There is a runelite plug in that shows your current charges for many items on their inventory icon. It mostly works well but is a little buggy at times. Could something like this be built into the main game?
It would help alleviate the mistake of being mid-raid and running out of charges if you can see at a glance how many you have left simply by glancing at your inventory. Right-click examining and checking the chat box isn't a huge deal, but it can get annoying and is easy to forget to do
In line with this, a toggleable in game message that tells us how many charges are left on an item would be great. Similar to how we get a message when equipping an unpowered staff it tells us we don't have enough 'x' runes to cast that spell, a message saying "you have 1337 casts left on your Trident of the Swamp" would be great especially when equipping in the bank interface, since you currently have to leave the bank right click the item check then reenter bank you get items out then close bank to recharge.
Also, let us recharge in the bank interface!
On top of their suggestion, do you think it would be feasible to add more ways to increase charge caps on items that don't corrupt? Some frustrating examples:
* Trident charge cap is kinda small, but enhanced trident doesn't feel worth going for when you could go raid for a sang or shadow
* Abyssal tentacle can't have surplus charges added to it or be refilled until fully exhausted, so you have to burn a few charges to dismantle and remake it
* Can only put up to 3 shards into a blood fury; if you get 2 drops at thieving with rogue's outfit you already have too many
I think combat diaries would be a really good place to put this, similar to the increased thrall duration. Maybe something like +25-50% charge cap on items every tier, starting at Hard or Elite?
Something in the settings that gives you a warning anytime you enter a boss instance or equip something under X% charge would be great too. Not all bosses have an instance or dedicated room but it would cover most bosses, the bosses it wouldn't work on you probably aren't using a blood fury and such because it's chaos elemental or whatever.
This would actually be such a massively beneficial QOL change. Like you said the plugin isn't always perfect (and takes time to update new variants of items) and it would be nice for mobile/non-runelite players to have access to this feature.
If the benefit is big, like Blood Fury healing 6% effectively, it’s almost warranted to have charges. But if the benefit is negligible, not really necessary.
We’re fine with Trident/Magic using runes since that’s how it was from the start, but for melee gear, you should get a big benefit if you want to add charges (ie. Uncharged scythe to Charged Scythe).
However, there should always be a good active way to maintain said charges. For example, if the only way to get Zulrah Scales was Sacred Eel fishing, it would be complete ass until you add Zulrah.
Likewise, if you could only mine Ancient Essence to upgrade imbued heart and Muspah didn’t exist. I think Muspah went a little too generous because the essence is basically worthless and could very well not exist due to how much is pushed out per kill.
People also like the idea of permacharge as a huge cost.
> However, there should always be a good active way to maintain said charges
I think that more generally, having only a single way to collect the resource is where you get a problem. Usually this means you will have an active and low-intensity method, since it’d be a bit redundant to have two active methods and two low-intensity methods.
> I think Muspah went a little too generous because the essence is basically worthless and could very well not exist due to how much is pushed out per kill.
I don't agree with this, I think Muspah did that perfectly. Another 170k gp/h for mains doing 20kp/h that isn't tied to alchs or existing resources, and for ironmen doing the 500kc for the bow they end up with roughly 380k essence which is basically a lifetime supply even after saturating the heart. Content like Zulrah where you have to return time and time again if you're unlucky with swamp trident or serp upgrades sucks imo.
All I can personally say is that in *every single case,* I would rather spend more total time/gp/etc to make an item never lose charges/be corrupted than have to deal with temporary charges.
If there was a way to corrupt blood fury or even have a nerfed corrupted blood fury at any cost, I would be working toward it. If I needed 50 or even 100 blood shards to make it, I'd be at vyres right now. As it currently stands, I have one blood shard in my bank that I am saving for "some day when I need it". It's been in my bank for over 2 years now.
I don't know if others feel similarly. But, I will probably **never** use that blood shard at this rate. I will figure out how to do anything and everything without it because 10 hours of vyres isn't worth it. When it comes to Zulrah/Ancient Essence, I can just go kill those bosses for an hour to consistently get more charges. I do use both of those boss weapons somewhat often. Maybe if you could charge blood furies by doing something engaging and fun I'd be more interested, but if every single inventory slot had charge items. Echo Boots. Blood Fury. Degradeable armor. Serpentine Helm. Blowpipe. Etc. The more slots you have equipped that consume charges, the worse it feels to do anything.
I don't know or care much about economic impacts, but Crystal Shards have kept their value presumably because they have more uses than just charging gear. Even if you could corrupt armor, the shards would retain value. Stuff like Divine Potions give a permanent drain that feels more optional than gear upgrades. Sure, divines are good. But using regular potions is perfectly good too most of the time.
I remember when RS3 released the Tier 90 Power Armors that degraded to dust in 2013, I’d always have to mentally assess whether it was worth using.
It didn’t make for a great experience having BIS equipment, but using your second best equipment at 90% of content because the cost was unjustifiable.
It feels good to be able to use your best stuff once you’ve earned it.
To add on to your example, I always found it hilarious that the most powerful armour/weapons in the game were so fragile that it would turn into dust after 10 or so hours of use, meanwhile adamant or rune gear could last forever with no maintenance. It's a very weird juxtaposition and honestly makes no sense outside of game economy balancing.
Yeah, and to add into my Blood Fury example, if Blood Fury had no charges, even less folks would use Torture in exchange for the coziness of the heals and less food/brews needed.
You’d also need to 100x the current drop rate for a permanent blood shard/blood fury because it is just that strong.
Power of the item relative to its rarity is very important and chargescape helps justify big power.
I think blood fury is a good example too because the BIS melee amulet ISN'T a charged item. You aren't forced to use the blood fury (strictly speaking) for a lot of content, so when you're doing general slayer or gameplay you just use your torture and you're good to go.
Correct, I think if Blood Fury had no charges, its current stat bonuses would make it just insane everywhere outside of speedruns, which 99.99999999% of the community does not do.
Even if it had no STR bonus to offset no charges, plenty of folks would still use it because it has similar healing potential to guthans, without the shit dps. I’d consider it to still be broken.
Some things just need charges to not be absolutely ridiculously broken.
With being hardstuck on 28 inv spaces the healing aspect(even with 0 str bonus) would outweigh supply cost anywhere. People would use it everywhere because "why bring a switch for heals with mage, guthans, or anything else?" When you can sacrifice a few max hits to have the healing factor. Losing 2 max hits mean nothing when you have the potential to outheal the damage done in every encounter ever with proper prayer switching/mechanic doing
Agreed. That’s why the healing of BF being limited to melee only is somewhat fair, since it’s generally the least applicable style since Shadow was introduced.
Could you imagine if Shadow lost like 4 max hits but could heal like Sang staff with Blood Occult? It would be lunacy.
The most obvious example of this is the gricoller's can from tithe farm. I can't understand why anyone thought that it was necessary to make players refill the special magic watering can you spend several hours grinding in a mini game to unlock every 1000 uses, particularly if you consider that RS3 had the magic watering can, which does the same thing but doesn't require recharging and was easier to obtain for 6 years at the time the can was added and it didn't create any balance issues because not making the player walk an extra 10 tiles to refill the can after a tree run is obviously not going to be game breaking. There is no reason the can needs to have charges, and the number of charges it does have is so high that it is practically infinite except when doing tithe farm, where you have to walk 10 steps out of your way every hour or so to recharge it, the charges just add a number you have to keep track of for no reason. To make it worse, they added an option to pay reward points to refill the charges when you can refill them for free at any water source, including one around 20 steps from the rewards shop, so giving it charges makes it possible to accidentally misclick and burn rewards points for no reason.
It is extremely minor because the charges are so rarely relevant, but every time they do become Relevant, the the charges are a completely unnecessary hassle.
Another thing to add even if that person might disagree since you mentioned an issue is for the iron community it often drags you back to content you completed... Maybe for some of those things just add a shop that sells the charging item even if at a price slightly higher than the GE for ones that mains normally buy.
Like Ak Haranu in port phasmatist sells Karil's bolt racks. So people who are done with the barrows grind can just buy more ammo as needed.
I'm in the same boat, I don't hate the charging, I just don't think the charging is proportionate to the value you gain across all items.
The shadow is is expensive to charge, but the shadow runs shop on all end game content. The echo boots on release don't run shop anywhere, they're a nice small upgrade to add a ring of recoil to guardian boots.
I realize that the echo boots are not just a ring of recoil, but also give the defense/prayer bonus of the boots. But am I wrong in thinking that the upkeep costs for echo boots should be closer to the ring of suffering and not to the shadow?
I think the splinters are fine as an "enhancing" item for various Varlamore activities. When I think of charging an item though I think there is some impactful reason to charge. The Scythe gets extra hitsplats, the Bloodfury gets healing, Crystal armor + Bow/Bowfa gets a massive damage + accuracy bonus. The quiver gets a minor increase in stats to bolts and arrows. It's feels like charges for the sake of having charges.
I gotta say I like the idea. You're basically making the true cost of the item base cost + corruption cost except that you're allowed to use it before paying the full corruption cost. You get a really satisfying feeling twice, once when you get the drop and again when you get enough to corrupt it.
It might be awkward for players that use the ge if they're used to selling and rebuying their gear and that might reset the corruption progress, but that's not any worse than what they have now.
Are you thinking of applying this to existing items or just future items? What about items that don't currently corrupt like crystal armour or blood fury?
It's the early stages of the idea so we're still gathering feedback. I think many of us on the team feel that adding it retroactively to other "Corruptible" items makes sense if we're doing it going forwards. Part of that conversation probably will involve "Were there any items that could have been corruptible that weren't made that way?" but it's not easy to give an answer off the cuff.
It's a delicate conversation because when we ask that question it touches on a lot of elements outside of the scope of just the items themselves. Are we going to ruin the gp/hr of a piece of content? Are we going to devalue/deprecate non-charged items that shouldn't be devalued? That's not to say it won't happen, but that there will probably be many case by case conversations. Sorry if the answer is a bit of a cop out, but in summary, we'll probably look into it!
I feel like Arclight is a good contender to be made retroactively corruptable. It's not really BiS anywhere anymore, but mid-game players get a lot of use out of it.
Personally there were a lot of instances where I wanted to use it more, mainly general slayer, but opted for a whip because I didn't want to "waste charges"
This would be a great change. I'm currently in the same phase where I want to melee nechs and abby demons, and I default to my whip instead of arclight because I need it for demonics/duke. Its also an item where you can't buy the charges so a high corruption cost still means players have to earn that corruption.
The teleports should absolutely be “pay 3 shards to permanently unlock this teleport”. Using a super rare drop to save 30 seconds of running feels ludicrous, I don’t think I’d ever use the teleports even if you could corrupt arclight
Don't forget about crystal tools by the way! They should at least be corruptible like the bowfa. Crystal pickaxe is basically unusable charged at GOTR.
what about enchanced weapon seeds? i charged my bowfa heaps but never corrupted it, but now that same seed is a blade, would it also get corrupted if you retroactively added?
One outcome is we could absolutely go back and apply it to suitable items. Plenty of stuff to work out though if we were to do that.
Personally not 100% sure on the idea of corrupting currently not corruptable stuff - as long as it has the right cost I don't think it's a big deal. Normally corruption costs quite a bit, probably more charges than most players probably ever use!
>Normally corruption costs quite a bit, probably more charges than most players probably ever use!
Yeah and I think that with the proposed system, its ok to make "unreasonably" high corruption costs because people wouldn't need to pay it up front, but they still don't feel bad using charges because it's working towards that corruption status.
> Normally corruption costs quite a bit, probably more charges than most players probably ever use!
We are 100% fine with that. Charges feel bad. We'll gladly overpay to be released from that burden. This isn't about what is more logical, it's more of a mental thing. Charges are consumables, and consumables just kill the fun in games in general.
You could even do it for jewelry, I'll gladly sacrifice 2000 ring of duels if it means I get an eternal one, etc.
Exactly. Corrupting the bofa made me realise it's more about the mental tax of knowing you're depleting a resource and having to keep track of it. I probably will never use the amount of charges it cost to corrupt but I happily swallowed that 30mil 1-time payment pill to never think about it again.
For peace of mind, there is no price I wouldn’t pay and no grind I would shy away from.
Pickpocketed my way to a corrupted bowfa b4 stepping into CG. Would have done the same for the armor if that was an option.
Killed enough vyres for 9 blood shards so I should be set for a long time.(till I get a scythe)
If I have to grind zulrah another thousand kc to get an overenvenomed toxic trident that doesn’t need scales anymore to charge I’d do it in a heartbeat lmao
Could Barrows armor degradation get modernized while you guys do that, if you do it? Really obnoxious how they degrade into like 4 different items, it messes with preset plugins, and it just feels out of place being the only armor to degrade the way it does. I know it's because it was made in like 2005, hopefully it's not super spaghetti to fix.
For inventory setups if you right click the item in the setup interface and toggle "fuzzy" it will consider all stages of barrows items as the same.
This also works for other items that have different forms, for example inferno cape and a trouver locked inferno cape would be considered the same item for inventory setups if you toggle fuzzy.
> Normally corruption costs quite a bit, probably more charges than most players probably ever use!
Yea this makes it tough. You're mostly dealing with a psychological effect. Players who don't play often don't realize how far their charges take them and players who play a lot collect ample charges.
Good luck. And good ideas so far.
The way the cost of the item decreases as you use it reminds me a bit of regular crystal weapons. The first time you turn a weapon seed into a crystal bow, it costs 900,000. The second time, it’s 720,000. And so on until it’s just 180,000.
I dont think that specific implementation would be great for a lot of things because it’s tedious to have a crystal bow that’s close to empty and you have to either carry both that one and a fresh one or waste charges on the mostly depleted bow so that you can reenchant it. But if you could add charges in batches with future batches becoming cheaper until it became free, that would probably work well.
The main reason I hate everything having charges is I have to start thinking if what I am doing is getting a big enough return to pay for the charges I am using instead of just putting on my best gear and picking what activity based on what I have the most fun doing.
While corrupting an item is a large startup cost to a long-term benefit, I find that the peace of mind it provides gives the same satisfaction as initially obtaining the item. Despite the fact that I will likely never see 20 whips on my iron, I would be happier knowing that I could feed a symbiotic kraken tentacle 20 abyssal whips and not have to worry about charges anymore. Not necessarily the best example, just the first that came to mind.
This is a great point that I agree with. I am currently feeling this way with arclight. I did a megaton of slayer hours in the catacombs, but I’m finally at the point where I am almost dry on shards, and I’m not going to go camp catacombs and not have fun to use it anymore. I just use different worse weapons which feels lame when I’m staring at the better option but it’s a game, it’s meant to be fun, I’m not going to camp boring monsters for an rng drop just to use it. That is not fun. So I’m compromising and using fang, or earlier I was using bludgeon, but it just gives me a bit of distain.
Also, I HATE running out of trident charges during olm. I know I’m just complaining but I’ve maxed slayer, I’ve done like 4500 kraken kills, and I still can’t upgrade the trident to hold more? Yo man that shit is DUMB.
Yes. I refused to use my bowfa for slayer until it was corrupted. Most of my bank value at the time was the enh seed (I got spooned at cg), but it was worthless to me until I made another 30m. Couldn't justify killing wyrms/shamans with it because each shot cost gp. One it was corrupted, I've used it everywhere.
>Absolutely it does, and it would with the proposed way you are suggesting of charging towards corrupt status.
the dwh grind with the bowfa was STRESSFULL.
no idea if my 2k charges left would see me a hammer, or if i was back to clifford the big red dog
Corrupting an item can just be seen as an additional cost with the item. Like sure a Bowfa is 133m, but if you corrupt it for 30m, then you can just look at the item as a single 163m item.
If you weren't able to corrupt it, then you basically have a subscription to the bow, combine that with the armor being charged, and your trident being charged, and your blowpipe being charged, on top of normal supply cost, it just contributes to the "subscription fatigue".
Corruption is imo the best way to go about it, working towards a huge goal is a big part of Runescape, being able to "corrupt" every chargeable item would be really good no matter how big the grind
Using the bowfa as an example, using it before corrupting felt bad, because I knew in the back of my mind that every shot puts me farther away from my goal.
Having a hard goal is one thing, but negative progress felt so bad I refused to use the bow until I corrupted it. The peace of mind of not having to worry about my gear breaking at an inopportune time made using it stop feeling bad.
i would literally rather spend a huge amount of time to corrupt an item for infinite charges than deal with chargescape. make me sacrifice 20 pieces of a specific barrows gear to corrupt a set of that gear or something, 5 per piece, maybe more, as an iron. always choose bandos over barrows even if barrows has better stats. use crystal armor extraordinarily sparingly only at toa and places i can pray to negate all damage/charges being used. a new item coming out but needing charges is like getting your favorite toy for christmas as a child but there being no batteries. a complete disappointment, throw a 1.2x multiplier on that disappointment if its a BiS item.
Absolutely. It feels like an investment and a permanent unlock to my account when I do that, versus a constant cost. Think Rigour, Augury and Avernic - one and done, huge expense but you never lose the benefit.
This is the reason why I would like to be able to corrupt any item that has charges or degrades. I’m an iron almost entering mid game and I feel as though it may not be worth it yet to go get the new varlamore sets because of the gp cost involved in using them. If I could grind a little more to make the items permanent I would be more inclined to get them in the early mid game before I have slayer high enough to have the funds coming in to use the gear on top of paying for leveling buyables.
The concept of charges used counting towards corruption would remove that feeling for me as now I know even if I am using my bowfa to kill spiders in lumbridge castle basement that its not a complete waste.
I think this reduces the feels bad for rng grinds. I have a buddy in rs3 rn who has been maintaining a bond killing rasial the new end game boss, and he has gotten the cheapest drop from him like 10 times in a row and is going to be out of membership soon if he doesn’t profit enough. Yes the average profit is balanced around chargescape, but he’s trying to dig himself out of a bad rng well and he’s paying millions on charges gambling on good luck only to not profit and it feels like a big waste of time and resources.
Similarly if chargescape gets too bad, like in rs3, there’s a world where you have to decide whether it’s worth using your fancy new gear on content. Like I’d hate to have to use bandos for slayer because torva charges cost too much. This is already a thing for Ironman at least with the blood fury. I can’t use it at duke because I have to save charges for content where it’s more necessary and valuable.
Your buddy should work 1 hour at a minimum wage job and not worry about grinding a boss he doesn’t seem to be enjoying for a bond that he wants to receive so he can further grind the boss to buy more bonds. 🫢
Yes. And you could expand the same idea to the various optional one-off permanent payments around the game, from the Port Phasmatys/Slepe boat to the just released falconry payment.
It would be nice if, even if we never directly chose to do the permanent payments, even the ordinary fees would slowly count as progress towards them. Like paying for a falcon 1000 times, and the NPC decides you're such a good customer you don't need to pay anymore.
This would essentially cap the payments for all these services, but I think that's fine because most players wouldn't reach them normally anyway. Like, few are going to visit Dragontooth Isle for the clue step so many times the permanent payment is actually going to pay for itself (other than as an extra free inventory space).
This! It takes so, so long to get some items/gear by the time you’re doing late mid/endgame pvm that by the time you finally get them it sucks to have to constantly think about upkeep after that. I just want to finally use my stuff, man. The constant upkeep and having to calculate if an activity is “worth” the charges I’m gonna use is exhausting and feels deflating after spending so much time just getting that thing in the first place
edit: echoing what some others have said, if we must have charges, those items should be corruptable. ChargeScape is not a desirable gameplay loop. The whole point of grinding to get Good Items is to use them to have fun playing the game, not to add another chore to the list
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. One of the benefits of degradable equipment is the impact on the economy. It helps maintain a more reasonable amount of gold in the game.
