I recently got some rune weapons so now I can contribute! I didn't get any til after I had conquered the map since I was using all my qualis gems to get lvl 30 stats, so by this point I had all the king weapons. Also I got the Sarleon, Fierd and D'Shar king weapons while I still held only Laria as the Empire and Ravenstern were rolling up the map and I took the opportunity to mug the Kings of the losing factions with little difficulty or consequences.
The rune weapons were therefore harder to get than at least some of the king weapons, but it depends which factions are losing and how many gems you want to spend on stats before you get one I suppose. You can farm some easy qualis gems from adventure companies and peasant rebellion hero though so if they keep coming up it's very easy to get rune weapons even before getting a fief. The only heroes relatively hard to beat were mystmountain, jatu, snake and noldor heroes, plus Syla Uzas and Sheik Salavan, which means the other 50% are easy.
In terms of their potential, I found them to be quite excellent in some ways. The Ruby greatsword has the range of a zweihander but can be used on horseback, has decent speed and high damage and pierce meaning it not only one shots at really good range on horseback but also has the potential to murder heavily armoured horses fast as well which is very good when powerfuk order knights are chasing me. The Emerald and Sapphire versions weren't so good, maybe they would be if I was on foot but if the weapon swings too fast then there's too much risk of swinging too early or late and the loss of piercing damage is major.
The bows on the other hand were more balanced. The Ruby bow had awful accuracy and high damage, but bows are already pierce damage anyway and with high power draw I could already one shot anyone with a body shot so the loss of accuracy was major. Emerald had a damage boost that wasn't as great, but its accuracy was less gimped but still worse than the noldor bow. However, the Sapphire bow had 1 less damage than a masterwork noldor bow but the same accuracy and a LOT of speed, I could draw it about twice as fast and on the open battlefield where the battle progresses fast and you have access to storage then running out of arrows isn't a huge problem and the extra fire speed gave me far more kills and was less dangerous when I missed a shot. So even though I have the king weapons I'm using a ruby greatsword and sapphire bow.
I haven't tried the noldor king weapons yet. I loaded and auto calced Wolfbode about 50 times and never got his strange rune axe, and beat him on the field about 6 times and never got the axe then either. If the Noldor weapons have a similiar drop rate then considering how hard the noldor are and the rare drop rate plus how much of a pain they are when they are angry and the loss of noldor services they would be WAY harder to get than any other weapons regardless of how powerful they are. I might try to get them sometime soon, after I finish my CKO and make them as strong as Twilight Knights
