New World Heartrune Guide: Which One Is the Best | Heartrune of Grasping Vines, Stoneform, Detonate, Cannon Blast, Dark Ascent

There are currently 5 different Heartrunes in New World. The Heartrune of Cannon Blast allows you to fire a cannonball. The Heartrune of Detonate lets you explode after charging for 3 seconds. Heartrune of Grasping Vines gives you a debuffing AOE root. Heartrune of Dark Ascent lets you fly into the air and crash back down, dealing damage and life-stealing. Heartrune of Stone form gives you temporary crowd control immunity and damage reduction. Many of these Heartrunes received changes on the New World Brimstone Sands PTR. In this Heartrune guide/tutorial, we'll talk about which Heartrune is best for your playstyle and why.

Heartrune of Grasping Vines

Let's begin with the Heartrune of Grasping Vines.

Minor Heartrune of Grasping Vines

This is now a 4-meter AOE, it used to be smaller than that, and that will root all enemies within that area for 3 seconds, and this is also where we find our first inconsistency, many hard runes can be affected by external effects like empowers for example or effects that can increase the duration of certain buffs, but for grasping Vine specifically what you would think would work being the 300 constitution perk, and the heavy armor perk that increases crowd control duration both doesn't work at all, so while we originally thought that this would heavily encourage this rune being used by heavy armor and high con users by tanks, in general, that is not the case, there's no additional benefit in that at least as of now unless it gets fixed, damage wise with a 250 base damage before all the scaling is applied, this rune is on the weaker, end the base version of the Rune drops from Illuvium mall in Gardens of Genesis.

CunningHeartrune of Grasping Vines

Cunning Heartrune of Grasping Vines provides you with leeching vines that allow you to heal for 20 of the Damage Done to rooted targets, honestly with the base damage being relatively low, we wouldn't recommend that and there's another heart rune that does a similar job of self-heal NCC much better, so we don't really think there's much of a reason to use this one.

Stalwart Heartrune of Grasping Vines

This one comes with resilient vines, which gives you 20 damage absorption or fortify, but also reduces your outgoing damage by 20 for 5 seconds, crafting this, by the way, requires rid of Adventure which you can get from questing in Brimstone Sands or from your faction vendor, we think this one is rather Niche though because they are few situations where you're okay with reducing your damage output, the main use case we could see for this is if you're using this for self-peel as a Healer and you don't really care about your damage output and you just want more survivability when you're ruining the enemy, but we imagine that most lights are our users that are after a defensive choice will not necessarily go for the vines.

Brutal Heartrune of Grasping Vines

This comes with rendering vines which applies a 20 rent to targets hit by the grasping vines for 5 seconds, but it also reduces your stamina regeneration by 50 for 5 seconds, we think for the types of players that will make the most use of this Rune which will likely be bruised in heavy or medium armor, the downside here is okay, you are gonna have less stamina, but the enemies will be in a route for three of these five seconds, so it's only two seconds more with half stem regeneration, but it's not like you're at much risk at that moment because enemies around you will have to weaken and rent on them anyways, apparently at the moment having more CCR increases the duration for the stamina regen reduction, this would make sense if it also increased the root duration so let’s hope it gets fixed.

Recipe: Major Heartrune of Grasping Vines

While we would technically consider this the best rune, the Purple Heart rune, the major heart rune of grasping vines is the only one that can go over the three seconds cap with additional quad control increase effects, at least according to what XR was able to find in the files, this one should be able to reach the full 4.2 seconds, as such for now until they fix it so that that's the case for all hot runes, the purple rune may actually be the best vines rune at least for tanks.

Heartune of Stoneform

Minor Heartune of Stoneform

This is generally the safety net option that we'll likely see on a lot of light armor users, Healer especially.

Greater Heartune of Stoneform

That is pretty much its only downside if you already have a massive amount of fortifying then you will probably hit cap and you won't benefit from this, but otherwise, it's up to 40 fortify that you're getting here for five seconds which we think is a very very good Safety Net in addition to the crowd control immunity, so if you're getting engaged on, we think this is probably your best bet to survive that for most builds that aren't heavily kept on fortify.

