How to Unlock Rune Words in Diablo 4

New with Diablo 4’s Vessel of Hatred expansion are the return of Rune Words, special socket items that grant new boons and abilities to your character. While you do lose out on gem slots by using them, rune words more than make up for this disadvantage by adding powerful new effects to your weapons and armor. Before you can make use of them, however, you’ll need to unlock them first. Here’s how to unlock rune words in Diablo 4.

How to use Rune Words in Diablo 4

Thankfully, rune words in Diablo 4 are unlocked as part of the Vessel of Hatred campaign. Begin the campaign and continue to complete the quests given to you. Eventually, you’ll be given the quest, “Fundament of Faith.” Upon completing this quest, an NPC will reward you with the ability to use rune words, and even supply you with a few starter runes! Just make sure to open the cache that silently appears in your inventory.

The runes themselves work in pairs, forming a word and completing the cause-and-effect passives you can gain. The purple Invocation Runes are the effect you want your rune word to have. They can range from restoring primary resources, to unleashing an ability you otherwise don’t know, to raising your critical strike chance by a small percentage. The yellow Ritual Runes are the conditions you need to satisfy for those invocations to happen. Using a skill after moving, drinking a healing potion, and casting your ultimate skill are all examples of ritual rune conditions. To make a rune word, you have to socket both a yellow rune and a purple rune onto a single piece of gear. Naturally, this means any gear you want to form a rune word on will need at minimum two sockets.

In addition to pairing yellow and purple runes together, you also need to balance out their Offering stat. You can think of Offering as the cost of forming the rune word. Ritual runes are worth a certain amount of Offering. Invocation runes require a certain amount of offering. As long as your ritual rune provides more offering than your invocation rune requires, you’ll be able to form the rune word without a problem. Just remember: you want the offering on the yellow runes to be equal or greater than the offering on the purple runes.

You’re refunded your runes if you salvage gear with them equipped, so feel free to experiment! Runes are just one of the new features in Vessel of Hatred. Check out our guide on The Best Mercenary Companion in Diablo 4 for a breakdown of the new companions you can bring on your adventure. Unlocking runes is straightforward, but earning more runes is a bit harder. Make things easier by learning How to Get Runes in Diablo 4.

Diablo 4 and its expansion, Vessel of Hatred, are available for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC.