Runes, sigils and relics: upgrades that outweigh gear

Gear is half of what your character is worth. The other half is upgrades: runes in armour, sigils in weapons, and a relic in its own slot.

The gap between plain exotic and exotic with the right runes is wider than the gap between exotic and ascended.

Runes

A rune slots into each piece of armour. A full set is six pieces, so six runes.

The bonus climbs in tiers, and only identical runes count toward it.

One rune gives the first bonus, two give the second, and so on to six. Odd tiers usually raise attributes; even tiers grant special effects.

🔴 So five matching runes plus one stray is five tiers, not six. One random rune slotted “for now” devalues the whole set.

Rarity tiers

Type	Bonuses	Armour requirement
Minor	2	none
Major	4	level 39
Superior	6	level 60
Legendary	6, the same ones	level 80

Every real build uses Superior. Minor and Major are what drops along the way and gets sold for materials.

Underwater the helmet is replaced by aquatic headgear, so keeping all six tiers there needs a seventh matching rune.

The day every build in the game broke.

If you played before Secrets of the Obscure and came back after, this is the change that made your characters stop working.

Runes used to carry six bonuses, and the sixth was the one that defined a build. Secrets of the Obscure pulled those sixth bonuses out of runes entirely and moved them into a new equipment slot: the relic.

Overnight, every set of six runes in every bank on every account lost the line that made people buy it. Builds that had been stable for years needed a second purchase to do what one used to. The forums were not calm about it, and the complaints were fair.

Two years on, the system is better than what it replaced. Runes and relics mix freely, so a combination that was impossible before is now three clicks, and the number of viable builds went up rather than down. That does not undo the evening when thousands of people opened their hero panel and found a hole in it.

Relics

In 2023, with Secrets of the Obscure, part of the sixth-tier rune bonuses moved into a separate item: the relic.

You now have a dedicated relic slot, available from level 60. The effect is no longer tied to one specific rune set, so you can pick runes for their attributes and choose the effect separately.

Core relics are crafted and sold on the trading post. Expansion relics come from collections, instanced content, reward tracks and achievements. In PvP nearly all of them are unlocked from the start.

Where relics come from

There were 40 core relics at launch, and Janthir Wilds added 12 more, on top of expansion-specific sets. So the shelf is wide and getting wider.

They arrive from crafting, the trading post, collections, fractals and strike missions, reward tracks, achievements, and the story itself. Nothing about that list is gated behind one kind of play, which was clearly the point.

Two details worth carrying away:

PvP hands you almost all of them for free through the build panel. If you want to feel what a relic does before committing gold to it, that is the cheapest test bench in the game.

The legendary relic exists, introduced in The Realm of Dreams, and it does what every legendary does: swap freely between every effect, forever, without buying anything again. For a player who rotates between four characters and six builds, it removes an entire category of small recurring annoyance.

Sigils

A sigil slots into a weapon. You always have two active:

• one in each hand with one-handed weapons
• two in a single two-handed weapon

The rarity tiers match runes: Minor with no requirement, Major from 39, Superior from 60, plus Legendary.

The two rules people lose money on

🔴 Stacking sigils (Bloodlust, Perception, Corruption) do not work together. Only one is active, and the main-hand weapon takes priority. Slotting two throws one away.

🔴 Identical sigils share cooldowns across weapon sets. Trigger it on the first set and the second set finds it on cooldown. Swapping weapons does not get around it.

Getting them back out

A rune or sigil can be recovered, though not for free:

• Upgrade Extractor, and its endless version, pulls the upgrade and leaves the item
• Black Lion Salvage Kit breaks the item down and returns the upgrade intact
• Ordinary salvage kits destroy the upgrade and leave you materials

Runes are therefore a case where hurrying is expensive.

Practical advice

Slot nothing before 80. Runes do not carry over on their own, and you replace gear every few levels. Putting Superior runes into level 45 armour spends gold on something that lives an hour.

At 80, buy a full set of matching Superior runes. Popular and unpopular runes differ enormously in price, so check the numbers before you commit.

Legendary runes and sigils pay off once you play several builds, because they switch for free. Until then they are an expensive version of the same thing.