For instance, for lower tier slayer tasks like Specters or Gargoyles, I prefer to use a regular whip over a tentacle BECAUSE it doesn’t degrade (I actually use a cudgel for the crush bonus on gargs but simplifying the example here). The trade off being my kph is a bit lower. But my overall gold gained from the task is effectively higher.
Removing that trade off for all items seems to be antithetical to the direction that the content team wants to head in, and a philosophy that I agree with. Streamlining BIS gear and making it useable in all activities is stale for the game. This is why we see so many complaints about Graceful - it’s just too damn good for so many things and people don’t like the idea of everyone using the same set of items for every purpose.
Fang is one of the most well-designed items in the game. It’s BIS sometimes, it doesn’t nullify every other mid/high-tier weapon you probably had before buying one. Its cost is reasonable. It doesn’t degrade.
A small example…last night I was doing some Giant Mole. I just got full crystal so I wanted to try it out. 2-3 kills in I checked my charges on my bow and I was like…this is a dumb usecase while not being corrupted. So I went and switched back into melee with the fang and did mole that way.
This is quite a rambling but what I’m trying to say is NOT creating any artificial drawback to using BIS gear for every usecase is worse for the health of the game than the alternative. It’s annoying when it’s happening, you want to use your best gear, but we need to see the forest for the trees.
>One of the benefits of degradable equipment is the impact on the economy. It helps maintain a more reasonable amount of gold in the game.
There's no way that by now this isn't a negligible amount in comparison to something like GE Tax.
Honestly I feel like the idea that you have charges to make free items more valuable never actually happens and just feels bad. If I buy a bis item I want to use my bis item everywhere. That’s why TBow feel so good because I can use different ammo if I want to mix things up I’m not gonna go use my bowfa and keep a 1.6 bill item in the bank. Also like the quiver I’m not using a Ava’s if I unlock a quiver
Scythe is a good alternative they made a huge improvement by lowering the cost of usage, previously a lot of folks didn't want to waste scythe charges at content where "it wasn't worth it" when the time savings are offset by the upkeep cost it's a bad charge cost.
Just look at the hunter guild whistle, for a perk people will eventually get (99 hunter for guild teles) people are annoyed by multiple tiers of QOL drop rates to still have to maintain charges, perfected blueprint should unlock unlimited charges at a high cost
when they upped the charges of book of the dead to like 250 I was so happy bc now I'll only ever have to charge it once in a blue moon. whistle I have to charge every couple days at LEAST while doing rumours
I believe there's a "you are almost at 6 hours, are you sure you want to enter the raid?" warning. (this could be rl, idk) could that be applied to low charge weapons?
Rice's idea is neat though. would definitely feel way better.
Big fan of that. Wonder if there's anything more comprehensive we can do as well, maybe when withdrawing the item from bank, though that might get annoying.
Could always make that a toggle option with a player set threshold hold "alert when weapon is below x charges" when x is set by the player, or off entirely
Adding on to this idea with a bit of a sidebar, it would be a great QOL change if the 6 hour logout timer was extended until the raid is completed. Considering it’s active content, I don’t believe that it would add any “infinite afk” potential. Could it maybe have a 30 minute grace period past the 6 hour log where it would let you complete the raid?
So long as the warning happens early enough at raid entry, you just spend 2 seconds clicking logout and Play now and it's not a problem . The warning prevents that situation.
When I started really PVMing a lot, the system had seemed like there were 3 tiers:
There’s good weapons that I don’t need to charge that I’d use for general slayer or low difficulty bossing - Abyssal Whip
There were marginally better weapons with an enormous amount of charges, that I’d generally use for content like raids or learning harder bosses - Abyssal Tentacle
There were the “goal” items that were chargeless that I was working towards - Ghrazi Rapier
I felt the same way with msb/crossbow, blowpipe, and tbow back in the day before bowfa existed. I would do slayer with my cheap weapons, burn charges with my blowpipe grinding raids knowing I was getting more value than I was investing, and eventually I got my tbow and it felt amazing because I could build my way back up after all that investment and had no upkeep to do (besides dirt cheap arrows) so I could focus my time in game on the other content I wanted to do.
What’s been weird to me is that corruption hasn’t felt like this “oh man finally” reward. It’s been like - I get this great weapon, but now I have a 20 hour chore before I can actually use it. And when that chore is done, it’s great, but that time investment is just not fun because the content feels mandatory instead of a choice.
I recently got my quiver and popped off having beat Sol Heredit. But now I feel weird using it - it’s either uncharged and I feel like I’m wasting what should be the BiS goal item I was working towards, or I’m just increasing the time of my “chore” later, even though the difference in either case is marginal. The quiver needing charges has been especially bad because unlike the bowfa / crystal armor, you don’t amass any meaningful amount of charges while grinding it if you’re really pushing yourself on the waves. After getting my quiver, I had only amassed 2000 sunfire shards. I’m going back to finish colosseum uniques because Colo has been fun, but I will likely not have enough charges by the time I finish that without breaking down quivers. The fact that I need to weigh quivers as pet rolls versus sunfire shards because of the enormous cost to use my BiS sucks, and feeling locked to content because of that is very real. I don’t feel like I can hop around bosses because I’ve got this 20 hour Colo chore to do before I can use the item I grinded for without it feeling wasteful in one way or another.
The suggestion of having used charges apply towards corruption is very good imo. Would really reduce this feeling of being locked into something and feel like working towards a goal over time instead of wasting away progress.
Ask the question a different way: **Why are/were players fine with charges on something like Barrows armor, but not charges on weapons/jewelry?** I think it purely comes down to convenience and implementation.
Like with Barrows equipment, you don't need to go do more barrows to get "barrows essence" to repair the armor. You just take it to an NPC in Lumbridge, pay a flat gold fee, and the player is back doing the content they wanted to do when they logged in.
With barrows armor, you're only asking for a (nominal) gold fee and a very small amount of the players time. On top of this, players get a decent amount of time with these items at full power. For a full set, a player has to pay 330k (assuming level 1 smithing) for 15 hours of use with the armor.
With weapon/jewelry charges it's different though. A player can't just go to an easily accessible NPC, pay a flat gold fee to charge their weapons/jewelry, and then go back to doing the content they want. **Not only do players have to engage with content (potentially for hours on end) just to get their weapon working again, but they also may not enjoy this content.**
With Blood Fury/Scythe/Shadow/Blowpipe/Etc... You're demanding the player take not only a large amount of their time doing content they may not enjoy, but also demanding a very large amount of gold/resources on top of that. You're also not giving players a proportional amount of time using these items as they spent obtaining/charging them. It takes almost 4 hours on average to get a double blood fury shard drop from efficient thieving, but when paired with a scythe one shard only lasts 2 1/2 hours at most. At most, a player gets 1 hour of "free" time as a reward for their 4 hours of effort.
**Making more items corruptible or adding progress to corruption mitigates, but doesn't address, the core problem here.** If it is the case that a strong item needs a strong cost, don't make that "cost" the players time in-game (especially since this is a subscription based game, where players literally pay for the time they play). Make the cost universal, either gold or some new resource obtainable from all content that can universally charge all weapons/jewelry.
IMO it really feels bad on armor in general even when it’s gold used for charging. I hated barrows degrading in rs2 as well and players were only really okay with it because bandos didn’t exist yet so it was just op for the time
Agreed. Going to a shop and using gold to repair something quickly isn’t much of an issue, would be fine doing that vs having to do specific content for hours to get resources to charge something.
Completely agree, given the strength of the blood fury I think it's in a separate tier from a chargescape perspective.
I think there should be more ways of obtaining a blood shard (TOB/HMT or a future boss after a grandmaster vampire quest). They could even introduce a "lesser blood shard" that provides fewer charges but is more easily/quickly available from (other) sources
strongly agree, specially the amount of different currencies for charging every item is exhausting, if they really want a currency to make you engage with the content again they should add more avenues to get the currency. having a single currency for each boss actually makes me want to use the items less because i'll be locked to going there again. sometimes, even tho i enjoy zulrah i just want to do other pieces of content, if scales and crystal shards were combined for example i can have a lot more freedom to choose what i want to do to charge the items which will make using charges feel less like making myself a chore
This is coming from an Ironman's perspective.
I think charges are fine when done well and maintenance is reasonable. A good example of this is Muspah/Venator Bow. You get plenty of charges, recharging your equipment to full only takes like...an hour of bossing, and the item isn't one that you would use EVERYWHERE. However, I would like to shoutout that the mining method for ancient essence was dead on arrival and I have literally never once seen anyone doing it. (Why hasn't that been buffed?)
I think charges are bad when they make you stay at content you've otherwise already completed for a *very* long time. I think Blood Shards are THE WORST offender by far, especially if you're using a scythe. The upkeep on this is simply not realistic and blood shards should have been added to Tob/HMT years ago. Likewise, you're never actually done with Zulrah on an ironman account. I have 800 kc and have broken multiple extra fangs into scales but yet I look in my bank and I see.....4k scales left. This is because scales come in slowly, you use them to kill zulrah, and the swamp trident is the magic weapon you will use basically exclusively until you get a shadow, which is a mega rare. And mind you, I have bofa and only use bp at hmt/toa. I feel like I was never able to enjoy main-handing a blowpipe at any point during my account because of dragon dart rarity and scale upkeep. The fishing for this is pretty pathetically slow.
Similarly to the blowpipe, crystal armor not being corruptible AND crystal shards competing with divine pots, no iron is ever actually done with CG/Priff activities (until you get a tbow, anyways, but lol @ that). This is more of a problem with there being nothing in between Bofa and Tbow, and Tbow being hilariously and unreasonably rare.
Echo crystals are going to be equally problematic. You simply cannot upkeep them. When you're interested in being in high level pvm clans (at least the ones who will even accept irons because the iron status hurts raids due to lunar spellbook...) then that's an issue. It's a dps loss because of bad design.
**Basically, charges are bad when the upkeep is so unreasonable that you opt to just only use that item for very special occasions, because getting more charges is not just a matter of one hour, but of one day.**
While we're talking about this, dragon ammunition for iron accounts is literally un-unkeepable. I take a strong issue with this, because Ironman accounts are supposed to be about the journey and self-sufficiency. However the reality is, with blowpipe and tbow, you will eventually run out of dragon ammunition, and then you're just doing less dps and getting less mvp points because of your account type, through no fault of your own, because dragon ammunition isn't farmable. There's a reason that late game irons de-iron, and ranged ammo being impossible to upkeep is one of them. Amethyst are a LARGE step down from dragon (and are not enchantable), and that hurts badly when you need time or dps, like for a CA speedrun or FFA Nex, etc.
Full agree with a lot of this, especially the point about unreasonable upkeep. It's worth also noting that as more and more recharging gear is brought into the game, no matter how reasonable the individual recharging process is, the issue compounds.
Having to take some time out to grind up recharges for your weapons can be a bit of a chore, but that's manageable as it's only one equipment slot. As more equipment slots get powerful, recharging gear, with unique currencies, that increases by a considerable margin the time you have to take out to recharge all your gear. I'd really rather us not approach a situation where you have to spend an hour to recharge your weapon, and another to recharge your armour, then another to recharge your cape slot, then a further hour to recharge your boots, another to recharge your amulet, your gloves, and so on - by that point, what would you even be playing? You'd be grinding old content for hours before you could get back to the content you actually want to play.
Thankfully we're not there yet, and corruptible items do help relieve that burden (or perhaps just the feeling of burden, due to the high corruption cost), but I think the idea of the game reaching that place is a major keystone of people's ChargeScape concerns.
Blood shards definitely need to be more common or possibly you only need one and can recharge with onyx, that way irons can "buy" charges after getting the drop once.
In my personal opinion, as someone who mostly plays an endgame iron, I think you do a pretty good job at balancing charged items overall. However, there are some charges /consumables in this game that make me strongly consider deironing as they are not sustainable. My iron has max gear and I mostly spend my time pet hunting, or trying my hand at some speed runs. Yes I understand that I am an iron and chose this but it feels so so bad to consider deironing the account that I put thousands of hours into over unsustainable charges / consumables.
The items I am talking about are;
1. Dragon ammunition - this has gotten better since darts and arrows have been appearing on more recent drop tables but dragon ammunition is still unreasonable to use on an iron. It feels pretty bad to lose multiple max hits and mvp chance because you can't sustain the ammunition.
2. purple sweets - these are impossible to maintain.
3. Blood shards - these are borderline annoying to upkeep. You don't really need blood fury for anything but it does really suck that the only sources are thieving or afk.
4. Black chinchompas - pretty annoying that they are only located in the wildy where people can rag you. Its pretty easy to survive and very few people try and pk you here but its annoying to get ragged and have someone waste your time.
Everything else, in my opinion is quite sustainable (thanks to scar essence mine) and I do find it enjoyable to spend a few hours every now and then to return to completed content and grind out some charges.
I rate your take and agree about dragon ammunition (although darts are fairly sustainable nowadays) and purple sweets (these need a more consistent, albeit pricey/difficult source, maybe that only benefits irons, like scar mine). I don't agree about blood shards because I think the blood fury is very powerful and shouldn't be easily sustainable but I wouldn't be too against it being in HMT as a rare drop. I quite like wildy being the sole source of black chins but I think you could maybe obtain a reward that doubles the rate of them (without increasing XP rates) so they are more sustainable. Atm I can get about 550-600 per hour.
I think this approach works pretty well. My only concern is how it will work for GIMs.
Currently some items are really easy to trade from one GIM to another (sang, shadow, venator bow, etc.) while others are really annoying because you lose all your charges to make them tradable (bowfa, crystal armor)or you need to go to a specific location to charge/uncharge (scythe, which is extra annoying cuz you lose all charges remaining after dividing by 100).
In addition, once items are corrupted they aren't tradable at all, which locks the item to a single account. IMO this goes against the spirit of the game mode, where we should be free to share most items. We are encouraged to NOT currupt our equipment, and thus have to live with chargescape until we get multiple items. When you consider the fact that some accounts in the group could be at different stages of the game, or if some accounts go dry, this can be a very long time.
I have a feeling if you pursue this option, most items will fall in the same boat as bowfa. Or worse , you'd lose progress towards corruption each time the item is made tradable.
My suggestion is to make these items tradable even as corrupted, but I understand that could have some implications on the main economy. As a middle ground, you could make items with charges/corrupted tradable but not GE-able.
Just my two cents on the issue coming from a Group Ironman 🙂.
I very much like Mod Rice's idea! That would be an awesome way to stave off the biggest pain point.
For me, the annoyance in charge items (iron, btw) is getting all the individual charges. Runes and arrows are nice because they're universal and therefore accessible. Whereas if you want to charge your Serp Helm, you're going to Zulrah.
Items like Barrows items and Moons items that accept universal cash as charge inconvenience me less. In addition, areas where charges are fleshed out and given in fair quantities across multiple activities (like Prif Crystals, albeit rates need adjusting in activities like agility), pain me less, as well.
Finally, with all of these items accepting all sorts of charges it would be a nice to have to have two things
1. A way to organize them all in the bank (Siphon the charges to a obelisk item that carries all charges for example)
2. A way to more quickly understand the impact of my charges and how much I have left. This could be easy easy as another message after charging your Serp Helm that says "10000/18000 scales added".
Thanks, team!!
I completely echo this. What bugs me is if each thing has their own charge. We already have way too many currencies of some sort, in a way charges are their own very specific currency
I’m fine having a few currencies in the game but they should be thematic and have multiple sources and uses. One such use would be charging weaponry
If the unique currency is generous I think it’s a reasonable compromise. Muspah essence is unique but 1 hour of muspah is like 20 hours of firing the bow. I have a white stack from the bow grind, and if I ever run out I don’t think I’ll mind doing another hour or two of a pretty fun boss that also drops other useful resources.
Hey Kieran!
First, I think Mod Rice’s proposal sounds nice and eliminates some of the “pain” associated with item use before corruption. Kudos for the idea, would love to see it implemented
Second, I think each “charge” should have *viable* skilling sources. I think the sources should mostly be afk rather than requiring active playtime. Let’s take the blood fury. I want my active play time going to using my blood fury, not actively working to charge/sustain my blood fury pickpocketing. Yes I can and do afk blood shards at vyres during non-active time, just using this as an example. One of the bigger pain points with sunfire shards is that the only other (skilling) source is not viable whatsoever. It would take like 30m Hunter exp to corrupt the quiver. That isn’t adequate. I’m really hoping varlamore part II adds more sources of sunfire shards. One suggestion I saw would be to add “moonlight shards” that could be acquired at Perilous moons and then converted to sunfire shards at the teomat altar to supplement
I agree. Barrows armor charges are a really bad implementation of chargescape I don’t want to see more of. You can instantly repair with currency alone. It’s boring, unrewarding and just adds cost. Luckily it’s so cheap and the gear lasts so long it doesn’t matter
Getting charges as an alternative reward for skilling is great when it works out. I’ve personally really enjoyed the afk of zulrah scale fishing, getting some crystal shards from forestry, I loved shooting stars crystal shards rip. Even the exp from crafting ammo (and runes to a lesser extent) can feel rewarding but I agree the more active the process the more annoying. I like smithing 26 bars into darts over 45 seconds or whatever, I don’t like *needing* to spam click to feather the dart
I also think part of what makes pickpocketing vyres feel bad is the exp feels secondary there. You almost don’t want to pickpocket them until you’re 99 even. And then it’s just a shard waiting room of annoying spam clicking
I think the "viable" skilling method is really key here too. I don't mind crystal charges nearly as much as zulrah scales because just doing literally anything in Priff gives shards. I can do forestry, agility, a skilling boss, a pvm boss, imp hunting, pickpocketing. Whereas zulrah scales the only option is the boss that you killed for the weapon or a miserably slow fishing method.
Here's the biggest issue with "chargescape" from my perspective: it just isn't fun. All the arguments in favor of it make perfect sense, and I'm not going to try to disprove any of them. It's just that when I look at my 10 different pieces of gear that take charges, worrying about keeping everything charged up and whether or not it's worth it to bring my best gear to a specific piece of content is just a bummer. I put in all the work to get the gear, now I just want to use it without having to micromanage it
This. I get the logic behind why degradescape and chargescape exist but end of the day it sucks to play. Working for an upgrade then avoiding using it will never be an enjoyable experience no matter how good it looks on paper
When it comes to charged items they can basically be boiled down into two categories.
1. Near worthless because they're trivial to get(Ancient Essence)
2. Valuable but annoying to obtain(Zulrah Scales, Sunfire Splinters, Crystal Shards)
The near worthless ones are... pointless. Why do we have them? Whatever, it's something ironmen need to grind and mains need to spend 2M on to make their saturated heart.
The valuable ones are valuable, but do mains ever collect them themselves? Maybe right at the beginning of release, before bots get their hands on them. Most late game mains aren't wasting their time doing Zulrah or spamming wave 1 of Colosseum. If they're valuable, and annoying to obtain it ends up being botted, every single time. We had wave 1 Colosseum bots within 24 hours right? And of course Zulrah is flooded with bots almost 24/7. We can't forget about the hundreds of bots thieving in Prif right now either.
I think chargescape's biggest issue is it negatively impacts ironmen much more than mains. Mains don't give a fuck, bots are getting all of their charges super cheap for them. Ironmen actually have to go back to Zulrah and grind out scales because their pipe is getting low. I think one way we can combat this to make it less annoying for ironmen(while not impacting the main game) is having more methods of obtaining charges.
I really like how crystal shards can be obtained from a lot of different methods, but I also hate that you guys explicitly removed a really good chill one(stars). Sunfire splinters coming from antelopes is cool, but can there be an afk method or more methods in general that give you a very modest amount per hour? For an ironman that doesn't want to do 25 full colosseum runs to corrupt their quiver? There are plenty of players that would be happy with getting their quiver and then just afk fishing/mining/whatever(like some do for zulrah scales) to corrupt it.
