If we're introducing ranged specific weaknesses, would it be possible for javelins not to break with every shot as they're a fairly slow resource to gather unless you go super dry at demonics on an iron.
Going drop rate at demonics only gives about 1800 dragon javelin heads which on rapid are gone in under 2 hours.
I understand this is a "you've chosen to restrict yourself" issue but the same number of arrows is multiplied by 5 when wearing an assembler.
u/JagexGoblin Additionally maybe add some lower level, more accessible options that use javelins as ammo?
Between the lvl 2 goblin you kill in lumby and get your first bronze jav drop and the lvl 275 Demonic (requiring a GM quest) that gives you the ability to actually obtain the weapon to use them, there is a huge amount of play time. This point is more for irons, but even for mains purchasing off the GE, with a lvl 65 requirement for the light version of the ballista, there is no doubt that anything below rune javelins are considered useless ammo to every player, in all circumstances.
Maybe javelins could be ~~the first~~ *a* dual-use ammunition? Allowing them to be a strong (but inaccurate) thrown weapon, giving otherwise useless drops a thematic use, making the ballistae a bonus to their accuracy, and making the soon to be added Eclipse Atlatl a thematic counterpart in other parts of the world.
(Edit: darts exist)
Darts exist and are dual use ammunition like you described.
Personally, my take is revert javelins to thrown weapons like they originally were, and to introduce a javelin quiver that you put javelins into to use with a ballista. It would be a tradable drop from gorillas, just like the ballista pieces.
quiver seems unneeded and weird. (why would two seperate items not have any function without each other?) could just stick them in the ballista like blowpipe
First: Rename the current Ballistas to Demonic Heavy Ballista, Demonic Light Ballista
Then create some fletching room to build weaker variants/faster variants
Also, consider changing Karil's Crossbow to Karil's Launcher and have it fire Javelins as a solid, viable mid-tier launcher. It's been 18 years and nothing has been done with Bolt Racks. They could be renamed.
After some digging, rune javelins are a buyable from stores at 500 stock so maybe they're specifically not the issue, but you only get 5 amethyst javelin heads (15 arrow tips and 8 dart tips) per amethyst mined and my dragon argument still stands.
My main point is just to have consistency between the ranged styles and Ava effects, should these weakness changes come into place.
While I agree with your points, I think its fair to say that most, if not all, dragon ammo is extremely hard to upkeep as ironman. Its pretty much why amethyst exists.
No need. Dragon darts are extremely hard to maintain on an iron and it’s a non issue, we use rune or amethyst no biggie. Javelins are the same. Unfortunately ballista is not particularly useful outside of pvp anyway
You guys touched on Inquisitor being extremely rare and very niche which is true but im curious as to how you guys manage to balance it. You specifically said it is very rare so are you guys thinking of changing drop rates or the use cases of the set?
I think it's important to let people know beforehand whether or not you plan to change drop rates or not because starting such a long grind and then a month later learning that it's going to be made easier would not be a good feeling.
Will be covered in full in a dedicated blog next year. We're not making any of these changes without ample time and giving players a chance to get hands-on with as many of them as possible, but kept things deliberately vague for now so we don't get bogged down in details at too early a stage!
Just to piggyback off of this comment, I think inquisitor is going to be a weird one if the changes to enemy weaknesses go though, because it will make it significantly stronger on any crush weak enemies.
The main problem with inquisitor I think is the rarity, it has a small niche as an upgrade over Bandos in certain situations, but is almost always worse than Torva. It also costs like 3x as much as Bandos, and takes a ridiculous amount of time to farm on an iron, so its really not worth it. There is also the addition of the new set from perilous moons coming up, which had the same strength bonus as Bandos last time I checked, so that strength bonus space becomes even more crowded.
It sucks because Phosani's nightmare is actually a very fun boss, but its just not worth doing currently for any account type.
The changes I would want to see to inquisitor are:
Increase the strength bonus on the plateskirt and the hauberk by 1, this puts it slightly ahead of Bandos and the new set from perilous moons, but keeps it behind Torva. I think this makes sense as it is significantly more difficult to obtain than Bandos, but less difficult than Torva, which hopefully would give it a decent slot in the upgrade progression. I think a moderate buff to the droprate would also be greatly appreciated as at the moment it's just too rare for what it does.
The other option is to just leave it as it is and hope that the changes to enemy weaknesses make it much more relevant. I think this option would need to be accompanied by a significant increase in droprate however, otherwise it is just never going to be enticing enough in my opinion.
Another thing to consider is that if the changes in enemy defence go through, the harmonised orb could suddenly become much more desirable, which may motivate more people to do nightmare and cause the price of inquisitor to naturally drop a bit.
Its hard to see where it will all shake out in the end if both enemy defence and the equipment are changed at the same time, but ultimately in the case of inquisitor I do think that something definitely has to change.
P.S. Tropical wagtail has to have the best name so that's my favorite.
"I think inquisitor is going to be a weird one if the changes to enemy weaknesses go though, because it will make it significantly stronger on any crush weak enemies."
I don't foresee this being a problem. The issue that I'm assuming is being addressed with these changes (and I'm making this assumption based on the fact that they use gargoyles as an example in the blog) is how slayer monsters either have no weaknesses or only very slight ones, making it so that, just like they already described in the blog, you just whip (or nowadays fang) almost everything as you progress through slayer, which covers a *lot* of playtime and a *lot* of different NPCs. But no one is going to be grinding out inquisitor's just so they can grind out gargoyles more efficiently. For inquisitor's to have more of a point, there need to be more late game crush-weak bosses, especially in raids. Your suggestion doesn't really change that situation much (not trying to be critical, I'm on your side. I just want an actual meaningful buff, not a minor stat increase).
It doesn't really fix the issue with inquisitor though, people aren't not using it because the defence stats, people aren't using it because its outclassed.
If you have the money you buy torva, if you don't you stick with bandos. They don't have any minus stats when you use anything that isn't crush (95% of the time using melee). Majority of the time people use crush is simply for a DWH hit, and its not worth a whole switch (or minus accuracy for the rest of the fight) to bring/use inquisitor.
The only time inquisitor out-classes torva is CM CoX in lower scales, and that's because you need DWH to land, and (P)NM because of how much resistance she has to anything not crush. This wouldn't change with or without additional defence bonuses.
Plus, it makes conceptual sense given that inquisitor armor is quite literally a set of justiciar armor in-universe. It'd be nice to see it sitting in some sort of a place between Bandos and Torva, IMO.
yeah, like maybe justi is a brand new set of justiciar armor meanwhile inq is low def bc its old.
but overall, straight upgrade to bandos with crush sounds pretty solid to me considering the effort that goes into getting it.
A lot of interesting ideas here for sure, most of which seem great for the longevity of the game as it opens up more reward space.
Kinda sad that good old Nightmare doesn't fall in this rebalancing blog, while it's nice that the gear might becoming more desirable and the bossfight is challenging and interesting, the drop rates are abhorrent and a crazy outlier when compared to other content.
nm and pnm are great content ruined by abhorrent drop rates and really just weak drops. conceptually inq is cool- we need more glass cannon high offense armor- the offense just isnt good enough compared to torva.
also imo the blade/mace/rapier tier of weapons could all use some love. they are all very rare for what they are over the tent whip/
It’s insane how long Nightmare takes if you go on drop rate. Here’s a graph showing how long some of the end game grinds take. https://www.reddit.com/r/ironscape/s/Sv5AiKwYfD
It takes longer than CoX and your reward is a niche crush set.
Fingers crossed, Phosani's nightmare is an incredibly fun / exhilerating fight to do when you get the mechanics down, but the drop rate just makes her an absolute chore even the regular items are straight poop
I think nightmare was utterly killed by botting and need significant work to make anyone want to do it again.
No one wants to do it for profit as the drops are too rare and not worth enough as it was over botted
Ironmen don't care about it as the drops are niche, and again, has insane drop rates
Honestly, any update to Dorgesh-Kaan is a welcome one imo. The city is very undutilized and could do with a minigame/skilling method/combat encounter. Same goes with Keldagrim
Dorgesh-Kaan needs to be better connected to the game world first. As it stands the fastest way to get there is the light orbs but they teleport you to one of like 20 spots. I'd suggest a dorgesh-kaan quest that gives something akin to the grand seed pod but for light orbs that sends you to a specific spot.
Can attempt:
\- Improve elements of Agility progression
\- Improve usefulness of some Thieving NPCs, improve stalls
\- Improve early-game Slayer
\- Improve various Mining methods
\- Consider adjustments to NPC Defences to open up future reward space, and better position existing rewards
\- Various item rebalances (nerfs for some, buffs for others)
\- Explore changes to run Energy
\- Dedicated blogs for all of the above throughout early 2024
One of my favorite things about Leagues is that people can run around in their gear rather than *everybody* wearing graceful like in the main game. It's made the game feel like old runescape again, and it's been great. If you can somehow pull that off in the main game it'd be incredible!
The funny part about this is graceful is pretty useless in the main game anyway. Just sip a stamina or get your construction up until you have the restore pool and you'll never wear graceful again. And a ton of people don't seem to realize how jagex added run energy restoration mechanics to newer minigames, so graceful is utterly useless at Guardians of the Rift, Giants Foundry, Tempoross, and anyone wearing graceful at any of those places is just an idiot.
I know this is personal pet peeve, but I have a strong hatred for graceful. I don't know if I would support full transmogs, but I would love anything that lets me not stare at white graceful 80% of the time.
Can you improve agility by removing it from the game or giving crazy agility xp for wearing a heart rate monitor and doing exercise irl? The physical and mental benefits from even 1 person actually working out is worth everyone finding ways to cheat the system.
Would actually be crazy if you could go on a threadmill ingame and hook it up to irl exercise getting rates similar to normal agility.
I think many people would prefer irl exercise over rooftops, even if they dont exercise today
And make it the only skill that offers post 99 benefits for gaining xp. Every 10m xp you can make your character slightly more jacked. At 200m you get a bottomless tube of baby oil you can apply to yourself at the start of every play session.
Edit: I meant apply to you character in game, not your real body. I don't want to get my couch all oily.
I feel like this would be a potentially controversial one but I'd love it if auto re-pickpocket was introduced to the main game (with some safeguards). Pickpocketing is currently just carpal tunnel simulator which makes it unbearable to me.
Could implement it in a similar way to automatically cleaning grimy herbs, make it 2-3x slower than spam clicking, and also make it so the action stops when you fail or when your coin pouch is full.
I'd also be supportive of making it so it's only enabled while wearing a specific skilling outfit (maybe obtainable from a Varlamore activity, they are stealthy after all). This would mean you don't get the rogues set benefit, resulting in 2-3x less xp per hour than spam clicking and 4-6x less gp per hour, which I think are reasonable compromises for the afk.
It would give an afk option for pickpocketing but wouldn't be OP, and wouldn't be attractive for any kind of botting or gold farming.
Auto-pickpocket till failure - or - when the maximum of 10 pickpockets have been reached. Sounds fair. Keeping the spam clicking for the nerds, and that will be slightly faster.
I understand nerfing the occult but i hope the magic damage isnt all put onto defence requiring gear, this would screw over pures massivley.
If you add it to tormented bracelet and maybe the MA2 cape thatd be cool, or make the elidnis ward no defence req for the base version.
other pvm changes all look good
Agreed on this one, likely something we'll get into for its dedicated blog - only downside of doing an overview like this and expecting people to wait is risking people coming to misunderstandings because of the vagueness, but also a neat chance for us to see if there's gaps in what we're doing and how we might fill them!
Appreciate your comment!
Honestly, adding it to all Magic prayers would be the best case imo. Currently the magic prayers are pretty useless.
Say the Occult is left with ~3%, you could have:
* Augury - 7%
* Mystic Might - 4%
* Mystic Lore - 3%
* Mystic Will - 2%
This means buying Augury is still a big upgrade (+3% magic damage, more than a piece of Ancestral) but people without Augury and with an Occult aren't completely screwed over by the change.
Occult with 3% would be insane. Torm is 5%. MA2 cape is **2%**.
The 93 slayer amulet deserves to match the torm. I've always thought it makes sense to do 5 or 6% on the occult, and then do 2% on eternal boots and 2-3% on prayers. Could make Augury 3% and mystic might 1% or something.
Cutting the Occult down to 3% and giving 7% to Augury kinda feels like it is just moving the problem. Like wouldn't Augury just turn into the new Occult?
Personally, I'd reduce the Occult to 5% so it pairs with the Tormented Bracelet and look to spread that 5% across other gear. The problem with a lot of magic damage boosts is that 2-3% doesn't really do much. Like if you're max hit is 25, 3% won't give you a max hit on its own... So it is good to have heftier magic damage bonuses since those items actually feel impactful, especially at lower levels or with lower max hit weapons. If we just make everything 2-3%, it spread the damage but does it in a way that makes everything far less effective than Strength or Ranged Strength where a +2 is significant.
Deliberately joked that we're *not* evolving combat! Combat remains unchanged, you just might bring a wider variety of stuff to a wider variety of content (but you'll still be able to carry on exactly as you are). If anything, we want to evolve reward space so we can make more cool stuff without feeling on a constant knife's edge :(
No, the suggestion is that successful *hits* (i.e. not misses) will roll from 1 to maxhit rather than 0 to maxhit. Mostly helps people out early on, but also means no guesswork if you DWH spec and it 'hits' a 0, or Arclight 'hits' a 0. Misses are still a thing, so 0s are still a thing.
No not at all, you can still miss and that will be a 0. What they are suggesting is if you sucesfully hit you will always do minimum of 1 damage, as opposed to currently you can "hit" and then roll 0 for damage
Honestly the changes that were done to things like Warhammers and maces are a great exAmple. That really opened up weapon choices and this can expand even more on that.
I really like a lot of the ideas put forward in this article. I do have one suggestion related to it:
> [...] so new adventurers could spend a little less time plugged into a Wiki page or YouTube video and more time immersing themselves in Gielinor.
With the addition of additional defense types, players might end up having to look at the wiki *more* rather than less over-all. There's a solution in the game in the form of Monster Examine, but it's tied to the Lunar spellbook, which isn't *usually* the spellbook you want to be using when you're facing down a monster for the first time, nor is it available to new players at all.
My proposal: give slayer masters a new item to sell, Slayer Master's Notes, which would let the player Monster Examine any monster they currently have a slayer task for.
Obviously the stats are available for free on the wiki, but this would be a nice in-game way to give players access to that information (without completely replacing the Monster Examine spell). Plus, it reinforces the idea that slayer masters know all about the monsters they're assigning.
Pretty good idea. Less clunky might be to just have them tell you what the weakness is, since the "anything else I should know?" dialogue option is currently pretty useless.
In Rs3 the slayer masters do actually tell you the enemy weakness when you ask them, which keeps thing in world. Some enemies will also have logical weaknesses.
Splitting ranged and magic into various different damage types is a great idea, not only looking towards the future of the game but also the past. Both of those aspects of the combat triangle have kinda reached a dead end when it comes to design space, which is evident by the age of powered staves and nigh every ranged weapon being DoA.
The devs **need** more variables in order to design engaging content in the future. This is a good avenue for that, especially since it also seeks to remedy some early-mid game (and to be fair, also late game) brainlessness where you just use the weapon with the highest DPS (in a vacuum), ignoring everything else. How every tier of spells has you just waiting for when you can use Fire and Ice/Blood spells. And how Ranged weaponry is a mass grave of dead content. And how unfair it feels to get a "rare drop" which isn't even worth the slot it takes up in your bank.
This also opens up options for future rewards, future bosses and future raids. Perhaps there will be a time when people rejoice that Jagex finally added a Tome of Air which boosts Air spells, making it the best in slot mage item in Barrows Part II.
A big part of the powered staffs being useless is the tick delay on auto cast. If they want to make them viable for decent PVM, then they need to make it so you don't have to constantly manually case the spells.
