Looking to make a Runepriest

[Regissoma]

In today's session my 2nd character has died and I am looking to make a Dwarven Runepriest. Sadly I have only played 4E for about two months now and know very little of the material to make a decent character, and henceforth would like to seek the assistance of the playground. Any help will be great as looking at the handbook hardly helped me.

Things to know: Level 5, 3200gp gold, 28 point buy, no dragon mag, eberron, or dark sun materials. My previous character was a striker, and due to a house rule we cannot use our old role when building our new character.
Current party:1 Wizard, 1 Necromancer-ish character, 1 fighter, 1 paladin, 1 bard, and 1 rogue

What I am personally looking for: The reason I wanted to play a Runepriest is due to only having 1 other leader in a group of 7. I was looking at buffing and healing while still being able to contribute in battle, and I am not interested in playing a cleric at all as we had one before so looking for something new. I am however open to any suggestions as long as I can either buff or heal allies.

[Epinephrine]

In today's session my 2nd character has died and I am looking to make a Dwarven Runepriest. Sadly I have only played 4E for about two months now and know very little of the material to make a decent character, and henceforth would like to seek the assistance of the playground. Any help will be great as looking at the handbook hardly helped me.

Things to know: Level 5, 3200gp gold, 28 point buy, no dragon mag, eberron, or dark sun materials. My previous character was a striker, and due to a house rule we cannot use our old role when building our new character.
Current party:1 Wizard, 1 Necromancer-ish character, 1 fighter, 1 paladin, 1 bard, and 1 rogue

What I am personally looking for: The reason I wanted to play a Runepriest is due to only having 1 other leader in a group of 7. I was looking at buffing and healing while still being able to contribute in battle, and I am not interested in playing a cleric at all as we had one before so looking for something new. I am however open to any suggestions as long as I can either buff or heal allies.

The first suggestion everyone will make is to make a warlord. Warlords are very strong leaders, and can buff and heal well while contributing in combat. With 7 party members their action point bonuses will be coming into play frequently, which is nice, and you have both a fighter and a rogue to pair up with in combat. Warlords can provide an initiative bonus to the whole party, allowing a substantial advantage in acting earlier, and they have some very nice repositioning powers, which can allow you to control the battlefield better.

The Runepriest is also a good choice; with passive buffs that many party members can benefit from. Runepriests have a striker-like ability, getting a damage bonus against foes that have attacked them and missed (Wis focus) or hit (Con focus). There is a very striker-y path for them at paragon, if you want to be dealing a lot of damage for a leader. Runepriest daily powers are not the best, until Epic levels. The runepriest can happily multiclass to Warlord to pick up a bonus for your allies on action points, and to poach powers since they are already strength-based.

An odd option might be to go with an artificer, as they provide many buffs that would help most of the party; if you can position so that your back line are adjacent to you and the front line is too, Magic Weapon would work very well.

I'd say that you should read through the Runepriest handbook, and to look at the warlord as well.

[Dimers]

In today's session my 2nd character has died and I am looking to make a Dwarven Runepriest. Sadly I have only played 4E for about two months now and know very little of the material to make a decent character, and henceforth would like to seek the assistance of the playground. Any help will be great as looking at the handbook hardly helped me.

Things to know: Level 5, 3200gp gold, 28 point buy, no dragon mag, eberron, or dark sun materials. My previous character was a striker, and due to a house rule we cannot use our old role when building our new character.
Current party:1 Wizard, 1 Necromancer-ish character, 1 fighter, 1 paladin, 1 bard, and 1 rogue

What I am personally looking for: The reason I wanted to play a Runepriest is due to only having 1 other leader in a group of 7. I was looking at buffing and healing while still being able to contribute in battle, and I am not interested in playing a cleric at all as we had one before so looking for something new. I am however open to any suggestions as long as I can either buff or heal allies.

There's not much to choose about a runepriest. They've received almost no support outside the book in which they were printed, so choices are straightforward -- there are maybe four or five powers to pick from at any given level. The basic builds are Str+Con (tough and likes to mix it up) or Str+Wis (better defense for yourself and allies). The other build option was printed in Dragon, so even if it were leader-oriented (it's not), you still couldn't use it.

Given the rather high point-buy, though, you could get by okay with high Strength and medium Con and Wis. This would take fullest advantage of the runepriest's unique feature -- being able to choose between two effects per power, on-the-fly. Whichever rider you choose, you've got a decent stat in it. You still couldn't raise both Con and Wis as you level up, assuming you raise your Str, but it'd be an interesting start at least.

As Epinephrine pointed out, warlord is an easy way to be quite effective as both a leader and a healer. And a Resourceful warlord build would also benefit from having two high secondary stats, Int and Cha instead of Con and Wis. Other leaders don't really have that function -- they can pick powers that use different secondary stats, but only runepriest and warlord have abilities that use BOTH secondary stats in different ways.

[Echobeats]

I like Runepriests. Minotaur is a good race for them if you're not committed to Dwarf.

Unfortunately the Rune feats are crap so they do rather lack support as has been said.

