Your equipment is everything to your character in Diablo 2: Resurrected. You’ll be using it to increase your character’s overall abilities and augmenting their powers that you’ll be consistently used throughout many of your battles. A significant improvement you want to make to your weapons is creating rune words. You can do this by placing specific runes into your equipment to form a word. That word gives an equipment a series of buff and enhancements based on the word you created.
Runes work similarly to gems, which means if you want to use them, you need to find an item that can accept sockets. From there, the real trick is finding runes. You can find them throughout the game, but they typically drop off bosses and powerful enemies, such as The Countess in Act 1.
When you have a handful of runes, all you have to do now is place them into a piece of equipment you want to use. You can use several resources to find the correct combination of rune words, and once you know the mixture, the next step is making sure you have enough sockets. For example, to create the rune word Black, you need to find a club, hammer, or a mace that contains three sockets so you can place the Thul, Lo, and Nef runes into the item. Once those items are in the weapon, you’ll receive all of the effects of the ‘Black’ rune word, significantly augmenting the weapon.
But, like gems, you cannot remove runes from any part of your equipment, so you want to make sure you’re planning to use the piece of equipment for quite some time before you get rid of it. Sometimes, it’s better to augment your equipment immediately before taking on a powerful boss. If you’re not struggling, placing the runes in your personal chest for later is always an option.