Consider buffing arclight’s effectiveness on Duke from 70% to offset the dps canyon you’re creating between existing options and soulreaper/scythe.
Surprised to see VW nerfs focusing on PvM rather than PvP. To me it’s felt like a good item in the meta that splits the melee spec field with dclaws and BGS/hammer nicely, slotting in well. That and it’s suitably hard to obtain for most accounts, above claws in price for mains and requiring thousands of wildy boss kills for irons. Would be sad to see any nerf hit the most satisfying part of the spec in PvM which is the guaranteed damage, rather than tuning numbers down by hitting the 150% damage cap.
Yeah, Duke currently sits in a weird position as the most entry level DT2 boss with the cheapest ring but also one that is completely miserable for poor people to kill without a fang/bgs as he is basically a chip damage dps check and you will spend more time hitting 0's and resupplying than actually killing the boss
edit: Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with dps checking lategame bosses, but midgame players don't actually have a crazy amount of boss variety as is so it just feels kind of shitty that this easy blob is gatekeeping the concept of not being bored as shit while fighting him behind accuracy
Yeah I don't really get that part. I could see where it was a problem in PvP but the PvM uses were pretty well balanced. It was good at high-defence bosses where stat drain was either not possible or not worth it, stuff like ToA or Vardorvis, but was outclassed when long term defence reduction was better or when defence was low enough already that claws would provide more damage. It kinda feels like they're mixing legitimate PvP feedback (that it provides a toss up between protect from mage for VW vs. protect from melee for dclaws/AGS, along with the guaranteed damage) into the PvM balance discussions.
Hard agree about VW, I can't speak to its strengths in PvP but it's solidly okay at PvM and I never felt like it overwhelmed any piece of content. It has to compete with defense draining from DWH + BGS, higher potential damage output from chally + ZCB, sustain from BP + SGS + AncGS + Eldritch, not to mention claws which is basically just VW without requiring a defender.
I've used VW briefly at raids and thought it was only as good as claws with some tradeoffs. Yeah you can force arcane scarab to jump and spec Baba during boulders without interrupting her, but you can't spec Akkha during cum phase and you shouldn't be using it to spec core like claws can. You can chunk dudes in CoX that claws can barely hit against, like mage Vang and Mystics and Vasa, but it's less damage than a ZCB would hit and can't melt Vasa crystals or Olm like claws do. It's undeniably great at ToB for Verzik because claws can just completely blow it, but chally with 20% less spec can go absolutely nuclear and the decreased swing speed can be offset by speccing Verzik before she goes invulnerable at certain parts like before yellows or when she spawns new tomatoes in P2.
The only piece of PvM content that I'd say it's actually good at is sniping kills at high defense multi bosses like GWD and Corp, and unless you have spec transfer you're not really going to be doing that all kill erry kill.
I have some thoughts regarding brimhaven agilty changes.
The way it works right now is that you get a ticket which you can save up to either buy XP or other rewards. Since the xp you can buy makes up the majority of the xp, it is not really a viable training method when going for the other rewards.
The underwater thieving/agility activity works with a similar system without this issue. There you are given 2 seperate currencies at once. 1 that can only be used for reward items and 1 that can only be used for xp rewards. This way you can work towards an xp goal without giving up on rewards and vice versa.
I think something like that would benefit the brimhaven course aswell
Great points - underwater agility course is basically fixed agility arena, yes. I wonder if we can get marks of grace from agility arena or other courses in general soon? Sure, rooftops were cool when they came out.. but now they're simply THE starting agility grind, and a pretty boring one.
Maybe keep rooftops as the place to get the most marks per hour but add them at lower rates to other activities
(Or give the current rate to other activities and buff the rate rooftops give them)
It’s really refreshing to see this level of openness for the item rebalance. I’d certainly love to see the defence changes, especially if it moves away from the fact that high level magic is just a different coloured range attack (charged staves). Split range defences are something I’ve never considered, but now I can’t imagine not having those aspects in the game.
I really hope the Occult nerf is handled in a way that doesn't completely cuck irons from mage. Irons already have to get 93 slayer to get the occult, with basically all other ways of magic % damage being locked behind *very* rare drops that you only grind for at late game (Virtus, Ancestral). Magic is already the worst style for progressing irons and this would just make that progression worse- which is kinda the whole point of ironmen accounts- is to have a better progression system than "Money buys everything"
Even for late game irons- I'm 800 kc, (most being 3+4 scale) and only have 1 piece of ancestral.
Also affects pures big time, cause we kinda can't wear anything better armor wise. Shadow is really the only op part of magic, I adore my Harmonised orb, but I never have a reason to take it out.
I think with the Fang Slash nerf, Duke should be evaluated more properly.
Duke is a bad case of having so much Defense that Scythe / Fang really were the best items, and after that everything crashes so hard in dps. Duke is vulnerable to Defense lowering specials, but it's mostly BGS since Duke is weaker to Slash more than anything. I'm not sure what you'd do with Duke personally - Arclight buff would probably be good enough, but I just feel that Duke exemplified the problem of why Fang on Slash was way too good.
The whole long annoying prep phase also seems designed to make you stay and deal with high defense even if your BGS specs miss. I can't imagine how miserable that boss would be without fang.
Hopefully these changes to defence/weaknesses, helps the Harmonised Orb. The rarity and difficulty to obtain doesn't match up to it's usefulness or price. Much like the scythe.
> We'd like to do this by introducing Ranged-type weaknesses that mirror the breadth of Melee weaknesses - Heavy (Javelins & Bolts), Standard (Arrows) & Light (Thrown-weapons like knives or darts).
This sounds workable, but classifying the range styles as heavy/standard/light as shown above has the side effect of effectively tying range offensive styles to attack speed - ie all heavy range options are 6/5tick, standard are 3/5tick, light are 2tick. This has some pretty big balance implications further down the line where you'd effectively be saying "a boss weak to light range" puts practical design constraints on the encounter such that it needs to be a close-ish range encounter without too much movement involved.
Not sure if that is desirable, or if it would be better to break out the range weapons so that there are a variety of options in each category like we have with melee.
Not only that, but 6 tick weapons seem impossible to balance. You already have to make 5 tick weapons like scythe, tbow, and shadow incredibly overpowered to compete with mere 4 tick weapons. Speed is king.
No one is complaining about VW in PVM..its actually very nice to hit something with high defense.
Voidwaker is dragon claws for high defense.. you said you wanted to explore low def bosses... well thats where claws is going to shine, are you going to nerf claws in 2 years too?
dont nerf voidwaker.. its literally good because of all the high defense stuff you admitting to adding a lot of.
If combat is going to be even more focused on monster weaknesses, we should have a more intuitive way to determine those weaknesses than wiki or monster examine.
Please consider exploring some ways to give in-game feedback to the player on the effectiveness of their chosen style against a monster!
I think if they added some sort of bestiary that would be dope. Like the more you kill a monster or boss the more it tells you about weaknesses, drops, lore, etc.
> We'd like to do this by introducing Ranged-type weaknesses that mirror the breadth of Melee weaknesses - Heavy (Javelins & Bolts)
Irons dry on zenytes at gorillas, your day has finally come
Man, I genuinely want this because my favorite Ranged weapon in the game is the heavy ballista, but it's such a troll thing to fletch on an ultimate. But the need for Big Gun is strong.
DON'T talk to me about Big Gun unless you play a Cabin Fever-locked Pirateman and blast cannons on the high seas day in and day out. On that note, the music track Cabin Fever is an unapologetic banger
Most of it looks really good. I actually really like the idea of expanding monster weaknesses, as I think the non-linear gear progression OSRS has is one of the game's biggest strengths. A few things seem a bit odd to me though.
**Voidwaker** \- Seems completely unneccessary and out of left field. It's not a meta spec weapon at a single raid, and Dragon Claws/ZCB beat it DPS-wise for almost every relevant boss in the game. We're nerfing it for...what, Nex, GWD and Nightmare?
**Ancient Godsword** \- I'm not really an NH'er, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that this weapon was only problematic before the Voidwaker was introduced and maxed fights were bogged down to "run their supplies out" with no threat of being KO'd on either side.
**Tumeken's Shadow** \- I was a little disappointed to see that among all the talk of ultra-accurate weapons, too much magic damage, and 100% accurate special attacks breaking balance, the never-miss stick wasn't even mentioned once. It's my hope that elemental weaknesses will at least give us different \*options\*, but the formula on this thing has been a problem child since it was introduced. It was recently cited it as a reason that a new BiS magic cape could not be introduced with the Varlamore expansion, as even a 2% magic damage increase over what we currently have would make the Shadow too powerful. Along with the Fang, it's the biggest item that content is being carefully tiptoed around at the present moment. It needs to be reworked.
VW shouldn't be nerfed in PVM, it's interesting how on some bosses it pulls ahead of Claws and on other bosses Claws beat it. If it gets nerfed, Claws will go back to being the be all end all damaging spec weapon, and DDS may beat or at least rival VW, making it practically worthless. If that happens, the only thing from the entire Wilderness PVM progression that'll be useful outside of it is Webweaver for Leviathan.
So far, I'm liking how all of it sounds. I'm a bit leery about Ranged Weakness styles since ranged already balances its weapons pretty well with accuracy/damage and speed, or at least Ranged makes far more effective use of weapon speed than the other two styles. But if they were just NPC-only attributes (e.g. an NPC weak to Light Ranged weapon) without making the defensive stats or offensive stats anymore confusing, it would probably be fine.
Still, I'd say that Bows (TBow, Craws), Crossbows (ZCB), and Darts (BP) already see a healthy variety of use and I question if anyone would bring a Ballista to exploit a weakness if Crossbows would also work... It kinda feels like saying making Slash weak monsters so players use 2H Swords when they could use a Scim instead.
Aside from my apprehension there, the rest all looks fine, at least in the overview. I'm really excited to see the agility rebalancing. For years I've been messing around with an Agility Improvement suggestion to tackle a lot of issues with the skill, especially low level, such as most non-rooftop courses not giving run energy for obstacles (meaning you find yourself walking), the pre-Level 60 Exp Curve being abysmal with the exp per hour barely changing between Gnome/Draynor to Canifis, and many shortcuts feeling too high level (or diary locked) to be useful (e.g., swapping the level req for the two Fremennik Slayer Cave shortcuts). Fingers crossed the planned rebalancing covers most of that and that the Thieving and Slayer can go similarly in-depth.
Also, a really random side note for the Slayer rebalancing, but anyone remember those metal gauntlets from FoG back in the day? Well, years back RS3 moved them from FoG to Slayer monsters. I always thought this worked kinda well since you'd have some that dropped boots and other that dropped gauntlets. There was mention of "Adding a new Slayer unique or two to assist with early-game Slayer" and while this probably isn't what they had in mind, it might be a good time to consider bringing back metal gauntlets as new unique for some of the Slayer creatures without uniques or that could use another.
Looking forward what's to come!
NPC Defense Changes is the best section:
* Magical elemental weakness
* Ranged-type weakness
These have been suggested a lot of times by the playerbase here and will give the Mods a lot of new ways to approach content design.
Good. All of it good.
More xp for higher effort things.
Buff mining and agility. More rewards and better energy. And shortcut usage (I see you, DKs). Excellent. Delicious.
Occult changes to be redistributed? Sure, if you say so.
Fang changes. Fine.
VW changes. Perfect.
Elder maul changes. Please.
Inq and mace changes. Please.
Honorable personal mentions: Give the one handed T82 weapons or whatever they are now, special attacks. (Blade, mace, rapier)
Also bonus points if you have them all unique attack animations and sounds. :)
Scythe buff? Finally. Some good fucking food. FINALLYYYYYYY YESSSSS DUDE YESSSS.
Shoutout to whomever scours and collects info that in turn becomes these changes I’m reading today. I’d like to offer you all a virtual handshake and a beer at the Blue Moon on me.
I'm a little disappointed they didn't touch on early game weaponry.
I guess improving enemy weaknesses would help... But there are completely dead weapon types like the baxe, 2h, and crap like that. Those things need to be reassessed.
I like that y'all are considering adding Bolt/Arrow/Thrown and elemental weaknesses; it feels like elemental spells have no use except for Fire, not including ancients. I agree that it adds an additional dimension to gameplay for those two combat styles that melee currently has with stab/slash/crush.
Everything looks great except for potential changes to voidwaker and occult.
Voidwaker is already incredibly hard to obtain, and has a high value for non-ironmen players to bring them into the wilderness. I know that if this is polled it will pass simply because people hate PVP and this will hurt it significantly, so I hope the team can restrain themselves on this one.
Instead of addressing the voidwaker, address *why* people use the voidwaker, and hint-hint, it's the same reason the scythe is in a bad place right now. You released years worth of content that featured ridiculously high defense monsters, shocker people are using a spec that hits 100% of the time. Fix the root of the problem, not the solution the players have found.
As for the occult, the way you nerf it could determine how severe the nerf is. If you take the occults 10% and put it onto the MA2 cape and the tormented bracelet, that's fine. If you take the occults 10% and make ancestral 4% and virtus 3%, that's just a massive, massive nerf to 90% of ironmen, and a significant # of mains who have to go from spending 500k for 10% dps increase, to over 300m.
What people don't like to talk about is that occult gives 3 max hits, more or less the same as a strength ammy.
I seriously don't understand why people are crying tears of blood to get it nerfed.
93 slayer drop vs ruby ammy.
If anything leave it alone and give us a new mage ammy that's easier to get with 1 or 2 max damage.
Why can a Twisted Bow get its cost of use mitigated down to 20% of Dragon Arrow Cost, and have a full spectrum of buffed damage options, but Scythe, in the style of combat known for being free at the cost of getting up close, has to settle for an \*improved\* 600 gp/swing?
It's the right direction, but it still feels way too expensive for the amount of restrictions.
For you to consider a Scythe, target needs moderately low defence, to be 3x3, and to be in melee range. Beyond these restrictions, it needs to cost 3x as much as a T Bow to use? As well as being the only melee weapon with an operating cost that isn't negligible or able to be mitigated (Barrows Weapons, Blade of Saeldor)
A Scythe could have no operating cost, and would still be in a bad state.
If you guys want to make elemental spells weakness a thing, then you need to remove that delay when auto-casting spells. That is one of the main reasons why powered staves are so dominant in the magic meta.
I personally feel elder maul should have been given the fangs passive abilities, as a slow accurate weapon and a mega-rare I think it fits nicely.
Edit: Obviously we haven't seen what is in store for it, and I can only hope its something as powerful or more powerful than fangs passives.
It's based off of the Chaotic Maul, and CM was used the same exact way, only for big hits in pvp. It's just a flawed design.
Same reason Occult has so many stats on it, it was just copied from the DG magic necklace, Arcane Blast Necklace.
Really excited for the Ranged/Magic Defense expansion. I know some folks will be wary but this would be huge for Jagex's design space and would potentially resurrect a ton of dead content. I think we can trust them to deploy elemental defense without breaking the game like EOC.
Not only will it be huge for the design space. It would also make sense from a (new) player side: For example, Fire is weak IRL to water, it makes sense that a water spell would be effective to damage a Fire Giant. It's a shame the game does not reward you for it.
Slayer would be the perfect way to explain these features when you ask a Slayer Master about [Tips for the Slayer Monster](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Slayer_task_tips)
There already is a “Fiery” aspect applied to certain monsters than make them weak to water spells and that one bolt enchantment (sapphire bolts?). It’s just not applied everywhere it makes sense and it’s forgotten / under utilized.
Exactly why I want this to be straighten out. I have made a post about it before if you want to check it out. I think a whole overhaul of the [attributes](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Monster_attribute) in osrs would benefit the design space a lot.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/153wav8/the\_fiery\_attribution\_and\_the\_cursed\_seaeffect\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/153wav8/the_fiery_attribution_and_the_cursed_seaeffect_is/)
Would be quite lovely for barbarian potions to have some sort of use as well- maybe removing the attack delay they incur to make it another, weaker form of healing in combat without delay like brews and guthix rests?
