Rune Knight in 5.5 2024

Rune Knight caught my eye as a fun sublcass to play. Couple questions:

1) Has anyone tried this in 5.5/2024 rules? 

2) What kind of feats have folks found useful? For example, do people find Polearm Master to be worth it with Rune Knight's many Bonus Actions & Reactions?

3) Runes - just to be sure, you get the passive benefits of all runes you have inscribed, yes? What about invoking runes - can you invoke more than one rune at a time to get multiple active benefits? (obviously not in the same Bonus Action)

Thanks! 

Quote from DrakojaPax >>

 

2) What kind of feats have folks found useful? For example, do people find Polearm Master to be worth it with Rune Knight's many Bonus Actions & Reactions?

I like the Feats from Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants as they are on flavor for the Rune Knight. Other feats are dependent on weapons I'm using and character story points I'm pursuing. You can never have too many options for Bonus Actions and Reactions. Flexibility makes combat interesting.

Quote from DrakojaPax >>

 

3) Runes - just to be sure, you get the passive benefits of all runes you have inscribed, yes? What about invoking runes - can you invoke more than one rune at a time to get multiple active benefits? (obviously not in the same Bonus Action)

I haven't seen anything that says otherwise, but you do get all of the passive benefits. Same for invoking runes; however, the DM might rule otherwise if he/she thinks that might be overpowered.

Quote from DrakojaPax >>

 

1) Has anyone tried this in 5.5/2024 rules? 

 

Unfortunately, that is a "No" from me.

I have both as a player and a DM. It’s fantastic and one of the most fun times I had as a fighter. I played up through 8, the one I’m DMing just hit 10.

For feats, in both cases we really leaned into the tank part and took Heavy Armor Master. Couple that with the resistance from hill rune and it was super fun. We had one fight with spiders, and hill helped me both on the piercing of the bites and the poison. Definitely my time to shine.

Cloud rune is fantastic to turn enemy crits against other enemies. (And advantage on a couple non-fighter skills sometimes gave me stuff to do outside of combat.) Unfortunately not great against a solo monster, but nothing works in every situation.

Besides HAM, my player is using PAM and really enjoying it. There is a little bonus action competition, but I think it’s the kind that just enough to make interesting tactical decisions, as opposed to it being annoying and feeling like you don’t get to pull of your cool moves.

I went with crusher for a little battlefield control, knocking enemies away from my allies. Worked great.

As for question 3. Yes you always get the passive benefits, and the only thing stopping you from invoking multiple runes is action economy. You can do it, as long as you have the available actions.

Quote from Xalthu >>

I have both as a player and a DM. It’s fantastic and one of the most fun times I had as a fighter. I played up through 8, the one I’m DMing just hit 10.

For feats, in both cases we really leaned into the tank part and took Heavy Armor Master. Couple that with the resistance from hill rune and it was super fun. We had one fight with spiders, and hill helped me both on the piercing of the bites and the poison. Definitely my time to shine.

Cloud rune is fantastic to turn enemy crits against other enemies. (And advantage on a couple non-fighter skills sometimes gave me stuff to do outside of combat.) Unfortunately not great against a solo monster, but nothing works in every situation.

Besides HAM, my player is using PAM and really enjoying it. There is a little bonus action competition, but I think it’s the kind that just enough to make interesting tactical decisions, as opposed to it being annoying and feeling like you don’t get to pull of your cool moves.

I went with crusher for a little battlefield control, knocking enemies away from my allies. Worked great.

As for question 3. Yes you always get the passive benefits, and the only thing stopping you from invoking multiple runes is action economy. You can do it, as long as you have the available actions.

Feats - was also thinking Heavy Armor Master, a good way to raise CON, which is important for your DCs, among other benefits. For STR, I was thinking definitely Great Weapon Master & Mage Slayer. 

PAM though, am on the fence. Interesting to hear you found it worth it, assuming first round you're forgoing the BA attack to invoke a rune. Seems like that'd be the main reason to take it, since your reaction seems even busier, between at least one rune and also Runic Shield at level 7? I suppose a Fighter has the feats to spare, and PAM might be better than other STR feats, like Slasher (for Halberd or Glaive), even with reduced usage.

Also building on the question of invoking two runes at same time, I had thought you'd want to do that to have all your benefits going during a combat, but then if you can't Short Rest before your next combat, you are somewhat gutted of your Subclass features. So maybe PAM would be helpful there. 