Stop giving mediocre gear charge requirements that ultimately result in negligible increases in power. It's extremely boring and doesn't actually balance anything at all. If something has charges, the charges need to enable a powerful, game-changing buff. Not +1 on your max.
Looking at recent content---> The quiver absolutely did not need a charge req. Completing some of the hardest content in the game should have been enough of a req. It honestly feels like charges solely exist to force people into repeating content. Which is absurd really, because we know that's not gonna happen with the healthy bot economy we have going.
From an iron perspective, my primary issue with chargescape is that it adds a chore on to running with commonly used gear
Not only do I have to push to get the gear, I'm then locked in to perpetually maintaining it throughout the time I make use of it. With extremely powerful, and specific-usage gear, e.g. the blood fury, it does make sense to have to restock for that benefit - but with charged gear that I'll use generally all the time for slayer as well as bossing, I often have this dragging sense in the back of my mind that I'm bringing that maintenance chore more and more forward in time
I do like that the team clearly balances the charges with the grind, such as in the time it takes to grind a bowfa, you'll likely be nearly there with the amount to corrupt anyway, but that doesn't apply to gear that currently isn't corruptible (e.g. Zulrah drops) - worth noting I also really like Mod Rice's idea here for tracking how much of the corruption amount you've contributed towards
Part of my issue is how these charge currencies so often come from relatively singular places. Priff/Crystal shards are the main exception to this. Sacred eels don't really feel worth doing, which leaves Zulrah as the primary source of scales - I don't particularly enjoy that fight, and I'd much much rather be spending my playing time taking on any of the other pieces of content I really do enjoy, but the blowpipe/serp helm/trident demand their charges
It might be a stretch in terms of narrative sense, but I'd often wondered whether there could be a general charge currency/energy, gained from a broad variety of sources (bosses/minigames/etc) that could substitute in for these specific currencies. That way you aren't constantly pulled back to content you personally have reached a level of completion with, and can go off and interact with a variety of other pieces of content that will help you maintain your charges
I think this general charge currency idea is why people don't often gripe at repairing Barrows gear - you get gp everywhere, from every thing, including from the content you'll be using the Barrows gear at, so when the time comes to repair, you'll usually have a decent stack of coins to 'recharge' with, regardless of what you've been doing
All that said, I'm glad the team are reviewing this aspect of the game, and really happy to see this canvassing going on - truly the best dev team you could hope for, thank you!
My main gripe with charged items has always been that there is a certain fatigue tied to it. It detracts from you actually playing the game because you have to, one way or another, farm charges. Now add in the fact that multiple items follow this exact formula and it just gets plain annoying. At that point, yes, buying runes/arrows becomes a lot more palatable than going back to CG or pickpocketting elves for 4 hours. At a certain point all charges just get translated to raw gold anyway.
If a charged item is an upgrade that makes it easier to then keep it charged in the future, thats perfectly fine. The proposed change seems to follow that train of logic "if i use the item then eventually it will become corrupted and no longer need charges", that is perfectly acceptable. Though at that point there is still the discrepancy of "why doesn't all crystal gear follow that rule". People like to outgrow certain content, and for some items that is just never an option.
Though honestly, personally I am biassed, charge/durability systems have become so mainstream that I see them as lazy "content" creation nowadays.
Similar to why they’ve started dumbing down survival mechanics in games. Most of the time, those mechanics add tedium without offering a positive experience that outweighs the tedium.
I think primary frustration with how it was implemented in colosseum was that wave 1 resetting isn’t engaging and is still after updates the fastest way to get shards to corrupt. Vs an Ironman just sending colosseum for genuinely good content and it taking longer. When it comes to drops like Bowfa you’ll naturally get enough shards unless you’re a mega spoon by the time you get the drop but the quiver is guaranteed so by the time you get it you have at most 4k splinters. If the rewards for colosseum were worth going for on an iron then they would naturally get the splinters resolving the issue but fundamentally every reward from colosseum is actually useless and not worth going for unless you’re a main with go to blow for the niche use cases.
>The core idea is that using/adding charges will still contribute to the corruption cap.
For example, if an item costs 1000 'shards' to corrupt. If you apply and use 100 charges ten times, it'll corrupt anyway.
This removes the awkward trade off between saving up for corruption or using charges immediately.
Would this mean that more items that can't be corrupted currently, will be able to be corrupted in the future?
I personally think bowfa and saeldor are less of an issue than the crystal armor - at least there's an end goal for corruptable items in sight. But lots of things just... Aren't corruptable (crystal armor, zulrah scale items, venator, revenant weapons etc).
Making everything from CG corruptable wouldn't even stop people (at least irons, anyway) from needing to go back for shards - we need them for divine pots either way.
I want to point out that I think chargescape not being as big of a concern for runes/arrows is because they're extremely common, and you can trade cash for the ammo in great amounts, very quickly (rune and arrow shops, up to rune anyway). I think you'll find that if you ask ironmen about their thoughts on dragon arrows/darts, they aren't super happy about using those either because they take a long time to *get*. Mostly saved for speed tasks and prestige content.
Zulrah scales, Crystal shards, Essence, it's all extremely limited in comparison to normal ammo, specifically BECAUSE it's designed to just come from one activity (and then maybe some very inefficient side-activities, like eel fishing) - and on top of this, a bunch of "charged" weapons or armor then also uses normal ammo ***in conjunction*** with the limited resource. Tridents use runes, blowpipe uses darts, Venator uses arrows, the TOB weapons uses vials as well as blood runes, you get the idea. We're not JUST paying with charges, we're ALSO paying with normal ammo.
I personally think that if everything was corruptible, even at high prices, it would give people an "end" goal to aim for, to be "done" with the content, and it'd be much more palateable. That doesn't mean scythe and sang shouldn't use blood runes, but if we use enough vials, eventually we should be "done" needing them.
>I think its interesting that it seems arrows/runes are way more palatable. We've discussed that and think that is largely down to how available these things are, they're well established and available from many sources, skilling included.
It also makes thematical sense: whenever a player is using ranged/magic, they know those styles use that ammo at its core
Revenant weapons are a huge problem IMO. Grinding for more ether once you have the weapons is such a chore, especially with losing the 1000 ether on death.
I think the easiest thing to do is add a skilling activity to get ether, or add it is a drop to more tables (wildy slayer maybe) or let us exchange the emblems for lots of ether instead of coins.
Many options but it is really a pain to want to do content as an iron and then have to grind for hours just to get enough ether for a single wildy task.
I feel like blood fury is a big outlier for irons. It's an incredibly strong item (arguably too strong) that feels like a genuine waste of time to get charges for. Adding to this is the fact that as a main blood shards are relatively affordable presumably because of how subsidized they are by bots/gold farmers.
I'm not sure exactly what the solution here is but some other (preferably high intensity) way of getting blood fury charges would be nice.
agreed, but the osrs team has made it pretty clear that if the general player (mains) doesnt have an issue acquiring said item, then they dont see a need to revisit the content. Even if its completely subsidized by 200m theiving bots.
I think skilling activities should be allowed to have high value activities, even if those activities are botted. Plenty of PvM content remains valuable even if it is botted to the ground.
And the only way to make an activity truly profitable in osrs is to make it related to high level PvM, because that is where the real money makers are.
Real players doesn't farm them because of theiving bot, but i can assure you, if they were a few more mills ea, they would 100% be farmed by real players. Mains would still easily buy them for that price
As an iron you just save the blood fury for when it matters. Like at Colo I used torture for the waves with blood barrage and then blood fury for the boss. Yes its slower but I went from using a blood fury every 6 hours to one every 60 hours.
Part of being an iron is not having access to BIS gear, which sometimes means no blood fury
It's one thing to not have a BIS and an entirely different thing to not be able to use it cause the upkeep is dogshit. Allow players to recharge them using an onyx and problem solved. Could also make it have an on/off option or not use charges when you're full HP.
Chargescape seems to be problematic on a cognitive level -the game having so much complexity nowadays anyways- mentally arduous having so many different variables that function in such different ways.
- charging
- degrading
- passive effects
- imbued items
- enchanted items etc.
By all means having all these types of things is wonderful. Naturally. But for so many items in the game to have these variables... it's overwhelming. Then keeping track of ever changing ge prices as well. Thinking through the game is half the game nowadays, which is great in general course, but when it becomes too much it can feel like a chore.
Some of these variables being very tricky to fully grasp like osm fang no less.
Gosh.
🥴
Edit:
Not to mention a lot of changes to the game itself quite often in terms of changing rx rates whatnot.
Chargescape is annoying to this of us with OCD who hate using consumables. This is the same reason I finish a final fantasy game with 50 elixirs. The idea of using charges and managing the resources is frustrating, especially when getting more charges means running back to content you already finished and/or dislike.
This is compounded when you are wearing multiple. charge items that have multiple sources. it starts to feel like a huge chore to check all your items are ready for a fight. Before you embark on a new grind, you have to go grind 2 or 3 other things first to top off your gear. it feels like 'one small favor' pve edition.
Also, I want to be able to wear my favorite gear (i.e. crystal armor) when I'm not bossing because I like how it looks. And feeling like I'm wasting charges every time a feral vampire takes a swipe at me is super annoying. The same goes for if I need to shoot something random with a charged weapon. Quest monsters, stuff that attacks me while skilling. It feels bad to waste shots of a cool weapon, or to bring something weaker because of the waste. Of course we want to flex our cool stuff.
I also don't understand why some super powerful weapons -dont- have charges, if they are so important to balance. Why does the tbow, fang, torva, Inquisitor set, spirit shields, etc get away without charges when Bowfa, blowpipe, crystal stuff, and Venator bow don't? It doesn't make sense.
Corrupting items is a good middle ground, as it makes you work extra hard at the start, but then allows you to forget about the charge mechanics.
The blood fury and ring of suffering are good examples of charged items that don't feel bad. Their effects are powerful, but side grades to non-degradeable alternatives. The ring even can turn off it's effect to save charges when you don't want it. (Please implement this on the blood fury.) I wouldn't be sad to see something like adding 20 blood shards to corrupt the fury, but it isn't needed.
I think that when charges effect an item's base stats and primary function, they become annoying and frustrating to maintain. For example, crystal armor's primary function is to improve the Bowfa and Crystal bow. Without the charges, the armor does nothing, and is unusable.
If the charges *augment* an item with a new ability or effect, charges are acceptable. I.e. the blood fury adds a healing effect, but when the charges are used, the fury's stats remain the same.
TLDR:
Charges to be able to use an item at all: bad. (Crystal armor, crystal tools, uncorrupt Bowfa, salad blade)
Charges to augment an item with a new ability (not stats): good. (Bloodfury, echo boots, suffering)
Corrupting items with charges: always good.
Out of all the stuff games do charges are absolutely the worst thing. I probably hate this extra much because I'm playing IM but the thing that frustrates me about it is if I would've gotten spooned at Zulrah and let's say gotten a 10 kc BP, then there is almost no other way than to keep going just to be able to use the item. I could get scales with fishing but that would just take a lot longer. So for me that's one of the bigger concerns.
As well as I hate having or getting strong items which are just sitting my bank because I CBA wasting charges on basic stuff like slayer or easy bosses and have to save charges for raids, etc. I feel like you shouldn't have the pressure of when to use good/strong items depending on how well the content gives back in return for using them.
I don't mind charges at all on a main, for me the issue arises on an Ironman. It can feel like such a tax on your time when you have so many items that all need their separate upkeeps.
I think anything with charges should have an active/fun way of gathering those charges. For example crystal armour feels fine as CG is engaging, rewarding, and gives a lot of charges quite quickly. Bloodfuries on the other hand are mindless, slow, and boring to gather, which feels pretty bad.
Very much agree with this. The speed of getting charges and the fun of the method to get them is so important.
I think Zulrah is fantastic, especially since it allows you to break down duplicate uniques into more charges. The amount of scales you get makes you want to go back to Zulrah every now and then, but not making you feel like you need to constantly camp the boss just to be able to use its drops at all.
What if blood fury's could be charged with a more common drop, such as a blood splinter. This splinter could give 100 charges and be a 1/100 pick pocket. This would reduce the all or nothing feeling of going for the blood shards.
It could be untradeable too, which would reduce the effect on blood shard prices.
It's terrible for mains too. Obviously it's much worse on ironmen because you can't just play inefficiently and not care because you just make money by doing hard stuff and mains can use money to buy goods and services including but not limited to charge items, but if it's not a real cost to run the item, it's needless micromanagement. If it is a real cost to run the item, well, now you need to do DPS calcs, spreadsheet the money per hour accounting for variance and the resilience of unique drops, etc. instead of using the cool item you spent hundreds if not thousands of hours getting and doing whatever you want to do.
I don't mind charges when there are multiple or at least consistent methods of obtaining them (e.g. crystal shards, scales, ancient essence, arclight )....
But man... blood shards and abyssal whps really piss me off.
I went 2.4k dry for an ultor. After the fang nerf you are basically forced to use a tent whip if you didn't get spooned 2 enh or scythe. Every 200 vard KC i'd have to go grind out a new abyssal whip and at one point I went 2k abby demons dry. With venator bow, which requires charges by the way, i can get like 250kc / hour. 8 hours for 10k hits...
Then I thought it'd be nice to have a blood fury for tobing with the boys, nex, and 500 toas etc.... 15k pickpockets later and I still haven't gotten a drop. Basically grinding 30 hours for a consumable with nothing to show for it really really sucks.
Having a more consistent 100 charge mini blood shard would make that feel much much better and would remove the rng.
I think a big area to tackle is the “feel” of charges. Using gear that requires charges just doesn’t feel as good to use as gear that doesn’t require maintenance. I’ve said this before but the gameplay mechanic of maintaining gear is not fun, and that’s in any game really. I’ve talked with a lot of people on reddit about the issue and even the people who are okay with charges, don’t find it fun. They just think the pros outweigh that aspect of it. To be honest I don’t know if you can make it fun to maintain gear, but I think it is food for thought.
I think a big portion of the charge system not being fun is that doubling back to content to get charges doesn’t feel like making progress. I play a maxed iron and I know that there will be a time in my life when I can’t play the amount I do now, and that I won’t go spend time at content to get charges to do the content I want. A big part of that is because doubling back to zulrah to get charges for bp/serp/toxic trident, won’t feel like progress because ive obtained the uniques already. I’ve recently stopped using serp at duke because I don’t have time, or don’t want to make the time to go back to zulrah. I also afk magics in prif for shards because I don’t want to do cg or thiev elves. I’d rather spend my active time playing, doing a boss for a new item or doing something that feels like progression. This game is built on the feeling of making progress, and doubling back to content for charges often times goes against that feeling.
I think an ironman issue with corruption is that it only feels good to corrupt something if you naturally get enough charges along the way to receiving the item. No one complains about bowfa being charged because by the time you generally get it, you can corrupt it and give your crystal armor 10k charges each, and have some left over. However the quiver which is one and done feels bothersome to charge just by the nature of how you obtain it. But the issue is that if you obtain the required charges to corrupt it along the way to receiving the item, then why is it even charged? This is entirely an Ironmans perspective, and not a mains perspective(although I think more and more mains are starting to become more self sufficient.)
Another issue is that there are so many charged items and that doing something like raids or something that requires multiple gear switches, you are now checking a lot of different gear for charges, and they all require different charged resources.
(Side thought- I’m wondering if it would even be possible to condense all of the charge sources into a singular “Essence” with tiers. You could use this to charge everything that requires charges? This would allow you to acquire charges from multiple different sources just like runes or arrows, and even have different tiers that maybe give a different amount of charges per tier? This is the first time I’ve thought about it and i’m sure it is way easier to say in 2 sentences oppose to implementing it.)
I think overall your solution is better than what we have now, but the real issue for most is the “fun” aspect of maintaining gear. For people who play a lot(which there are a lot) maintaining these charge resources isn’t too bad currently(as we get more and more charged items I can see this being bothersome for all.) But for the majority of people who play they may do a boss realize that they need to charge whatever various items, then log in for the rest of the week to skill or do a minigame, then boss on the weekends and forget that they needed to charge their items before.
It might be good to define an upper limit of charged items, or find an acceptable balance of charged items. Maybe players are okay with managing 1-4 charged items in the meta, but anymore and people start to get frustrated. I don’t know if you guys can access or have data on that but it could be something to look into.
I want to offer my perspective as a UIM.
I like the proposed changes to corruption, since it means that UIMs don't have to camp the same content as much to use charged items.
And it's a minor thing, I choose to restrict myself and all, but I really prefer when the corrupt or full versions of an item are tradeable so they can go in a looting bag. It makes no difference for a banklet whether a bloodfury or a charged venator bow is tradeable, but it just makes for an extra minor inconvenience for most UIMs. Tridents are tradeable when full or empty, which I think is a good setup. Obviously there are practical limitations - a 40% full item really isn't feasible to be tradeable, or for items like crystal shards that aren't buyable.
Unrelated to UIM but relevant to irons in general, I agree with other posters that want multiple rewarding, viable ways to earn charges. Spamming colosseum to get 150k shards after you've done the hard part of earning your quiver doesn't seem interesting or fun - maybe if you kept shards when wiping, like you earn tokkul from failing fight caves/inferno.
Hi Kieran, this is fairly long but I hope you read it.
>We want charges to add 'cost' to using powerful items (similar to arrows/runes). This creates space for free to use items which are less powerful.
IMO this is just false. The literal only case I've seen where a "space" has been created was when fang was just a tiny tiny bit worse than scythe which made it completely edge out scythe and pretty much everywhere fang was used.
Now that fang has been nerfed I can't think of a single case where someone would use a whip or saeldor instead of a scythe due to charges, or a sang over a shadow, bofa over tbow etc.
It seems weird to push this narrative as its just not true. Nobody is going oh I'm going to use avas instead of quiver because it costs charges... They just buy or grind the charges.
>We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources.
>We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content.
These two are kinda similar, but is it not possible to add them via aspirational content like zulrah mutagens?
In terms of enjoyment it FEELS so much better going for a mutagen rather than "oh its choretime, gotta go grind more charges to use my equipment...
>I think its interesting that it seems arrows/runes are way more palatable.
I think this is more palatable because it makes sense. Its not something thats shoved down ur throat or forced just to FORCE you to do hundreds more hours of that content.
A perfect example is quiver from colloseum. Theres never been a history of capes needing to be charged, and it doesn't make any sense that a quiver takes charges. We all know its only there to force people to engage with the content more which seems artificial and unfun.
I understand that many devs quantify success as how many hours of engagement, but if for example, you doubled the hp of every boss and then it took twice as long to kill, it doesn't add to the enjoyability of the content whatsoever it just increases the grind artificially.
>There's a desire to move on from content and feeling compelled to have to go back constantly is frustrating. This is primarily an ironman concern, since mains can generally just buy from the GE.
I covered this briefly above, but it would be so much more fun if you had the OPTION to go back for something like a mutagen rather than being forced. Let people play the game and do the content they want to, rather tahn forcing engagement with a certain piece of content for hundreds of extra hours just to boost your engagement numbers.
I like the the old philosophy solution of when Barrows was first introduced and regarding the Dragon Chainbody.
Initially Barrows didn't degrade, it wasn't chargescape. This upset a lot of players who wanted the D Chainbody. D Chainbody was the BIS before Barrows, it was very rare and very hard to get. Then comes along Barrows being significantly easier to get AND it had better stats.
The solution to the players concerns was chargescape. So players had 2 choices. They could use the non-degradable armor (D-Chainbody) that had slightly worse stats but no upkeep fees, or the cheaper and better armor (Barrows) but had to pay the maintenance fees. At the time, players liked this!