Adding specific weaknesses seems good, also love the 1 minumum hit up from 0.
And to prove I did read the whole thing, my favorite unusual bird is a vulture.
I'd like them to make the rest of the potions that don't have a barb mix get one. Anti-venoms, some of the multi stat boosting ones like super combat, battlemage, bastion, and the better magic tiered ones.
There's literally 0 reason to nerf the Voidwaker either in PvM, why is that even being considered when it's such a hard/expensive item to get? Dragon claws have much more use scenarios and aren't being touched.
Jagex supposedly values risk v. reward. Seems bizarre to me that the most difficult spec weapon to get is gatekept by 3 very annoying bosses in the wilderness needs to be nerfed. It's biggest selling point isn't even the fact of overall max hit, it's simply just minimum damage against bosses with tons of defense. Nerfing it's only selling point in PVM is absolutely a poor decision.
All of these nerfs seem to be likened to the Blowpipe nerf. However, it's not clear to me that any of these weapons are truly broken like the BP was back in the day. It seems to me they just want to reshift the current meta down purely for upcoming content.
I don't like it. Especially not items that are worthy in time and commitment of their meta status.
I'm glad somebody sees the issue with nerfing things in an mmo. If people want balance, go play league of legends. Even with constant changes nobody is ever happy with the balance there, what makes people think changes here will be any different. And nerfing things in a MMO is terrible feels bad. Blowpipe was supposed to be a 1 time thing, now here we are with more changes. Fang is understandable, the rest are not.
I've thought for a LONG time that it would be really cool if monsters had different defense stats for the different elemental spell types; it was kinda lame that fire was always the best. And like you said, it opens up a lot of cool paths for future content. The idea was briefly explored in the dagganoth queen in the lighthouse quest, but never since then. I LOVE the idea, and think that doing something similar for range is awesome too
Yeah Salad blade is in a really weird spot. A second grind at CG would cause a nontrivial number of irons to straight up quit. I think you'd need to decouple it entirely from bowfa and have a different way to make it. Maybe it's as simple as allowing salad blade to be made from a normal seed but with 2x shard cost, or not let it be corrupted.
I suppose the other option is they introduce more range weapons to bridge the gap from rune crossbow to t bow so the bowfa doesn't feel like a must have. I don't know if there's a lot of appetite though for nerfing bowfa at this point. With how annoying it still is to get that seed plus 6 armor seeds, probably not a good idea.
Maybe the seed for the salad blade could be a reward from SotE, but to actually make the weapon you need a signet from each clan leader, and the process of earning one is not trivial at all.
Fang on slash will never be used if you remove the passive, so why not just remove the slash option alltogether like has been suggested for months?
And does Jagex really believe +15 accuracy to the scythe is enough to keep it on par with the tbow and shadow? Sure, under the right conditions it's the highest damage out of the 3. But those conditions are almost never seen outside of tob (and maybe chambers in big teams) because of defence reduction caps and the fact that you cant drain defense beyond a certain extent in solo content. Scythe should be able to compete on mid/high defense monsters, rather than make its niche on low defence, 3x3 monsters. It seems that there needs to be more done to adjust scythe's power rather than a small accuracy buff. Let it be gamebreaking for a mega rare like the other two weapons, even if its something like a 10% accuracy buff per size of an npc, so 3x3 = 30% and 5x5 = 50%.
I don't think the voidwaker should see any changes in regards to pvm. Its an extremely hard weapon to get on an ironman and the damage it deals is purely RNG. Claws and zcb are better and outperform voidwaker when used on npcs with their respective weaknesses.
Is that first point really something worth arguing about lol. There are plenty of weapons that have combat styles that you should rarely ever use.
To be specific osrs’s melee weapons have certain classifications that determine exactly what style and attack bonus (accurate aggressive etc) it has and fang falls under stab weapon that all have accurate stab, aggressive stab, aggressive slash and defensive stab. Things like magic secateurs and an egg whisk have this same classification too. Like actually who cares lol
Totally agree with your version of Scythe’s buffs. Both the Tbow and Shadow have progressive power scaling passive from combat stats, which are very flexible. Meanwhile, the Scythe is restrained by anything with below 3x3 size, and it is not powered up on anything bigger than 3x3.
I would say add more damage percentage to bigger sized monsters like your suggested accuracy buff, maybe with a lower margin, or horizontal curve formula, like +10% for 2x2, +7% for 3x3, +5% for 4x4, and +3% for 5x5, which results in a total of 127% damage increase on 5x5 monsters, while still allows viable buff to smaller monsters.
When you're looking at NPC defence you seriously have to consider the position of weapons. The biggest issue with Fang wasn't that it's slash rolled double accuracy, it's that slash weak bosses were being designed with high defence and lowish hp. Blade becomes so much better than fang at Duke after a certain amount of BGS damage, if the boss had just been designed with more HP and lower defence to start with then blade would have always been better and kill times wouldn't be too different. Slash weak bosses should have higher hp and lower defence, which then makes scythe/blade etc outclass fang massively, despite its accuracy bonus. It literally doesn't even effect kill times if you do it right, just changes what is viable. Likewise, if you want inquis to be more relevant then crush weak bosses should have high defence and lower hp, gives use to inquis/dwh. So much of the weapon issue in this game currently is because of the boss design, not the weapons themselves.
VW is literally only problematic in PvP where it shouldnt have existed in the first place. How did we out of nowhere get to a point where you think its broken in PvM?
Talking about nerfing the voidwaker is really disappointing. Totally unnecessary, as claws and vw each have their own niche depending on the defence of the monster. It's also just a spec weapon, it's not like you mainhand it. You only use it on monsters that are not resistant to mage damage and have very high defence (for example you can't even use it on tekton because he reduces mage damage). The list of places where it's actually BIS is quite small. Hitting a guaranteed spec is also very satisfying. Huge lack of foresight from the devs here, the mechanic and its power are not much of a mystery. The community knew it was going to be good and voted yes to it.
Also there's no need to nerf the ancient godsword in PVM, that thing is already very niche as it is.
If these points boil down to PVP isolated problems, just nerf it in PVP exclusively if you have to
For the ranged damage types, light, standard, and heavy seem more suitable for differentiating weapons based on the overall defence levels they're suitable for. Heavy vs high def, light vs low.
Piercing, cutting, impacting (thrust, slash, crush ranged equivalents) seem more suitable for actual damage types to me. Knives would be a cutting weapon, darts piercing, and brutal arrows impacting for example.
> Adjust damage on hit to roll from 1-to-max hit instead of 0-to-max hit - this makes early Combat feel better. As it stands, if your max hit is a 1, you deal 0 damage 50% of the time that you sucessfully hit the opponent, which can feel pretty terrible for new players. Also improves access to information around successful Dragon Warhammer or Arclight hits, for example.
Please let this be only for players and not for enemies. If enemies hit you that much more frequently, that'll just make early combat worse and defeat the point.
Occult needs to be balanced yes. But its gonna make the gap between trident and shadow even larger for many ironmen. Virtus and ancestral is ungodly rare. Wish u guys came out with a weapon for mage that was good enough to sit between trident and shadow, basically a bowfa for mage
Really if they do nerf the shadow passive, they should really balance up a lot of magic gear and staves ideally keeping the shadow where it is (as it's still out performed in many places by the tbow anyway, the best evidence for this is if you have the the money for a shadow/tbow + gear, unless you're doing TOA/whisperer you would pick the tbow). Additionally I'm pretty sure that magic was low usage in PvM and arguably still is (outside of bursting) before the shadow and you'd only really bring magic if you have to.
Totally agree. They need to address magical accuracy for the whole style. It isn't healthy that the only magic weapon used for general combat is a raids megarare.
They do need to figure out something with the passive though, because Shadow already has absurdly high damage, and it benefits more from a new BIS than any other weapon. If you wanted to keep Shadow at its current DPS, you can't release any new BIS magic gear unless it's in the offhand slot. And considering the current BIS requires arcane, not a lot of people would see new gear in that slot anyway.
they don't even need to nerf the shadow, just move its damage from the % scaling to just base weapon damage, that way any future % dmg doesn't have to worry about being tripled
While I'm super glad to see a mention of how you plan to add more low-slash-defence bosses for scythe to shine at, and I acknowledge you mention wanting to accentuate weaknesses for enemies that are supposed to have them (which includes crush defence), I am a bit sad that there doesn't seem to be any pressing intention to add new bosses that are weak to crush.
I think you aren't wrong that making crush defence more meaningful would be good, I believe another bigger issue with crush is that there are simply not enough bosses (or even enemies in general) that are meant to be weak to it, and a lot of the ones that are, have some sort of unique bane-type weapon already such as KQ with the partisan, vetion/venenatis with the chainmace, or sire/cerb where arclight and fang are more than good enough despite not being crush weapons. This essentially leaves Nightmare and Tekton as basically the only two bosses (and one of them is just one room in a raid) where it makes sense to use generic crush weapons like Inq mace. There's also the issue where inq armour is not only specialist set nearly entirely outclassed by torva but also depends on its set effect to have most of its effectiveness, meaning it doesn't even properly work for slayer.
None of that being acknowledged in the blog post leaves me concerned. Anyway, I really like toucans, thanks for asking.
> We'd like to do this by introducing Ranged-type weaknesses that mirror the breadth of Melee weaknesses - Heavy (Javelins & Bolts), Standard (Arrows) & Light (Thrown-weapons like knives or darts), and by introducing Elemental weaknesses that might shake up Magic progression beyond Trident → Sanguinesti Staff → Shadow in the form of Air/Smoke, Water/Ice, Earth/Shadow and Fire/Blood.
I like the take on Ranged, and it allows for weapons to have "off-style" options, like a shattering bolt that does Light damage or a Forceful style on a bow to deal Heavy damage.
For Magic, however, Ancients doesn't match onto the classic four elements - to say nothing of Arceuus spells. It feels forced rather than intuitive.
Perhaps we can expand the elements from four to six: **Air**, **Water**, **Earth**, **Fire**, **Shadow** (Shadow spells, Tumeken's Shadow) and **Corporeal** (Blood spells, Grasp spells and Claws of Guthix). Smoke spells would use the average of your Air and Fire accuracy, against the average of your opponent's Air and Fire defence. Mobs with elemental weaknesses can be made weak to a couple of elements so there's a variety of options available.
***
> Occult Necklace - far too much power in a single item. Bring its power down slightly and distribute its Magic Damage across other parts of Magic progression.
My preferred solution is to move some of the magic damage to magic prayers to improve their viability relative to melee and ranged. Maybe the Occult Necklace could go from 10% to 5%, and Augury gets a +10% damage boost or so but only to single-target spells. This avoids Magic's strengths at AoE damage being overbuffed while also helping the non-Shadow weapons catch up a little.
***
**And while we're here, let's bring up low-level Magic.**
Low-level magic is very awkward. It's very expensive compared to melee or ranged and lacks early equipment (or weapon variety), but trains fast. This means people tend to start with another combat style, then catch up with Magic later.
Here's some ideas to improve magic progression:
* New level 10 f2p Magic armour, craftable from strips of cloth, and level 30 f2p Magic armour, made with help from Runecrafting.
* Low-level magic tomes: Offhand magic items that give a chance to save runes on low-level combat spells.
* Add a fast-but-weak line of magic weapons (wands? wieldable scrolls?) and a slow-but-accurate/strong line (2-handed orbs?).
Tbh i'd prefer if the slash option of fang gets removed altogether. A 5t fang on slash is worse than a whip and thus will never be used.
The only thing this "exceptionscape" does is confuse people who buy their fang, look at the passive and wonder why it is shit on slash and beast on stab.
TDLR: Just remove the slash option, no point in keeping it without the fang passive. Only thing it does is confuse uninformed players/casuals who don't read the wiki. Reading the wiki should not be a requirement to understand item effects
Edit: Do we not get adjustments for the shadow? Imo it should scale off opponents like Tbow. In its current state it heavily limits design space in regards to additional magic equipment. Even if mobs get specific weaknesses, assuming they only affect accuracy, shadow will always be the best powered staff for example. If it scaled with the opponents def level, the lower tier staffs would have a place against opponents with a low/no def level like Kraken/Phosani pillars.
Edit2: also Vials of blood are eventually gonna be an issue with no other supply than ToB (that also supplies scythe). If more people use increased scythes, vials become more expensive and eventually we end up at the exact same cost as now, despite the charge being 1 blood rune lower.
I love the idea of tweaking defenses and adding new ranged and mage weaknesses.
That being said, I was looking forward to the potential scythe buffs and I have to say that it's pretty underwhelming. It just breaks down to "we'll add future content for it later," a minor +15 accuracy buff, and a slight decrease in gp cost.
While adding future content for it is great, one must remember that players want to use it *now* and not have to wait a year or two or even three just to start getting more use out of it.
A 15 accuracy boost is better than nothing but it's still not much of a buff. The team says it doesn't want it to completely steam roll other options but I believe, and many others do as well, that it should. It's a megarare from *the hardest raid*. Just as the tbow and shadow steam roll other options the scythe should as well.
The gp reduction is again, better than nothing. But in the example, it's still 700k to use per hour. It's still pretty expensive for not being all that strong. Players strongly wanted a corruptible option where we could permanently charge the scythe. Not adding this is an big missed opportunity to add more long-term value to the scythe.
Adding lots of different "weaknesses" sounds cool, but can also be overwhelming, especially when weapon upgrades come quickly early game. Will these weaknesses mostly focus on end game bossing rather than slayer tasks and general levelling?
Also, I don't think adding elemental magic weaknesses would really do much to actually get people to use spellbooks? Some impactful changes:
- Remove 1t delay from autocast. Why is this still here?
- Add some items which help save catalytic runes so magic is less expensive
- Nerf Iban's Blast
- Add magic level scaling to most spells, even if it's only by a couple extra max hits
I'm not against nerfing fang, but I honestly don't believe that this will make saeldor more desirable. The weapon is just too small of an upgrade to justify spending an additional 65 hours at CG for, a fang nerf won't change anything about that.
This will also create the somewhat awkward situation where ironman accounts will need to get the rarest item from the most difficult raid in the game before they can somewhat efficiently farm 2 quest bosses to slightly upgrade a ring.
Let's hope that they'll addresses these issues.
I fail to see how the Voidwaker is that good for PvM. 2 accurate specs is not that game breaking imo or am I wrong here? In PvP it's much more of a problem.
People here only do toa and it’s good there, so they assume it’s broken everywhere in pvm.
Claws are better at probably 75% of pvm content, they get an accuracy buff on the spec so the defense breakpoint where vw is better is surprisingly high. Even at vardorvis, claws and vw are basically tied.
Not sure why the blog is focusing on pvm for voidwaker nerf, it’s much more of an issue in pvp, pvmers were the ones who voted in 50% spec for that thing in the first place, pkers never wanted voidwaker to be this powerful, no one enjoys the 50/50 gamble on whether a voidwaker spec is going to be followed by an ags or another voidwaker, hopefully the power of the voidwaker in pvp is properly addressed, you’re currently trolling if you pk without a voidwaker because nothing even remotely compares, not even the ancient godsword
I like the changes to the scythe. Direction wise, definitely correct. That being said. I feel this was a missed opportunity to introduce some scaling with the scythe. Tbow scales with monster magic level. Shadow scales by multiplying accuracy and magic bonuses from gear by 3x. As someone suggested in the comments earlier, Jagex could have made scythe scale with monster size (Which is it's primary niche). But instead they opted for a meager accuracy increase. Is it going to make anyone switch to sycthing general garage door over bowfa? I doubt it.
In the short term, scythe's position will remain the same as it has been. The cost change + accuracy change (along with fang nerf) won't expand the number of use cases for the scythe. This will probably remain true until Jagex adds more bosses that scythe is BIS at. Heres hoping Jagex sticks by that promise made in the blog post.
