Most players in Returners strengthen their heroes by focusing on leveling up, transcendence, equipping better gear, and enhancing skills.

While these methods do significantly increase combat strength, they cannot bring out the heroes’ full potential; in order for heroes to reach the peak of their power, they need to be equipped with runes.

Runes are extremely important in the late game phase since they increase stats based on percentages. Since heroes take much longer to upgrade and level up as they grow stronger, runes can provide a much-needed boost to offset the slow rate of improvement in the mid-late phase of the game.

Starting with basic rune combinations, this guide focuses on Rune Dungeon rotations and which runes are most effective.

Acquiring and Combining rune bits

Every hero in Returners has their own runes, so the Rune Dungeon has a different level for each hero. You can obtain a specific hero’s rune bits by running their designated Rune Dungeon. The rune bits you can earn will be the attack, defense, or support.

The grade of the runes are all different depending on the difficulty of the dungeon you enter, and the number of required rune bits increases along with the grade of the rune. The required number of rune bits are as follows: 5 for low, 10 for mid, and 15 for high. Upon collecting all the required rune bits, you can combine and equip them by clicking [+] on the screen.

A hero can only equip one rune at 1-star, and the number increases by 1 until that hero reaches 3 stars. The number of slots then increases by 2 from 4-star onward, reaching a max of 9 runes at 6 stars. Note that each type of rune - attack, defense, and support - can only be equipped up to 3 times per hero.

After combining rune bits, a player receives a rune with a randomly generated effect based on what type of rune is made. Attack runes provide offensive effects (water/magic attack damage increase, attack % increase, attack speed increase, critical chance, critical damage, etc.); defense runes provide defense effects (physical/magic defense increases, defense % increase, etc.); while support runes provide a wide variety of effects such as additional health, evasion, penetration, HP restoration upon killing an enemy, and lifesteal.

Rune Dungeon rotation, rune transfers, and recommendations

Although Rune Dungeon heroes change on a daily basis, there’s a fixed weekly rotation:

Since the Rune Dungeon heroes are on a fixed rotation, you can’t always get the runes for the heroes you want.

Thankfully, you can get around this by using the Rune Transfer to switch runes from one hero to another. If you use the Rune Transfer a lot, you should level up the Rune Altar for a more efficient transfer.

The number of available transfers is not that high at first, and the target hero is chosen at random. Because of this, early transfers may make you feel like you’re gambling your gold away.

When the Rune Altar reaches level 15, you can choose the hero class you want to transfer to, and when the altar reaches level 25 you can transfer rune bits to a selected hero. So if you’d rather not risk your gold and rune bits, hold off on transferring until your Rune Altar reaches level 15.

The number of Rune Transfers increases as the Rune Altar levels up, so if you wish to use the transfer function a lot, spend you Altar Essence on the Rune Altar.

As mentioned before, the number of runes your hero can equip is limited to 3 for each type. The efficiency of the specific runes varies based on each hero’s skills and class. But there are still a number of widely-used rune combinations.

For attack runes, physical/magic attack damage increase and attack damage % increase are the most popular. For players who are entering the mid-late levels, having attack damage % increase runes is a must. The other most commonly used attack runes for physical damage heroes are critical hit chance, critical damage, and attack speed runes.

For defense, it doesn’t really matter what type of defense rune you equip as all of them are physical/magic defense-related. Tanks, however, may be better off with physical/magic defense % increase rather than general increase runes as their basic defense stat is fairly high.

With support runes, additional health and evasion are most effective for tanks. For support and magic damage-based heroes, additional health should work better than any other runes because their health is quite low in general. The lifesteal rune is considered as important as the attack damage increase rune, so physical attack-based heroes must have it for more efficiency.