Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred adds a ton of new content to the loot-driven dungeon crawler, including a new region, mercenaries, and Runewords. Runewords are created when you combine two runes in an item with two sockets, giving you powerful bonuses. These new items are only available if you have the expansion and there is a large variety, giving you plenty of options, once you unlock them.
How to unlock Runewords
Ritual Runes gather offering, which activates the ability of the invocation rune when the required amount is reached.
You unlock Runewords during the main Vessel of Hatred questline, during the Madman, Crowned quest that takes you to speak to Ormus in the Council Chambers. After speaking to him, you’ll receive a briefing on the Runewords mechanics, and an initial set of Runes to begin experimenting with. Runewords don’t start dropping as loot until you complete this quest, so you try and prioritize getting through the Vessel of Hatred campaign, or at least through this mission.
How Runewords work and where to find more
For a Runeword to work, you need to combine two halves into a single item. This means it needs to be an item that can have two sockets, a two-handed weapon, pants, chest, or helm. There are ritual Runes and invocation Runes. The ritual Runes create offerings by performing a specific task. For example the Yul Rune grants 50 offering each time you use a skill with a cooldown. Invocation runes activate a special ability when enough offering is collected. Sometimes it’s something as simple as reducing any active cooldowns you have, but it can also activate an ability from another class. Combining one of each Rune in a single item creates a Runeword. You can only have two Runewords activated at once, but you can unsocket them at a Jeweler at any time to make changes or swap Runes.
Farming for specific Runes isn’t possible currently, but you can farm for Runes in general. Runes can drop from any loot source, but they seem to drop more frequently from activities with a large chest as a reward. Infernal Hordes and summoned bosses seem to typically offer at least one if not a few, and activities like Helltides can drop them as well. While they can drop from almost anywhere, the best place to farm them is the Undercity in Kurast.
Using Tributes that specifically state they will drop Runes will reward you with Rune for completing an Undercity run, so long as you reach attunement level 1 by clearing enough enemies across the three floors prior to the boss fight. These also drop randomly, although Tree of Whispers caches seem to drop them the most consistently and in the largest quantity. Once you have four of the same Rune, you can reroll them at the Jeweler for a random Rune, with a decent chance for it to be a higher rarity than the Runes you rolled. Be careful rerolling Runes, as Runes are required for crafting specific Mythic Uniques. You can check with the Jeweler to see which Runes are required for which Mythic, so you can save them.