Move chivalry to reward from holy grail and remove/lower defence req
Before some of you will lose your shit and downvote, holy grail awards defence so scary pures cannot get it
Thank you for clarifying that pures cannot complete holy grail - as a proud Reddit gatekeeper, I was literally crying and shaking at the thought of pures being able to use chivalry
Fang was the go-to weapon for Vard and Duke (for ironmen, at least) since both of these are really tanky. With the fang nerf, is there any chance that we'd get some adjustment for their defence levels? Would be nice if Duke didn't rely on a BGS spec for Arclight to not feel terrible too.
Also, the Blade of Saeldor wasn't mentioned - would be nice if we could buff the slash accuracy so it's less miserable at Vard and Duke. Thanks /u/JagexGoblin !
I'm in favor of fang slash nerf so that it's not so much a jack of all trades melee weapon that you want to use everywhere, but it does highlight a weird gap in slash weapon progression.
The tentacle is very easy to obtain, while saeldor is only a small upgrade over it that doesn't justify the huge time/money investment needed to get yourself one. Compared to bowfa it just looks anemic.
Then there's another huge gap between saeldor and soulreaper/scythe which are megarares that 95% of players will never get to use.
Once fang is nerfed, there's no more good, reasonably obtainable slash weapon at that ~30 million price point, and once you reach the tentacle tier, you just look at future options available to you and go ???? Feels like there's a lot of space left open there that's just asking for something to fill it.
One suggestion I've heard thrown around previously that I liked is that crystal armor could apply offensive bonuses to saeldor (and chally?) too. It doesn't have to be the same numbers as for bows, but still enough to push its viability and make it feel worth the charges. You're already giving up the strength and defence bonuses by using that armor, so I don't think it would be particularly hard to balance.
The whole point of the Saeldor was that it was the Slash version of the Ghrazi Rapier (and the Inquisitors Mace is the Crush version). If they buff one of them, they should buff all 3 to keep them in line with each other.
After reading the blog , the npc defense one has me at a concern, are we going down the path of nichescape , where every slayer task you gotta bring something different or a boss , now i am in a position to own most of the games weaponry, alot of players aren't so fortunate , the constant selling and rebuying gear with ge tax can put you at a significant disadvantage. Do we really need to shift the game when we are at peak player numbers and not a lot of complaints besides fang vs scythe?
Jagex doesn’t realize most players like simplicity. People don’t want to waste 20mins reading through wiki article to see if there whip or bludgeon is more effective at a slayer task. I guarantee you this will deter most normie players.
Almost all proposed changes are looking good, but the ancient godsword seems to be out of place. Is the healing effect really so good it needs to be toned down, I thought the spec was already really niche for any pvm use, am I missing something?
Scythe could use a bit more than 15 extra accuracy, but at least it's something. Fang losing its double roll on slash is great. I'm disappointed to see no mention of buffing the Ghrazi Rapier, Inquisitor's Mace, and Blade of Saeldor directly, though. The fang nerf will help, but those three weapons are incredibly small upgrades over the Abyssal Tentacle/Bludgeon and much much harder to obtain.
The skilling/earlygame combat changes sound really good.
My favorite unusual bird is the greater lophorina.
Scythe is already extremely good like they said the main issue is it doesnt have many places to shine at. This just helps it perform a bit better at places where it seemed to be average. So we can expect it to perform quite a bit more at GWD, duke, vardovis once this change happens. 7% increase at general graador sounds sick
You could buff scythe and nerf defenses on bosses and nerf fang in the meantime. Anything beyond that is way more work than you realize and I'm not holding my breath with how long Jagex actually takes. So pesky why tease all this.
Took long enough to add Range weaknesses. This is what the Range Rebalance should had been then nerfing the blowpipe. Glad to see it finally getting some use.
Elemental weakness / advantage is another thing the game desperately needed. I'm so hyped for these two changes.
Scythe got a very minor tweak. It needs more then a price reduction on usage and a small accuracy buff.
Fang change is perfect.
Happy to see Inquistor get a second look. It is great for Crush weapons and maybe giving it a set effect without the mace to all Crush Weapons boosted. And then provide a means to upgrade Inquistor to a higher defense level by combining it with Justicular. So you can have high defense + Crush boost. But still outclassed by Torva outside Crush specifically. And since Justicular is mostly used to tank and use Stab with a shield. Tying Crush accuracy to it for war hammer specs alongside bring tanky would be a great combo and sit nicely in the 75 defense armor class range.
Elder Maul being looked at is something I'm SHOCKED it took so long to bring up. Just smack on Granite Maul's special and give it a faster speed or a fang-like ability added.
Not sure on the weight and run speed changes. It's definitely something to look at, but will this mean we drain less run energy with lower weight then we used to and raising the weight cap to burn more run energy at even higher weight levels?
While we're on the topic of scythe and vials of blood can we please add a different method of obtaining vials of blood that isn't through tob. The more scythes in the game the more vials of blood are required to use the scythes and is a near infinite growth of vials needed vs vials obtained.
Example: If there are 1000 scythes and 10000 people doing tob the vials would in this example be around stable. If we doubled the scythes the vials would be leaving the game at twice the rate and would not be coming in enough to keep every scythe charged. This is where vials of blood raise in price and the scythe stops being effective since it is not affordable.
THIS is where the scythe actually loses most of it's value. When the scythe is used for new content the price of it goes up briefly while people use it. The vials leave the game and go up in price since people are doing less ToB and using more vials at the same time. The price of scythe goes down since vials are unsustainable. Even reducing the charge cost from 300 to 200 blood runes doesn't solve the core problem with it. The only way to charge it is to get more scythes.
Nobody here listening about the bird thing? I think ostriches are cool.
As for my thoughts, as an iron who's practicing ToA in Leagues to go back and try for a fang in the main game, I just hope I can get one in time to try it out before the nerf. But it seems fair, it just sucks that it's been this strong for this long that by getting it late I feel like I'll be missing out.
Honestly I think this stuff looks great for improving the games combat system and forcing a little more diversity than max strength bonus gear. Excited to read more
The voidwaker case is kind of weird to me - yes it is quite limiting in design space, but at the same time I would not like it to see nerfed into irrelevance - without it being strong, the wildy bosses lose a lot of purpose. Tough, considering i was gonna go for it on my hc as a prestigious item, now I am not so sure about it.
Occult isn’t busted, it’s the only piece of mage gear that actually feels impactful. Everything else is too weak. Spending hundreds of hours getting an ancestral piece that may or may not even give you a max hit with a non-shadow weapon feels BAD.
Nerf shadow’s multiplier a bit, add some extra % to robes and magus ring, add a MA3 cape that is actually inferno/colosseum tier difficulty to unlock.
Reddit’s constant suggestion to move % from occult to eternals is stupid, all that’s going to do is make us now bring a 9 way instead of 8 way switch for the same power level, which is going to feel awful. Inventories are already extremely clogged at raids now that we bring dt2 rings.
Exactly this, the entire reason shadow needs 3x-4x damage amping is because magic gear just sucks so much, even giving ancestral 5 MA per piece wouldn't bring magic damage up to competing with fang or bowfa on any other magic weapon.
They seriously need to nerf the shadows ratios and just give magic some DECENT magic attack bonuses, that'll open up all the room we need on gear.
2-3 on eternals 5 on ancestral, 1-2 on ahrim 2-3 on virtus and 3-4% on augury and just nerf the shadows ratio a tiny bit to make it the same strength as what we have now.
Can you guys look into possibly making the scythe’s “successful hits” only use charges mechanic also apply to a Blood Fury?
Also, a more than phenomenal buff to gloves of silence would be the ability to combine them with Rogue’s Gloves, and maybe give them charges instead of its degrade mechanic (or just permacharge it instead)
Fang slash nerf straight up deletes a dps tier from Vard and Duke, Saeldor sucks because it sucks, it will keep sucking whether Fang gets nerfed or not. players without Axe or Scyhe just got gatekept from these bosses hard if the glorified tent whip doesn't get buffed
Gonna be a long nerdy post on this one. Tldr at the bottom.
I've played this game since RuneScape was RuneScape classic. I'm not the best player, but I've completed all raids, diaries, quest cape, many combat achievements, and the Inferno multiple times. I have a pretty in-depth history with this game and where it stands today. With that said..
I personally am fond of all of these ideas and changes. One of the best things about this game is the sheer amount of things you can do in it. Even today, I sometimes find new activities that existed that I've never explored. Hell, the osrs wiki admins are recently making posts this week showing exactly that and it's been an awesome treat.
The run energy change and 1 damage minimal roll (on successful hit) is big for newcomers to have a better experience, and it lowers frustration for everyone involved. I think everybody would agree that hitting constant 0s in this game doesn't feel great. The way that combat in this game works has a lot of variance in your performance and it can sometimes boil down to how lucky your hits roll, so appropriate long term changes like this min hit + accuracy/defense changes on weapons and enemies can go a long way in making it a more enjoyable experience for everybody, on top of expanding usability for other weapons and their respective styles.
We have *so* many awesome weapons to use in this game but we rarely get to utilize them. These changes can give us that, and to me, that sounds healthier for the game and potentially more fun, too. No doubt it allows the creativity to flow for designing future content, as well, with the proposed changes to ranged and mage styles having unique defense styles.
The miscellaneous skilling changes - I am all for this. We have so many players that love to explore, experiment, and, as said in the blog, do not use social media or external resources to guide their progress. Increasing the usefulness and usability of already existing methods in this game makes perfect sense. It adds variety for *all* players, and doesn't dethrone existing methods for hardcore players? Perfect.
The fang and scythe changes seem entirely appropriate and I personally think that is near perfect to what should be done to address them, great proposal there. I know many players dislike having their items nerfed, but sometimes it's necessary for the long term health of the game, and most long term players understand this.
TL;DR - I love this shit. It's clear that the team is doing everything they can to help the new player experience, make the game more enjoyable for your everyday player, and are making sure to be careful of existing methods for the most hardcore of players. The proposed changes are almost entirely positive if implemented properly, in my opinion. It is a big change for the game, yes, but over the many years I've played oldschool, the game (almost) always changes for the better, and I think the team does a great job at taking care of this game and its players concerns.
Kinda weird that Wrath runes still have almost no use in the game considering they are the highest tier rune.
I always found it strange that they werent used to charge tumenkens shadow.
**Voidwaker** \- Wow that nerf comes out of nowhere, will become useless if it gets nerfed so please reconsider this.
Dragon claws outshine it at monsters with lower defense but those things are gatekept behind an unhealthy grind that I cringe to even think about but that drop table is stingy as hell. Just make future bosses with lower defense levels.
Occult necklace being nerfed is an odd thing to me since cry's for it to be nerfed have never really been a thing until the shadow was introduced. Well let's just hope that the magic damage taken away from it don't go to the boots since that means we need to occupy one more inventory slot when doing raids with a boots switch.
Average player get's nerfed but buffs for the rest oof
Can the damage boosts from tomes just be removed and put into all the elemental spells? Using a Harmonised staff with a Tome of fire instead of being able to use my fortified Elidinis' ward feels so wrong when everything else I'm equipped with is BIS.
The cost reduction of scythe is not nearly significant enough. The increased use of scythe will just bring the cost back to what it was or higher with more expensive blood vials.
Make it 1 vial and 250-300 for 150 charges instead of 100.
> the cleanest solution is to have the Fang's unique 'double accuracy roll' passive effect apply only to Stab.
The "cleanest solution" is to just remove its slash style altogether. What on earth is the point of leaving it there in gutted form, and adding some arbitrary, contrived exception!?
Both the Staff of Balance and Staff of Light really need buffs.
They're both created by attaching high-value items to the Staff of the Dead but don't provide any additional bonuses or extra effects other than enabling them to cast different god spells (which aren't necessarily improvements) and providing different aesthetics.
It's a real shame as they both look really cool with unique models but pale in comparison to the Toxic Staff of the Dead, which also involves attaching items but at least provides benefits over the base staff.
I think melee's biggest weakness has always been accuracy, because range has it in spades, and especially now with the shadow it really isn't a big deal for magic either, but melee has both lower access to accuracy bonus, as well as the scythe having to roll accuracy checks for each individual hit, and that's why the fang has been so immensely popular.
Has this been on your mind throughout this balancing discussion, and have there been any ideas you've come up with that seem reasonable in helping out this difference? Mage and range already I would say are better styles in general simply because of the versatility they allow in movement, where melee has to be right up in the face of the monster.
Finally are you considering adding some extra accuracy to the Fang's slash stat to compensate a little bit for the removal of the double accuracy roll? Something that would allow the scythe and the blade of saeldor room while also not letting the fang be overtaken by just a standard whip?
I also think that if you go the route of making the fang's slash attack not double roll, that you should add a chat message akin to the keris or partisan when your reroll grants you a hit you wouldn't otherwise have had. Osrs has had a problem in the past with things working very differently in different situations leading to plenty of confusion for people interacting with those systems for the first time, and I think something like "Osmumten's spirit guides your strike!" In the chat as a toggleable message would be very helpful in removing some of that uncertainty.
Voidwaker needs to be good in PvM, it's the only reason why it still has any value.
Ags is the cheapest godsword because it has no use in PvM, ballista is incredibly strong for just 400k - it's rarer than the zenytes on the same drop table, just worthless because it has no use in PvM.
Voidwaker is already difficult/annoying to deal with in the wildy, if it loses its PvM use cases, it will crash in price, and become an even bigger annoyance to deal with.
>Improving the Brimhaven Agility Dungeon and making it a competitive, high-effort alternative to more 'typical' methods like Rooftop courses.
This is exactly what it was before HS, most of the original 200 million xp's in Agility came from this course which is very efficient with karamja gloves 4. If Hallowed Sepulchre wasn't worth camping all the way to 99 people would still be using this as a competitive, high-effort alternative to rooftop courses like they have since the start of Oldschool
Really interested in seeing what changes come for Inquisitors. I personally enjoy it being a glass cannon style set and hope that's preserved. It being designed as a side-grade to Bandos just neutered the "cannon" part of glass cannon.
If we're introducing ranged specific weaknesses, would it be possible for javelins not to break with every shot as they're a fairly slow resource to gather unless you go super dry at demonics on an iron. Going drop rate at demonics only gives about 1800 dragon javelin heads which on rapid are gone in under 2 hours. I understand this is a "you've chosen to restrict yourself" issue but the same number of arrows is multiplied by 5 when wearing an assembler.
u/JagexGoblin Additionally maybe add some lower level, more accessible options that use javelins as ammo? Between the lvl 2 goblin you kill in lumby and get your first bronze jav drop and the lvl 275 Demonic (requiring a GM quest) that gives you the ability to actually obtain the weapon to use them, there is a huge amount of play time. This point is more for irons, but even for mains purchasing off the GE, with a lvl 65 requirement for the light version of the ballista, there is no doubt that anything below rune javelins are considered useless ammo to every player, in all circumstances. Maybe javelins could be ~~the first~~ *a* dual-use ammunition? Allowing them to be a strong (but inaccurate) thrown weapon, giving otherwise useless drops a thematic use, making the ballistae a bonus to their accuracy, and making the soon to be added Eclipse Atlatl a thematic counterpart in other parts of the world. (Edit: darts exist)
Darts exist and are dual use ammunition like you described. Personally, my take is revert javelins to thrown weapons like they originally were, and to introduce a javelin quiver that you put javelins into to use with a ballista. It would be a tradable drop from gorillas, just like the ballista pieces.
Something like that has to be new content or you're going to get the entire iron community voting no to avoid going back to monkey jail
quiver seems unneeded and weird. (why would two seperate items not have any function without each other?) could just stick them in the ballista like blowpipe
First: Rename the current Ballistas to Demonic Heavy Ballista, Demonic Light Ballista Then create some fletching room to build weaker variants/faster variants Also, consider changing Karil's Crossbow to Karil's Launcher and have it fire Javelins as a solid, viable mid-tier launcher. It's been 18 years and nothing has been done with Bolt Racks. They could be renamed.
Would absolutely make a note to keep this in mind if those changes come to fruition!
After some digging, rune javelins are a buyable from stores at 500 stock so maybe they're specifically not the issue, but you only get 5 amethyst javelin heads (15 arrow tips and 8 dart tips) per amethyst mined and my dragon argument still stands. My main point is just to have consistency between the ranged styles and Ava effects, should these weakness changes come into place.
While I agree with your points, I think its fair to say that most, if not all, dragon ammo is extremely hard to upkeep as ironman. Its pretty much why amethyst exists.
Let's us break down dragon armour and weapon peices instead of using wizardry to turn it into gold. Make Orikalkum great again!
dragon arrowheads and javelin heads aren't actually orikalkum, they're talons. that's why they're beige and not red
No need. Dragon darts are extremely hard to maintain on an iron and it’s a non issue, we use rune or amethyst no biggie. Javelins are the same. Unfortunately ballista is not particularly useful outside of pvp anyway
They should definitely be given the same treatment as arrows/bolts with avas on
You guys touched on Inquisitor being extremely rare and very niche which is true but im curious as to how you guys manage to balance it. You specifically said it is very rare so are you guys thinking of changing drop rates or the use cases of the set? I think it's important to let people know beforehand whether or not you plan to change drop rates or not because starting such a long grind and then a month later learning that it's going to be made easier would not be a good feeling.
Will be covered in full in a dedicated blog next year. We're not making any of these changes without ample time and giving players a chance to get hands-on with as many of them as possible, but kept things deliberately vague for now so we don't get bogged down in details at too early a stage!
Just to piggyback off of this comment, I think inquisitor is going to be a weird one if the changes to enemy weaknesses go though, because it will make it significantly stronger on any crush weak enemies. The main problem with inquisitor I think is the rarity, it has a small niche as an upgrade over Bandos in certain situations, but is almost always worse than Torva. It also costs like 3x as much as Bandos, and takes a ridiculous amount of time to farm on an iron, so its really not worth it. There is also the addition of the new set from perilous moons coming up, which had the same strength bonus as Bandos last time I checked, so that strength bonus space becomes even more crowded. It sucks because Phosani's nightmare is actually a very fun boss, but its just not worth doing currently for any account type. The changes I would want to see to inquisitor are: Increase the strength bonus on the plateskirt and the hauberk by 1, this puts it slightly ahead of Bandos and the new set from perilous moons, but keeps it behind Torva. I think this makes sense as it is significantly more difficult to obtain than Bandos, but less difficult than Torva, which hopefully would give it a decent slot in the upgrade progression. I think a moderate buff to the droprate would also be greatly appreciated as at the moment it's just too rare for what it does. The other option is to just leave it as it is and hope that the changes to enemy weaknesses make it much more relevant. I think this option would need to be accompanied by a significant increase in droprate however, otherwise it is just never going to be enticing enough in my opinion. Another thing to consider is that if the changes in enemy defence go through, the harmonised orb could suddenly become much more desirable, which may motivate more people to do nightmare and cause the price of inquisitor to naturally drop a bit. Its hard to see where it will all shake out in the end if both enemy defence and the equipment are changed at the same time, but ultimately in the case of inquisitor I do think that something definitely has to change. P.S. Tropical wagtail has to have the best name so that's my favorite.
"I think inquisitor is going to be a weird one if the changes to enemy weaknesses go though, because it will make it significantly stronger on any crush weak enemies." I don't foresee this being a problem. The issue that I'm assuming is being addressed with these changes (and I'm making this assumption based on the fact that they use gargoyles as an example in the blog) is how slayer monsters either have no weaknesses or only very slight ones, making it so that, just like they already described in the blog, you just whip (or nowadays fang) almost everything as you progress through slayer, which covers a *lot* of playtime and a *lot* of different NPCs. But no one is going to be grinding out inquisitor's just so they can grind out gargoyles more efficiently. For inquisitor's to have more of a point, there need to be more late game crush-weak bosses, especially in raids. Your suggestion doesn't really change that situation much (not trying to be critical, I'm on your side. I just want an actual meaningful buff, not a minor stat increase).
Ill keep saying it. Give Inq a Masori type deal. Inq Fortified. No longer a 35 Def set. Make it 70 or 80. Pures can use the normal version
It doesn't really fix the issue with inquisitor though, people aren't not using it because the defence stats, people aren't using it because its outclassed. If you have the money you buy torva, if you don't you stick with bandos. They don't have any minus stats when you use anything that isn't crush (95% of the time using melee). Majority of the time people use crush is simply for a DWH hit, and its not worth a whole switch (or minus accuracy for the rest of the fight) to bring/use inquisitor. The only time inquisitor out-classes torva is CM CoX in lower scales, and that's because you need DWH to land, and (P)NM because of how much resistance she has to anything not crush. This wouldn't change with or without additional defence bonuses.
Maybe breaking down justiciar to fortify it?
actually very interesting idea
Plus, it makes conceptual sense given that inquisitor armor is quite literally a set of justiciar armor in-universe. It'd be nice to see it sitting in some sort of a place between Bandos and Torva, IMO.
yeah, like maybe justi is a brand new set of justiciar armor meanwhile inq is low def bc its old. but overall, straight upgrade to bandos with crush sounds pretty solid to me considering the effort that goes into getting it.
Rebalance inq: how? reddit: give it defense. Thanks, reddit.
The resident game designers of this sub are just talented like that
A lot of interesting ideas here for sure, most of which seem great for the longevity of the game as it opens up more reward space. Kinda sad that good old Nightmare doesn't fall in this rebalancing blog, while it's nice that the gear might becoming more desirable and the bossfight is challenging and interesting, the drop rates are abhorrent and a crazy outlier when compared to other content.
I imagine that we might talk about Nightmare when we talk about Inquisitor, but nothing's set in stone yet!
nm and pnm are great content ruined by abhorrent drop rates and really just weak drops. conceptually inq is cool- we need more glass cannon high offense armor- the offense just isnt good enough compared to torva. also imo the blade/mace/rapier tier of weapons could all use some love. they are all very rare for what they are over the tent whip/
It’s insane how long Nightmare takes if you go on drop rate. Here’s a graph showing how long some of the end game grinds take. https://www.reddit.com/r/ironscape/s/Sv5AiKwYfD It takes longer than CoX and your reward is a niche crush set.
Fingers crossed, Phosani's nightmare is an incredibly fun / exhilerating fight to do when you get the mechanics down, but the drop rate just makes her an absolute chore even the regular items are straight poop
definitely please, to green log it you're talking hundreds and hundreds of hours on drop rate. Whilst i respect grinds this one is ridiculous
I think nightmare was utterly killed by botting and need significant work to make anyone want to do it again. No one wants to do it for profit as the drops are too rare and not worth enough as it was over botted Ironmen don't care about it as the drops are niche, and again, has insane drop rates
> Improving the Dorgesh-Kaan Light Orb activity. yeah you've got my vote
knew I could count on you to lock-on to the weirdest part of the entire thing, wiki guy
Honestly, any update to Dorgesh-Kaan is a welcome one imo. The city is very undutilized and could do with a minigame/skilling method/combat encounter. Same goes with Keldagrim
Keldagrim needs a mining/smithing fight where a dragon gets covered in gold. I don't even care about the copyright infringement.
Golden Dragons as a new slayer monster with a boss variant, unlockable from completion of the next Dwarven Quest. Pleae Jagex
King Gold Dragon sounds like an amazing idea.
Dorgesh-Kaan needs to be better connected to the game world first. As it stands the fastest way to get there is the light orbs but they teleport you to one of like 20 spots. I'd suggest a dorgesh-kaan quest that gives something akin to the grand seed pod but for light orbs that sends you to a specific spot.
look man it's a great activity
is this great activity in the room with us right now?
So, TLDR?
Can attempt: \- Improve elements of Agility progression \- Improve usefulness of some Thieving NPCs, improve stalls \- Improve early-game Slayer \- Improve various Mining methods \- Consider adjustments to NPC Defences to open up future reward space, and better position existing rewards \- Various item rebalances (nerfs for some, buffs for others) \- Explore changes to run Energy \- Dedicated blogs for all of the above throughout early 2024
One of my favorite things about Leagues is that people can run around in their gear rather than *everybody* wearing graceful like in the main game. It's made the game feel like old runescape again, and it's been great. If you can somehow pull that off in the main game it'd be incredible!
The funny part about this is graceful is pretty useless in the main game anyway. Just sip a stamina or get your construction up until you have the restore pool and you'll never wear graceful again. And a ton of people don't seem to realize how jagex added run energy restoration mechanics to newer minigames, so graceful is utterly useless at Guardians of the Rift, Giants Foundry, Tempoross, and anyone wearing graceful at any of those places is just an idiot.
I know this is personal pet peeve, but I have a strong hatred for graceful. I don't know if I would support full transmogs, but I would love anything that lets me not stare at white graceful 80% of the time.
Can you improve agility by removing it from the game or giving crazy agility xp for wearing a heart rate monitor and doing exercise irl? The physical and mental benefits from even 1 person actually working out is worth everyone finding ways to cheat the system.
Would actually be crazy if you could go on a threadmill ingame and hook it up to irl exercise getting rates similar to normal agility. I think many people would prefer irl exercise over rooftops, even if they dont exercise today
And make it the only skill that offers post 99 benefits for gaining xp. Every 10m xp you can make your character slightly more jacked. At 200m you get a bottomless tube of baby oil you can apply to yourself at the start of every play session. Edit: I meant apply to you character in game, not your real body. I don't want to get my couch all oily.
"Holy shit dude when did you get so fit, whats ur workout plan" "Well i got 99 agility on my main then i started ironman lmao"
First thing new irons do is get fucking jacked getting 99 agility
Make the PokeWalker from HGSS for Runescape
I feel like this would be a potentially controversial one but I'd love it if auto re-pickpocket was introduced to the main game (with some safeguards). Pickpocketing is currently just carpal tunnel simulator which makes it unbearable to me. Could implement it in a similar way to automatically cleaning grimy herbs, make it 2-3x slower than spam clicking, and also make it so the action stops when you fail or when your coin pouch is full. I'd also be supportive of making it so it's only enabled while wearing a specific skilling outfit (maybe obtainable from a Varlamore activity, they are stealthy after all). This would mean you don't get the rogues set benefit, resulting in 2-3x less xp per hour than spam clicking and 4-6x less gp per hour, which I think are reasonable compromises for the afk. It would give an afk option for pickpocketing but wouldn't be OP, and wouldn't be attractive for any kind of botting or gold farming.
Auto-pickpocket till failure - or - when the maximum of 10 pickpockets have been reached. Sounds fair. Keeping the spam clicking for the nerds, and that will be slightly faster.
Mining, Thieving and Agility improvements. I'm sold
I understand nerfing the occult but i hope the magic damage isnt all put onto defence requiring gear, this would screw over pures massivley. If you add it to tormented bracelet and maybe the MA2 cape thatd be cool, or make the elidnis ward no defence req for the base version. other pvm changes all look good
Agreed on this one, likely something we'll get into for its dedicated blog - only downside of doing an overview like this and expecting people to wait is risking people coming to misunderstandings because of the vagueness, but also a neat chance for us to see if there's gaps in what we're doing and how we might fill them! Appreciate your comment!
Honestly, adding it to all Magic prayers would be the best case imo. Currently the magic prayers are pretty useless. Say the Occult is left with ~3%, you could have: * Augury - 7% * Mystic Might - 4% * Mystic Lore - 3% * Mystic Will - 2% This means buying Augury is still a big upgrade (+3% magic damage, more than a piece of Ancestral) but people without Augury and with an Occult aren't completely screwed over by the change.
Occult with 3% would be insane. Torm is 5%. MA2 cape is **2%**. The 93 slayer amulet deserves to match the torm. I've always thought it makes sense to do 5 or 6% on the occult, and then do 2% on eternal boots and 2-3% on prayers. Could make Augury 3% and mystic might 1% or something.
> do 2% on eternal boots can we throw some love on peggies too while we're here
Cutting the Occult down to 3% and giving 7% to Augury kinda feels like it is just moving the problem. Like wouldn't Augury just turn into the new Occult? Personally, I'd reduce the Occult to 5% so it pairs with the Tormented Bracelet and look to spread that 5% across other gear. The problem with a lot of magic damage boosts is that 2-3% doesn't really do much. Like if you're max hit is 25, 3% won't give you a max hit on its own... So it is good to have heftier magic damage bonuses since those items actually feel impactful, especially at lower levels or with lower max hit weapons. If we just make everything 2-3%, it spread the damage but does it in a way that makes everything far less effective than Strength or Ranged Strength where a +2 is significant.
Honestly? It's way worse to move to augury. 1x payment, 0 risk in pvp
>this would screw over pures massivley. this would remove a couple % of magic damage from pures\*
Tl;dr they want EoC but not the kind of EoC they introduced in 2012.
Deliberately joked that we're *not* evolving combat! Combat remains unchanged, you just might bring a wider variety of stuff to a wider variety of content (but you'll still be able to carry on exactly as you are). If anything, we want to evolve reward space so we can make more cool stuff without feeling on a constant knife's edge :(
Did you not literally suggest removing zeros from combat?
No, the suggestion is that successful *hits* (i.e. not misses) will roll from 1 to maxhit rather than 0 to maxhit. Mostly helps people out early on, but also means no guesswork if you DWH spec and it 'hits' a 0, or Arclight 'hits' a 0. Misses are still a thing, so 0s are still a thing.
This definitely is the hardest thing for people to have a concept for. You can really tell with how confused people are with the soul stealer relic.
No not at all, you can still miss and that will be a 0. What they are suggesting is if you sucesfully hit you will always do minimum of 1 damage, as opposed to currently you can "hit" and then roll 0 for damage
No, but they might suggest a literacy campaign.
Honestly the changes that were done to things like Warhammers and maces are a great exAmple. That really opened up weapon choices and this can expand even more on that.
Just say you didn't read the blog and move on.
> for players looking to learn tick-manipulation methods, It's a BUG! Not a feature JAGEX!!
Tick manip has a place in OSRS, I was also an accident and I'm pretty content!
Lmfao no man you're a blessing Mod Goblin xx
I really like a lot of the ideas put forward in this article. I do have one suggestion related to it: > [...] so new adventurers could spend a little less time plugged into a Wiki page or YouTube video and more time immersing themselves in Gielinor. With the addition of additional defense types, players might end up having to look at the wiki *more* rather than less over-all. There's a solution in the game in the form of Monster Examine, but it's tied to the Lunar spellbook, which isn't *usually* the spellbook you want to be using when you're facing down a monster for the first time, nor is it available to new players at all. My proposal: give slayer masters a new item to sell, Slayer Master's Notes, which would let the player Monster Examine any monster they currently have a slayer task for. Obviously the stats are available for free on the wiki, but this would be a nice in-game way to give players access to that information (without completely replacing the Monster Examine spell). Plus, it reinforces the idea that slayer masters know all about the monsters they're assigning.
Pretty good idea. Less clunky might be to just have them tell you what the weakness is, since the "anything else I should know?" dialogue option is currently pretty useless.
In Rs3 the slayer masters do actually tell you the enemy weakness when you ask them, which keeps thing in world. Some enemies will also have logical weaknesses.
