Enchanting

Enchanting provides Glyphs in Elder Scrolls Online. Glyphs are enchantments which are applied on gear. There’s three types of glyphs: armor glyphs, weapon glyphs, and jewelry glyphs . Glyphs are crafted at enchanting station, typically found in towns. The combination of runes used to craft the glyph affects the quality and effects of the final glyph, much like the combination of reagents does in Alchemy.

To craft glyphs, the enchanter needs Runes. These are gathered in the world. The runestone nodes visually appear to be very small-sized shrines, which come in different colors. The color of the shrine defines the type of the rune.

When an enchanter crafts new glyphs, they will learn the translation of the runes used in the process. The translations define what kind of effects the rune will have in a glyph.

Runes Explained

There’s three types of runestones in Elder Scrolls Online: Potency Runes, Essence Runes and Aspect Runes. In order to craft a glyph, you need all three of them, and each of the rune will define what the final glyph does.

Let’s say we have a weapon enchant glyph with the following effect: ‘Deals 15 Fire Damage’.

• The Potency rune is needed to tell the glyph what it actually does, in this case it simply ‘deals damage’. It also determines how high level you must be to be able to use the Glyph.
• The Essence rune tells the glyph what kind of damage it does, in this case ‘Fire Damage’. It determines the attribute or stat that the enchant affects.
• The Aspect Rune tells the glyph how much damage it does, in this case ’15’. In short, the Aspect rune determines the quality of the Glyph.

Potency Runes

Potency Runes are one of the three required runestones for Glyphs.  Potency runes determine how high level you must be to be able to use the Glyph. They are gathered from blue rune nodes, and are square-shaped.

Potency Runes can be either additive or subtractive. As an example, you can combine any of the additive potency runes together with the Essence rune ‘Rakeipa’ (translation is Fire) to create a weapon enchant glyph which deals x Fire damage. If  you use a subtractive rune instead of an additive rune, you get a different glyph. In this case it would be a Fire Resistance jewelry enchant glyph.

Special thanks to beta tester SirAndy for compiling a list of the rune translations and glyph combinations.

Additive Potency Runes

Subtractive Potency Runes

Essence Runes

Essence Runes are the second type of runestones.  They determine the attribute or stat that the enchant affects. Essence runes are gathered from yellow runestone nodes, and are trapezoid-shaped.

The stats and attributes will not be too strange to Elder Scrolls players. The standard elemental damage types, Magicka, Health and Stamina boosts and regenerations exist in ESO as well as a couple of other effects.

Aspect Runes

Aspect Runes are the third and final type of runestones.  Aspect runes determine the quality of the crafted Glyph. They are gathered from red runestone nodes, and are round-shaped.

The translation of aspect runes directly matches their rarity/quality, which visually shows as item color, ranging from white (base/common) to gold (legendary).

List of Glyphs in Elder Scrolls Online

As mentioned earlier, there’s three types of glyphs: Armor glyphs, weapon glyphs and jewelry glyphs. Here’s a list of all possible rune combinations, glyph names and glyph descriptions under each category.

Note that the potency rune you use in crafting the glyphs will affect its name and its level. If you use the additive potency rune ‘Pora’, for example, the Glyph’s prefix will be ‘strong’: ‘Glyph of Magicka’ then changes to ‘Strong Glyph of Magicka’, and so on.

Armor Glyphs

The list of armor glyphs is pretty short. There’s only three ways to enchant your armor; the glyphs will either add Magicka, Health or Stamina on an armor piece.

Small Armor slots vs Normal Armor slots

Something to consider with Armor Glyphs is that they come in two sizes: normal enchants and small enchants. Small enchants don’t give you the full bonus of the glyph that the tooltip promises. In reality it’s only around 40% of the tooltip’s value. All glyphs applied on Shoulders, Waist, Hands and Feet slots will be small enchants. If you apply the same glyph on other armor slots, you’ll get the full benefit of the enchant.

Weapon Glyphs

As you can see there’s quite a few ways to enchant your weapon in ESO. The standard ‘deal elemental damage’ enchants and ‘absorb Stamina/Magicka/Health’ enchants from previous Elder Scrolls games exist in ESO as well. There’s new ones, too, such as Glyph of Rage: Increase your power.

Jewelry Glyphs

Considering that there’s only three item slots for jewelry (two rings and a necklace), the number of different jewelry glyphs is huge. You can reduce magicka/stamina costs of abilities, increase resistances, improve regeneration rates and much more.

How to Use Glyphs

A question you constantly see pop up in ESO beta is how to enchant your items or how to apply glyphs on your gear. Since this is not clear to a great number of players, we’ll show you how to do it.

Using Glyphs is simple. First you must either open your inventory or current gear, then right click on the item you wish to enchant. A menu will pop up, and if the item can be enchanted, it will have the ‘enchant’ option.

Choosing ‘enchant’ will open another window, showing the Glyphs you have in your inventory that can be applied on the item. Again, note that there are three types of glyphs: armor glyphs, jewelry glyphs and weapon glyphs. Only the right types of Glyph will show up in this menu.

You can click on the desired Glyph and choose to enchant your item. By default the Enchant button is bound to ‘E’ in this window. You will also see a preview of your item’s stats with the enchantment.

Once you’ve completed these steps, the Glyph will disappear from your inventory and the enchant will appear on the item.

Glyph Extraction

Glyphs can be extracted at an enchanting station. This is the process of breaking down the glyph. Once you extract a glyph, it will be destroyed. Extracting a glyph will yield runes and inspiration points for enchanting, also known as crafting experience. You can increase the chance of getting getting runestones from extraction with the enchanting skill line passive Aspect Extraction.

Enchanting Skill Line

The Enchanting skill line offers five passive skills which provide bonuses to Enchanting.

Potency Improvement is the passive skill you must invest skill points in if you want to advance as an enchanter. Putting points in this passive will allow you to craft higher level glyphs.

Aspect Improvement allows you to use higher quality Aspect runes for Enchanting. The higher the quality of your Aspect rune, the better the stats of your glyph. Any serious enchanter will invest all three skill points in this passive.

Keen Eye: Rune Stones gives the rune stone nodes a glow in the world, making them easier to see. I find that in general the rune stones are quite easy to see as it is, but if taking this passive means you’ll have an easier time spotting the nodes, go ahead and take it.

Hireling will send you rune stones every day. Investing in this skill will increase the frequency and quantity at which the runes are sent. It’s free runes, what can you say? As long as you have the skill points, it’s a nice passive to have if you care about Enchanting.

Aspect Extraction increases the chance of extracting Aspect runes from glyphs. Maxing out at 15%, the value of this passive isn’t amazing. It does mean you can extract the legendary Aspect runes easier, which will come in handy once you want to craft more powerful glyphs for your gear. Again, if you are into Enchanting, you probably want to take this anyway.