GL will be soon getting the Truststone system. Since I'm quite used to calling it the runes system and it's a shorter word, I'll just be calling it runes in this explanation. As per usual, JP spent quite a bit of time figuring this system out, so that GL doesnt have to. I want to first give an explanation on how the system works, some suggested rune builds and my opinion on why it's one of the best and one of the worst systems in the JP version rn.

I highly suggest reading this with https://wotv-calc.com/JP/other/materia since I'll be leaving out a lot of the more detailed information to avoid stuffing too much information in this guide. I will also be using terms from the page so you can cross compare stuff easier (ignore the difference between runes and materias, do you understand how many times I have to type runes in this entire guide?). You can also use =runes command in discord with the Ildyra bot to check for stuff, shoutout to caelum for the bot btw.

How it works?

Runes, like its truststone name suggests, is a system that works exclusively on TMRs. TMRs will have 6 slots corresponding to 6 runes(they each have a name but I'll just be talking about the letters written on them to avoid confusion from translation), I, H, F, O, W and S (tho no one can really agree on which letter is on the 4th rune). 3 runes on the left side, I, F and W are all defensive runes while 3 runes on the right, H, O and S are offensive ones. Defensive and offensive runes also each have a separate set of types (think of assault/aim/crit weapons etc) that it can be. Each rune has 5 tiers, N(green), R(blue), SR(purple), SSR/MR(yellow) and UR(pink). We'll get back to this later. By equipping these Runes on the TMR, you gain bonuses to your TMR equipment.

Runes provide 3 types of bonuses, stat bonus, passive bonus and set bonus.

• The type of stat bonus is fixed based on what type and letter that Rune is. For example, an I rune will always have atk, tp and crit evade as stat bonuses and a hp type Rune will always have hp as an main stat bonus. Although the type of stats are fixed, the actual amount of each stat depending on the letter is randomized(the additional stat from type is fixed) and the cap of each stat is based on the rarity of the rune. To get the distribution you want, you will need to spend gil to reroll the distribution of the stats. While its not hard to max one specific stat. You'll need plenty of prayers to Hiroki if you want high results in multiple stats. All of these stat bonuses can be added together on top of the base stats your TMR already has, making potentially very powerful TMR equipments.

• Each crafted rune will get a randomized passive bonus based on the rarity and whether it is a defensive or offensive rune. For example, you can get max hp up on defensive runes only while atk up is available on offensive runes only. Each passive has 4 rarities, and a UR rune can get a tier 2-4 passive while a MR/SR rune can get tier 1-3, R can get 1-2, and so on. UR and MRs can also get a second passive by fusing another rune's passive (can be N to UR) into it. These passives are added to the list of passives that your TMR has and therefore do not stack with passives of the same type from other runes, the tmr and other equipments your units has.

• There's also a set bonus(group bonus on wotv-calc). This is gained if you equip multiple runes of the same type. Like if your I and F runes are both HP type, you get 5% max hp, and 5% all elemental res if your W rune is also HP type. Note that defensive and offensive runes do not have shared types, so it's always recommended to have 3 runes of the same type in general since you can not mix set bonuses. This bonus is it's own thing and stacks with everything.

Why should I care?

Let's just give an example, say if you craft a set of runes for evade/acc and go for luck set for defensive, you get a set bonus of 15% luck, 12 luck from 3 runes, 5 to 19 luck from W (lets take an average of 12), and a 10% luck passive from random passives. Since no other equipment has luck, you get an additional 24 luck and 25% luck from these runes, on a unit with 160 base luck (fairly average) this is 64 additional luck from the rune set, giving you roughly 25% acc and dodge, which beats out even the best UR acc vc, and that's not even talking about the everything else you can get. In simple terms, if you do not work on your runes, your meta units might not even be able to compete with outdated units in pvp.

That said, the difference between a perfect rune build and a decent one is fairly small compared to that of a decent one with a no rune build, so it's not necessary to seek perfect runes.

If you dont care about PVP or any competitive content like Guild Raids and ToR, then you dont really have to think too much about it. pve content difficulty is not there yet.

How to make a rune

Runes are made from 20 Runeshards of that letter. There are currently 3 main resources of UR runeshards.

• Each month, you have a quota of 50 UR runeshards for each letter you can exchange with lower rarity rune shards at a rate of 5:1 for each tier higher you go, so 25 SR runeshards for 1 UR runeshard. This is the fastest way to get a lot of UR runes since you can get 2.5 UR runes of each letter if you farm enough lower rarity ones, we will talk about that process more in the last part.

