Grief is infamously known as the best melee runeword in the game. It's often said it's so good that it's broken.
The reason, however, may not be clear as the stats are rather deceiving. This runeword doesn't have any % Enhanced Damage, which means the weapon damage will appear unchanged from the weapon base in the item's tooltip and the character screen.
Still,
Grief has huge added flat damage (+340-400 damage). Furthermore, this bonus is added to the weapon's damage when applying any enhanced damage modifier from any other piece of gear, like 30-60% ED from
Steelrend or +350% ED to Demons from
Laying of Hands.
Also, other stats like 30-40% Increased Attack Speed, Ignore Target's Defense, 20% Deadly Strike are very desirable modifiers in any melee weapon and elevates the runeword's DPS even higher (and all the rest are noteworthy stats).
Grief's added flat bonus will be used when calculating
Smite damage.
Grief only takes a single High Rune (
Lo) to make; it likely has the best cost-benefit of all melee runewords.
Teebling Admin