What are runes?
Runes are items you equip to gain a passive effect, and some of them also give a named skill. The official rune list sorts them into five kinds: Rare Yellow, Yellow, Blue, Red and Ideal. Each rune has levels from +1 to +9, and its effect gets stronger at every level.
Rare Yellow Runes are the special ones. Instead of plain stats they bring unusual effects: faster revival, extra damage to buildings in wars, or a direct answer to an enemy's skill or rune. See Rare Yellow Runes for the full story.
Rune colours and class runes
Each rune kind has its own colour. In your Rune Bag the runes you have collected sit in colour-marked boxes, so you can see at a glance what you own and which bonus attributes it gives you.
Rare Yellow Runes are universal: any class can use them. Rare Blue Runes are the opposite: each one gives a rune skill made for a single class.
Getting, upgrading and collecting runes
The main way to get rare runes is Melting. You put in a special material and it turns into a random treasure. Materials include Dragon Balls, Refined and Super Gems, Rune Crystals and Jiang Hu items, and the possible prizes include rare Runes, large amounts of Chi Points, Star Stones and Permanent Stones.
- Melting: open the Melting window from the Forging interface or the Treasures icon. After you put a material in, every possible result is shown, and you melt once or 10 times in a row.
- Upgrading: runes are levelled up with Rune Essences. Clan events such as Forged in Myths hand out Universal Rune Essences (B): 100 for the clan leader and 70 for each member of a winning clan (see Forged in Myths).
- Duplicates: if you own two runes of one type, decompose the weaker one to get back 80% of the Rune Essences you spent on it.
- Collection ranking: the game scores the runes you have collected and ranks heroes by that score. Reaching certain scores gives extra attributes.