Hmm.. i can get behind that. At least then we won't have to research the M.R of Unyielding to put it on a banner, and can start working on Understand a Master Rune for Purification.
Not needing to do detail work on the unyielding rune is one reason I prefer the armour to bungie's alternative proposal of making a banner, yes. I'd like to see master rune research happen but there are many runes, not least purification, I'd rather see being tinkered with than unyielding.
That's fair yeah! I'm suggesting a theme largely because Armor runes have been demonstrably hard to combo in previous attempts. But Master Blizzards and Lightning and Impact or Master Blizzards and Lightning and Grungni are both going to be really powerful rune sets regardless of if they actually Combo I think.
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In regards to this what other supporting runes do you think would be better for the Eternal Bastion armor suggestion than the currently proposed Fortitude and Preservation? Myself I'm the most iffy on Preservation, even if the idea of sealing every crack and weakness which it professes when used on armor is rather fitting to the Eternal Bastion concept.
I still suspect the combo airballs on Otrek's and Gloin's suits had less to do with armour specifically being hard to combo and more to do with the arrays we chose basically boiling down to stongest defensive master rune we got + a coupla other physical and magical defence runes on top. I believe thinking less prosaically, for lack of a better word, will improve our chances going forward: blizzard/lightning/impact all contribute toward a coherent statement, moreso than gromril/preservation/sanctuary did imo. The former says "thunderbolt in the heart of winter" while the latter says "I'm stacking all the bonuses to Armour Class, bro, so I'll be really hard to hit".
I hope you don't feel I'm being overly dismissive or that I'm misrepresenting the work that went into picking Otrek's runes, and obviously there's an element of reading entrails at work here when I'm trying to prognosticate what makes for good combo fodder, because who can say how Soul really goes about deciding if a set will combo or not. If we go with a handpicked set for the griffonking and it fails to combo, feel free to quote this post back at me and ask me how things worked out for me lol
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As for the dwarf armour, I'm in agreement with you that preservation is the odd man out. Unyielding and fortitude both work on the man inside the armour and intuitively fit well together with the concepts I associate with the heart: persistence, stubbornness, vitality etc. Preservation is described as affecting the armour itself, making it supernaturally protective. It's a rune designed to work on dead matter; a fine low-risk choice for most armour but a poor fit for this particular suit, imo.
Instead, we may want to look for another rune that would associate with the flesh-and-blood man inside the armour rather than the cold metal of the suit itself. The heart's got connotations with vigour and physical strength, so if you're willing to deviate from the philosophy of maximum defence a little bit, I think the rune of might could be really sick together with unyielding and fortitude. Being able to take on all comers and stay standing necessarily suggests being able to push back, after all, and those three runes together all pull towards the direction of overflowing vitality and inexhaustible strength. It's the kind of armour I picture Snorri the Immovable wearing.
Alternatively you could pull on the idea of a man's heart being the seat of violent emotions and put a rune of fury in there, but I acknowledge that's kind of an oddball choice and would be going even further afield of your goal of making a defensive piece (even though I think it could potentially be really cool).
