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How/where do I collect Runes in Undermountain
prethen
Member Posts: 137 Arc User
I'm done with the campaign, but I now have a quest to gather runes in Undermountain. That seems a bit aimless. Any clues here? I've done a couple Master Expeditions but I'm not finding them there, and I need something for that end treasure chest.
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When you have 10+ of any given resonance, go do an ME. In the first chamber, go to the left altar and interact with it. Pick option 2. Pick a resonance that you have enough of and fashion a rune. Place it. Run the ME.
To gather for a rune in an ME you need 10 and you make them in the instance of the ME before you enter the first gate.
I didn't see this before, but Sinye lit up with a quest completion icon and I now have a runic resonator. If I go into an ME, first room, I still can't select any of the options because I need 10 (resonance) to choose which rune I will go for. I've done multiple rune battles in a couple different districts, but I don't notice anything that I've obtained or can obtain from such a battle (other than Runic Corruption which I saw I had during one battle).
I'm sure it'll click soon, but I still need a budge in the right direction. I keep reading the quest to collect enough resonance to choose the reward at the end of the quest.
I guess the real question, is how the heck to I collect resonance? Do I need to do something? I had someone in-game try to help and all he could tell me is to keep killing things in the Rune battles. I find no resonance drops. My current quest is Risk Versus Reward and I just need to Collect Runic Etching.
Like I said, I'm missing something dumb and I'll probably kick myself once I figure out what the heck I'm not doing.
Go to any of the maps which have the runic encounters, slippery slope gate (Twisted Caverns map) is the easiest because the encounters are closest together and the encounters are also slightly easier to get through so this map is usually the busiest, but these encounters are in other Undermountain maps too, such as Wyllowwood and Vanrakdoom. But those ones seem more difficult to get through than the ones in the Twisted Caverns.
The way they work is counterintuitive... normally you hit enemies and do as much damage as you can and kill them as fast as you can, but in these Runic Encounters you do the opposite. You do the least amount of damage possible and keep them alive as long as you can. Think of it like milking a cow. You don't want to kill the cow or you will have to find a new cow to milk. These enemies renew hitpoints continually so if you do it right you can just find one target and keep it alive and milk it for the drops. Do not use dailies or encounters on them, just use at-wills. Make a loadout which has the best defense you will need, and maybe use a healer comp as well or something like that. They hit like trucks so the only thing you really want to be doing is to keep yourself alive as long as possible, keep dashing out of their way, and keep hitting them with at-wills to keep them dropping essence until the timer goes down.
It used to be that it showed on the screen when it was dropping, but like so many other things they changed it to make it worse no idea why, so now they go into your inventory but you have no visual clue it's happening and just have to trust the process. I wish they would revert it to how it was before.
These runic encounters work best and go the most smoothly in one of two ways. Either you have a few people there and people are just hitting things all over the place and you don't get too much aggro yourself and can hit without being targeted, or you are all on your own on a map, aggro only one enemy and draw it away from everything else (still keeping both of you within the boundaries of the encounter inside that coloured wall) and just hit that enemy over and over with your at-wills and keep moving out of it's red zones and try not to let it hit you or disable you. It only usually gets messy when you aggro more of them by accident and you have several of them on you at once, so the trick is (if you are there on your own) to aggro only one and draw it away from everything else in some corner somewhere and just try not to aggro anything else. It's easier in the Twisted Cavern map in the place where the sea is, you can go out into the water and hit it out there, it will follow you there, but in the other one in the cavern it is more tight in space and it's easier to aggro more of them than you want to. If at any stage you feel overwhelmed by too many enemies at once, leave the area to disengage, then go back in and start with just one again. The worst way it goes is often when you are there alone and you have one enemy exactly where you want them and are milking them for drops and some other person comes along and starts hitting your target with dailies and encounters and kills it and you have to go find another one, which they then kill all over again. So yea, it works best when you're all on your own or there's a few people, not in the middle with only one or two. I usually go to a map where there are no people, like Vanrakdoom, because even though it's harder there, I at least can do it my way and get left alone and pull one to the side and milk it while jumping around out of the way without being bothered by other players.
When you have done a few of them, go and do your 3 X ME's a day, go to the first altar and you need to convert first, there is no timer on this process so just convert everything you have in all of the sections when you are there so you know how many runes you have and how long it will be until you need to go and do more Runic Encounters to get more essence.
For ME's, the weapon drops come from the NPC you hand in your quest to outside of the expedition, that requires finding all 9 relics during a run of 3 maps (3 relics each map) for the best chance of a drop, and the stuff for the Zok Box (vanity pets) and the stuff you use for the watcher set mini bosses comes from the chest inside the ME at the end.
PS the colour of the encounter denotes which type of essence drops the most from that encounter.