Runestones are going to be really important in Diablo 3. There will be 6 types of Runestones each with 1 of 7 ranks. These Runestones are applied to your skills similar to the way that glyphs are applied to your character in World of Warcraft and with similar effect. These effects range from the sort of damage your minions will deal to the types of effects that your abilities do on your target.

Runestones, though, will be in high demand but in limited supply, this supply and demand nature will gives these items consistent value on the Diablo 3 gold based and real money auction houses.

Rune Dust, on the other hand, is an essential trade good used in, at least, equipment enhancements which are very similar to enchants in World of Warcraft. In World of Warcraft an enchant’s effect was guaranteed, but enhancements in Diablo 3 have been said to be random to some degree. This means you could spend enormous amounts of trade goods re-enhancing an item until you get the maximum effect out of your Mystic.

Rune Dust is salvaged from Runestones, and here lies the problem. Is it more valuable to salvage Runestones or to sell them straight up on the auction house? The amount and type of Rune Dust you get from a Runestone and their market prices will help us determine this. So far we only know that a rank 1 Runestone will yield us some amount of rank 1 Rune Dust, but how many? Once we know which should be early after the release of the game or sometime late in the beta, we will be able to determine if we can buy Runestones and salvage them to Rune Dust or if we should sell our Runestones wholesale.

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