• Each new event sells 4 5 UR Runeshard of choice and 8 5 MR runeshard of choice tickets in its mog shop. There's usually 1 per month so you get 1 UR rune per month from this.

• You can get currency to exchange for runeshards from a milestone mission based on your scores on quests, I'm not going to go too deep into this since its fairly easy to understand once the system is in place. You can get runes pretty fast at first due to a lot of stuff being ran during anni but it slows down afterwards and I think I roughly get 1-2 UR runes worth of currency each month.

• Sometimes Runeshards are sold in paid lapis bundles. They are quite rare and like most paid lapis bundles, is very overpriced. You cant really get a lot this way.

When you get 20 runeshards of a certain letter, you can make a rune of that letter. At first, Jp can only make 1 rune at a time and batch creation is added later. You'll see why batch creation is important later. You get to choose which type of rune you want to make and get a randomized passive. Congratulations, you now have a lvl 1/20 Rune with a lvl 1/20 passive. If you dont get the passive you want, you can dissemble the rune for a gil cost and get 20 shards back. Dissembling is capped at 50 attempts per day. JP later updated it so that you can instantly reroll (dissemble and reassemble for the old price) a rune on the spot when making 1 rune at a time.

The level of the rune itself increases the main stat by a fixed amount and increases the cap of the randomized stats. Therefore, stat rerolling is only useful when you reached the lvl cap. Raising the lvls require a specific amount of ore of a certain rarity, for example, a silver ore cannot replace a bronze ore. So you need to exchange for different rarity ores in the ore materials exchange (opened alongside runes).

The level of passives increase the effectiveness of the passive. Each rarity has its fixed passive % at a specific lvl. You can always tell which rarity the passive is by the lvl 1 effect. For example, a tier 4 atk % passive is always at 4% at lvl 1 and 20% at lvl 20, while a tier3 is 3% at lvl 1 and 15% at lvl 20. passives are leveled by feeding other runes into the passive. Usually N rarity runes are used in this way. You will need a lot of N runes to level 1 UR rune into max lvl so it's really annoying at first to level these, not that it isnt rn since you still need to manually click each rune to feed them into a passive.

For Ur and MR runes, you can fuse the passive from another rune of the same letter but a different type. For obvious reasons, you shouldn't and cant fuse a passive of the same type into another rune. The rune that has its passive fused into another become a rune without a passive and can be dissembled for 20 shards. For runes with 2 passives, you can choose which passive you are leveling so feel free to fuse without leveling the passives to max level. This process requires stat boosting and reset hammers.

After getting a good rune, time to make it useful. the 6 rune slots will start up locked for every single TMR. You will need to unlock them with gil and equipment books(depending on which weapon the unit that this tmr came from). If you want to use UR runes, you will need to level the slot to lvl 2 with roughly 200 gold ore worth of equipment exp.

Now, you can finally get benefits from the rune system. Runes will follow the tmr across different content, you can put runes on and take them off without any cost.

TL:DR

Rune raising step by step for dummies

1.obtain SR rune shard by runeshard farming quests and then exchange for UR runeshards

2.choose which type of rune to make

3.reroll until preferred passive

4.lvl up rune with ore

5.reroll substat distribution

6.fuse second passive into rune from a rune with same letter but different type, requires stat boosting and reset hammers. dissemble blank rune

7.lvl up passives with N and R runes

8.unlock rune slot on tmr with books and gil

9.lvl up slot with ore

10.put rune in

11.profit?

recommendations

Disclaimer: These recommendation come from my friends, my guildmates and myself based on our experiences, many of us do compete in gw, arena CM etc, so we'd like to think we are making the right calls but none of us are really top 10 in jp in anything. I will not talk about everything that's available but you can cross reference with wotv-calc or Ildyra bot to see for yourself.

General goal: most of us have a few more general runes on certain slots and more specialized ones on others so we just have to switch 1 rune if another unit is using this tmr. I've been slacking a bit and just mostly have general runes with some unleveled specialized ones rn.

There are a lot of options for potential passives. Just keep in mind what passives are widely available on other equipments so that you dont build a passive to have it overridden on every single unit.

Left side set: tanks, and units with good guaranteed hits tend to go for the HP set while everyone else should go into luck set. Luck set is superior to the evasion set since there are a lot of good evasion non-tmr equipments but not many in luck, so getting luck main stat will avoid the equipment stacking penalty for evasion. For units that are not evasion, you do not want to lose out on this luck if your enemy's evasion units all have these. you know, arms race, that sort of stuff. Not much to say about the HP set, 5% ele res is just so much better than 3 def or spr and healing power stacking is not super relevant in jp atm. crit evasion is just too niche and tp is not really relevant in a lot of content.

