Runebreak

Runebreaking
Runebreaking is the act of a runecrafter using the Runebreak skill on a magical item. The result is a loot window appearing with a variety of Runecrafter's crafting materials (runeshards) available for the taking. These are then used by the Runecrafting profession at a workbench to craft Runes.

Drops
Runebroken items will usually (though not always) drop a Powder, Shard, and/or Crystal type runeshard with a rarity typically the same as that of the item being broken. There is a significantly lower chance of also dropping Kinetic, Sentience, and Perpetual runeshards; some, all, or none of the different types can be dropped from the same item.

The size of the runeshards that Runebreaking yields is dependent on the broken item's level, where "size" refers to whether the runeshard is small (Powder, Arc, Spark, or Blur suffixes), medium (Shard, Charge, Surge, Glow) or large (Crystal, Burst, Blast, Flare). Empirical data suggest that each potential type of runeshard of every size is rolled separately between 1 and 3, with higher levels having a better chance of dropping larger runeshards and a lower chance of dropping smaller runeshards, and vice versa for lower level items. Because each type appears to be rolled separately, a runebreak can sometimes yield a large quantity of runeshards, or only one, but never nothing at all.

Trivia

 * The "Runebreak" ability was temporarily disabled on the 3rd March 2011 due to an exploit.