Currently levelling Runekeeper towards the Unwound Fate set, with the plan of using Aether Conduit for RoH as my onslaught stack spender. About halfway there on levelling and already feeling the frustration.
So firstly, the way runes interact with onslaught isn’t the best. For those who don’t know, the onslaught stacks don’t get consumed when the rune is placed. They are consumed when the rune detonates and hits something. So immediately there’s the problem of the arming delay, where you’d love to start generating new onslaught stacks for your next rune but the previous one hasn’t even blown up yet so you’re just sitting on your old stacks getting nowhere. Annoying but not a dealbreaker.
The part that makes this worse is the atrocious cast range on runes. If you’re fighting at range, which is what Unwound Fate wants you to do, these runes are getting cast nowhere near anything you’re actually fighting. So the onslaught stacks are just sitting in reserve doing nothing until you either inch closer to be within range, or you come across something melee. And if that something melee is too fast moving, then it will charge right past the runes you’re placing before they arm. So the solution is either be at just the right range so that ranged enemies are within placement radius, or in case of melees…don’t move. Facetank everything, cause relocating wastes all the runes you’ve already placed but haven’t detonated yet.
The arming time is something that has been complained about basically since Inquisitor was introduced. I get it, it’s probably not going to change. But could we at least be able to cast these runes at respectable range? Inquisitor is a ranged mastery, after all. The current state where the arming time is bad against mobile melee enemies and the cast range too short for stationary ranged enemies leaves the runes in a really uncomfortable spot, and forces the ranged inquisitor to basically facetank or be at such close range to everything that all the advantage they get out of being ranged is basically neutralised.