Left side passives: Luck and HP again take the throne as generally useful passives due to how rare those stats are on other equipment. Most of the other stuff are down to preference between which debuffs/ailments you want protection against, a lvl 20 UR rune completely neutralizes the chance you get hit by that ailment from normal skills like kmont and duane's disable etc and reduces chances to lose to RNG. On the other hand, elemental res/atk type res/def/spr down resistance can sometimes save you from a lot of dmg, increasing your chances to win from RNG. these will be up to the meta units and your preferences. ele res is a part of more specialized builds as it can stack with alex ring and hp type set bonus, while attack type res is less useful due to the amount of res you can already get from different gears. Evasion is not that useful due to it not stacking with evasion gear if evasion is relevant and too small to be useful when its not. TP/crit evasion and ATK/Mag down res are all probs too niche. Agi down res is mostly relevant in pvp but sometimes you just do not feel its impact.

TL:DR:HP set for tanks and units with good guaranteed hits, luck set for everyone else. HP and luck are great for everything, build status ailment/debuff res depending on what you need.

Right side set: for physical dps, atk type is generally better due to physical dps having better guaranteed hit moves or better accuracy so they dont need that much help in hitting evasion. While mages tend to not have as great guaranteed hits moves so they instead go into acc type. But, there's exceptions so choose the set based on who do you want to use these runes on. . You can make a strong case for crit set but I just prefer my more consistent dmg from atk set. AP set is mostly a guild raid/raid set as it can come up invaluable when you get to use an additional skill from the ap cost reduction. dex set are kind of a combination of atk/crit and acc but so much worse in each department, I wouldn't recommend it. Lastly, tanks and full supports tend to benefit from the agi set(available only on MR and UR runes)

Right set passive: not actually a lot to talk about in this one. atk/mag up is great for how rare they are in other equipments, yes, galmia exists but there are better clothes for defensive reasons. reaction block is almost must get for pvp. accuracy gives you a middle ground if you dont want to use a slot for acc gear but it will be overridden otherwise. Dmg limit cap is useful for GR only pretty much. The rest are just highly unit dependent.

TL:DR: atk set for pdps, acc set of mdps, agi set for tanks and supports. atk/mag up and reaction block great. other stuff depend on what you need.

Builds with runes: the originally niche build of tmr weapon 2 non-tmr gear is now very mainstream in jp atm. Especially with the new bell-less ones such as locke, alstoria, and detective leela. These units have their own method of ap generation and can operate effectively even without bells, allowing them to fully utilize the build.

My opinion on this. you can stop reading if you dont want to hear me rant.

I love it and hate it at the same time.

The core of WotV is building your team, and the runes adds a lot of customization to what you can do to your units. I do enjoy playing around with these runes. Also, as I mentioned before, its not really a very p2w system as you cant really get better runes and significantly more runes by just spending.

BUT, holy moly, this system is grind heavy. There are 11 mobs in each quest with 10 of them each having 10% chance to drop 1 SR runeshard per run, which means you get 1 SR runeshard per run on average. If you join hosts during triple drop, it takes 417 runs on average to get the 1250 SR runeshards needed for the monthly quota of 50 UR shards. And, you have to do it 6 times for the 6 different rune letters every single month. amounting to 2502 multis per month. That is assuming there even is a triple drop every single month, which spoilers alert, there isnt in jp.

To get just the UR shards from event mog shops, you need 60k additional currency on top of all the other stuff you need to farm, which, assuming you get 250 per multi run(which you dont), is an additional 240 multis. and 96 more if you want the MR runeshards as well.

So, just for these categories, you need to farm multi 2742 to 2839 times on average each month.

AND that's only for runeshards, you haven't even gotten to the runes yet.

once you got your runeshards, the extremely fun process of rerolling begins. it takes a bit to get the passives you want, and you only get 50 rerolls per day, so you'd better remember to engage in passive rerolling every single day. Or else, when you find yourself in need of a rune, you might not be able to get it immediately. At least the instant reroll helps a bit.

Also, enjoying tapping a gazillion times to get enough exp to level a passive to lvl 20.

When you have the runes, have fun tracking which rune has which passives and what runes are for whom. If you have different teams for gw arena and CM, oh boy. Some people legit have spreadsheets to help them keep track on where their runes are.

My suggestions for wotv gl team

drastic increases to baseline drop rates, imho, triple drop should just be baseline with monthly triple drop on top of that. that's still 834 multis per month on average btw.

get the jp qols asap, they dont solve the problem but at least they do make stuff easier.