If I may be forgiven for cross-posting and even worse quoting myself here's what I said in a similar thread over at the Amazon Basin:
Quote:a number of factors will make runes more common
It looks like all runes will be upwardly cubable. As our mathematicians have figured, this doesn't mean you'll be able to cube Zods but it does mean that runes you have plenty of will become more useful runes. (For me even some medium rarity runes such as Dol, Io and Pul became no longer worth picking up in 1.09)
A spin-off from that is that people will probably now squirrel away every rune. All those Rals, Orts and Thuls that I've seen people leave on the ground add up!
Next, we've been told that the drop system has been re-done and that rune drops are better now. This will still mean that Zod is rare - if drops are still rarer according to how high level the rune is - because if Zods were reasonably common and all the lower level runes were more common we'd soon be awash with Ists and Vexs which I'm quite sure is not intended.
Next factor is MF runs. Meph runs in particular had a very low runes to items drop rate. With a change in the culture towards mass killing of normal monsters in order to get set and unique items, more runes, jewels and charms will be a spin-off of that likely change in behaviour
The Countess drops on average a rune per run and we've been promised an improvement in her drops
Potentially the biggest factor is the promised change to quest rewards. There are two quest rewards currently offering runes: Act 4 Quest 2 and Act 5 Quest 2. We don't know what they are going to do but it seems reasonable that the Ral Ort Tal of Normal should be something more significant later on and that the improvement in Hellforge runes from Normal to Nightmare should be mirrored by a similar improvement in the rune drop in Hell compared to Nightmare
Conclusion: don't expect Zods but do expect to be able to operate several grades above your current rune usage (for instance if you now have plenty of Sols and Shaels you should be able to find plenty of Lums and Ums for the same effort). And of course the possibility of a lucky find is always there