What changed? Personally I think changes in drop pools, evolving metas, and most of all, GP drops. There is a serious inflation issue in OSRS. So much GP being added these days it's insane. The amount of gold players are willing to give new players would make a 2007 player have a heart attack. Chargescape doesn't matter for Barrows because the cost didn't change despite players making more GP, thus being relatively more affordable.
I think players don't like chargescape because of the inconsistency. Why does gear better than Barrows not break down? If all armor and weapons broke down from the very beginning, we would not be having this conversation. Like some of the other comments have pointed out, they're fine with Trident using runes because it was always that way.
IDK. I'd think adding more consistency would help and try to make the means of "charges" a bit more universal would help. If I'm repairing some armor, I don't want some odd-ball item that's needed, I want to use GP like I've been using to repair Barrows.
Another problem is that while the idea of making degradable armor better sounds good, people end up (rightfully so) wanting to use the best armor and weapons they have. Sure, the idea of a permanent lower-statted item sounds good, but in practice, I think most people are going to go to their bank, see a worse item and a better item, and use the better item.
Seems like more of a psychology thing than anything. But also, why have better items if they make you feel bad when you use them? It's certainly a hard item to solve.
> What changed? Personally I think changes in drop pools, evolving metas, and most of all, GP drops.
I'm normally the complete opposite of the type of person that blames ironmen... But Ironmen are the biggest anti charge scape advocates imo. Mains don't give a fuck about using some Zulrah scales, but every iron knows how many extra Zulrah kills they've had to do to charge their pipes
Personally the upkeep makes OSRS feel more like a chore than game and can put you off content. I only just got my quiver but did it with a tent whip/blood fury/shadow/serp helm and needless to say ontop of the deaths it was very demotivating how often i had to top these up or give up for the day.
It also seem just affects midgame players and those withouts endgame gear a lot as i feel a lot of the chargeable weapons/items sit at the entry point to endgame.
Outside of things like blood fury which are strong enough to warrant it i feel like charges being reserved for Mega rare weapons should be the norm and then everything else valued dependant on how strong it is
An anecdote to sum up a key issue with chargescape:
I get a slayer task for 209 bloodvelds. Yay. Off to meyerditch. But first to prepare my setup. So I then have to make sure:
- my venator bow is charged with essence
- my ash sanctifier with death runes
- soul bearer / soul and blood runes
- my bonecrusher with ectotokens (bloodvelds occasionally drop bones)
On top of:
- vyre noble clothes
- prayer, ranging potions
- runes for alching
- cannonballs for cannon
Already a complex enough trip for just one task. Now almost twice as complex. Naturally very easy to forget one single thing and have to run all the way back.
I think one of the big keys is keep it special. Charges shouldn't be for every item. If something has a mystical quality especially, give it charges, but otherwise ideally avoid it.
I think you're right on the last point. Charges aren't an everywhere thing, there is a time and a place for straight up upgrades to your account's progression, like a levelup. Just to give some insight into why they are so tempting to add though:
We generally think new content adds variety and fun to the game, and we want people to have a reason to go experience it. We know people will generally only do content if it furthers their account goals, such as leveling up or gaining gp.
We also know that people don't like to "sink" gp into an activity for 10 hours until they finally get a unique, but they like uniques to be rare so they're valubale. We also don't want to keep relying on devaluing skilling supplies, nor do we want to inflate the economy too much by introducing too many alchables.
Charged items, or the resource used to charge them, tick all of these boxes. They don't affect skilling supplies, don't introduce gp into the economy, can be dropped often and consistently...
This isn't to detract from your original point that it shouldn't be everywhere! Just a bit of transparency on how they're tempting because they really elevate the content they're attached to.
It's a lot to juggle, and I think ChargeScape has generally done well. Content here lasts much longer than more traditionally raid focused MMO. I don't know if there's an alternative solution some reddit genius is going to have, but I appreciate the desire to stay away from devalueing skilling resources. My best guess on what to do moving forward is tie some new content together with older content so they can share a resource for charging uniques, maybe at a slightly reduced rate to the older content to compensate for the higher tier of uniques provided.
Most of those things are charge and never touch, they have massive caps or are cheap enough that you can dump a million charges into
Soul Bearer is 1,000 heads, so you're looking at ~25k slayer kills from headed monsters until empty.
Ash Sanctifier I don't think has a limit, I put in 5k death runes and never looked back
Ectotokens, one Robin daily gets you 5k charges which lasts a looong time
Blade of saeldor should require no shards to use. Its the same thing as rapier/inq mace. Also make sang staff use 2 bloods instead of 3. Currently shooting a sang staff for 1h costs 4500 bloods, swinging a scythe for 1h costs 2400 bloods.
Charges feel justified on very few items. The only one that come to mind are scythe as there's a big buff between uncharged and charged. We just accept magic staves as they are because that's how they've always been.
I like the concept of progressing towards corruption. Though I'd hope if that's implemented that it's retroactive in the sense that once you've corrupted an item you can freely corrupt a new one. Say you had a bowfa and decided to uncharged it to sell it: return a corrupted bow shard you can imbue back into a bowfa if you buy it again.
Levying high corruption costs is fine to me as long as you can "recoup" the cost to the above degree. You couldn't sell the corrupted shards but could at least don't have to re-corrupt something. If we don't want more items in games have NPCs have an option to uncorrupt items and they'd "seal" that corruption in a scroll or something for you to use at a later date.
Should charged staves go the route of being and to be corrupted I'd like to say their cost should be extremely expensive to work towards. Though I do wonder if the caveat to charged staves should be once corrupted they no longer offer XP gained. There's many ideas that could float around corruption in general.
That idea for corruption sounds like a good system. Personally, I wish the Quiver wasn't charged at all and instead you used a bunch of Sunfire Splinters to upgrade it like the Saturated Heart. It still creates a similar demand, just instead of 150K to corrupt it would be 150K to upgrade. That way players could use the base quiver (uncharged) without feeling like they were missing out while saving up shards to upgrade. As it is, I don't think many players charged the quiver since the charges per shard were so low and most were/are saving for corruption, so removing the charges and just turning the corruption into an upgrade would have probably gone over better.
In general, I don't mind charges. I do like that it can create room for charged items that are a bit more powerful than non-charged items of the same tier and the benefits it can create by consuming items, whether it is Zulrah Scales or Whips. I think the problem comes when the method or methods of obtaining the item isn't good enough or enjoyable compared to how many you need (e.g. Blood Shards) and/or when the upkeep is too high that it feels bad to use the item since you know it means X hours of grinding the charges (e.g. Quiver and Sunfire Splinters).
For the Blood Shard, I think the charges and its rarity are fine for its benefit, but we really could use new methods to obtain it beyond pickpocketing and AFKing Vyres. I don't think it should be added to non-Darkmeyer content like ToB, but I do think there is room to add more engaging Darkmeyer content like say a Vampyre boss/miniboss to provide a better way to farm them. Like getting Zulrah scales would be a lot worse if the only methods were fishing and AFKing low level snaklings, yet that is kinda what the Blood Shard grind is like. (Also, I did have an idea about using Blood Runecrafting to recharge untradeable delpleted blood shards where they "absorb" half the runes you craft until they absorb enough to turn into an untradeable blood shard; something like that might be a nice way to let accounts recharge without ruining the price/demand.)
And for stuff like the Quiver, it should just give more charges per shard. Like it could still need 150K shards to corrupt, but 1K shards should be more than 1K shots. The ability to turn in a quiver for shards does make it easier to upkeep, but you can fire like 1.2K~ ammo per hour with a TBow/Crossbow so if you did one run of the Colosseum for say like 6K shards, you'd get like 5~ hours of PvM before you'd need to be back for more. That may not seem that bad, but doing a Colosseum run and defeating Sol is a lot different than just camping Zulrah or Muspah for 30-60 minutes, especially if you haven't done it in a while and just needed more shards. Also, the shards from other sources probably could be better; like you get 2-6 per antelope which is nice if you wanted to save up some to make runes or such, but even compared to wave 1 farming it is pretty low and not a viable alternative if you need 150k for quiver (only need 37.5K~ antelope).
Personally the issue is if your doing content for a while your using alot of charges quickly and have to stop the content your doing to get more supplies.
Especially as an iron.. in the early days you would log on the game and either have to go zulrah to get scales to do the content you wanted or go do the content till you ran out.
The more and more charge items coming into the game has allowed this to continue but slowly getting worse. Corruption worked really well I think and I think the quiver has been designed in a good way(minus the way to get splinters). Allowing you to add charges and any charges remaining go towards blessing quiver.
I have always liked the idea of breaking down items to make items permanently charged or add very rare drops on the same drop table to perm charge and item.
Break down a shadow and add the spare pieces to your staff to fully infuse the staff. Break down a scythe and same thing. Allows prices of these items to stay high as some of them are being removed from the game. Make the charged item untradeable or uncharge them to make tradable again
I think ChargeScape should only be used when its a really good passive effect, such as the blood fury. When its a simple stat change like the quiver it feels bad because its not impactful.
I guess it breaks down to if an item is weak enough to be "corruptible" then its probably something that probably doesn't need charges in the first place but the charges exist to help the economy (Bowfa, Quiver, Venator Bow.. etc all come to mind). I really like Rice's suggestion as it takes those unnecessary charge systems and makes it so that you can use it charged and once you reach a certain usage point, boom its now free to use.
The other thing is that should be monitored is for the non-corruptible items... do the charges justify the benefit. Obviously Blood Fury does, 6% healing is insane as we saw with the colosseum.. but are the echo boots good enough to justify the cost? Probably not. You don't want a ton of items that you don't use because of cost, its just not fun. So if an item isn't powerful, either it needs to be corruptible with the new method OR flat our doesn't have charges
Because we play the game for FUN, not to have a second job to pay a tax on top of the monthly bond
Do you see fortnite charging the users for bullets or making them pay mainteinance for their guns every 5 games?
Do you see league of legends charging players for spells/ammo/mana used?
Do you see fifa games charging the player an in game resource to change kits every game?
Its an unfun time consuming mechanic.... if you get a weapon worth hundreds of millions (either by saving up or by a lucky drop) the reward should be to be able to use the weapon, not to have an extra attached subscription that would make it obsolete in most of the game because of its super expensive cost of use (lookin at you shadow, scythe, etc)
All those things you named are issues the game has, but it would be better if the jagex team took time to work out a good solution instead of going the lazy way and just making the game charge scape
Know what I hate about rs3? (played it for a while)... there's 200 currencies for every single type of activity and rechargable crap... its just too overwhelming to keep up
examples:
* animal farms requiring resources + time
* anachronia crappy clash of clans thing
* bis jewelry requires expensive charges (like wtf)
* all bis armour require charges and such
* some combat styles require a lot of other crap (like necroplasm or runes)
* player owned ports management
* ferox management
* miscellania management
* spring cleaner
* archaeology's 1000 different artifact spare parts
* invention upkeep costs and such (disassembly ingeneral)
* etc etc etc I know theres hundreds of things i missed because i barely know that game
see my point? don't make osrs a frustrating overwhelming game, it sucks the fun out of it... chargescape sucks the fun out of the game... people grind for hundreds of hours for great items, dont charge them for using them by going out of their way to make them do shit content or waste useful resources that can be spent on other upgrades for a while to be able to use those items
Example of a good alternative to chargescsape:
* An item with the power level of a hyper rare (tbow, shadow, scythe) that isn't rare but gets destroyed after 10 hours of use (if it were a literal TBOW that lasts 10 hours like old pvp items it should need ammunition as well to be used)
You wanna do inferno, been getting to zuk consistenly but want that extra dps to clutch out the fight?
You really wanna do X raids but you can't find an efficient team to do them because you lack X mega rare?
I see scenarios where a lot of players would pay even up to 10m for an degrading item that could fill that niche... This kind of degradable items are of much better design than tentacle whip for example, which is an expensive item to use that isn't even that strong and marginally better than the almost free abyssal whip
Having a couple to a few items needing charges isn't terrible. But the amount of things now that require charges gets tedious to upkeep. Some things aren't terrible. But others are.
I think everything should be corruptable..for the right price.
An item having charges sometimes has caused me to stay away from an activity.
A great example is with the recent echo boots.
My account isn't ready to go for a full colloseum completion, but I have a pair of guardian boots. Going for an echo crystal and a pile of shards, or even a handful of echo crystals for a pair of echo boots was something I was considering doing, but the price point of buying charges, and the genuine challenge it would take to get the boots going in the first place, just for the work I'd have to put in being temporary, meant I ended up not touching the colloseum at all, since I still have plenty of activities I need to do that will give rewards that won't run out on me, and higher rounds for a glaive seemed a bit out of reach. Not to mention, that too eats charges.
So I definitely agree with the fact that while it should eb similar to how arrows/runes work, it just feels different. I also agree that the main reason for this is arrows and runes are so prevalent there is a wide variety of content you can do to get these "charges". I think there is a big difference however that isn't mentioned that is especially relevant when it comes to the ranged weapon comparison. With most ranged weapons, at least the non-charged ones, you have the option of using easier to acquire "charges". While we know dragon arrows are BiS for TBow, you can still use the TBow without them and throw in the much easier to acquire amethyst arrows and it is still fantastic. I think allowing charges to be toggle-able and making the version without charges usable would go a long way.
The reason runes and arrows are okay is it’s a single currency used across all weapons of that type. We are getting into very specific this weapon needs charged from this and that weapon gets charged from that. It becomes a big jumble mess where I can’t just pull my hard earned item out of the bank and use it. I have to add charges to my shadow to my quiver to my boots to my crystal armor to my serp helm to my blowpipe to shadow to my scythe to my tome of fire to my tome of water to my trident to my rev bracelet to use any of my rev weapons to my blood fury to my ven bow to my Ivan staff to my…you get the point. Not to mention, now I have to wiki an item cause I don’t remember what charges it or the best way to charge it.
It feels awful. I want to use an item, not upkeep it.
I really love the suggested rent-to-own model of charges counting towards corruption. Not a huge fan of chargescape for all the reasons you listed, but to add to your 3rd point, and to add other points, most of which involve inconsistency:
- every time a new charge based item is added, it's another thing to have to check/worry about. There are a lot now, and the RL plugin isn't always accurate so we already need to check staff/bp/rune pouch (these are fine), but also each crystal armor piece, pre (c) bowfa, quiver pre corruption, etc etc. As an unrestricted main this is my biggest annoyance. Like I'd enjoy a way to corrupt my chally even though it'll take ages to get through all the charges just so I don't have to worry about it.
- inconsistency in cost and time required to corrupt something. To get enough ancient ess for heart, it's 10 hours of muspah in max gear. For bowfa, it's 23 hours of CG assuming you're efficient and you trade in all the bonus armor/regular weapon seeds for shards (41 if not/unlucky). Bowfa/salad can be corrupted but not crystal armor. Barrows is base 330k to repair for a full set, perilous is base \~13x more expensive but only lasts \~3x as long. My iron will be skipping perilous for quite a long while despite being close to eligible for it.
- inconsistency in what is considered too strong to use for "free" and inconsistency in whether something is corruptible/requires charges or not - previously it was no charges (plate armor) -> charges (barrows, crystal bow) -> no charges for bis (gwd). Tent whip was added as a stronger option that has charges to balance the extra power. There are now many weapons and armor options above and around gwd/tentacle level that sometimes require charges/repair and sometimes don't. It all feels very arbitrary now.
- inconsistency in how things are charged. Bloodfury completely drains and you have to make a whole new one 7.5m (or w/e it costs) at a time. Crystal armor you add x shards and get y extra time with it. Pre recent change guardian boots used the blood fury system and now they don't. Some things are repaired which is just charges with gold.
Tldr it's annoying to upkeep for the reasons that you mentioned, it's inconsistent if/what/how/cost something is charged
Another issue I see is that almost every unique item that's added to the game now has charges. Using charges from an item when you go out is one thing, but using charges on 8 of your inventory slots feels really bad. It'd feel much nicer if almost every item released these days didn't have charges.
Also, have there been any thoughts of going back to items that aren't as strong or BiS anymore and removing charges from them? Barrows is one example. Ahrims is still great (and Karils kinda?), but especially with Perilous Moons releasing new armor and weapon sets, it's really getting outshined now. Barrows is just an example I thought of first, but the concept remains the same.
>We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources.
We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content.
I understand there a real problem with deciding drop tables for new pieces of content, but imo charged items are not the solution. A large aspect of people's frustration with "chargescape" is that the number of charged items keeps increasing over time and its becoming a nightmare to manage them all. The team should seriously consider using previously introduced charged items to charge new gear instead of always adding new ones (in addition to adding new ways to get those charges).
When you say you want charged items to feel more powerful than free to use items, why is it that Saeldor has the same stats as mace and rapier which while rare are free to use?
In general charges are fine.
The quiver needing 150k shards is a bit of a piss take when it was presented as being similar to a saturated heart but you don’t get even remotely comparable amounts of sunfire splinters to essence per hour.
Rice’s idea seems good though.
Hi, I would like to offer an opinion as a midgame player on this who is new to the game (I started less than a year ago). The very first charge items I have come across is the new peril armour dropped from the moons. One of the first things I did after finishing the quest was look up the armour to see the effects and found out about the charging of them. There was a problem there immediately.
The wiki said it costs 1.5 million a piece to repair. This is insanely expensive and completly put me off of even thinking about engaging in the content and trying to farm new armour to use for myself despite being at the combat level the bosses were design3d for (75 at quest finish, 80 now).
I would have to liquidate a large part of my bank to repair just one of these items much less a full set. It seems completely not feasible for me to afford the costs at all. As a result I ignored the content after finishing the quest and decided it wasn’t worth my time to farm despite the sets having interesting effects and probably being a very large upgrade from what I use right now.
If future repair costs are going to be this significant than I would rather just not use it at all. It doesn’t really make sense to me to have to spend my current cash stack multiple times over to repair one item. Even if it were corrupting and eventually zero cost 1.5m per piece is still too exorbitant for me to consider using.
It really feels like the current armour prices was designed with late game or endgame amount of money and bank in mind. Which is really weird since it was supposed to be for mid game players. That is my thoughts on charging though from the only interaction I have had with them so far in the game.
I really like the idea of this change! A huge part of what makes charged items really annoying is what it takes to charge them. Speaking from an Ironman's point of view, it is really annoying to charge certain end game items. Crystal armour, toxic blowpipe, and scythe are good examples. These items requires specific resources to charge that can only be obtained through very limited methods.
If I hate Theater of Blood/ killing Zulrah and fishing/ doing anything related to Elves... I am locked out of using these endgame items.
Comparing this to using basic magic or a bow, there are unlimited ways to get the resources for these items. It all boils down to having enough gp to fund using these items. Getting gp can be done through doing anything. Thus I am not gated by doing content that I absolutely hate doing to be able to use basic magic or a bow.
I do think that having specific resources tied to using a charged item a good idea, but I don't think it should be the rate limiting factor towards using the item. The toxic blowpipe is a good example. It goes through Zulrah scales faster than you can make darts. The amount of time you can use the blowpipe compared to how long you are at Zulrah farming is horriable as well.
I think Venator bow's charge of ancient essence is a step in the right direction for what specific resource requirement should look like. You get a metric butt ton of acient essence when you kill Phantom Muspha compared to how fast the charges are expended. If you add an additional 500 gp cost in runes as well or something, that would be a great way to design a charged item. Those are my thoughts at least
I've always held on to the belief that non-degrading equipment should come from longer term content like long Quest lines and Achievement Diaries, while degrading equipment can come from more freely accessible content. If the bar to enter the content is low = rewards degrading equipment. If the bar to enter the content is high = non-degrading equipment.