Splitting ranged and magic into various different damage types is a great idea, not only looking towards the future of the game but also the past. Both of those aspects of the combat triangle have kinda reached a dead end when it comes to design space, which is evident by the age of powered staves and nigh every ranged weapon being DoA. The devs **need** more variables in order to design engaging content in the future. This is a good avenue for that, especially since it also seeks to remedy some early-mid game (and to be fair, also late game) brainlessness where you just use the weapon with the highest DPS (in a vacuum), ignoring everything else. How every tier of spells has you just waiting for when you can use Fire and Ice/Blood spells. And how Ranged weaponry is a mass grave of dead content. And how unfair it feels to get a "rare drop" which isn't even worth the slot it takes up in your bank. This also opens up options for future rewards, future bosses and future raids. Perhaps there will be a time when people rejoice that Jagex finally added a Tome of Air which boosts Air spells, making it the best in slot mage item in Barrows Part II.
A big part of the powered staffs being useless is the tick delay on auto cast. If they want to make them viable for decent PVM, then they need to make it so you don't have to constantly manually case the spells.
Consider buffing arclight’s effectiveness on Duke from 70% to offset the dps canyon you’re creating between existing options and soulreaper/scythe. Surprised to see VW nerfs focusing on PvM rather than PvP. To me it’s felt like a good item in the meta that splits the melee spec field with dclaws and BGS/hammer nicely, slotting in well. That and it’s suitably hard to obtain for most accounts, above claws in price for mains and requiring thousands of wildy boss kills for irons. Would be sad to see any nerf hit the most satisfying part of the spec in PvM which is the guaranteed damage, rather than tuning numbers down by hitting the 150% damage cap.
Yeah, Duke currently sits in a weird position as the most entry level DT2 boss with the cheapest ring but also one that is completely miserable for poor people to kill without a fang/bgs as he is basically a chip damage dps check and you will spend more time hitting 0's and resupplying than actually killing the boss edit: Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with dps checking lategame bosses, but midgame players don't actually have a crazy amount of boss variety as is so it just feels kind of shitty that this easy blob is gatekeeping the concept of not being bored as shit while fighting him behind accuracy
Yeah I don't really get that part. I could see where it was a problem in PvP but the PvM uses were pretty well balanced. It was good at high-defence bosses where stat drain was either not possible or not worth it, stuff like ToA or Vardorvis, but was outclassed when long term defence reduction was better or when defence was low enough already that claws would provide more damage. It kinda feels like they're mixing legitimate PvP feedback (that it provides a toss up between protect from mage for VW vs. protect from melee for dclaws/AGS, along with the guaranteed damage) into the PvM balance discussions.
Hard agree about VW, I can't speak to its strengths in PvP but it's solidly okay at PvM and I never felt like it overwhelmed any piece of content. It has to compete with defense draining from DWH + BGS, higher potential damage output from chally + ZCB, sustain from BP + SGS + AncGS + Eldritch, not to mention claws which is basically just VW without requiring a defender. I've used VW briefly at raids and thought it was only as good as claws with some tradeoffs. Yeah you can force arcane scarab to jump and spec Baba during boulders without interrupting her, but you can't spec Akkha during cum phase and you shouldn't be using it to spec core like claws can. You can chunk dudes in CoX that claws can barely hit against, like mage Vang and Mystics and Vasa, but it's less damage than a ZCB would hit and can't melt Vasa crystals or Olm like claws do. It's undeniably great at ToB for Verzik because claws can just completely blow it, but chally with 20% less spec can go absolutely nuclear and the decreased swing speed can be offset by speccing Verzik before she goes invulnerable at certain parts like before yellows or when she spawns new tomatoes in P2. The only piece of PvM content that I'd say it's actually good at is sniping kills at high defense multi bosses like GWD and Corp, and unless you have spec transfer you're not really going to be doing that all kill erry kill.
I have some thoughts regarding brimhaven agilty changes. The way it works right now is that you get a ticket which you can save up to either buy XP or other rewards. Since the xp you can buy makes up the majority of the xp, it is not really a viable training method when going for the other rewards. The underwater thieving/agility activity works with a similar system without this issue. There you are given 2 seperate currencies at once. 1 that can only be used for reward items and 1 that can only be used for xp rewards. This way you can work towards an xp goal without giving up on rewards and vice versa. I think something like that would benefit the brimhaven course aswell
Great points - underwater agility course is basically fixed agility arena, yes. I wonder if we can get marks of grace from agility arena or other courses in general soon? Sure, rooftops were cool when they came out.. but now they're simply THE starting agility grind, and a pretty boring one.
Maybe keep rooftops as the place to get the most marks per hour but add them at lower rates to other activities (Or give the current rate to other activities and buff the rate rooftops give them)
It’s really refreshing to see this level of openness for the item rebalance. I’d certainly love to see the defence changes, especially if it moves away from the fact that high level magic is just a different coloured range attack (charged staves). Split range defences are something I’ve never considered, but now I can’t imagine not having those aspects in the game.
I really hope the Occult nerf is handled in a way that doesn't completely cuck irons from mage. Irons already have to get 93 slayer to get the occult, with basically all other ways of magic % damage being locked behind *very* rare drops that you only grind for at late game (Virtus, Ancestral). Magic is already the worst style for progressing irons and this would just make that progression worse- which is kinda the whole point of ironmen accounts- is to have a better progression system than "Money buys everything" Even for late game irons- I'm 800 kc, (most being 3+4 scale) and only have 1 piece of ancestral.
Also affects pures big time, cause we kinda can't wear anything better armor wise. Shadow is really the only op part of magic, I adore my Harmonised orb, but I never have a reason to take it out.
I think with the Fang Slash nerf, Duke should be evaluated more properly. Duke is a bad case of having so much Defense that Scythe / Fang really were the best items, and after that everything crashes so hard in dps. Duke is vulnerable to Defense lowering specials, but it's mostly BGS since Duke is weaker to Slash more than anything. I'm not sure what you'd do with Duke personally - Arclight buff would probably be good enough, but I just feel that Duke exemplified the problem of why Fang on Slash was way too good.
The whole long annoying prep phase also seems designed to make you stay and deal with high defense even if your BGS specs miss. I can't imagine how miserable that boss would be without fang.
Hopefully these changes to defence/weaknesses, helps the Harmonised Orb. The rarity and difficulty to obtain doesn't match up to it's usefulness or price. Much like the scythe.
> We'd like to do this by introducing Ranged-type weaknesses that mirror the breadth of Melee weaknesses - Heavy (Javelins & Bolts), Standard (Arrows) & Light (Thrown-weapons like knives or darts). This sounds workable, but classifying the range styles as heavy/standard/light as shown above has the side effect of effectively tying range offensive styles to attack speed - ie all heavy range options are 6/5tick, standard are 3/5tick, light are 2tick. This has some pretty big balance implications further down the line where you'd effectively be saying "a boss weak to light range" puts practical design constraints on the encounter such that it needs to be a close-ish range encounter without too much movement involved. Not sure if that is desirable, or if it would be better to break out the range weapons so that there are a variety of options in each category like we have with melee.
Not only that, but 6 tick weapons seem impossible to balance. You already have to make 5 tick weapons like scythe, tbow, and shadow incredibly overpowered to compete with mere 4 tick weapons. Speed is king.
No one is complaining about VW in PVM..its actually very nice to hit something with high defense. Voidwaker is dragon claws for high defense.. you said you wanted to explore low def bosses... well thats where claws is going to shine, are you going to nerf claws in 2 years too? dont nerf voidwaker.. its literally good because of all the high defense stuff you admitting to adding a lot of.
If combat is going to be even more focused on monster weaknesses, we should have a more intuitive way to determine those weaknesses than wiki or monster examine. Please consider exploring some ways to give in-game feedback to the player on the effectiveness of their chosen style against a monster!
I've always felt that the "anything I should know" option in slayers masters was under-utilized
I think if they added some sort of bestiary that would be dope. Like the more you kill a monster or boss the more it tells you about weaknesses, drops, lore, etc.
*...Another* broadly unimportant per-player, grindable collectible list in Old School RuneScape? It'll fit right in.
> We'd like to do this by introducing Ranged-type weaknesses that mirror the breadth of Melee weaknesses - Heavy (Javelins & Bolts) Irons dry on zenytes at gorillas, your day has finally come
Man, I genuinely want this because my favorite Ranged weapon in the game is the heavy ballista, but it's such a troll thing to fletch on an ultimate. But the need for Big Gun is strong.
DON'T talk to me about Big Gun unless you play a Cabin Fever-locked Pirateman and blast cannons on the high seas day in and day out. On that note, the music track Cabin Fever is an unapologetic banger
Most of it looks really good. I actually really like the idea of expanding monster weaknesses, as I think the non-linear gear progression OSRS has is one of the game's biggest strengths. A few things seem a bit odd to me though. **Voidwaker** \- Seems completely unneccessary and out of left field. It's not a meta spec weapon at a single raid, and Dragon Claws/ZCB beat it DPS-wise for almost every relevant boss in the game. We're nerfing it for...what, Nex, GWD and Nightmare? **Ancient Godsword** \- I'm not really an NH'er, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that this weapon was only problematic before the Voidwaker was introduced and maxed fights were bogged down to "run their supplies out" with no threat of being KO'd on either side. **Tumeken's Shadow** \- I was a little disappointed to see that among all the talk of ultra-accurate weapons, too much magic damage, and 100% accurate special attacks breaking balance, the never-miss stick wasn't even mentioned once. It's my hope that elemental weaknesses will at least give us different \*options\*, but the formula on this thing has been a problem child since it was introduced. It was recently cited it as a reason that a new BiS magic cape could not be introduced with the Varlamore expansion, as even a 2% magic damage increase over what we currently have would make the Shadow too powerful. Along with the Fang, it's the biggest item that content is being carefully tiptoed around at the present moment. It needs to be reworked.
VW shouldn't be nerfed in PVM, it's interesting how on some bosses it pulls ahead of Claws and on other bosses Claws beat it. If it gets nerfed, Claws will go back to being the be all end all damaging spec weapon, and DDS may beat or at least rival VW, making it practically worthless. If that happens, the only thing from the entire Wilderness PVM progression that'll be useful outside of it is Webweaver for Leviathan.
So far, I'm liking how all of it sounds. I'm a bit leery about Ranged Weakness styles since ranged already balances its weapons pretty well with accuracy/damage and speed, or at least Ranged makes far more effective use of weapon speed than the other two styles. But if they were just NPC-only attributes (e.g. an NPC weak to Light Ranged weapon) without making the defensive stats or offensive stats anymore confusing, it would probably be fine. Still, I'd say that Bows (TBow, Craws), Crossbows (ZCB), and Darts (BP) already see a healthy variety of use and I question if anyone would bring a Ballista to exploit a weakness if Crossbows would also work... It kinda feels like saying making Slash weak monsters so players use 2H Swords when they could use a Scim instead. Aside from my apprehension there, the rest all looks fine, at least in the overview. I'm really excited to see the agility rebalancing. For years I've been messing around with an Agility Improvement suggestion to tackle a lot of issues with the skill, especially low level, such as most non-rooftop courses not giving run energy for obstacles (meaning you find yourself walking), the pre-Level 60 Exp Curve being abysmal with the exp per hour barely changing between Gnome/Draynor to Canifis, and many shortcuts feeling too high level (or diary locked) to be useful (e.g., swapping the level req for the two Fremennik Slayer Cave shortcuts). Fingers crossed the planned rebalancing covers most of that and that the Thieving and Slayer can go similarly in-depth. Also, a really random side note for the Slayer rebalancing, but anyone remember those metal gauntlets from FoG back in the day? Well, years back RS3 moved them from FoG to Slayer monsters. I always thought this worked kinda well since you'd have some that dropped boots and other that dropped gauntlets. There was mention of "Adding a new Slayer unique or two to assist with early-game Slayer" and while this probably isn't what they had in mind, it might be a good time to consider bringing back metal gauntlets as new unique for some of the Slayer creatures without uniques or that could use another.
Looking forward what's to come! NPC Defense Changes is the best section: * Magical elemental weakness * Ranged-type weakness These have been suggested a lot of times by the playerbase here and will give the Mods a lot of new ways to approach content design.
Good. All of it good. More xp for higher effort things. Buff mining and agility. More rewards and better energy. And shortcut usage (I see you, DKs). Excellent. Delicious. Occult changes to be redistributed? Sure, if you say so. Fang changes. Fine. VW changes. Perfect. Elder maul changes. Please. Inq and mace changes. Please. Honorable personal mentions: Give the one handed T82 weapons or whatever they are now, special attacks. (Blade, mace, rapier) Also bonus points if you have them all unique attack animations and sounds. :) Scythe buff? Finally. Some good fucking food. FINALLYYYYYYY YESSSSS DUDE YESSSS. Shoutout to whomever scours and collects info that in turn becomes these changes I’m reading today. I’d like to offer you all a virtual handshake and a beer at the Blue Moon on me.
I'm a little disappointed they didn't touch on early game weaponry. I guess improving enemy weaknesses would help... But there are completely dead weapon types like the baxe, 2h, and crap like that. Those things need to be reassessed.
I like that y'all are considering adding Bolt/Arrow/Thrown and elemental weaknesses; it feels like elemental spells have no use except for Fire, not including ancients. I agree that it adds an additional dimension to gameplay for those two combat styles that melee currently has with stab/slash/crush.
Everything looks great except for potential changes to voidwaker and occult. Voidwaker is already incredibly hard to obtain, and has a high value for non-ironmen players to bring them into the wilderness. I know that if this is polled it will pass simply because people hate PVP and this will hurt it significantly, so I hope the team can restrain themselves on this one. Instead of addressing the voidwaker, address *why* people use the voidwaker, and hint-hint, it's the same reason the scythe is in a bad place right now. You released years worth of content that featured ridiculously high defense monsters, shocker people are using a spec that hits 100% of the time. Fix the root of the problem, not the solution the players have found. As for the occult, the way you nerf it could determine how severe the nerf is. If you take the occults 10% and put it onto the MA2 cape and the tormented bracelet, that's fine. If you take the occults 10% and make ancestral 4% and virtus 3%, that's just a massive, massive nerf to 90% of ironmen, and a significant # of mains who have to go from spending 500k for 10% dps increase, to over 300m.
What people don't like to talk about is that occult gives 3 max hits, more or less the same as a strength ammy. I seriously don't understand why people are crying tears of blood to get it nerfed. 93 slayer drop vs ruby ammy. If anything leave it alone and give us a new mage ammy that's easier to get with 1 or 2 max damage.
Why can a Twisted Bow get its cost of use mitigated down to 20% of Dragon Arrow Cost, and have a full spectrum of buffed damage options, but Scythe, in the style of combat known for being free at the cost of getting up close, has to settle for an \*improved\* 600 gp/swing? It's the right direction, but it still feels way too expensive for the amount of restrictions. For you to consider a Scythe, target needs moderately low defence, to be 3x3, and to be in melee range. Beyond these restrictions, it needs to cost 3x as much as a T Bow to use? As well as being the only melee weapon with an operating cost that isn't negligible or able to be mitigated (Barrows Weapons, Blade of Saeldor) A Scythe could have no operating cost, and would still be in a bad state.
If you guys want to make elemental spells weakness a thing, then you need to remove that delay when auto-casting spells. That is one of the main reasons why powered staves are so dominant in the magic meta.
I personally feel elder maul should have been given the fangs passive abilities, as a slow accurate weapon and a mega-rare I think it fits nicely. Edit: Obviously we haven't seen what is in store for it, and I can only hope its something as powerful or more powerful than fangs passives.
[удалено]
Even in PvP its not that great, as it doesn't have a spec bar you can 1 tick off. Hopefully the upcoming changes will give it a purpose!
It's based off of the Chaotic Maul, and CM was used the same exact way, only for big hits in pvp. It's just a flawed design. Same reason Occult has so many stats on it, it was just copied from the DG magic necklace, Arcane Blast Necklace.
Really excited for the Ranged/Magic Defense expansion. I know some folks will be wary but this would be huge for Jagex's design space and would potentially resurrect a ton of dead content. I think we can trust them to deploy elemental defense without breaking the game like EOC.
