I hope they are careful when designing the runes if they truly see it as a customization option for the player (as they advertise). If it is too much of “simply increase the skill in effectiveness”, then where is the customization? Many players will then use the same runes and have the same play styles. Hopefully they will introduce rare and unique runes as well.

I would have prefered a bunch more passive skills. Simply take the rune effects and turn them into passives. Is there really a need for skill runes?

I still kind of like it though; it’s an original idea, something new.

I think the skill runes add a random effect that passives don’t.  You can enhance your skills mostly through adding points into passives, and also through random drops to add an extra dimension.

I wouldn’t mind seeing more passives AND skill runes though

i hope the unannounced weapon enhancement is an expanded crafting system. for me the runewords got boring because they weren’t random, everyone had/wanted the same stuff, and you knew what the best possible items were. it would be much more interesting for the best items in the game to potentially come from crafting recipes with random results. everyone would have different stuff (assuming no dupes) and you would always have a reason to keep searching for recipe ingredients. would lead to an interesting economy too, with ingredients having relatively set values and individual items having all different sorts of values based on fits to builds.

i’m excited for the skill rune system. i think it will lead to a lot of variation, experimentation and replayability.

The problem with runewords isn’t the lack of randomness, it’s the lack of variety. They were the best items you could get, so why bother with anything else? Instead of adding a billion random options, they could add a billion VIABLE items which can be crafted in some sure way.
That way you can make whatever item you want, and still be different from everyone else.
I just don’t like the idea of random crafting. It requires you to spend way too much time outside of the game, and is a horrible waste of time.
I wouldn’t mind it if there were different ingredients you could collect by killing monsters and doing quests that could be used to create items with very little randomness. As long as there are many different ingredients and many ways to put them together, you’ll still have lots of variety.