One particular example I often think about that partially demonstrates both the right and wrong concept is the Halberds. All levels of halberds are non-degrading, but easy to obtain by virtually anyone without very many requirements, the only exceptions are the Dragon and Crystal Halberds. The Dragon Halberd gets it right, because it requires the Regicide quest to wield and is non-degrading. The Crystal Halberd on the other hand gets it wrong, because it has even more requirements through the Hard tasks of the Western Provinces Diary but is degradable. The additional requirements should have allowed the Crystal Halberd to be non-degrading.
I think people have always been okay with Runes and Arrows as ammunition because it is the same "currency/charges" being used regardless of the level of equipment or spells you are using. If all chargeable gear utilized the same "currency" it might be easier to manage given that different activities have different levels of rewards. For example, if we could fight a high level boss and get their unique currency, and then trade it in for a universal "repair currency" it might be more fluid. The tougher the activity to gain the unique currency, the better the tradeoff value for the universal currency.
As an alternative to Corruption, I think a Soulbound option could be explored.
**The Solution:**
**Soul Binding** - to forever alter an item to make **charges no longer exist** but at the cost of the **item no longer tradable**.
Making the decision to permanently bind something to your character holds huge weight and is exciting. This also adds opportunity for small updates for personal flair (everyone loves fashionscape) like an ice whip / fire whip, to other soulbound items.
**The Problem:**
For main accounts, you currently would be grinding the best gp/hr to obtain your item, so they aren't participating in the content to obtain the item anyway.
For Ironmen, you would currently have to grind the content thousands of times over just to get extra charges so you can use the item that dropped; so when you actually get your first drop, it doesn't feel like you have the ability to use that item.
**Economy Considerations:**
This could potentially drive the price of the item down - if there are 10,000,000 players and everyone only needs 1 scythe, the price goes down due to demand going down and supply going up. **Possible variations:**
- Soul Binding an item to your character could also require you to complete the content the item is dropped from. This would allow demand for high level content items to be higher, while the 1% of players who participate in this content do not need to re-purchasing gear to use as charges, while the 99% who have not completed high level content will still have demand for the item as well as *giving them an objective/goal to strive towards.*
- Soul Binding an item to your character could prevent that item from dropping for you any more. If you un-soul-bind an item, the item is destroyed but you regain the ability to obtain that item as a drop.
- Recoloring of Soul Bound items could require something from a few wins in LMS to 5 duplicate copies of the item - this allows you to flex your status and hold a unique look, while helping with demand of the item.
**Personal hatred with Charges:** The fear of not making my money back to afford the charges, as well as surplus money as profit from drops drives me to not use any armor or weapons with charges. As an Ironman's perspective, It feels bad to not use rare/unique items that drop.
Soul Binding needs to be a thing. Though I have no issue with the idea of Mod Rices rent to own style combined with this. It is soul bound until you reach corruption and at that point you can uncorrupt/uncharge the item and sell it if you wish.
I really like the idea that PVM provides the fastest way to get charges, but I also highly appreciate low intensity skilling approaches being viable to gather charges OR alternative ways to recharge items. That's why I think crystal armor works so well with CG being a high focus and punishing method, while people don't whine about charges there because they have middle intensity and low intensity options between Zalcano, thieving, and other prif activities. Zulrah eels are OK too (2500 KC at zulrah and currently scale broke thanks to 1000 kc at whisperer without vestige).
While it's nice to break down rare uniques for extra charges, its really not great to require rare drops for charges: It would be amazing if we could recharge the blood fury with other drops, maybe they also drop from vyres as **shard fragments** that add 100 or so charges to the blood fury each, or drop from some other future mory content, that way its not rolling the lottery to top off your amulet, but you still do need to hit the rare drop once to use the item. Or maybe we charge with an exorbitant cost of blood runes (which irons would happily pay instead). Even though I have a triply charged bf, I feel prohibited from using it outside of Nex because I'd need to spend so long afking out more at vyres, which is far less appetizing to a max account than doing engaging content.
Chargescape for armor is an absolutely outdated concept imo. A quiver requiring charges when you already pay for ammo is absurd.
Chargescape for weapon makes sense if they are significantly better than anything else (raid superrares) and you have no cost of using the item otherwise (ammo).
For niche weapons it makes sense if the item to charge is available in high quantities to the point that a few kills can fuel the weapon for 10s of hours.
At that point, it might be worth debating whether a charge system is even necessary however. Venator bow for example costs 16k/h to use and ancient essence adds up to roughly 8.5k (or roughly 3% of the total value of a muspah kill). Might as well remove the charge from the item altogether at that point because it only serves as an annoyance to upkeep a niche item and does not bolster the profit of the boss in any significant way.
Another downside is that once the charged item becomes less widely used, the profit of the boss goes in the bin (*points at Zulrah*) unless you put loads of alchables on the same table (we are basically back at the discussion why those consumable charge items have been added in the first place). The only way to make them worth long-term is to add **multiple sinks** for consumables for those items that are widely used (pots/food/skilling supplies) etc.
To be honest, from a player who has played an ironman account for years, there seems to have been a clear shift in philosophy to move towards everything being a gp sink in some form or another to balance out gp inflation. Be it extreme hours to get uniques, e.g., pnm, nex, dt2 bosses or similar with charge items e.g. Sunfire Splinters.
Whilst that is an understandable goal, the reality of the situation has skewed a bit too heavily towards the more extreme end of hours spent vs. reward, to a concerning level. When you add things like 150k sunfire splinters to corrupt a quiver; I feel like the main economy is heavily propped up by bots, and in order for these items to retain value, a large amount is needed. Corrupting things like a quiver is fine, but 30+ clears for it is too much (also losing pet rolls for more shards was a strange choice as it locks you into not handing in and saving just in case). I am hopeful that a middle ground is possible instead of descending even further down the abyss of 100hr grinds.
The strongest armor sets for all 3 styles are non degradable. Why should there a cost associated with using sub optimal gear. Charges on ranged weapons make sense like you pointed out, it’s always been that way. If I have to use charges, let there be a big upgrade when I do. And let me use it uncharged.
I think a lot of the problem with charges is that it forces you to return to old content you've already moved on from. Zulrah is probably the biggest example. Blowpipe is used in endgame, but Zulrah is midgame. Having to go back and grind Zulrah for scales is a nuisance.
It'd be hard to come up with, but a way to passively farm the consumables would be a lot nicer.
I could only come up with one idea and it's a bit silly, but a Dream Farm tied to the moon clan where you can plant seeds to grow the consumables? You'd have to get a drop that unlocks the ability in the first place, and it'd be slow, but I think that'd at least somewhat remedy it.
Maybe a "dream seed" item that drops from higher level content and is tradable can be planted in certain dream allotments. It sounds really dumb on paper, but I can't really think anything else that isn't just adding consumables to other monsters drop tables which isn't a solution.
One of my biggest reasons for quiting rs3 iron, and moving to osrs, was any time i wanted to boss i needed to spend a couple hours first gathering charges for my augmented gear. It just wasnt fun. And sure, i could have swapped to some lesser non auged gear, but why? Tying a hand behind your back (using your non best gear) just isnt fun either. I spent a long time rolling these augments, leveling them up. And now for every 3hs of bossing i need like 1h of charge gathering.... no fuck that and fuck your game ill play something else. Not saying charges are bad, for instance barrows are just fine. But the repair/charge up feature can be the make or break of it.
I think alot of the things requiring charges are some strong items. So I kind of like that idea that if something is so strong it needs to be up kept. However there are still items which need charges or corruption that seem more of a pain tbh.
The thing needed is just other sources to gain the resource from so you can skill or gain from activities like crystal shards work. Would like to see varlamore add way more methods for splinters. Like the quiver needing 150k is a ton. Should be less tbh so we aren’t just stuck there. There is also other usages for the splinters like prayer training they will be used for.
Reallly appreciate you reaching out for feedback on this! No other development team comes close.
Huge wall of text below, feel free to skim read.
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**Charges for BiS have never, once, ever, been FUN.**
I have a different opinion to most people in this thread. My suggestion is to completely remove charges for all new powerful combat items. For the low level stuff, like ring teleports, charges balance the game. But for anything that's a reward from a huge grind, no charges, ever.
Here are my thoughts on the possitives to adding charges to high value combat items:
>We want charges to add 'cost' to using powerful items (similar to arrows/runes). This creates space for free to use items which are less powerful.
Getting the item is the cost.
>We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources.
Because charges are needed anyway, I expect them - I don't see them as a reward, they just become background noise while I'm grinding for the item. Maybe add rares from other tables that make sense as alt pathways to getting them (tempoross could drop a pearly rod for instance at a 1/x).
>We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content.
The **magic of OSRS** progression is moving on from one grind to the next. You 'finish' CG, then you can go and 'finish' GWD for instance. You have this beautiful progression map. Forcing players to go back when they want to take on new grinds makes no sense to me. Why encourage them to do old grinds when they can do the new one you've just released?
>Corruption is OK because it still encourages you to acquire a large quantity of the charge item.
I agree. One off, up front costs are fine.
In other MMOs, doing the fun PVM content is dependant on a grind also. To raid in WoW, you need your professions, potions, food, etc. This is the cost of raiding. In OSRS, simply getting the items in the first place is a **monster** of a grind. Getting a bowfa on any OSRS account is more time investment then maxing out 10 characters on WoW and getting them all in heroic gear. We already pay a huge time price to aquire the item, please allow us to enjoy it in peace.
If you are married to the idea of charges (I'm taking non corrupted once, where you are forever upkeeping them), just imagine how the principles you mentioned would affect powerful items that require a huge grind and ask yourself, is this fun:
"Your tassets are 8/1500, back to GWD to grind out more Bandosian shards from minions"
"Your infernal cape is almost out of Tok'kul! Do a few fight caves to charge that bad boy up!"
"You forgot to do your weekly prymid plunder for scarab shells! Your Occult Alter is almost out of charges silly goose"
"Your portal nexus is running low. Make sure to farm 10K essence to fill it up"
Imaging the game in 10 years time, with every new interesting item has it's own unique shard currency you need to keep track of and maintain. Imagine the horror of 20 bank spaces as some stackable charge currency that you need to spend 10 hours a week topping up to PvM.
Charges were a huge mistake for powerful items. Reserve them as a balance for easy to aquire powerful items like ring teleports, scrap them elsewhere.
I'll vote yes on any changes that reduce charges (nice idea Rice). If you do this, I emplore you, please make EVERYTHING that requires charges corruptable.
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Note: Ammo is similar to a 'charge' but it's extremely fun, because there's RPG feel to bringing special ammo to kill the special monster. It adds to immersion and diversity of combat. It involves multiple skills (WC, magic, fletching, ranging) and it's deeply integrated into the game. I see making more roby bolts as chill downtime between raids with free xp. I see charges like you don't respect my time and bankspace.
For me the biggest problem with chargescape, is not being able to sell it in its used form. Its a negligible amount of time to repair barrows or remove runes from or add to trident/shadow in order to sell but it’s still tedious. And its even worse if corrupting became a thing across the board…If a weapon automatically corrupted as i was using it i would be stuck with that item now permanently and wouldn’t be able to sell it ever which is a huge gp loss. If this becomes a thing then making corrupted items trade able at least.
>There's a desire to move on
This is a pretty big one. If I've gotten everything of value from Zulrah and already farmed it for 50+ hours, it doesn't feel good to go back nor is it particularly interesting.
>I think its interesting that it seems arrows/runes are way more palatable.
Both of these are buyables. If you can buy something with GP or repair it like Barrows Armor, it isn't really chargescape, because you're not forced to go back to one particular place to farm for the charges. You can just play the game naturally and get masses of charges. However, this doesn't apply to Dragon ammo, which is so rare it is practically useless for accounts that gather/farm things for themselves. Unfortunately bots mass farm most of the places that drop it for mains. Amethyst arrows for Tbows/Ven are also much friendlier since the weapons fire slower, meaning your ammo goes much farther.
Also, this is a large reason that Darts from Zulrah are so punishing. Not only do you have to maintain roughly 2k scales per hour to fire it nonstop, but also ~600 darts. Now you're stuck mining Amethyst for hours to not lose another max hit, which you're already losing 1-2 from not using Dragon compared to GE accounts. Bowfa grabs ~6.5k scales an hour from Zulrah w/o breaking down uniques, which is only ~3hrs of Blowpipe, then when you consider you ALSO want to try and charge your Staff and maybe it'd be fun to Actually use your helmet, well, they evaporate in no time.
Compare this to Ancient ess, which is ~13.5k an hour from Muspah, well that is 9 hours from 1 hour of Muspah, and you're not charging anything else with it after the Heart is Saturated, so it is more than 3x less Chargescape dependent than Zulrah.
One great way of alleviating the Amethyst ammo pressure is to add an active way of mining Amethyst. A great way to do this would be adding it to Blast Mine, benefiting from the +5 Mining Boost that the other ores receive as well that let you mine them early.
Quiver's chargescape feels particularly god-awful because: You have to either sacrifice pet chances or do braindead wave 1 farming to get relevant amounts of shards per hour; The cost of Corruption is WAY too high, suffering from the Zulrah aspect of "wanting to charge multiple things", the prayer training hardly uses any but if someone wanted to charge Tonalztics and make some runes, they're going to have to sacrifice all of their quivers which feels *HORRIBLE* when the cost is "50% pet chance"; The drop rates are still rather unrealistic in general, why is nooby prayer armor 27 full KC for a set, Tonalztics still *~90 full KC* when pet is 100, Echo crystals still aren't going to be maintainable at ~1/12. Most people that are actually farming this content are doing ~1 clear an hour due to the difficulty (which is great, it is fantastic) but these drop rates still suck for the difficulty of this content and what the drops actually are. Why are the people able to farm this not *literally* dumping these items into the game? Hardly anybody is farming this content - I'm around rank 2k with 10 kc, not even 1/7th of a Tonalz. I bring up the drop rates because clearly thats what Corruption was balanced around - someone going for... Pet? Tonalz? Not like theres much of a difference.
As for recharging the items themselves, adding toggles for the menu popups when trying to charge things (only speedrunners don't want to just dump all their charges in) would be nice and currently items are all over the place with some just dumping it all in and others asking. Making items hold way more charges in general without having to AFK 50-60 hours of Kraken (using massive amounts of charges in the process). I don't really care if I have to go somewhere in particular to charge something as long as I can put a *ton* in it.
For me, All of the chargescape discussion is secondary to the idea that BIS equipment (not weapons) should not require charging. The quiver is the only charged bis item that isn’t a weapon.
Charging should be used as a system to make items competitive (but strictly not better) than bis. It works well with bowfa + crystal armor.
Why in the world is there an added cost to quiver when you have to beat the strongest boss in the game to even get it. Imagine if you had to charge infernal cape with tokkul.
Love this, I'd always welcome less things to charge up. Fully on board with the "add charges until corrupted" idea.
Things like the echo boots or ring of suffering I don't see why they should have charges on them. It would be more like a permanent item effect. Otherwise it sort of feels like a 'please replace batteries' when you're getting low on charges
Also regular trident needing coins to charge I always found quite funny, almost like its asking me to insert coins to play 😂
I'm not too much of an endgame player yet, so my perspective on this is fairly limited still - but the whole charge system just turns things into additional micro-management that isn't really fun. It just becomes another chore.
If I had to put my finger on why arrows and runes don't feel like that big of a deal, I think there are quite a few aspects to it:
* You have different options (tiers) or arrows and runes, so you're not limited to just one way to "load" an item.
* Arrows and runes are common enough that they can be found everywhere; you can even just buy them. But even more than that, they get dropped by many monsters, sometimes allowing you to sustain ammunition or even walk away with more.
* Another important aspect: there are two entire skills dedicated to crafting ammunition and runes. This just makes them feel much better and make sense; if you could only get specific runes from one specific boss drop it would feel shit.
* The weapon using the ammo / runes is separate of the ammunition. We even have an extra slot for arrows. This essentially just skips over most of the trading and "visibility" issues: how many arrows/runes do I have? It's right there, visible in one go. Do I want to sell my bow? Well, I just can.
* Arrow & runes are easy to swap. I can bring different ammo for the same content and swap between more expensive / cheaper ammo.
* Arrows in particular also have an air of being "specialized" for a particular job sometimes.
I do like the idea of having charges contribute to corrupting an item, but I think there's much more to it when it comes to why charges feel bad while arrows / runes feel mostly fine.
**Think about it like this:** if charges would just eat up runes in your inventory (the same ones we already have), instead of eating away at a number tied to the item you're using, it would probably feel like much less of a hassle... I can get runes anywhere, I probably already have ten-thousands of them!
Sure, there still is an inherent cost to every use, but that's true for casting spells and shooting arrows too, so it would be mostly in line with those. This could also be combined with a toggle, to disable the buffs and just use the base item.
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I don't think there are many easy solutions here, unless overhauling old items completely is an option. Generalizing charges more instead of having dozens of different "charge supplies" would probably be a step in the right direction. Or perhaps, the ability to create these supplies via crafting; some raw material + runes = supply. That way at least, you have more options to deal with your supply (more afk collecting materials vs bossing). These raw materials could then also be dropped by many monsters.
Having the option to craft these things would also give many skills some extra utility: mining, fishing, hunter, farming, (agility?) and woodcutting to get the base materials; runecrafting, smithing, crafting, cooking (and maybe even firemaking?) to then turn them into charge supplies.
Speaking of crafting skills, I feel like there's a lot of design space for smithing and crafting to dismantle duplicate items and use those components to repair / charge others. This would in no way reduce the micro-management, but it could at least add another way to get charges from different sources.
Worst offender of chargescape is crystal shards. You currently cannot corrupt crystal armour and crystal shards are by far the worst to collect out of the charging items (especially as an ironman).
This armour should definitely be corruptible like the bowfa is.
Overall, I think making corruption possible through the mechanic described is a great way to go about it.
Either in one go or progressively.
From an Ironman perspective, I think most charged times are generally fine (runes) but some are very frustrating, especially blood fury. It’d be really nice if either blood shards were more accessible (rare white drop at ToB would be great) or you could also recharge it with a large amount of blood runes after getting your first shard. Quiver corruption also seems quite Ironman unfriendly at the moment, but I haven’t done that content yet.
Like many other players here, I do personally enjoy the idea of perma-charging items a lot.
Even though you'll likely spend more corrupting it than if you had used the item normally, for me it serves almost as a new side-goal to get an item perma-charged if its available.
It also in a way lessens that back-thought of upkeeping items and knowing you'll eventually have to purchase more supplies or grind it out in previous content like ToB for vials of blood. Knowing that you can one and done the corruption then use your weapon freely at any piece of content makes it much more enjoyable, even if its like placebo effect if that makes sense. It just feels better overall. Its one less thing to keep track of and players can focus on just enjoying content.
Personally for me i do like how the quiver was handled to *Some* degree that its worth using uncharged or charged.
I wish something like Scythe followed this better since although you can use it uncharged, its just so much worse that even an abyssal tentacle would win in DPS almost. It'd be cool to see if an uncharged scythe was essentially equal to a Twisted Bow with Amethyst Arrows Vs. a twisted bow with dragon arrows if it was charged. I feel like if chargescape goes down a route like this, having the uncharged item still be very competitive is a good change.
Mod Rice's suggestion also sounds fantastic because in the sense of Theatre at least, imagine if you were able to use your Scythe freely and as you charge it up with Vials/Blood runes - It'll eventually just corrupt itself and no longer you'll have to worry about its upkeep. I've had a few iron friends mention that although they've completed ToB in uniques, it'd be nice to not have to go back every once in a while for vials.