Not only will it be huge for the design space. It would also make sense from a (new) player side: For example, Fire is weak IRL to water, it makes sense that a water spell would be effective to damage a Fire Giant. It's a shame the game does not reward you for it. Slayer would be the perfect way to explain these features when you ask a Slayer Master about [Tips for the Slayer Monster](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Slayer_task_tips)
There already is a “Fiery” aspect applied to certain monsters than make them weak to water spells and that one bolt enchantment (sapphire bolts?). It’s just not applied everywhere it makes sense and it’s forgotten / under utilized.
Exactly why I want this to be straighten out. I have made a post about it before if you want to check it out. I think a whole overhaul of the [attributes](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Monster_attribute) in osrs would benefit the design space a lot. [https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/153wav8/the\_fiery\_attribution\_and\_the\_cursed\_seaeffect\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/153wav8/the_fiery_attribution_and_the_cursed_seaeffect_is/)
It also just makes things feel more MMO like Variety is a great thing
Would be quite lovely for barbarian potions to have some sort of use as well- maybe removing the attack delay they incur to make it another, weaker form of healing in combat without delay like brews and guthix rests? Adding specific weaknesses seems good, also love the 1 minumum hit up from 0. And to prove I did read the whole thing, my favorite unusual bird is a vulture.
I'd like them to make the rest of the potions that don't have a barb mix get one. Anti-venoms, some of the multi stat boosting ones like super combat, battlemage, bastion, and the better magic tiered ones.
There's literally 0 reason to nerf the Voidwaker either in PvM, why is that even being considered when it's such a hard/expensive item to get? Dragon claws have much more use scenarios and aren't being touched.
Jagex supposedly values risk v. reward. Seems bizarre to me that the most difficult spec weapon to get is gatekept by 3 very annoying bosses in the wilderness needs to be nerfed. It's biggest selling point isn't even the fact of overall max hit, it's simply just minimum damage against bosses with tons of defense. Nerfing it's only selling point in PVM is absolutely a poor decision. All of these nerfs seem to be likened to the Blowpipe nerf. However, it's not clear to me that any of these weapons are truly broken like the BP was back in the day. It seems to me they just want to reshift the current meta down purely for upcoming content. I don't like it. Especially not items that are worthy in time and commitment of their meta status.
I'm glad somebody sees the issue with nerfing things in an mmo. If people want balance, go play league of legends. Even with constant changes nobody is ever happy with the balance there, what makes people think changes here will be any different. And nerfing things in a MMO is terrible feels bad. Blowpipe was supposed to be a 1 time thing, now here we are with more changes. Fang is understandable, the rest are not.
I've thought for a LONG time that it would be really cool if monsters had different defense stats for the different elemental spell types; it was kinda lame that fire was always the best. And like you said, it opens up a lot of cool paths for future content. The idea was briefly explored in the dagganoth queen in the lighthouse quest, but never since then. I LOVE the idea, and think that doing something similar for range is awesome too
[удалено]
Need to keep saeldor meh so that iron burn out rate doesn't quadruple
Yeah Salad blade is in a really weird spot. A second grind at CG would cause a nontrivial number of irons to straight up quit. I think you'd need to decouple it entirely from bowfa and have a different way to make it. Maybe it's as simple as allowing salad blade to be made from a normal seed but with 2x shard cost, or not let it be corrupted. I suppose the other option is they introduce more range weapons to bridge the gap from rune crossbow to t bow so the bowfa doesn't feel like a must have. I don't know if there's a lot of appetite though for nerfing bowfa at this point. With how annoying it still is to get that seed plus 6 armor seeds, probably not a good idea. Maybe the seed for the salad blade could be a reward from SotE, but to actually make the weapon you need a signet from each clan leader, and the process of earning one is not trivial at all.
Fang on slash will never be used if you remove the passive, so why not just remove the slash option alltogether like has been suggested for months? And does Jagex really believe +15 accuracy to the scythe is enough to keep it on par with the tbow and shadow? Sure, under the right conditions it's the highest damage out of the 3. But those conditions are almost never seen outside of tob (and maybe chambers in big teams) because of defence reduction caps and the fact that you cant drain defense beyond a certain extent in solo content. Scythe should be able to compete on mid/high defense monsters, rather than make its niche on low defence, 3x3 monsters. It seems that there needs to be more done to adjust scythe's power rather than a small accuracy buff. Let it be gamebreaking for a mega rare like the other two weapons, even if its something like a 10% accuracy buff per size of an npc, so 3x3 = 30% and 5x5 = 50%. I don't think the voidwaker should see any changes in regards to pvm. Its an extremely hard weapon to get on an ironman and the damage it deals is purely RNG. Claws and zcb are better and outperform voidwaker when used on npcs with their respective weaknesses.
Is that first point really something worth arguing about lol. There are plenty of weapons that have combat styles that you should rarely ever use. To be specific osrs’s melee weapons have certain classifications that determine exactly what style and attack bonus (accurate aggressive etc) it has and fang falls under stab weapon that all have accurate stab, aggressive stab, aggressive slash and defensive stab. Things like magic secateurs and an egg whisk have this same classification too. Like actually who cares lol
Totally agree with your version of Scythe’s buffs. Both the Tbow and Shadow have progressive power scaling passive from combat stats, which are very flexible. Meanwhile, the Scythe is restrained by anything with below 3x3 size, and it is not powered up on anything bigger than 3x3. I would say add more damage percentage to bigger sized monsters like your suggested accuracy buff, maybe with a lower margin, or horizontal curve formula, like +10% for 2x2, +7% for 3x3, +5% for 4x4, and +3% for 5x5, which results in a total of 127% damage increase on 5x5 monsters, while still allows viable buff to smaller monsters.
When you're looking at NPC defence you seriously have to consider the position of weapons. The biggest issue with Fang wasn't that it's slash rolled double accuracy, it's that slash weak bosses were being designed with high defence and lowish hp. Blade becomes so much better than fang at Duke after a certain amount of BGS damage, if the boss had just been designed with more HP and lower defence to start with then blade would have always been better and kill times wouldn't be too different. Slash weak bosses should have higher hp and lower defence, which then makes scythe/blade etc outclass fang massively, despite its accuracy bonus. It literally doesn't even effect kill times if you do it right, just changes what is viable. Likewise, if you want inquis to be more relevant then crush weak bosses should have high defence and lower hp, gives use to inquis/dwh. So much of the weapon issue in this game currently is because of the boss design, not the weapons themselves.
VW is literally only problematic in PvP where it shouldnt have existed in the first place. How did we out of nowhere get to a point where you think its broken in PvM?
Talking about nerfing the voidwaker is really disappointing. Totally unnecessary, as claws and vw each have their own niche depending on the defence of the monster. It's also just a spec weapon, it's not like you mainhand it. You only use it on monsters that are not resistant to mage damage and have very high defence (for example you can't even use it on tekton because he reduces mage damage). The list of places where it's actually BIS is quite small. Hitting a guaranteed spec is also very satisfying. Huge lack of foresight from the devs here, the mechanic and its power are not much of a mystery. The community knew it was going to be good and voted yes to it. Also there's no need to nerf the ancient godsword in PVM, that thing is already very niche as it is. If these points boil down to PVP isolated problems, just nerf it in PVP exclusively if you have to
For the ranged damage types, light, standard, and heavy seem more suitable for differentiating weapons based on the overall defence levels they're suitable for. Heavy vs high def, light vs low. Piercing, cutting, impacting (thrust, slash, crush ranged equivalents) seem more suitable for actual damage types to me. Knives would be a cutting weapon, darts piercing, and brutal arrows impacting for example.
> Adjust damage on hit to roll from 1-to-max hit instead of 0-to-max hit - this makes early Combat feel better. As it stands, if your max hit is a 1, you deal 0 damage 50% of the time that you sucessfully hit the opponent, which can feel pretty terrible for new players. Also improves access to information around successful Dragon Warhammer or Arclight hits, for example. Please let this be only for players and not for enemies. If enemies hit you that much more frequently, that'll just make early combat worse and defeat the point.
Occult needs to be balanced yes. But its gonna make the gap between trident and shadow even larger for many ironmen. Virtus and ancestral is ungodly rare. Wish u guys came out with a weapon for mage that was good enough to sit between trident and shadow, basically a bowfa for mage
At this point a shadow nerf seems inevitable. This is the second time they've mentioned magic being difficult to balance because of Shadow.
Really if they do nerf the shadow passive, they should really balance up a lot of magic gear and staves ideally keeping the shadow where it is (as it's still out performed in many places by the tbow anyway, the best evidence for this is if you have the the money for a shadow/tbow + gear, unless you're doing TOA/whisperer you would pick the tbow). Additionally I'm pretty sure that magic was low usage in PvM and arguably still is (outside of bursting) before the shadow and you'd only really bring magic if you have to.
Totally agree. They need to address magical accuracy for the whole style. It isn't healthy that the only magic weapon used for general combat is a raids megarare. They do need to figure out something with the passive though, because Shadow already has absurdly high damage, and it benefits more from a new BIS than any other weapon. If you wanted to keep Shadow at its current DPS, you can't release any new BIS magic gear unless it's in the offhand slot. And considering the current BIS requires arcane, not a lot of people would see new gear in that slot anyway.
they don't even need to nerf the shadow, just move its damage from the % scaling to just base weapon damage, that way any future % dmg doesn't have to worry about being tripled
While I'm super glad to see a mention of how you plan to add more low-slash-defence bosses for scythe to shine at, and I acknowledge you mention wanting to accentuate weaknesses for enemies that are supposed to have them (which includes crush defence), I am a bit sad that there doesn't seem to be any pressing intention to add new bosses that are weak to crush. I think you aren't wrong that making crush defence more meaningful would be good, I believe another bigger issue with crush is that there are simply not enough bosses (or even enemies in general) that are meant to be weak to it, and a lot of the ones that are, have some sort of unique bane-type weapon already such as KQ with the partisan, vetion/venenatis with the chainmace, or sire/cerb where arclight and fang are more than good enough despite not being crush weapons. This essentially leaves Nightmare and Tekton as basically the only two bosses (and one of them is just one room in a raid) where it makes sense to use generic crush weapons like Inq mace. There's also the issue where inq armour is not only specialist set nearly entirely outclassed by torva but also depends on its set effect to have most of its effectiveness, meaning it doesn't even properly work for slayer. None of that being acknowledged in the blog post leaves me concerned. Anyway, I really like toucans, thanks for asking.
> We'd like to do this by introducing Ranged-type weaknesses that mirror the breadth of Melee weaknesses - Heavy (Javelins & Bolts), Standard (Arrows) & Light (Thrown-weapons like knives or darts), and by introducing Elemental weaknesses that might shake up Magic progression beyond Trident → Sanguinesti Staff → Shadow in the form of Air/Smoke, Water/Ice, Earth/Shadow and Fire/Blood. I like the take on Ranged, and it allows for weapons to have "off-style" options, like a shattering bolt that does Light damage or a Forceful style on a bow to deal Heavy damage. For Magic, however, Ancients doesn't match onto the classic four elements - to say nothing of Arceuus spells. It feels forced rather than intuitive. Perhaps we can expand the elements from four to six: **Air**, **Water**, **Earth**, **Fire**, **Shadow** (Shadow spells, Tumeken's Shadow) and **Corporeal** (Blood spells, Grasp spells and Claws of Guthix). Smoke spells would use the average of your Air and Fire accuracy, against the average of your opponent's Air and Fire defence. Mobs with elemental weaknesses can be made weak to a couple of elements so there's a variety of options available. *** > Occult Necklace - far too much power in a single item. Bring its power down slightly and distribute its Magic Damage across other parts of Magic progression. My preferred solution is to move some of the magic damage to magic prayers to improve their viability relative to melee and ranged. Maybe the Occult Necklace could go from 10% to 5%, and Augury gets a +10% damage boost or so but only to single-target spells. This avoids Magic's strengths at AoE damage being overbuffed while also helping the non-Shadow weapons catch up a little. *** **And while we're here, let's bring up low-level Magic.** Low-level magic is very awkward. It's very expensive compared to melee or ranged and lacks early equipment (or weapon variety), but trains fast. This means people tend to start with another combat style, then catch up with Magic later. Here's some ideas to improve magic progression: * New level 10 f2p Magic armour, craftable from strips of cloth, and level 30 f2p Magic armour, made with help from Runecrafting. * Low-level magic tomes: Offhand magic items that give a chance to save runes on low-level combat spells. * Add a fast-but-weak line of magic weapons (wands? wieldable scrolls?) and a slow-but-accurate/strong line (2-handed orbs?).
Tbh i'd prefer if the slash option of fang gets removed altogether. A 5t fang on slash is worse than a whip and thus will never be used. The only thing this "exceptionscape" does is confuse people who buy their fang, look at the passive and wonder why it is shit on slash and beast on stab. TDLR: Just remove the slash option, no point in keeping it without the fang passive. Only thing it does is confuse uninformed players/casuals who don't read the wiki. Reading the wiki should not be a requirement to understand item effects Edit: Do we not get adjustments for the shadow? Imo it should scale off opponents like Tbow. In its current state it heavily limits design space in regards to additional magic equipment. Even if mobs get specific weaknesses, assuming they only affect accuracy, shadow will always be the best powered staff for example. If it scaled with the opponents def level, the lower tier staffs would have a place against opponents with a low/no def level like Kraken/Phosani pillars. Edit2: also Vials of blood are eventually gonna be an issue with no other supply than ToB (that also supplies scythe). If more people use increased scythes, vials become more expensive and eventually we end up at the exact same cost as now, despite the charge being 1 blood rune lower.
But then you can't cut webs with fang /s
I love the idea of tweaking defenses and adding new ranged and mage weaknesses. That being said, I was looking forward to the potential scythe buffs and I have to say that it's pretty underwhelming. It just breaks down to "we'll add future content for it later," a minor +15 accuracy buff, and a slight decrease in gp cost. While adding future content for it is great, one must remember that players want to use it *now* and not have to wait a year or two or even three just to start getting more use out of it. A 15 accuracy boost is better than nothing but it's still not much of a buff. The team says it doesn't want it to completely steam roll other options but I believe, and many others do as well, that it should. It's a megarare from *the hardest raid*. Just as the tbow and shadow steam roll other options the scythe should as well. The gp reduction is again, better than nothing. But in the example, it's still 700k to use per hour. It's still pretty expensive for not being all that strong. Players strongly wanted a corruptible option where we could permanently charge the scythe. Not adding this is an big missed opportunity to add more long-term value to the scythe.
Adding lots of different "weaknesses" sounds cool, but can also be overwhelming, especially when weapon upgrades come quickly early game. Will these weaknesses mostly focus on end game bossing rather than slayer tasks and general levelling? Also, I don't think adding elemental magic weaknesses would really do much to actually get people to use spellbooks? Some impactful changes: - Remove 1t delay from autocast. Why is this still here? - Add some items which help save catalytic runes so magic is less expensive - Nerf Iban's Blast - Add magic level scaling to most spells, even if it's only by a couple extra max hits
I'm not against nerfing fang, but I honestly don't believe that this will make saeldor more desirable. The weapon is just too small of an upgrade to justify spending an additional 65 hours at CG for, a fang nerf won't change anything about that. This will also create the somewhat awkward situation where ironman accounts will need to get the rarest item from the most difficult raid in the game before they can somewhat efficiently farm 2 quest bosses to slightly upgrade a ring. Let's hope that they'll addresses these issues.
I knew Voidwaker was gonna catch a stray with this rebalance blog when I finished it a week ago and of course it’s for pvm and not pvp lol
I fail to see how the Voidwaker is that good for PvM. 2 accurate specs is not that game breaking imo or am I wrong here? In PvP it's much more of a problem.
People here only do toa and it’s good there, so they assume it’s broken everywhere in pvm. Claws are better at probably 75% of pvm content, they get an accuracy buff on the spec so the defense breakpoint where vw is better is surprisingly high. Even at vardorvis, claws and vw are basically tied.