Stalwart Heartune of Stoneform

This may in some situations give you more survivability, but the problem is the moment there is any anti-hill around this will be reduced and that is something the other heart rune doesn't suffer from, mitigated damage in the first place is usually more beneficial than healing it back up afterward, especially when you're using Stone formula healer, you're going to be more likely to be focused by people with entering heel, so they'll get double for their money there.

Brutal Heartune of Stoneform

It can be an excellent deterrent to scare off overly aggressive enemies. Still, we don't think it's worth losing your stone form.

Heartrune of Detonate

Cunning Heartrune of Detonate

So if you're looking for an Empower, this can be beneficial, but if you're already close to empower cap from other effects, then this won't give you much additional benefit, we think for most PVP scenarios, this will be this safe go-to option, because in PvP you're usually not going to run around at a power cap, in PVE, you're closer to empower cap much more often, and this will probably have less value.

Stalwart Heartrune of Detonate

We don't think that reducing your damage output by 30 on the heart rune of detonating, specifically is worth it, so we don't really see much value in this particular one.

Brutal Heartrune of Detonate

For PVE, this is hands down the best option, because in PVE the risk of actually getting hit by something is much lower and you'll benefit from doing all that extra damage all the time, in PvP, we will label this high risk medium reward, you can most certainly get away with it, especially if you're running something like for example Hatchet and you're just going to run defy death anyways or maybe if you're running this also in heavy because you're dealing less damage overall then but you're also not going to be as fast about taking 15 more damage for a bit, but for many others taking 15 more damage is just incredibly dangerous, it's even more risky with the great sword which already has another effect that makes you take more damage while you're in the assault stance, we think it's a very strong Rune and the 30 movement speed slightly offsets the extra damage taken because you can Juke better as well, but I would definitely recommend having a cunning or just a major heartrune at hand as well, in case there's ever a situation where you don't want to get blown up too easily.

Heartrune of Cannon Blast

Cunning Heartrune of Cannon Blast

This one doesn't reduce the damage or we have any other negative downside, so it's really just a better version of the major heart rune at the same time the effect itself is also not particularly spectacular because enemies usually don't line up and it's going to be rare that you even hit more than two targets.

Stalwart Heartrune of Cannon Blast

It could be interesting and effective if it can combo well with other CC, we'll have to try it, we believe that option will be rather Niche anyways because we don't think most people who pick Cannon blast are going to pick it for the CC.

Brutal Heartrune of Cannon Blast

This may be the best option even when going for single Target damage, the problem that we found with the cannon blast is that the hitbox of the projectile itself is extremely small, it almost feels more like a bow projectile even though it's supposed to be a cannonball.

Heartrune of Dark Ascent

Major Heartrune of Dark Ascent

The other leaching perks aren't really important if you're really looking for leaching then you're likely looking for the heart rune of dark ascent because it has way more leaching than any other ability and still a pretty decent amount of Base damage, different from the others, this effect doesn't come with a damaging cut.

Cunning Heartrune of Dark Ascent

This is actually pretty good, this is longer than the root or the vines, this is actually pretty decent and it also heals you at the same time, it doesn't come with the additional weekend or rent though, we could imagine this being somewhat useful as a safety tool, you fly up to avoid damage and then when you crash down, you slow enemies and then you have the chance to quickly move away.

Stalwart Heartrune of Dark Ascent

It seems like this refers to the AOE damage, so you have to drop down on three targets to get the full fortify, and then you also get 30 reduced damage, we don't think this trade-off is good in many situations, and you're just much better off slowing all enemies around you and getting away and avoiding damage taken that way rather than having this odd trade-off that also relies on you having a lot of enemies around that is assuming we're interpreting this description correctly.

Brutal Heartrune of Dark Ascent

We think losing a stagger is a significant downside, and we think not getting slow which we think is a very nice follow-up tool is also a significant downside in many situations, you actually end up dealing less damage with this option, but in the situation where it's effective and you're hitting a lot of enemies, you can basically be surrounded drop down on them deal a lot of damage to them, and heal for an absolutely insane amount.