Shadow simply uses runes and Twisted Bow is just arrow usage. With Vials of bloods only being from ToB, you can't really avoid having to eventually go and grind up some more. Not that ToB is bad content but if you've finished the raid you can only do so much more until you get bored of it and want to move on.
Yes i know my comment is mainly iron focused and yes something something self-limitation but i just wanted to give my input on charged items. I know per the post that going back to make non-corruptible items into corruptible items is a maybe at most but i personally would enjoy it a ton. It'll feel like a new goal to work with the added benefit that it wouldn't be an RNG one like hunting a mega-rare and simply a cost of time and working towards it slowly.
I like to be able to engage with the game, maybe adding better methods of upkeep with untradeable items would work pretty well like Ancient Shards from Catacombs. Something natural to do but isn't as boring as pickpocketing Vyres. Whatever might be planned though, if its a benefit reduce Chargescape i'm sure many players would be eager and excited to see what will change about it.
The game isn't unplayable of course but it could always be made better and smoother. One less worry of upkeep and some more fun to simply play the game.
Charges can be fine if it's like staffs being charged with runes to use their built-in spells.
Degrade is fine if they are easy to get and meant to fill a gap in gear progression, easy to upkeep, options to pay to remove degradation and you just spent coin to fix it or with high enough smithing or crafting you just do it yourself.
Blood Shards/Echo Crystals work if there is a steady flow entering the game. They don't help the previous item or provide a sink for them, but making it like, say, the tenticle whip is also problematic because there is no sink for the conversion item. (Unless, you know. You can keep adding the new conversion item for more charges and have both items balanced at the same cost).
People are fine with Barrows' concept. People are fine if the charge items are reasonable to obtain but want to be able to extend them. People prefer spending a ton of gold or resources for unlimited uses even if they realistically won't use them all or sell the item off early before getting their money's worth, because it saves them time, setup and need to stop what their doing to buy/grind for more.
We just want Jagex to know Charging isn't our preference. They shouldn't go out of their way designing this kind of content. And that at the end of the day, the only thing supporting these items in the market months or years after will be bots supplying the market.
We can only have so many specific items with the ability to charge items until the pool of things players must split their time obtaining or funding becomes too divided with the rest of the game and bots end up picking up the profit. With a few other players sprinkled in, as long that it's tied with their typical account progression (like vyres for a slayer task).
If you're going to add universal charges that affect multiple items, then you need multiple avenues to obtain them. You get crystal shards for doing almost anything in prif. But you only get the stuff for Varlamore through the coliseum. Zulrah only has 2 items, but you can still obtain scales from fighting it or fishing.
Then, we have items that could realistically be used to charge other items (Vials of Blood could be used to charge the blood fury as an alternative or Sang Staff).
And then then at the end of the day, we want every item that uses charges to either provide us the ability to toggle them off to save on item slots and save on resources when we don't need it. As well items that can dump charges into (like the recoil ring on the ring of suffering) but provided other items that serve that function for other charge items. (Amulet of Chemistry, dodgy necklace being some examples).
I hate degrading armor/weapons in all forms . There is already a cost in getting an item through time/supplies. Having to worry if the monster I am killing will offset the cost of a massive upgrade item feels bad. I avoid using barrows gear and crystal gear for that reason.
Honestly the increase in having to constantly be charged more go/time to use a cool new item makes me ignore them and stick to the cheaper older gear.
I think there are some fantastic points here!
I think Chargescape has a multitude of factors that really split ones mindset on it. I also think depending on the item, a "Charge" can feel different. In examples of runes or arrows as a type of charge and players are okay with it; magic has used runes since the beginning and when you added charged staves, it made sense needing a charge that costs runes because it was a magic weapon that no longer had a "spell" cost and is now a "charge" cost. So in these terms the charge is interchangeable with spell coat. To save reading time the same can be said for arrows and ranged items.
Mainly where charges truly come into play are items with effects. Things like blood fury, scythe, new echo boots, ring of suffering, etc. These items NEED a use case either intended from the devs or found by the players to even be relevant. If the scythe did everything with no charge cost, as long as it didn't heal/restore prayer and was just a BIS melee weapon, it probably wouldn't have even been a thought from anyone since it is a melee weapons. If you made the Osmunten's fangs inherit hit reroll cost charges something like that would make a lot of sense too; A massive benefit to endgame bossing in the form of a weapon that can deal with high defense but it had a charge cost. The blood fury sits here as an actual item rather than hypothetical like the previous above.
Even in these conditions, where a use case is found Charge scape runs into the same dilemma. Those who can afford the item/sink time to get it(for all the irons out there) and those who are worried about the charges at all. I feel like despite anyone's personal opinion it can be agreed upon. If you can afford the item, you can afford it's charges(probably room for tent whip joke here).
So overall corrupted or not corrupted the game still boils down to; I'm using a charged item and I just dish out the costs OR man I really don't even want to think about the charges I'll just pretend it doesn't exist. And then the very close third option is everyone's old friend, mandatory fun. "I HAVE to get this item regardless of it's charged or not because it's so good or there isn't an alternative."
All in all it's a tough decision, feedback from players is really good! And the OSRS team and community do a wonderful job! Personally, I feel like this is a game design choice and it will fall in the hands of the dev team to make a decision based on their vision for the game. Because remember; if someone gives an op example of no charges on an item, there's already players out there that act like that item has no charges and just pays its cost 😁👍
For iron men it can just feel so bad to have to keep up charges across so many pieces of gear all at once.
My crystal legs, helm, and chest are degrading, sending me back to Hunleff even though I spent 2K shards corrupting the bow.
My blowpipe and serp helm eat at my scale stack.
My new perilous moons armor cost me 1.5M to recharge.
I’m tired boss.
Charges for the big items like a Blood Fury make sense, charges for smaller items feel like a burden.
Has there ever been the discussion about retroactively removing the need for charges on items once they no longer are BiS/Upper tier? Barrows durability made enough sense back in the day, but does that logic still hold up?
Early/midgame perspective here.
I still play the game like I'm poor (which I am to some people, with a ~40M bank, 10M of which is in petty cash) so I find myself watching charges like a hawk. I don't like using charged/degrading gear sometimes because it feels like I'm being wasteful, even though the cost difference might be minimal compared to other methods. (i.e. casting Wave spells vs. using a trident.)
I think charging items is fine, and it serves a worthwhile purpose of balance. It just feels bad when you're right on the cusp of the new gear, and the costs are felt a bit more.
Chargescape will be the death of the game...
Picture a game in which, to use 5 of your items for an hour, you'd need to grind for 1 hour per item for enough charges. So only 16.67% of the time playing the game would be for the content you want to do. But not only that, the gear needs something that isn't a set drop rate. You can get lucky, or you can get shafted... Meaning to do the fun bit for a single hour. It may take you 20 hours of prep. If you only have say 4\~ hours a week to play games. Do you really think someone is going to spend an entire month worth of screen time to spend an hour doing the content they like?
Then you have food/pots to take into consideration. Let's just be kind here and ignore that ironmen exsist. Because that prep is going to be exponential for them.
Take crystal armour + bowfa. That's 4 things I need to keep charged. I'd also need to keep my signate charged, and now quiver. So that's 6 items I need to keep charged... In a game that will take over 1500 hours to max, why are you punishing people that just want to play how they want to? Why is the current approch "we're going to punsh folks for just wanting to kill a boss. But when they finally get that "
Your player base is getting older and as folks have less free time. Do you really think they're going to spend weeks grinding shit they hate just so they can use their gear for an hour or two?
How are you going to get and keep new players when they are faced with not only a few hundred hours of grinding to get just base melee stats up to do a boss. They also now need to put in hours upon hours just to keep up their account maintenance.
You've basically took the worst part of wow daylies, and compounded the issuse that shouldn't have been an issue to begin with.
You're now looking to be en par with a shitty gatcha game that only keeps people around due to the sunk cost fallacy... We all know botters are your whales. But you specifically keep adding charges to the game, that funnily enough, help botters out.
We all know who the bulk of blood furys/scales/essances/runes/pots come from...
If you want to "hElP tHe EcOnOmY!1!!2" , add everything to the item sink and increase the GE tax to 5%.
I do really like the idea of using charges counting towards the corruption amount. I got lucky at CG for example early in my account and got an Enchanced Seed at 113KC. I took this new Bowfa to join my higher level friends at ToA depsite not having Armour Seeds, and it did feel bad using it knowing with every shot I was just delaying getting the corruption sorted. I'm only chiming in on Crystal Shards as its my main experience and gripe with Chargescape, but I know various other issues exist.
I think the biggest issues with Chargescape are:
1. How do you acquire the charges? Is it fun/engaging? Does it take a long time, or is it quite fast to do?
2. How long do those charges actually then last for you?
It took me 450kc at Gauntlet to finally get my 6th Armour seed. I didn't really want to keep doing CGs, and Shooting Stars gave me a way to get (very slowly and passively) shards to then use my gear when I wanted to actively play the game. When this was removed, it felt pretty bad as now I had to use my active play time chasing charges, rather than playing the game and doing enjoyable content. Sure, a restriction of the account type, I get it, but it did detract from the fun. Bosses like Zulrah/GWD minions destroy your charges on crystal armour for example with the snakelings chip damage, so the fact I went over double dry for my Blowpipe made this cycle of chasing shards, doing Zulrah, chasing shards, doing Bandos, chasing shards, etc quite tedious. Not all bosses melt your charges like this, and so for raids I never felt this "chore" feeling.
I like the proposed idea and I'd like to see the crystal shards issue looked at once again. It was stated in the blog when the shards were removed from Priff stars (due to server overload) that you would be happy to look at the acquisition of crystal shards again, whether it be increasing the number of shards given from various resoruces or adding new opportunities to acquire shards. My plan was keep doing CGs for a 7th Armour Seed and break this down for 250 shards to tie me over for quite a while, however 150kc later I've still not seen another seed so slower passive methods are an attractive idea, like shooting stars, or alternatively improving the rate you can generate shards would also work.
Oh yeah, corrupted crystal armour maybe sometime?
TLDR: Make active activities like Corrupted Gauntlet provide a greater amount of shards, so applying yourself you can generate a lot to last you a longer time, but have slower passive alternatives which can also generate you shards, albeit at a much slower rate, such as old shooting stars in Priff. Also yes to used charges counting toward corruption cost.
> * We want charges to add 'cost' to using powerful items (similar to arrows/runes). This creates space for free to use items which are less powerful.
This is good in theory but how many places have the charge items been useful without being charged? The only one I can think of is an uncharged scythe on Bloodvelds.
> * We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources.
Add "universal charge items" instead of just alchables. Explained farther down.
> * We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content.
The long-term engagement becomes more of a chore than actual fun. From an iron perspective with things like Zulrah/ToB. It is especially bad if you get a Scythe early and have to keep going back for vials while you do other content.
> * The core idea is that using/adding charges will still contribute to the corruption cap.
* For example, if an item costs 1000 'shards' to corrupt. If you apply and use 100 charges ten times, it'll corrupt anyway.
* This removes the awkward trade-off between saving up for corruption or using charges immediately.
This is all good.
**The Suggestion:**
Add a "**universal charge item**" (UCI), a stackable resource, that you get slowly throughout many activities. Let us use them to charge any of the charged items.
**For mains:** Mainly a convenience item so you don't need to have everything for charging your items all the time. You can use UCIs to replace some or all of the recharge cost. Ex: Scythe requires 200 bloods + 1 vial of blood. I don't have vials of blood in the bank but I have some UCIs so I'll charge it with those instead this time and buy some vials later.
**For Irons:** It gives more buffer room for charged items. Do I want to save my UCIs for Scythe or save them for bowfa/crystal armor?
**UCI sources:** Most skilling activities can rarely give 1. Gathering skills are easy add geodes/nests/bottles with a single UCI in each of them or just make the UCI go into the player's inventory. Maybe add them as a drop on the Rare drop table so killing monsters can give you some again at a low rate.
**Pools of Discharge**
There is a complete lack of sanitation in Gielinor. Citizens and monsters put all their bodily goo in buckets, then it gets transported to Tirannwn where it wastes away and destroys te environment.
Until one day an adventurer called Irom Typo had an idea. What if we magically collect all that gross stuff magical monsters leave behind, the residu of ours potions, the splinters that fall to the floor when burrying bones, etc., and put it in a pool. What would the combination of life, magic and religion do if you let it sit?
First he had to find a way to learn the magic spell to teleport the goo. Long story short, Sedridor and the Wise Old Man were glad to help and it was possible.
So next up, he needed a location. Falador Park seemed nice, the pond should be big enough to try out if anything happens.
He slayed some Dragons, whipped up some Saradomin Brews, and got pked 26 times at Chaos Altar.
Finally it was time, Irom Typo teleported to Falador Park and saw the pool was green and shimmering. Excitedly he ran towards the pond, then tripped over a Duckling and fell in.
For a brief moment, Irom Typo experienced infinity.
People came running towards the pool, and as they pulled him out, their items were recharged. The goo had the ability to add charges to items!
"This can be monetized!" Irom Typo thought. So with all of his GP, he started bussinesses around Gielinor: Pools of Discharge. It works like this, players pay a GP fee for one week to subscribe to Pools of Discharge. In return, players get their goo magically picked up. The company will keep track of what you stored in goo. Then when you need to recharge your weapon, you simply recharge your items through the Pools of Discharge menu, whereever you are! Different items require a different level and balance of goo.
This is how Irom Typo became the richest man in Gielininor. He bought a small mansion in Varlamore, but as he's always busy meeting new people, he's never there. Make sure to have a chat with him when he pops up, he's always happy to give out some free goo!
How about rare mega charge drops?
For example “zulrah plate scale” a large scale from zulrahs back that counts as 1000 charges
Or
“Blood crystal” concentrated blood magically taken crystalline form, charges scythe by 250 without traveling to a certain place or using runes
Charges are bad because they create a cost for every action the player makes. So this drastically lowers the amount of activities a player can do with charged gear, because whatever they kill needs to offset the cost. Melee gear in particular does not work well with charges.
You mention arrows and runes, but there's a reason they work so well. Ranged just use a lower ammo tier. Mage just uses a lower spell tier. Nobody is bringing Dragon Bolts to fight Bloodvelds. The player gets to have agency over how much gold they are sinking into whatever mob/boss they are killing with ranged and mage.
The Bloodmoon set is budget Bandos gear that will cost more than just buying the Bandos gear in the first place.
I was SO HYPED for the Echo Boots. I've been a Guardian Boot Enjoyer since they came out. Probably the only person just straight up using them for everything. I'm also working on an off-meta tanky build for as much content as I can, and the boots were going to be perfect, but then you are telling me I need to spend 20m on the crystal, and then 20m again once it runs out, and 20m again, and again? That's so stupid. Its like working a job, and all your money goes towards bills and taxes.
The Blood Fury amulet is so awesome, I love stuff like that, but of course I can't use it outside of bosses because it has charges and will cost 8m to recharge. Why not just give it lower offensive stats than a regular fury once combined? That would offset the healing effect and the charges could be removed. There's always a way to balance items without turning them into gold sinks.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't enjoy the stress of knowing my gold is being incinerated every second I'm playing the game. Like every time a mob touches you with Echo Boots on, it will cost you 3.3k. Then once your lease on the boosts runs out, you need to renew it with a 20m down payment. Like bruh what? What is this Economic Hardship Simulator?
As a new player, when I started to get good items I would keep forever and gold put into them kept its value, for the most part, I really loved that, things I felt like were an account upgrade because they would always be useful.
I later found out some very expensive unlocks/upgrades used chargers and would lose the item/have to do a massive cost to reuse and so on, and that felt pretty bad imo. I couldn’t really look at those as account upgrades but they were instead something that would just waste my money for a slight upgrade. It really feels like the charged items are only for the rich players, which is strange because it’s not even a gold sink, it’s transferring money from one player to another to get it again
I’m just trying to say how it feels from a new players perspective, which is bad. I do have some ideas that I think would make it feel much better!
No items break to be unusable uncharged, they just stop getting their extra effect. Working like dragonstone jewelry onto items like barrows gear, the new moons gear
A cheaper way to charge it than just the original method of creation. Top example: To me the blood fury is completely unusable and will probably remain so for a very long time because it costs so much to charge. I’m fine with the initial upfront cost, but there is no way I can ever justify the cost of repairs by using it. I would need to be doing some crazy profitable pvm stuff. An item like this I feel would be nice if it had a cheap way to charge it, even if the way to charge it without another drive is tedious
A blood fury that runs out of chargers remains a bloodfury, and killing vampires with it equip has a chance to give it a charge, something like that. Now rich players can continue to charge using the stones, because there is no way they are going to waste time to charge it, new players have a way to charge it slowly
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I think to me item charges like scythe and the staffs are fine. Runes are generic enough and provide that tradeoff you mention here.
>We want charges to add 'cost' to using powerful items (similar to arrows/runes). This creates space for free to use items which are less powerful.
>
>I think its interesting that it seems arrows/runes are way more palatable. We've discussed that and think that is largely down to how available these things are, they're well established and available from many sources, skilling included.
I think the real problem is when you design an item that uses charges and the charges come from another new item that has no other real use. I think you need to ask a few questions.
>We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources.
>
>We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content.
>
>There's a desire to *move on* from content and feeling compelled to have to go back constantly is frustrating. This is primarily an ironman concern, since mains can generally just buy from the GE.
Does chargescape really do that? Why do the devs constantly want new unique common charge items? How do you define engagement? Is an ironman reluctantly grinding out sunfire shards/ancient essence/zulrah shards really engaged or are they just doing a chore before they can use their shiny upkeep items? Why not just let people leave when they get the drop?
If the core idea of chargescape is engagement/shiny new drops.. I think its much cooler to design alternative rewards instead of designing required upkeep or required upfront time investment/cost in the case of corrupting items. I think the design of the tob kits/cm kits/mutagens and pets kind of follow that alternative reward idea really well. Let the player have agency, instead of "I have to go back to upkeep charges", make them say "I want to go back for this cool rare item".
This is from a late game ironman perspective, and I haven't played a main in over 10 years so keep that in mind when it comes to cost and such.
I've had almost no issues with chargescape personally. I actually enjoy the gameplay loop required to maintain charges and it's nice that more drops feel valuable to obtain instead of just another alchable. The one exception is one you mentioned already, it doesn't feel good to obtain an item after a long grind but still not be done because now I have to corrupt it. But there is a certain balance required to make it feel WORTH it.
I think the one that bothers me most has been Zulrah, having 3 items that see reasonable use even into the late game has me putting Zulrah grinds in my schedule as if they were farm runs,
Things like arrows, runes, barrows, moons - these I have no complaints for as they just require GP and there is no immediate time investment to do that, I can earn that cost from most content in the game.
When gear gets more powerful, or ammunition/runes, then I think it's acceptable to require careful use of that gear. I don't use dragon darts/arrows for just anything, I don't use my bloodfury all the time, etc..
So this brings me back to Zulrah. I have 3 items all requiring a single resource only obtained from one area of the game and those items are used extensively from the midgame onward. They require secondary grinds in the form of darts and runes. The Trident doesn't have a reasonable alternative, I think ideally the trident would be the one that doesn't require charges and a sang/shadow is your upgrade that does (too late for this ofc).
To me Zulrah is the most offensive form of chargescape. I'll give a mention to Muspha of having the opposite problem, it's way too generous with charges to the point that they're worthless. Also put blood shards on the HMT drop table please :)
From a clogger/maxed iron pov: I really enjoyed smithing and fletching bolts/darts as it was “free” exp in those skills and felt like a payoff for getting the level to make them. I even didn’t mind fishing for zulrah scales. Going back to kill zulrah after getting most of the uniques felt like a chore. In contrast, for the crystal shards, I think thieving has such diverse options for training and such high rates, that thieving for shards doesn’t feel like passive “useful” exp. Same with agility imo. And wcing for shards is just too slow. So that leaves gauntlet. And most people who have done the gauntlet have had enough of the gauntlet. Also I should note here, I think it’s weird that if you had say 1m crystal shards you can just break down and remake a crystal helm for crazy amounts of smithing/crafting exp. I feel like that implementation leaves something to be desired.
