Mid-Runes?

Are these useful for anything?

• Shael
• Dol
• Hel
• Io
• Lum
• Ko
• Fal

I've been doing a lot of countess runs, and I have way too many mid-runes.

Hel is popular for Recipe: Remove All Items from Sockets when people want to re-roll things like Spirit for perfect FCR. Do people ever use the others besides maybe the odd 1 or 2 for a runeword? You can't craft anything with them. They all require chipped or flawed gems to cube up, so that's a major bottleneck holding me back from just combining them into Lem runes for better stash space management.

For most people, a fair few of them are useless for anything other than cubing up to others.

However, there are some valid uses for low and mid runes in general:
- Cube up to higher runes
- Trade currency for lowbie/starter stuff
- Rerolling cheaper high-end runewords (e.g. Spirit or Insight)
- Upgrading uniques/sets
- Crafting
- Adding sockets (to whites)
- Repair via cube
- ...

Shameless plug:
If you wanna get your stash space sorted by selling some of them, I'm happy to take a whole boatload off your hands in the right combination...
trade/lem-ko-shael-tal-p-diamond-t1110481.html

Some of those mid runes aren't used very much at all like Lum. I think Io is more famous for not being Lo.

Being on the lower end of mid, Shael is easy to throw into any mid-level weapon and I don't worry about the sunk cost of clearing the weapon later. I've given my merc a ShaelShaelShael Hone Sundan and a ShaelShaelShael Tomb Reaver before while leveling. The latter sounds like it should be hilarious with 120% IAS and it kind of is. Combined with 27% more IAS, you can have your merc hitting 9/2 Jab for 5.56 hits per second.

Out of the others on your list, everyone knows about Hel, Ko is useful as part of Heart of the Oak, and Fal cubes into Lem. The others aren't as important.

At the very least for trading:
- Those "mid-runes" are worthless in terms of buying power,
- They are not even mid-rune in my eyes, but low-rune: mid-runes would start at Pul and end at Gul,
- Dont bother trading with anything below Pul or Lem... That why most veteran players hardly grabs those you named after a month or two in ladder.

I run a gem mule and keep a bunch of chipped and flawed gems in her stash, usually all leftovers from starting new characters or making my socket quest chars. So when I have an abundance of Lum-fals, I cube them all up. I’ve gotten up to Um a couple times that way

i keep on one of my mules 3 each for those runes. There are plenty of recipes that need them, and I hate missing something that should be easy to find when i need it, but other than that i really only keep an extra stash of hels, since those have a fairly common use.

Fals i figure are just at the borderline of cubing up, i've made a few Pul/ Um with spare Fal/ Lem cubing.

Schnorki wrote: 4 years ago

Shameless plug:
If you wanna get your stash space sorted by selling some of them, I'm happy to take a whole boatload off your hands in the right combination...
trade/lem-ko-shael-tal-p-diamond-t1110481.html

Out of curiosity, why do you want all those? And why those numbers? Noob here

Janet the Java wrote: 4 years ago

Out of curiosity, why do you want all those? And why those numbers? Noob here

I guess he want to upgrade some armors.

mockingbirdreal wrote: 4 years ago

Janet the Java wrote: 4 years ago

Out of curiosity, why do you want all those? And why those numbers? Noob here

I guess he want to upgrade some armors.

You guessed correctly.

Keep those runes and cube them up. They will give you a healthy supply of Um and higher runes. There are also some very useful rune words that use them, like Obedience.

Thanks all for the input. I've updated my rune management strategy based on a combination of advice posted in this thread and my recent experiences in-game.

Tir through Sol are worth hoarding and trading in bulk, because these runes are used in crafting recipes.

El and Eld are worth picking up and cubing to Tir, because they require no additional reagents.

Io through Fal can be cubed up to Lem, and it's easy to do since they drop much less frequently than the flawed gems required for the recipes.

Lem+ can just be traded to other players for better ratios than the Horadric Cube upgrade recipes.

Hel is worth keeping, because there are always people looking for it in bulk to reroll runewords.

At first I considered keeping Shael and Dol to cube up to Hel, but I wasn't finding enough Chipped Gems for this strategy. One day I decided to just give up and drop all of my 80 Shael and Dol runes in one of those "free" public lobby games. People picked them up in a frenzy, but then they just threw the runes back on the Ground once they realized what they were actually picking up.

TLDR: most runes, even El, are worth picking up. The only exceptions are Shael and Dol. Those are trash that nobody seems to want, not even poor players who are begging for free stuff.

Shael has several uses, first for its numerous uses (ias/fhr is nice), then for Treachery - go to merc armor to level up. But after that, you don't need them much. Dol are... desperately the worst rune to pick indeed, except to make Hel or White necro rune word.