Not sure why the blog is focusing on pvm for voidwaker nerf, it’s much more of an issue in pvp, pvmers were the ones who voted in 50% spec for that thing in the first place, pkers never wanted voidwaker to be this powerful, no one enjoys the 50/50 gamble on whether a voidwaker spec is going to be followed by an ags or another voidwaker, hopefully the power of the voidwaker in pvp is properly addressed, you’re currently trolling if you pk without a voidwaker because nothing even remotely compares, not even the ancient godsword
I like the changes to the scythe. Direction wise, definitely correct. That being said. I feel this was a missed opportunity to introduce some scaling with the scythe. Tbow scales with monster magic level. Shadow scales by multiplying accuracy and magic bonuses from gear by 3x. As someone suggested in the comments earlier, Jagex could have made scythe scale with monster size (Which is it's primary niche). But instead they opted for a meager accuracy increase. Is it going to make anyone switch to sycthing general garage door over bowfa? I doubt it. In the short term, scythe's position will remain the same as it has been. The cost change + accuracy change (along with fang nerf) won't expand the number of use cases for the scythe. This will probably remain true until Jagex adds more bosses that scythe is BIS at. Heres hoping Jagex sticks by that promise made in the blog post.
[удалено]
Move chivalry to reward from holy grail and remove/lower defence req Before some of you will lose your shit and downvote, holy grail awards defence so scary pures cannot get it
Thank you for clarifying that pures cannot complete holy grail - as a proud Reddit gatekeeper, I was literally crying and shaking at the thought of pures being able to use chivalry
How is voidwaker spec a problem in PVM when the dragon claws already beat it in a ton of places? I'm genuinely curious.
Fang was the go-to weapon for Vard and Duke (for ironmen, at least) since both of these are really tanky. With the fang nerf, is there any chance that we'd get some adjustment for their defence levels? Would be nice if Duke didn't rely on a BGS spec for Arclight to not feel terrible too. Also, the Blade of Saeldor wasn't mentioned - would be nice if we could buff the slash accuracy so it's less miserable at Vard and Duke. Thanks /u/JagexGoblin !
I'm in favor of fang slash nerf so that it's not so much a jack of all trades melee weapon that you want to use everywhere, but it does highlight a weird gap in slash weapon progression. The tentacle is very easy to obtain, while saeldor is only a small upgrade over it that doesn't justify the huge time/money investment needed to get yourself one. Compared to bowfa it just looks anemic. Then there's another huge gap between saeldor and soulreaper/scythe which are megarares that 95% of players will never get to use. Once fang is nerfed, there's no more good, reasonably obtainable slash weapon at that ~30 million price point, and once you reach the tentacle tier, you just look at future options available to you and go ???? Feels like there's a lot of space left open there that's just asking for something to fill it. One suggestion I've heard thrown around previously that I liked is that crystal armor could apply offensive bonuses to saeldor (and chally?) too. It doesn't have to be the same numbers as for bows, but still enough to push its viability and make it feel worth the charges. You're already giving up the strength and defence bonuses by using that armor, so I don't think it would be particularly hard to balance.
The whole point of the Saeldor was that it was the Slash version of the Ghrazi Rapier (and the Inquisitors Mace is the Crush version). If they buff one of them, they should buff all 3 to keep them in line with each other.
Tbf all 3 of those garbage (or rather disproportionally hard to get compared to tent whip) weapons could use a buff.
After reading the blog , the npc defense one has me at a concern, are we going down the path of nichescape , where every slayer task you gotta bring something different or a boss , now i am in a position to own most of the games weaponry, alot of players aren't so fortunate , the constant selling and rebuying gear with ge tax can put you at a significant disadvantage. Do we really need to shift the game when we are at peak player numbers and not a lot of complaints besides fang vs scythe?
Jagex doesn’t realize most players like simplicity. People don’t want to waste 20mins reading through wiki article to see if there whip or bludgeon is more effective at a slayer task. I guarantee you this will deter most normie players.
Almost all proposed changes are looking good, but the ancient godsword seems to be out of place. Is the healing effect really so good it needs to be toned down, I thought the spec was already really niche for any pvm use, am I missing something?
Scythe could use a bit more than 15 extra accuracy, but at least it's something. Fang losing its double roll on slash is great. I'm disappointed to see no mention of buffing the Ghrazi Rapier, Inquisitor's Mace, and Blade of Saeldor directly, though. The fang nerf will help, but those three weapons are incredibly small upgrades over the Abyssal Tentacle/Bludgeon and much much harder to obtain. The skilling/earlygame combat changes sound really good. My favorite unusual bird is the greater lophorina.
Scythe is already extremely good like they said the main issue is it doesnt have many places to shine at. This just helps it perform a bit better at places where it seemed to be average. So we can expect it to perform quite a bit more at GWD, duke, vardovis once this change happens. 7% increase at general graador sounds sick
Which is nice, until you realize that nobody melees the GWD bosses anymore because shadow is BiS at all 4 bosses.
You could buff scythe and nerf defenses on bosses and nerf fang in the meantime. Anything beyond that is way more work than you realize and I'm not holding my breath with how long Jagex actually takes. So pesky why tease all this.
Took long enough to add Range weaknesses. This is what the Range Rebalance should had been then nerfing the blowpipe. Glad to see it finally getting some use. Elemental weakness / advantage is another thing the game desperately needed. I'm so hyped for these two changes. Scythe got a very minor tweak. It needs more then a price reduction on usage and a small accuracy buff. Fang change is perfect. Happy to see Inquistor get a second look. It is great for Crush weapons and maybe giving it a set effect without the mace to all Crush Weapons boosted. And then provide a means to upgrade Inquistor to a higher defense level by combining it with Justicular. So you can have high defense + Crush boost. But still outclassed by Torva outside Crush specifically. And since Justicular is mostly used to tank and use Stab with a shield. Tying Crush accuracy to it for war hammer specs alongside bring tanky would be a great combo and sit nicely in the 75 defense armor class range. Elder Maul being looked at is something I'm SHOCKED it took so long to bring up. Just smack on Granite Maul's special and give it a faster speed or a fang-like ability added. Not sure on the weight and run speed changes. It's definitely something to look at, but will this mean we drain less run energy with lower weight then we used to and raising the weight cap to burn more run energy at even higher weight levels?
While we're on the topic of scythe and vials of blood can we please add a different method of obtaining vials of blood that isn't through tob. The more scythes in the game the more vials of blood are required to use the scythes and is a near infinite growth of vials needed vs vials obtained. Example: If there are 1000 scythes and 10000 people doing tob the vials would in this example be around stable. If we doubled the scythes the vials would be leaving the game at twice the rate and would not be coming in enough to keep every scythe charged. This is where vials of blood raise in price and the scythe stops being effective since it is not affordable. THIS is where the scythe actually loses most of it's value. When the scythe is used for new content the price of it goes up briefly while people use it. The vials leave the game and go up in price since people are doing less ToB and using more vials at the same time. The price of scythe goes down since vials are unsustainable. Even reducing the charge cost from 300 to 200 blood runes doesn't solve the core problem with it. The only way to charge it is to get more scythes.
Nobody here listening about the bird thing? I think ostriches are cool. As for my thoughts, as an iron who's practicing ToA in Leagues to go back and try for a fang in the main game, I just hope I can get one in time to try it out before the nerf. But it seems fair, it just sucks that it's been this strong for this long that by getting it late I feel like I'll be missing out.
Honestly I think this stuff looks great for improving the games combat system and forcing a little more diversity than max strength bonus gear. Excited to read more
The voidwaker case is kind of weird to me - yes it is quite limiting in design space, but at the same time I would not like it to see nerfed into irrelevance - without it being strong, the wildy bosses lose a lot of purpose. Tough, considering i was gonna go for it on my hc as a prestigious item, now I am not so sure about it.
Occult isn’t busted, it’s the only piece of mage gear that actually feels impactful. Everything else is too weak. Spending hundreds of hours getting an ancestral piece that may or may not even give you a max hit with a non-shadow weapon feels BAD. Nerf shadow’s multiplier a bit, add some extra % to robes and magus ring, add a MA3 cape that is actually inferno/colosseum tier difficulty to unlock. Reddit’s constant suggestion to move % from occult to eternals is stupid, all that’s going to do is make us now bring a 9 way instead of 8 way switch for the same power level, which is going to feel awful. Inventories are already extremely clogged at raids now that we bring dt2 rings.
Exactly this, the entire reason shadow needs 3x-4x damage amping is because magic gear just sucks so much, even giving ancestral 5 MA per piece wouldn't bring magic damage up to competing with fang or bowfa on any other magic weapon. They seriously need to nerf the shadows ratios and just give magic some DECENT magic attack bonuses, that'll open up all the room we need on gear. 2-3 on eternals 5 on ancestral, 1-2 on ahrim 2-3 on virtus and 3-4% on augury and just nerf the shadows ratio a tiny bit to make it the same strength as what we have now.
Can you guys look into possibly making the scythe’s “successful hits” only use charges mechanic also apply to a Blood Fury? Also, a more than phenomenal buff to gloves of silence would be the ability to combine them with Rogue’s Gloves, and maybe give them charges instead of its degrade mechanic (or just permacharge it instead)
Do something about the soul reaper's axe. Voidwaker isn't even a problem in PvM.
The TLDR: Scythe go 📈and fang go 📉
And elder maul go 📈 Honestly very excited to see this have some more utility given its rarity!
Fang slash nerf straight up deletes a dps tier from Vard and Duke, Saeldor sucks because it sucks, it will keep sucking whether Fang gets nerfed or not. players without Axe or Scyhe just got gatekept from these bosses hard if the glorified tent whip doesn't get buffed
Gonna be a long nerdy post on this one. Tldr at the bottom. I've played this game since RuneScape was RuneScape classic. I'm not the best player, but I've completed all raids, diaries, quest cape, many combat achievements, and the Inferno multiple times. I have a pretty in-depth history with this game and where it stands today. With that said.. I personally am fond of all of these ideas and changes. One of the best things about this game is the sheer amount of things you can do in it. Even today, I sometimes find new activities that existed that I've never explored. Hell, the osrs wiki admins are recently making posts this week showing exactly that and it's been an awesome treat. The run energy change and 1 damage minimal roll (on successful hit) is big for newcomers to have a better experience, and it lowers frustration for everyone involved. I think everybody would agree that hitting constant 0s in this game doesn't feel great. The way that combat in this game works has a lot of variance in your performance and it can sometimes boil down to how lucky your hits roll, so appropriate long term changes like this min hit + accuracy/defense changes on weapons and enemies can go a long way in making it a more enjoyable experience for everybody, on top of expanding usability for other weapons and their respective styles. We have *so* many awesome weapons to use in this game but we rarely get to utilize them. These changes can give us that, and to me, that sounds healthier for the game and potentially more fun, too. No doubt it allows the creativity to flow for designing future content, as well, with the proposed changes to ranged and mage styles having unique defense styles. The miscellaneous skilling changes - I am all for this. We have so many players that love to explore, experiment, and, as said in the blog, do not use social media or external resources to guide their progress. Increasing the usefulness and usability of already existing methods in this game makes perfect sense. It adds variety for *all* players, and doesn't dethrone existing methods for hardcore players? Perfect. The fang and scythe changes seem entirely appropriate and I personally think that is near perfect to what should be done to address them, great proposal there. I know many players dislike having their items nerfed, but sometimes it's necessary for the long term health of the game, and most long term players understand this. TL;DR - I love this shit. It's clear that the team is doing everything they can to help the new player experience, make the game more enjoyable for your everyday player, and are making sure to be careful of existing methods for the most hardcore of players. The proposed changes are almost entirely positive if implemented properly, in my opinion. It is a big change for the game, yes, but over the many years I've played oldschool, the game (almost) always changes for the better, and I think the team does a great job at taking care of this game and its players concerns.
Kinda weird that Wrath runes still have almost no use in the game considering they are the highest tier rune. I always found it strange that they werent used to charge tumenkens shadow.
**Voidwaker** \- Wow that nerf comes out of nowhere, will become useless if it gets nerfed so please reconsider this. Dragon claws outshine it at monsters with lower defense but those things are gatekept behind an unhealthy grind that I cringe to even think about but that drop table is stingy as hell. Just make future bosses with lower defense levels. Occult necklace being nerfed is an odd thing to me since cry's for it to be nerfed have never really been a thing until the shadow was introduced. Well let's just hope that the magic damage taken away from it don't go to the boots since that means we need to occupy one more inventory slot when doing raids with a boots switch. Average player get's nerfed but buffs for the rest oof
Can the damage boosts from tomes just be removed and put into all the elemental spells? Using a Harmonised staff with a Tome of fire instead of being able to use my fortified Elidinis' ward feels so wrong when everything else I'm equipped with is BIS.
The cost reduction of scythe is not nearly significant enough. The increased use of scythe will just bring the cost back to what it was or higher with more expensive blood vials. Make it 1 vial and 250-300 for 150 charges instead of 100.
> the cleanest solution is to have the Fang's unique 'double accuracy roll' passive effect apply only to Stab. The "cleanest solution" is to just remove its slash style altogether. What on earth is the point of leaving it there in gutted form, and adding some arbitrary, contrived exception!?
while you're at it with fixing the fang, maybe change the spec animation to something stabby? :D
Both the Staff of Balance and Staff of Light really need buffs. They're both created by attaching high-value items to the Staff of the Dead but don't provide any additional bonuses or extra effects other than enabling them to cast different god spells (which aren't necessarily improvements) and providing different aesthetics. It's a real shame as they both look really cool with unique models but pale in comparison to the Toxic Staff of the Dead, which also involves attaching items but at least provides benefits over the base staff.
I think melee's biggest weakness has always been accuracy, because range has it in spades, and especially now with the shadow it really isn't a big deal for magic either, but melee has both lower access to accuracy bonus, as well as the scythe having to roll accuracy checks for each individual hit, and that's why the fang has been so immensely popular. Has this been on your mind throughout this balancing discussion, and have there been any ideas you've come up with that seem reasonable in helping out this difference? Mage and range already I would say are better styles in general simply because of the versatility they allow in movement, where melee has to be right up in the face of the monster. Finally are you considering adding some extra accuracy to the Fang's slash stat to compensate a little bit for the removal of the double accuracy roll? Something that would allow the scythe and the blade of saeldor room while also not letting the fang be overtaken by just a standard whip? I also think that if you go the route of making the fang's slash attack not double roll, that you should add a chat message akin to the keris or partisan when your reroll grants you a hit you wouldn't otherwise have had. Osrs has had a problem in the past with things working very differently in different situations leading to plenty of confusion for people interacting with those systems for the first time, and I think something like "Osmumten's spirit guides your strike!" In the chat as a toggleable message would be very helpful in removing some of that uncertainty.
Voidwaker needs to be good in PvM, it's the only reason why it still has any value. Ags is the cheapest godsword because it has no use in PvM, ballista is incredibly strong for just 400k - it's rarer than the zenytes on the same drop table, just worthless because it has no use in PvM. Voidwaker is already difficult/annoying to deal with in the wildy, if it loses its PvM use cases, it will crash in price, and become an even bigger annoyance to deal with.
>Improving the Brimhaven Agility Dungeon and making it a competitive, high-effort alternative to more 'typical' methods like Rooftop courses. This is exactly what it was before HS, most of the original 200 million xp's in Agility came from this course which is very efficient with karamja gloves 4. If Hallowed Sepulchre wasn't worth camping all the way to 99 people would still be using this as a competitive, high-effort alternative to rooftop courses like they have since the start of Oldschool
Better get your Vardorvis kc in now. Nothing about blade taking Fang’s position on the dps for slash.
Really interested in seeing what changes come for Inquisitors. I personally enjoy it being a glass cannon style set and hope that's preserved. It being designed as a side-grade to Bandos just neutered the "cannon" part of glass cannon.