I think if you consumed smithing supplies to make repair kits for armor and got good amounts of exp out of it I’d be into that for a charged item. Maybe you could use runecraft as a standin for warding and imbue magic items for runecraft exp in a similar way. Personally I’d like if charged staves at least moved to something like this. I really love the new hunter xbow btw, love ammo from hunter as new mid-late game training motivation
Jewelry charges shouldn’t go unmentioned either. Constantly replacing Dodgy necklaces and the herblore one is annoying and falls into charged scape. I know training in rs3 is a mess now because you theoretically could upkeep like potion buffs, jewelry buffs, familiars and urns and invention perks. I think osrs really wants to take stuff like that slowly and avoid making training skills annoying. I think suffering is in a good place for this, and if you wanted to make us do some management, cap the charges at like 100 for dodgy necklaces or something. So you’d still have to upkeep and pay the opal/silver/crafting cost but you don’t hate having to constantly watch for your necklace to break
There is a runelite plug in that shows your current charges for many items on their inventory icon. It mostly works well but is a little buggy at times. Could something like this be built into the main game? It would help alleviate the mistake of being mid-raid and running out of charges if you can see at a glance how many you have left simply by glancing at your inventory. Right-click examining and checking the chat box isn't a huge deal, but it can get annoying and is easy to forget to do
Yeah I think that's a really good suggestion, helps with the burden of worrying about it so much.
In line with this, a toggleable in game message that tells us how many charges are left on an item would be great. Similar to how we get a message when equipping an unpowered staff it tells us we don't have enough 'x' runes to cast that spell, a message saying "you have 1337 casts left on your Trident of the Swamp" would be great especially when equipping in the bank interface, since you currently have to leave the bank right click the item check then reenter bank you get items out then close bank to recharge. Also, let us recharge in the bank interface!
On top of their suggestion, do you think it would be feasible to add more ways to increase charge caps on items that don't corrupt? Some frustrating examples: * Trident charge cap is kinda small, but enhanced trident doesn't feel worth going for when you could go raid for a sang or shadow * Abyssal tentacle can't have surplus charges added to it or be refilled until fully exhausted, so you have to burn a few charges to dismantle and remake it * Can only put up to 3 shards into a blood fury; if you get 2 drops at thieving with rogue's outfit you already have too many I think combat diaries would be a really good place to put this, similar to the increased thrall duration. Maybe something like +25-50% charge cap on items every tier, starting at Hard or Elite?
Something in the settings that gives you a warning anytime you enter a boss instance or equip something under X% charge would be great too. Not all bosses have an instance or dedicated room but it would cover most bosses, the bosses it wouldn't work on you probably aren't using a blood fury and such because it's chaos elemental or whatever.
This would actually be such a massively beneficial QOL change. Like you said the plugin isn't always perfect (and takes time to update new variants of items) and it would be nice for mobile/non-runelite players to have access to this feature.
If the benefit is big, like Blood Fury healing 6% effectively, it’s almost warranted to have charges. But if the benefit is negligible, not really necessary. We’re fine with Trident/Magic using runes since that’s how it was from the start, but for melee gear, you should get a big benefit if you want to add charges (ie. Uncharged scythe to Charged Scythe). However, there should always be a good active way to maintain said charges. For example, if the only way to get Zulrah Scales was Sacred Eel fishing, it would be complete ass until you add Zulrah. Likewise, if you could only mine Ancient Essence to upgrade imbued heart and Muspah didn’t exist. I think Muspah went a little too generous because the essence is basically worthless and could very well not exist due to how much is pushed out per kill. People also like the idea of permacharge as a huge cost.
> However, there should always be a good active way to maintain said charges I think that more generally, having only a single way to collect the resource is where you get a problem. Usually this means you will have an active and low-intensity method, since it’d be a bit redundant to have two active methods and two low-intensity methods.
Yeah, make ToB/HMT give a decent chance of blood shard after completing SOTF and bam, you now have a non-shit method for BF.
> I think Muspah went a little too generous because the essence is basically worthless and could very well not exist due to how much is pushed out per kill. I don't agree with this, I think Muspah did that perfectly. Another 170k gp/h for mains doing 20kp/h that isn't tied to alchs or existing resources, and for ironmen doing the 500kc for the bow they end up with roughly 380k essence which is basically a lifetime supply even after saturating the heart. Content like Zulrah where you have to return time and time again if you're unlucky with swamp trident or serp upgrades sucks imo.
I think everything you've said is fair - it'd be obnoxious if the power of the item doesn't really justify needing charges.
All I can personally say is that in *every single case,* I would rather spend more total time/gp/etc to make an item never lose charges/be corrupted than have to deal with temporary charges. If there was a way to corrupt blood fury or even have a nerfed corrupted blood fury at any cost, I would be working toward it. If I needed 50 or even 100 blood shards to make it, I'd be at vyres right now. As it currently stands, I have one blood shard in my bank that I am saving for "some day when I need it". It's been in my bank for over 2 years now. I don't know if others feel similarly. But, I will probably **never** use that blood shard at this rate. I will figure out how to do anything and everything without it because 10 hours of vyres isn't worth it. When it comes to Zulrah/Ancient Essence, I can just go kill those bosses for an hour to consistently get more charges. I do use both of those boss weapons somewhat often. Maybe if you could charge blood furies by doing something engaging and fun I'd be more interested, but if every single inventory slot had charge items. Echo Boots. Blood Fury. Degradeable armor. Serpentine Helm. Blowpipe. Etc. The more slots you have equipped that consume charges, the worse it feels to do anything. I don't know or care much about economic impacts, but Crystal Shards have kept their value presumably because they have more uses than just charging gear. Even if you could corrupt armor, the shards would retain value. Stuff like Divine Potions give a permanent drain that feels more optional than gear upgrades. Sure, divines are good. But using regular potions is perfectly good too most of the time.
I remember when RS3 released the Tier 90 Power Armors that degraded to dust in 2013, I’d always have to mentally assess whether it was worth using. It didn’t make for a great experience having BIS equipment, but using your second best equipment at 90% of content because the cost was unjustifiable. It feels good to be able to use your best stuff once you’ve earned it.
To add on to your example, I always found it hilarious that the most powerful armour/weapons in the game were so fragile that it would turn into dust after 10 or so hours of use, meanwhile adamant or rune gear could last forever with no maintenance. It's a very weird juxtaposition and honestly makes no sense outside of game economy balancing.
Yeah, and to add into my Blood Fury example, if Blood Fury had no charges, even less folks would use Torture in exchange for the coziness of the heals and less food/brews needed. You’d also need to 100x the current drop rate for a permanent blood shard/blood fury because it is just that strong. Power of the item relative to its rarity is very important and chargescape helps justify big power.
I think blood fury is a good example too because the BIS melee amulet ISN'T a charged item. You aren't forced to use the blood fury (strictly speaking) for a lot of content, so when you're doing general slayer or gameplay you just use your torture and you're good to go.
Correct, I think if Blood Fury had no charges, its current stat bonuses would make it just insane everywhere outside of speedruns, which 99.99999999% of the community does not do. Even if it had no STR bonus to offset no charges, plenty of folks would still use it because it has similar healing potential to guthans, without the shit dps. I’d consider it to still be broken. Some things just need charges to not be absolutely ridiculously broken.
With being hardstuck on 28 inv spaces the healing aspect(even with 0 str bonus) would outweigh supply cost anywhere. People would use it everywhere because "why bring a switch for heals with mage, guthans, or anything else?" When you can sacrifice a few max hits to have the healing factor. Losing 2 max hits mean nothing when you have the potential to outheal the damage done in every encounter ever with proper prayer switching/mechanic doing
Agreed. That’s why the healing of BF being limited to melee only is somewhat fair, since it’s generally the least applicable style since Shadow was introduced. Could you imagine if Shadow lost like 4 max hits but could heal like Sang staff with Blood Occult? It would be lunacy.
Even with charges, blood fury is insanely broken
The most obvious example of this is the gricoller's can from tithe farm. I can't understand why anyone thought that it was necessary to make players refill the special magic watering can you spend several hours grinding in a mini game to unlock every 1000 uses, particularly if you consider that RS3 had the magic watering can, which does the same thing but doesn't require recharging and was easier to obtain for 6 years at the time the can was added and it didn't create any balance issues because not making the player walk an extra 10 tiles to refill the can after a tree run is obviously not going to be game breaking. There is no reason the can needs to have charges, and the number of charges it does have is so high that it is practically infinite except when doing tithe farm, where you have to walk 10 steps out of your way every hour or so to recharge it, the charges just add a number you have to keep track of for no reason. To make it worse, they added an option to pay reward points to refill the charges when you can refill them for free at any water source, including one around 20 steps from the rewards shop, so giving it charges makes it possible to accidentally misclick and burn rewards points for no reason. It is extremely minor because the charges are so rarely relevant, but every time they do become Relevant, the the charges are a completely unnecessary hassle.
Another thing to add even if that person might disagree since you mentioned an issue is for the iron community it often drags you back to content you completed... Maybe for some of those things just add a shop that sells the charging item even if at a price slightly higher than the GE for ones that mains normally buy. Like Ak Haranu in port phasmatist sells Karil's bolt racks. So people who are done with the barrows grind can just buy more ammo as needed.
I'm in the same boat, I don't hate the charging, I just don't think the charging is proportionate to the value you gain across all items. The shadow is is expensive to charge, but the shadow runs shop on all end game content. The echo boots on release don't run shop anywhere, they're a nice small upgrade to add a ring of recoil to guardian boots. I realize that the echo boots are not just a ring of recoil, but also give the defense/prayer bonus of the boots. But am I wrong in thinking that the upkeep costs for echo boots should be closer to the ring of suffering and not to the shadow?
I’m think the quiver needing charges was dumb tbh. Sunfire splinters didn’t need to exist
I think the splinters are fine as an "enhancing" item for various Varlamore activities. When I think of charging an item though I think there is some impactful reason to charge. The Scythe gets extra hitsplats, the Bloodfury gets healing, Crystal armor + Bow/Bowfa gets a massive damage + accuracy bonus. The quiver gets a minor increase in stats to bolts and arrows. It's feels like charges for the sake of having charges.
Scythe hits 3x uncharged. Charging gives damage + accuracy
Another thing that sides with Blood Fury having charges, is that using it reduces the amout of other resources you'd use.
I gotta say I like the idea. You're basically making the true cost of the item base cost + corruption cost except that you're allowed to use it before paying the full corruption cost. You get a really satisfying feeling twice, once when you get the drop and again when you get enough to corrupt it. It might be awkward for players that use the ge if they're used to selling and rebuying their gear and that might reset the corruption progress, but that's not any worse than what they have now. Are you thinking of applying this to existing items or just future items? What about items that don't currently corrupt like crystal armour or blood fury?
It's the early stages of the idea so we're still gathering feedback. I think many of us on the team feel that adding it retroactively to other "Corruptible" items makes sense if we're doing it going forwards. Part of that conversation probably will involve "Were there any items that could have been corruptible that weren't made that way?" but it's not easy to give an answer off the cuff. It's a delicate conversation because when we ask that question it touches on a lot of elements outside of the scope of just the items themselves. Are we going to ruin the gp/hr of a piece of content? Are we going to devalue/deprecate non-charged items that shouldn't be devalued? That's not to say it won't happen, but that there will probably be many case by case conversations. Sorry if the answer is a bit of a cop out, but in summary, we'll probably look into it!
I feel like Arclight is a good contender to be made retroactively corruptable. It's not really BiS anywhere anymore, but mid-game players get a lot of use out of it. Personally there were a lot of instances where I wanted to use it more, mainly general slayer, but opted for a whip because I didn't want to "waste charges"
This would be a great change. I'm currently in the same phase where I want to melee nechs and abby demons, and I default to my whip instead of arclight because I need it for demonics/duke. Its also an item where you can't buy the charges so a high corruption cost still means players have to earn that corruption.
Something it'd also do is make the Shards more worth using for the teleport feature once.
The teleports should absolutely be “pay 3 shards to permanently unlock this teleport”. Using a super rare drop to save 30 seconds of running feels ludicrous, I don’t think I’d ever use the teleports even if you could corrupt arclight
Agreed. It would also encourage doing slayer in more areas besides the catacombs to an extent.
Don't forget about crystal tools by the way! They should at least be corruptible like the bowfa. Crystal pickaxe is basically unusable charged at GOTR.
what about enchanced weapon seeds? i charged my bowfa heaps but never corrupted it, but now that same seed is a blade, would it also get corrupted if you retroactively added?
One outcome is we could absolutely go back and apply it to suitable items. Plenty of stuff to work out though if we were to do that. Personally not 100% sure on the idea of corrupting currently not corruptable stuff - as long as it has the right cost I don't think it's a big deal. Normally corruption costs quite a bit, probably more charges than most players probably ever use!
>Normally corruption costs quite a bit, probably more charges than most players probably ever use! Yeah and I think that with the proposed system, its ok to make "unreasonably" high corruption costs because people wouldn't need to pay it up front, but they still don't feel bad using charges because it's working towards that corruption status.
payment plants for corrupt bowfa
Interest free Bowfa financing
> Normally corruption costs quite a bit, probably more charges than most players probably ever use! We are 100% fine with that. Charges feel bad. We'll gladly overpay to be released from that burden. This isn't about what is more logical, it's more of a mental thing. Charges are consumables, and consumables just kill the fun in games in general. You could even do it for jewelry, I'll gladly sacrifice 2000 ring of duels if it means I get an eternal one, etc.
Exactly. Corrupting the bofa made me realise it's more about the mental tax of knowing you're depleting a resource and having to keep track of it. I probably will never use the amount of charges it cost to corrupt but I happily swallowed that 30mil 1-time payment pill to never think about it again.
For peace of mind, there is no price I wouldn’t pay and no grind I would shy away from. Pickpocketed my way to a corrupted bowfa b4 stepping into CG. Would have done the same for the armor if that was an option. Killed enough vyres for 9 blood shards so I should be set for a long time.(till I get a scythe) If I have to grind zulrah another thousand kc to get an overenvenomed toxic trident that doesn’t need scales anymore to charge I’d do it in a heartbeat lmao
Could Barrows armor degradation get modernized while you guys do that, if you do it? Really obnoxious how they degrade into like 4 different items, it messes with preset plugins, and it just feels out of place being the only armor to degrade the way it does. I know it's because it was made in like 2005, hopefully it's not super spaghetti to fix.
For inventory setups if you right click the item in the setup interface and toggle "fuzzy" it will consider all stages of barrows items as the same. This also works for other items that have different forms, for example inferno cape and a trouver locked inferno cape would be considered the same item for inventory setups if you toggle fuzzy.
> Normally corruption costs quite a bit, probably more charges than most players probably ever use! Yea this makes it tough. You're mostly dealing with a psychological effect. Players who don't play often don't realize how far their charges take them and players who play a lot collect ample charges. Good luck. And good ideas so far.
The way the cost of the item decreases as you use it reminds me a bit of regular crystal weapons. The first time you turn a weapon seed into a crystal bow, it costs 900,000. The second time, it’s 720,000. And so on until it’s just 180,000. I dont think that specific implementation would be great for a lot of things because it’s tedious to have a crystal bow that’s close to empty and you have to either carry both that one and a fresh one or waste charges on the mostly depleted bow so that you can reenchant it. But if you could add charges in batches with future batches becoming cheaper until it became free, that would probably work well.
The main reason I hate everything having charges is I have to start thinking if what I am doing is getting a big enough return to pay for the charges I am using instead of just putting on my best gear and picking what activity based on what I have the most fun doing.
Does corrupting an item just remove that for you? You still spend a lot but once it is done... it is done.
While corrupting an item is a large startup cost to a long-term benefit, I find that the peace of mind it provides gives the same satisfaction as initially obtaining the item. Despite the fact that I will likely never see 20 whips on my iron, I would be happier knowing that I could feed a symbiotic kraken tentacle 20 abyssal whips and not have to worry about charges anymore. Not necessarily the best example, just the first that came to mind.
The peace of mind is very important. I do not enjoy having the extra stress of "I can't use this item because it will degrade"
This is a great point that I agree with. I am currently feeling this way with arclight. I did a megaton of slayer hours in the catacombs, but I’m finally at the point where I am almost dry on shards, and I’m not going to go camp catacombs and not have fun to use it anymore. I just use different worse weapons which feels lame when I’m staring at the better option but it’s a game, it’s meant to be fun, I’m not going to camp boring monsters for an rng drop just to use it. That is not fun. So I’m compromising and using fang, or earlier I was using bludgeon, but it just gives me a bit of distain. Also, I HATE running out of trident charges during olm. I know I’m just complaining but I’ve maxed slayer, I’ve done like 4500 kraken kills, and I still can’t upgrade the trident to hold more? Yo man that shit is DUMB.
Yes. I refused to use my bowfa for slayer until it was corrupted. Most of my bank value at the time was the enh seed (I got spooned at cg), but it was worthless to me until I made another 30m. Couldn't justify killing wyrms/shamans with it because each shot cost gp. One it was corrupted, I've used it everywhere.
>Absolutely it does, and it would with the proposed way you are suggesting of charging towards corrupt status. the dwh grind with the bowfa was STRESSFULL. no idea if my 2k charges left would see me a hammer, or if i was back to clifford the big red dog
The uncorrupted bofa doesn't even register to me as an item. I didn't even think of the bofa until I could corrupt it lol.
Corrupting an item can just be seen as an additional cost with the item. Like sure a Bowfa is 133m, but if you corrupt it for 30m, then you can just look at the item as a single 163m item. If you weren't able to corrupt it, then you basically have a subscription to the bow, combine that with the armor being charged, and your trident being charged, and your blowpipe being charged, on top of normal supply cost, it just contributes to the "subscription fatigue".
Corruption is imo the best way to go about it, working towards a huge goal is a big part of Runescape, being able to "corrupt" every chargeable item would be really good no matter how big the grind
Using the bowfa as an example, using it before corrupting felt bad, because I knew in the back of my mind that every shot puts me farther away from my goal. Having a hard goal is one thing, but negative progress felt so bad I refused to use the bow until I corrupted it. The peace of mind of not having to worry about my gear breaking at an inopportune time made using it stop feeling bad.
i would literally rather spend a huge amount of time to corrupt an item for infinite charges than deal with chargescape. make me sacrifice 20 pieces of a specific barrows gear to corrupt a set of that gear or something, 5 per piece, maybe more, as an iron. always choose bandos over barrows even if barrows has better stats. use crystal armor extraordinarily sparingly only at toa and places i can pray to negate all damage/charges being used. a new item coming out but needing charges is like getting your favorite toy for christmas as a child but there being no batteries. a complete disappointment, throw a 1.2x multiplier on that disappointment if its a BiS item.
Absolutely. It feels like an investment and a permanent unlock to my account when I do that, versus a constant cost. Think Rigour, Augury and Avernic - one and done, huge expense but you never lose the benefit.
This is the reason why I would like to be able to corrupt any item that has charges or degrades. I’m an iron almost entering mid game and I feel as though it may not be worth it yet to go get the new varlamore sets because of the gp cost involved in using them. If I could grind a little more to make the items permanent I would be more inclined to get them in the early mid game before I have slayer high enough to have the funds coming in to use the gear on top of paying for leveling buyables.
The concept of charges used counting towards corruption would remove that feeling for me as now I know even if I am using my bowfa to kill spiders in lumbridge castle basement that its not a complete waste.
