RUNE BUILD: Baretta

Baretta wouldn't be a nightmare with dps runes if, say, you had 0 mons that would be later-game keepers that could farm, which is so important for a first 6.

Girlfriend's account has a repped damage-hybrid Baretta that's very much serviceable doing Tamor Hell or lower Faimon.

That being said, your build type is more popular and stronger because of Baretta's kit, that's his main strength. He's in plenty of ToA 1-100 lineups, goes to every cairos element dungeon except water for me, speed lead works in PVP, etc.

Spd slot 1 is universal, and his defense is low enough relative to his hp that unlike some mons, if you had enough acc from substats, I would only consider spd/hp/hp, not a defense rune anywhere. In contrast, Shannon has roughly the same defense but substantially less hp, which is why (again, assuming enough acc from substats) if you have room, Shannon can go spd/hp/def or spd/hp/hp and be functionally the same, or even better with the split hp/def. Bear in mind, if you have heals that are % based, your healers don't care if you go for hp or defense. If you have heals that are flat, based on your ATK or defense or something, then defense scales with your heals whereas increasing hp just gives you padding against death, it doesn't improve heal efficiency. Ahman will improve in a PVE group that has split defense/hp runes, even if a mon is a bit more skewed towards base hp. The problem with runing like this is how much you PVP with a mon. You can control who you use it to attack (and avoid ignore defense), but you can't on defense, and a lot of teams used to farm and gank have ignore defense. It's so rare to get ignored in PVE, though, that defense works out very well on supports when combined with hp.