Seems how a Rune Knight manages its resources could be highly DM-dependent. Not just for how often Short Rests can happen but also how often you can activate your runes before a combat. Since they only last one minute, you really want to be sure you're about to throw down. By comparison, a Barbarian's rage now lasting 10 minutes makes it feel safer to do ahead of time if you're proceeding through enemy space and/or reasonably expecting combat in fairly soon. Interesting considerations.

Quote from DrakojaPax >>

Quote from Xalthu >>

I have both as a player and a DM. It’s fantastic and one of the most fun times I had as a fighter. I played up through 8, the one I’m DMing just hit 10.

For feats, in both cases we really leaned into the tank part and took Heavy Armor Master. Couple that with the resistance from hill rune and it was super fun. We had one fight with spiders, and hill helped me both on the piercing of the bites and the poison. Definitely my time to shine.

Cloud rune is fantastic to turn enemy crits against other enemies. (And advantage on a couple non-fighter skills sometimes gave me stuff to do outside of combat.) Unfortunately not great against a solo monster, but nothing works in every situation.

Besides HAM, my player is using PAM and really enjoying it. There is a little bonus action competition, but I think it’s the kind that just enough to make interesting tactical decisions, as opposed to it being annoying and feeling like you don’t get to pull of your cool moves.

I went with crusher for a little battlefield control, knocking enemies away from my allies. Worked great.

As for question 3. Yes you always get the passive benefits, and the only thing stopping you from invoking multiple runes is action economy. You can do it, as long as you have the available actions.

 

Feats - was also thinking Heavy Armor Master, a good way to raise CON, which is important for your DCs, among other benefits. For STR, I was thinking definitely Great Weapon Master & Mage Slayer. 

PAM though, am on the fence. Interesting to hear you found it worth it, assuming first round you're forgoing the BA attack to invoke a rune. Seems like that'd be the main reason to take it, since your reaction seems even busier, between at least one rune and also Runic Shield at level 7? I suppose a Fighter has the feats to spare, and PAM might be better than other STR feats, like Slasher (for Halberd or Glaive), even with reduced usage.

Also building on the question of invoking two runes at same time, I had thought you'd want to do that to have all your benefits going during a combat, but then if you can't Short Rest before your next combat, you are somewhat gutted of your Subclass features. So maybe PAM would be helpful there. 

Seems how a Rune Knight manages its resources could be highly DM-dependent. Not just for how often Short Rests can happen but also how often you can activate your runes before a combat. Since they only last one minute, you really want to be sure you're about to throw down. By comparison, a Barbarian's rage now lasting 10 minutes makes it feel safer to do ahead of time if you're proceeding through enemy space and/or reasonably expecting combat in fairly soon. Interesting considerations.

 Just to be clear, I didn't use PAM; my player uses it. But he seems to be liking it. To me, having a couple different bonus actions (there's also second wind in the mix) gives you options as a player and makes it more tactically interesting. There's been some situations when it was clearly a better choice to use one or the other, but some where you have to think about it. To my mind, that's good game design.

When I was doing it as a player, I was in a campaign where we are more likely to have one large set piece combat that could take most or all of the session, so we'd just burn through our resources because a second fight before a rest was rare. I tend to run more multi-fight days. In both cases, the rune knight was really kicking ass.

Also, another thing to consider is grappler and/or unarmed fighting style. You're going to have a high str, and when you go to size large, you can grapple creatures up to huge, and you'll have advantage on those str checks. It actually got to the point I was glad to have a 1-handed weapon and I kind of stopped using a shield, so I could grapple with one hand, and still hit them with my hammer with the other hand. And with unarmed fighting, you get to throw in a 0-action d4 damage just for holding the enemy (not much, but kind of fun). But grappler synergizes really well with being large and dragging people around while you attack them with advantage.

Yeah, options, I like them. And Polearm Master's benefit is squarely good - you always want to pour on the damage - and it's resource free. On the other hand, what's not free is the feat pick. Fighters can afford it more than others, but that feat could have been something else. So with just those first three feat slots, I'd for sure want to pick up Great Weapon Master and Mage Slayer. Only one slot left for Polearm Master or Heavy Armor Master. Normally I'd think PAM would be stronger, but with such a BA-heavy class (there's also Second Wind), it seems like it could easily be left out. But then I haven't played it.

I was very much leaning toward a reach weapon though, so it feels kinda sad to not have PAM on that.