Rune Priest: A Comparison of Oath Runes

During preview weekend I typically kept the Oath Rune of Warding on myself.  I was surprised to see on these boards that many (maybe even most) favor self-buffing with the Oath Rune of Iron. To be sure I wasn't completely nuts, I decided to run some numbers and compare the benefits from each. I looked at each oath rune under ideal conditions - i.e., with the given mastery path maxed out. Your mileage will obviously vary based on what spec you choose.

    With 15 mastery points in Grimnir, Oath Rune of Warding gives an additional 14.95% mitigation to all damage types. That's some serious business, at least as long as it's not dispelled. That's compared with 80 willpower and initiative on the Oath Rune of Iron.

     At level 40, with Valaya maxed out, Oath Rune of Iron gives us:
1.71% chance to evade ranged attacks
1.71% chance to disrupt spell attacks
+18 healing per second

In other words, we get around half of what the tactic Discipline gives us, plus a little bit of evasion gravy. Oath Rune of Iron is worth a little more than half of a tactic.

    With Grimnir maxed out, Oath Rune of Warding gives us:
14.95% mitigation to corporeal damage
14.95% mitigation to spiritual damage
14.95% mitigation to elemental damage

In other words, Warding gives us the effect of the tactic Stubborness, plus the same effect applied to two other damage types. The rune is roughly equivalent in value to 3 tactics.

    Now I'm all for willpower stacking, and plan on speccing as heavily as possible into willpower with my renown points and on using Discipline, but it seems to me that that's a huge tradeoff in terms of value, and that I should not hesitate to trade the potential extra stats from Iron for the increased mitigation from Warding. And I fully acknowledge that avoidance is far better than mitigation, especially since some of the things that can be avoided are debuffs that mitigation won't help against at all. But when you're looking at a choice between a certain amount of avoidance and almost 10 times that much evasion, the evasion looks like it will have a much bigger impact.

    Even if you have no points in Grimnir, you get 9.4% mitigation to the three non-physical damage types; I'd still take that over the max-Valaya'ed Iron. But since I'm planning on speccing up Grimnir, it seems like a no-brainer: as best I can tell, when compared with similar tactics available to Rune Priests, the effect of the Oath Rune of Warding are objectively far superior to the effects of the Oath Rune of Iron.

Comments

[Dmitry Soloviev]

It's easy. Oath Rune of Warding doesn't stack with Prismatic Shield of Archmage. Because AM+RP combination is a must for a generic balanced group… It’s better to buff INT or WIS+INI.