ritual rune: gain offering every time you stand still for 0.3 seconds
• Thul invocation rune: casts sorcerer's frost nova, freezing enemies and making them vulnerable
• Vex invocation rune: gain +3 to all skills for five seconds
• Que invocation rune: Casts druid's petrify, stunning enemies and increasing your critical strike damage

Everyone can have two runeword combinations at once, but you can't use the same rune twice. Any extra runes you get can be traded to other players or used to craft better runes. If you get enough of the same type, they can even be turned into one of the ultra-powerful mythic uniques.

Runewords will only be usable if you own Vessel of Hatred, unlike Diablo 4's new mercenaries and Dark Citadel co-op dungeon. And they're going to fit nicely into Diablo 4's massively reworked leveling progression, which Blizzard announced today. The level cap will be lower, powerful loot will drop earlier, and new difficulty options will let you scale the challenge up higher than before. When the expansion launches on October 8, we're going to be playing a completely different Diablo 4 and I'm ready for it.

Additionally, you'll be able to play with runewords in a limited playtest of the upcoming patch in the Diablo 4 PTR starting next week.

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