Short review of Runemaster (RM); just a few notes about runie after I got 50 lvl:
1) Main feature: runie could use all kind of magic elements and give his spells a lot of forms. If you know monsters, you always could find element which this monster doesn’t have resist.
2) you gameplay is very interesting, diverse, but ‘glass-cannonish’ (+2 life weapon helps!)
3) In compare to istar, runie can NOT cast:
- mana shield
- wraithrom/probability travel
- stone prison/grow trees
- spell speed buff limited to +10 (istar got +19..+24)
- clairvoyance
- auto-id
- detect monsters/detect traps/temp.ESP
- fireflash/hellfire (vs susp EVIL and GOOD), earthquakes
But runie can do some unique stuff:
- glyph floors with all kinds of different runes (they work like traps and deal damage!)
- control mana-efficiency/damage/AoE-radius/duration of spells
- could cast brief spells
4) Runie doesn’t get resistances for learning elements. Instead RM could use two sigils to enhance his equipment with wide-variaty of different properties (from speed to rare resistances).
5) RM could do some rogue-ish stuff, has ‘Sprint’ technique and not bad stealth. Actually it’s possible to train melee-runemaster as he is good with weapons and even interception 😉
Conclusion:
Playing runie is very interesting, for now it’s my favorite class in TomeNET. Having not much utility spells (stone prison, wraithform & etc) makes runie much harder class for surviving in late game, so the only option often is to ‘tank’ with your damage. Early-mid gameplay isn’t too hard, although you could sometimes have backslashes which make bad stuff with your character/inventory.
I often have a lot of suggestions and new ideas about classes.. But in case of runie I don’t have almost any – because it’s too well designed*. The only thing which I could suggest – remove the need to have physical rune in backpack to be able to cast glyphs. It would make possible to use more wide variaty of glyphs on the floor and make gameplay richier.
* right after I finished writing this review – it helped me to understand class better and I’ve saw that actually I got some ideas about runie. You could check them in my blog: http://tangar.info/en/blog/class-runemaster-ideas/