I recommend you make a double-sided card to keep track of your rune state. You can have fun making up a design for the Rune of Destruction and the Rune of Protection.

[Regissoma]

Alright thanks for the help guys. I guess I will look into Warlord and play test both to see which one I like more before the actual game.

[tcrudisi]

Runepriests are one of the most fun classes in the game. Period. No exaggeration.

Warlords are probably the best leaders in the game. They are also quite boring.

If you want to have a crap-load of fun, go Runepriest. If you want to be awesome but boring, go Warlord. Oh, and Runepriests are decent enough. Let me put it this way: When someone says, "Hey, I want to play a Leader", I say "Play a Runepriest. You can thank me later."

[Epinephrine]

Runepriests are one of the most fun classes in the game. Period. No exaggeration.

Warlords are probably the best leaders in the game. They are also quite boring.

I agree that Runepriests are fun, and you have choices to make every turn thanks to the different effects depending on which rune state you enter. I don't agree that warlords are boring, but I really enjoy them. Everyone will have their own preferences, but I think you can make a very fun warlord.

[georgie_leech]

I'd highly recommend taking a look at Zaq's That Rune Aimer (http://community.wizards.com/content/forum-topic/3746226) guide. It provides solid advice and is well written and easy to read.

[MeeposFire]

Do note that if you play a rune priest I highly recommend having a bunch of little markers and cards with all the stuff you can grant. Rune Priests can grant a large number of buffs at the same time so it can get confusing about who has what buff and what it does so having different markers and cards to help keep track will help a lot.

[Zaq]

I see my guide has already been linked (thanks, Georgie). It's got a lot of advice for Runepriests.

With no Dragon (so no Order Adept and no Words of Bravery) and no Eberron (so no Mark of Healing), you're going to have kind of a tough time granting saving throws, since that's the single biggest gap in the Runepriest's arsenal. That said, if you've already got another leader in the party, you can probably just encourage them to cover that base, I guess. You'll eventually be able to load up on Gloves of Grace; hopefully you won't need to grant too many saves before you can afford those. (You can really afford to load up on them by low Paragon or so, though I recognize that that's a ways away for you.)

That said, no character is perfect, so I don't want to scare you away from being a Runepriest. You can still be perfectly awesome with just PHB3 powers. It's a little unfortunate that you can't use Serene Blade, which is my favorite Artistry option, or Enlightened Word, which is my favorite paragon path, but there's still good options out there. I'd recommend probably going with Defiant Word over Wrathful Hammer; without access to Protective Scroll, I don't think it's really worthwhile to go for CON over WIS. (Yes, I know that dwarves boost STR/CON; go WIS-secondary anyway.)

No Dragon means no proficiency-granting backgrounds, so you're either going to be using a dagger or burning a feat on getting a better weapon. The only benefit of getting a better weapon is going to be a bigger [W] size (you don't really get a lot of benefit out of weapon keywords), so if you can stomach getting a d4 [W] size, you might just want to stick with a dagger until you've got feats to spare. Your job is to be a force multiplier, not a damage monster. Whatever you choose, make absolutely certain that you're using a weapon with a +3 proficiency bonus; as I say over and over in my guide, if you don't hit, you don't matter. Every +1 counts, and you're a leader—you've got to land your hits to make sure that your allies are as awesome as they can be.

I know you don't have that many feats to choose from, but I'd argue against taking any Rune feats. They're really not that powerful even if you have a bunch of them. The best of the lot is Rune of Battle, but it's Epic-only, and it's basically just as good without any other Rune feats backing it up. What feats SHOULD you take, then? The usual suspects are pretty good—an appropriate Expertise feat, Improved Defenses (this one can wait until Paragon), Superior Will, Improved Initiative/Battlewise, Skill Power, a fun multiclass feat . . . you're not going to need to set up any specific feat combos, so you can pretty much just take general-purpose feats and be good to go. Do think carefully about your MC options, especially once Paragon hits—the native Runepriest paths in PHB3 aren't terrible, but they're not amazing either, so you might want to look abroad for a good paragon path.

I do see that you said that "looking at the handbook hardly helped." Was that MY handbook, or one of the other ones? If it was mine, is there anything else I can explain that the handbook didn't make clear?

[Nightgaun7]

I've wanted to play a runepriest for ages, and this is not helping

[Inevitability]

I've wanted to play a runepriest for ages, and this is not helping

How nice to suddenly drop by in a thread made for someone else and complain this information isn't helping you?

[Nightgaun7]

How nice to suddenly drop by in a thread made for someone else and complain this information isn't helping you?

Rather the opposite - the posts by tcrudisi and Zaq are fueling my desire to play one.

[Tegu8788]

I suspect he meant it's not helping having this in front of him when he's been unable to play a runepriest.

But I can't say for certain, because I'm not him.

[Dimers]

Rather the opposite - the posts by tcrudisi and Zaq are fueling my desire to play one.

Man, I have *got* to get my 4e game ready to play ... sigh ... just a couple more years ...

[Tegu8788]

Soon as you do, I'm in.