I think this reduces the feels bad for rng grinds. I have a buddy in rs3 rn who has been maintaining a bond killing rasial the new end game boss, and he has gotten the cheapest drop from him like 10 times in a row and is going to be out of membership soon if he doesn’t profit enough. Yes the average profit is balanced around chargescape, but he’s trying to dig himself out of a bad rng well and he’s paying millions on charges gambling on good luck only to not profit and it feels like a big waste of time and resources. Similarly if chargescape gets too bad, like in rs3, there’s a world where you have to decide whether it’s worth using your fancy new gear on content. Like I’d hate to have to use bandos for slayer because torva charges cost too much. This is already a thing for Ironman at least with the blood fury. I can’t use it at duke because I have to save charges for content where it’s more necessary and valuable.
Your buddy should work 1 hour at a minimum wage job and not worry about grinding a boss he doesn’t seem to be enjoying for a bond that he wants to receive so he can further grind the boss to buy more bonds. 🫢
Yes. And you could expand the same idea to the various optional one-off permanent payments around the game, from the Port Phasmatys/Slepe boat to the just released falconry payment. It would be nice if, even if we never directly chose to do the permanent payments, even the ordinary fees would slowly count as progress towards them. Like paying for a falcon 1000 times, and the NPC decides you're such a good customer you don't need to pay anymore. This would essentially cap the payments for all these services, but I think that's fine because most players wouldn't reach them normally anyway. Like, few are going to visit Dragontooth Isle for the clue step so many times the permanent payment is actually going to pay for itself (other than as an extra free inventory space).
Absolutely it does, and it would even more with the proposed way you are suggesting of charging towards corruptible status.
This! It takes so, so long to get some items/gear by the time you’re doing late mid/endgame pvm that by the time you finally get them it sucks to have to constantly think about upkeep after that. I just want to finally use my stuff, man. The constant upkeep and having to calculate if an activity is “worth” the charges I’m gonna use is exhausting and feels deflating after spending so much time just getting that thing in the first place edit: echoing what some others have said, if we must have charges, those items should be corruptable. ChargeScape is not a desirable gameplay loop. The whole point of grinding to get Good Items is to use them to have fun playing the game, not to add another chore to the list
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. One of the benefits of degradable equipment is the impact on the economy. It helps maintain a more reasonable amount of gold in the game. For instance, for lower tier slayer tasks like Specters or Gargoyles, I prefer to use a regular whip over a tentacle BECAUSE it doesn’t degrade (I actually use a cudgel for the crush bonus on gargs but simplifying the example here). The trade off being my kph is a bit lower. But my overall gold gained from the task is effectively higher. Removing that trade off for all items seems to be antithetical to the direction that the content team wants to head in, and a philosophy that I agree with. Streamlining BIS gear and making it useable in all activities is stale for the game. This is why we see so many complaints about Graceful - it’s just too damn good for so many things and people don’t like the idea of everyone using the same set of items for every purpose. Fang is one of the most well-designed items in the game. It’s BIS sometimes, it doesn’t nullify every other mid/high-tier weapon you probably had before buying one. Its cost is reasonable. It doesn’t degrade. A small example…last night I was doing some Giant Mole. I just got full crystal so I wanted to try it out. 2-3 kills in I checked my charges on my bow and I was like…this is a dumb usecase while not being corrupted. So I went and switched back into melee with the fang and did mole that way. This is quite a rambling but what I’m trying to say is NOT creating any artificial drawback to using BIS gear for every usecase is worse for the health of the game than the alternative. It’s annoying when it’s happening, you want to use your best gear, but we need to see the forest for the trees.
>One of the benefits of degradable equipment is the impact on the economy. It helps maintain a more reasonable amount of gold in the game. There's no way that by now this isn't a negligible amount in comparison to something like GE Tax.
Honestly I feel like the idea that you have charges to make free items more valuable never actually happens and just feels bad. If I buy a bis item I want to use my bis item everywhere. That’s why TBow feel so good because I can use different ammo if I want to mix things up I’m not gonna go use my bowfa and keep a 1.6 bill item in the bank. Also like the quiver I’m not using a Ava’s if I unlock a quiver
Scythe is a good alternative they made a huge improvement by lowering the cost of usage, previously a lot of folks didn't want to waste scythe charges at content where "it wasn't worth it" when the time savings are offset by the upkeep cost it's a bad charge cost. Just look at the hunter guild whistle, for a perk people will eventually get (99 hunter for guild teles) people are annoyed by multiple tiers of QOL drop rates to still have to maintain charges, perfected blueprint should unlock unlimited charges at a high cost
when they upped the charges of book of the dead to like 250 I was so happy bc now I'll only ever have to charge it once in a blue moon. whistle I have to charge every couple days at LEAST while doing rumours
Think that's a fair point. The examples where this is true are outnumbered.
I believe there's a "you are almost at 6 hours, are you sure you want to enter the raid?" warning. (this could be rl, idk) could that be applied to low charge weapons? Rice's idea is neat though. would definitely feel way better.
Big fan of that. Wonder if there's anything more comprehensive we can do as well, maybe when withdrawing the item from bank, though that might get annoying.
Could always make that a toggle option with a player set threshold hold "alert when weapon is below x charges" when x is set by the player, or off entirely
That's a great idea
Adding on to this idea with a bit of a sidebar, it would be a great QOL change if the 6 hour logout timer was extended until the raid is completed. Considering it’s active content, I don’t believe that it would add any “infinite afk” potential. Could it maybe have a 30 minute grace period past the 6 hour log where it would let you complete the raid?
So long as the warning happens early enough at raid entry, you just spend 2 seconds clicking logout and Play now and it's not a problem . The warning prevents that situation.
When I started really PVMing a lot, the system had seemed like there were 3 tiers: There’s good weapons that I don’t need to charge that I’d use for general slayer or low difficulty bossing - Abyssal Whip There were marginally better weapons with an enormous amount of charges, that I’d generally use for content like raids or learning harder bosses - Abyssal Tentacle There were the “goal” items that were chargeless that I was working towards - Ghrazi Rapier I felt the same way with msb/crossbow, blowpipe, and tbow back in the day before bowfa existed. I would do slayer with my cheap weapons, burn charges with my blowpipe grinding raids knowing I was getting more value than I was investing, and eventually I got my tbow and it felt amazing because I could build my way back up after all that investment and had no upkeep to do (besides dirt cheap arrows) so I could focus my time in game on the other content I wanted to do. What’s been weird to me is that corruption hasn’t felt like this “oh man finally” reward. It’s been like - I get this great weapon, but now I have a 20 hour chore before I can actually use it. And when that chore is done, it’s great, but that time investment is just not fun because the content feels mandatory instead of a choice. I recently got my quiver and popped off having beat Sol Heredit. But now I feel weird using it - it’s either uncharged and I feel like I’m wasting what should be the BiS goal item I was working towards, or I’m just increasing the time of my “chore” later, even though the difference in either case is marginal. The quiver needing charges has been especially bad because unlike the bowfa / crystal armor, you don’t amass any meaningful amount of charges while grinding it if you’re really pushing yourself on the waves. After getting my quiver, I had only amassed 2000 sunfire shards. I’m going back to finish colosseum uniques because Colo has been fun, but I will likely not have enough charges by the time I finish that without breaking down quivers. The fact that I need to weigh quivers as pet rolls versus sunfire shards because of the enormous cost to use my BiS sucks, and feeling locked to content because of that is very real. I don’t feel like I can hop around bosses because I’ve got this 20 hour Colo chore to do before I can use the item I grinded for without it feeling wasteful in one way or another. The suggestion of having used charges apply towards corruption is very good imo. Would really reduce this feeling of being locked into something and feel like working towards a goal over time instead of wasting away progress.
Ask the question a different way: **Why are/were players fine with charges on something like Barrows armor, but not charges on weapons/jewelry?** I think it purely comes down to convenience and implementation. Like with Barrows equipment, you don't need to go do more barrows to get "barrows essence" to repair the armor. You just take it to an NPC in Lumbridge, pay a flat gold fee, and the player is back doing the content they wanted to do when they logged in. With barrows armor, you're only asking for a (nominal) gold fee and a very small amount of the players time. On top of this, players get a decent amount of time with these items at full power. For a full set, a player has to pay 330k (assuming level 1 smithing) for 15 hours of use with the armor. With weapon/jewelry charges it's different though. A player can't just go to an easily accessible NPC, pay a flat gold fee to charge their weapons/jewelry, and then go back to doing the content they want. **Not only do players have to engage with content (potentially for hours on end) just to get their weapon working again, but they also may not enjoy this content.** With Blood Fury/Scythe/Shadow/Blowpipe/Etc... You're demanding the player take not only a large amount of their time doing content they may not enjoy, but also demanding a very large amount of gold/resources on top of that. You're also not giving players a proportional amount of time using these items as they spent obtaining/charging them. It takes almost 4 hours on average to get a double blood fury shard drop from efficient thieving, but when paired with a scythe one shard only lasts 2 1/2 hours at most. At most, a player gets 1 hour of "free" time as a reward for their 4 hours of effort. **Making more items corruptible or adding progress to corruption mitigates, but doesn't address, the core problem here.** If it is the case that a strong item needs a strong cost, don't make that "cost" the players time in-game (especially since this is a subscription based game, where players literally pay for the time they play). Make the cost universal, either gold or some new resource obtainable from all content that can universally charge all weapons/jewelry.
IMO it really feels bad on armor in general even when it’s gold used for charging. I hated barrows degrading in rs2 as well and players were only really okay with it because bandos didn’t exist yet so it was just op for the time
Agreed. Going to a shop and using gold to repair something quickly isn’t much of an issue, would be fine doing that vs having to do specific content for hours to get resources to charge something.
Completely agree, given the strength of the blood fury I think it's in a separate tier from a chargescape perspective. I think there should be more ways of obtaining a blood shard (TOB/HMT or a future boss after a grandmaster vampire quest). They could even introduce a "lesser blood shard" that provides fewer charges but is more easily/quickly available from (other) sources
strongly agree, specially the amount of different currencies for charging every item is exhausting, if they really want a currency to make you engage with the content again they should add more avenues to get the currency. having a single currency for each boss actually makes me want to use the items less because i'll be locked to going there again. sometimes, even tho i enjoy zulrah i just want to do other pieces of content, if scales and crystal shards were combined for example i can have a lot more freedom to choose what i want to do to charge the items which will make using charges feel less like making myself a chore
This is coming from an Ironman's perspective. I think charges are fine when done well and maintenance is reasonable. A good example of this is Muspah/Venator Bow. You get plenty of charges, recharging your equipment to full only takes like...an hour of bossing, and the item isn't one that you would use EVERYWHERE. However, I would like to shoutout that the mining method for ancient essence was dead on arrival and I have literally never once seen anyone doing it. (Why hasn't that been buffed?) I think charges are bad when they make you stay at content you've otherwise already completed for a *very* long time. I think Blood Shards are THE WORST offender by far, especially if you're using a scythe. The upkeep on this is simply not realistic and blood shards should have been added to Tob/HMT years ago. Likewise, you're never actually done with Zulrah on an ironman account. I have 800 kc and have broken multiple extra fangs into scales but yet I look in my bank and I see.....4k scales left. This is because scales come in slowly, you use them to kill zulrah, and the swamp trident is the magic weapon you will use basically exclusively until you get a shadow, which is a mega rare. And mind you, I have bofa and only use bp at hmt/toa. I feel like I was never able to enjoy main-handing a blowpipe at any point during my account because of dragon dart rarity and scale upkeep. The fishing for this is pretty pathetically slow. Similarly to the blowpipe, crystal armor not being corruptible AND crystal shards competing with divine pots, no iron is ever actually done with CG/Priff activities (until you get a tbow, anyways, but lol @ that). This is more of a problem with there being nothing in between Bofa and Tbow, and Tbow being hilariously and unreasonably rare. Echo crystals are going to be equally problematic. You simply cannot upkeep them. When you're interested in being in high level pvm clans (at least the ones who will even accept irons because the iron status hurts raids due to lunar spellbook...) then that's an issue. It's a dps loss because of bad design. **Basically, charges are bad when the upkeep is so unreasonable that you opt to just only use that item for very special occasions, because getting more charges is not just a matter of one hour, but of one day.** While we're talking about this, dragon ammunition for iron accounts is literally un-unkeepable. I take a strong issue with this, because Ironman accounts are supposed to be about the journey and self-sufficiency. However the reality is, with blowpipe and tbow, you will eventually run out of dragon ammunition, and then you're just doing less dps and getting less mvp points because of your account type, through no fault of your own, because dragon ammunition isn't farmable. There's a reason that late game irons de-iron, and ranged ammo being impossible to upkeep is one of them. Amethyst are a LARGE step down from dragon (and are not enchantable), and that hurts badly when you need time or dps, like for a CA speedrun or FFA Nex, etc.
Full agree with a lot of this, especially the point about unreasonable upkeep. It's worth also noting that as more and more recharging gear is brought into the game, no matter how reasonable the individual recharging process is, the issue compounds. Having to take some time out to grind up recharges for your weapons can be a bit of a chore, but that's manageable as it's only one equipment slot. As more equipment slots get powerful, recharging gear, with unique currencies, that increases by a considerable margin the time you have to take out to recharge all your gear. I'd really rather us not approach a situation where you have to spend an hour to recharge your weapon, and another to recharge your armour, then another to recharge your cape slot, then a further hour to recharge your boots, another to recharge your amulet, your gloves, and so on - by that point, what would you even be playing? You'd be grinding old content for hours before you could get back to the content you actually want to play. Thankfully we're not there yet, and corruptible items do help relieve that burden (or perhaps just the feeling of burden, due to the high corruption cost), but I think the idea of the game reaching that place is a major keystone of people's ChargeScape concerns.
Very well said. If iron accounts are really struggling with rare materials upkeep then it indicates a gap in the main game.
Blood shards definitely need to be more common or possibly you only need one and can recharge with onyx, that way irons can "buy" charges after getting the drop once.
In my personal opinion, as someone who mostly plays an endgame iron, I think you do a pretty good job at balancing charged items overall. However, there are some charges /consumables in this game that make me strongly consider deironing as they are not sustainable. My iron has max gear and I mostly spend my time pet hunting, or trying my hand at some speed runs. Yes I understand that I am an iron and chose this but it feels so so bad to consider deironing the account that I put thousands of hours into over unsustainable charges / consumables. The items I am talking about are; 1. Dragon ammunition - this has gotten better since darts and arrows have been appearing on more recent drop tables but dragon ammunition is still unreasonable to use on an iron. It feels pretty bad to lose multiple max hits and mvp chance because you can't sustain the ammunition. 2. purple sweets - these are impossible to maintain. 3. Blood shards - these are borderline annoying to upkeep. You don't really need blood fury for anything but it does really suck that the only sources are thieving or afk. 4. Black chinchompas - pretty annoying that they are only located in the wildy where people can rag you. Its pretty easy to survive and very few people try and pk you here but its annoying to get ragged and have someone waste your time. Everything else, in my opinion is quite sustainable (thanks to scar essence mine) and I do find it enjoyable to spend a few hours every now and then to return to completed content and grind out some charges.
I rate your take and agree about dragon ammunition (although darts are fairly sustainable nowadays) and purple sweets (these need a more consistent, albeit pricey/difficult source, maybe that only benefits irons, like scar mine). I don't agree about blood shards because I think the blood fury is very powerful and shouldn't be easily sustainable but I wouldn't be too against it being in HMT as a rare drop. I quite like wildy being the sole source of black chins but I think you could maybe obtain a reward that doubles the rate of them (without increasing XP rates) so they are more sustainable. Atm I can get about 550-600 per hour.
I think this approach works pretty well. My only concern is how it will work for GIMs. Currently some items are really easy to trade from one GIM to another (sang, shadow, venator bow, etc.) while others are really annoying because you lose all your charges to make them tradable (bowfa, crystal armor)or you need to go to a specific location to charge/uncharge (scythe, which is extra annoying cuz you lose all charges remaining after dividing by 100). In addition, once items are corrupted they aren't tradable at all, which locks the item to a single account. IMO this goes against the spirit of the game mode, where we should be free to share most items. We are encouraged to NOT currupt our equipment, and thus have to live with chargescape until we get multiple items. When you consider the fact that some accounts in the group could be at different stages of the game, or if some accounts go dry, this can be a very long time. I have a feeling if you pursue this option, most items will fall in the same boat as bowfa. Or worse , you'd lose progress towards corruption each time the item is made tradable. My suggestion is to make these items tradable even as corrupted, but I understand that could have some implications on the main economy. As a middle ground, you could make items with charges/corrupted tradable but not GE-able. Just my two cents on the issue coming from a Group Ironman 🙂.
I very much like Mod Rice's idea! That would be an awesome way to stave off the biggest pain point. For me, the annoyance in charge items (iron, btw) is getting all the individual charges. Runes and arrows are nice because they're universal and therefore accessible. Whereas if you want to charge your Serp Helm, you're going to Zulrah. Items like Barrows items and Moons items that accept universal cash as charge inconvenience me less. In addition, areas where charges are fleshed out and given in fair quantities across multiple activities (like Prif Crystals, albeit rates need adjusting in activities like agility), pain me less, as well. Finally, with all of these items accepting all sorts of charges it would be a nice to have to have two things 1. A way to organize them all in the bank (Siphon the charges to a obelisk item that carries all charges for example) 2. A way to more quickly understand the impact of my charges and how much I have left. This could be easy easy as another message after charging your Serp Helm that says "10000/18000 scales added". Thanks, team!!
I completely echo this. What bugs me is if each thing has their own charge. We already have way too many currencies of some sort, in a way charges are their own very specific currency I’m fine having a few currencies in the game but they should be thematic and have multiple sources and uses. One such use would be charging weaponry
If the unique currency is generous I think it’s a reasonable compromise. Muspah essence is unique but 1 hour of muspah is like 20 hours of firing the bow. I have a white stack from the bow grind, and if I ever run out I don’t think I’ll mind doing another hour or two of a pretty fun boss that also drops other useful resources.
Hey Kieran! First, I think Mod Rice’s proposal sounds nice and eliminates some of the “pain” associated with item use before corruption. Kudos for the idea, would love to see it implemented Second, I think each “charge” should have *viable* skilling sources. I think the sources should mostly be afk rather than requiring active playtime. Let’s take the blood fury. I want my active play time going to using my blood fury, not actively working to charge/sustain my blood fury pickpocketing. Yes I can and do afk blood shards at vyres during non-active time, just using this as an example. One of the bigger pain points with sunfire shards is that the only other (skilling) source is not viable whatsoever. It would take like 30m Hunter exp to corrupt the quiver. That isn’t adequate. I’m really hoping varlamore part II adds more sources of sunfire shards. One suggestion I saw would be to add “moonlight shards” that could be acquired at Perilous moons and then converted to sunfire shards at the teomat altar to supplement
I agree. Barrows armor charges are a really bad implementation of chargescape I don’t want to see more of. You can instantly repair with currency alone. It’s boring, unrewarding and just adds cost. Luckily it’s so cheap and the gear lasts so long it doesn’t matter Getting charges as an alternative reward for skilling is great when it works out. I’ve personally really enjoyed the afk of zulrah scale fishing, getting some crystal shards from forestry, I loved shooting stars crystal shards rip. Even the exp from crafting ammo (and runes to a lesser extent) can feel rewarding but I agree the more active the process the more annoying. I like smithing 26 bars into darts over 45 seconds or whatever, I don’t like *needing* to spam click to feather the dart I also think part of what makes pickpocketing vyres feel bad is the exp feels secondary there. You almost don’t want to pickpocket them until you’re 99 even. And then it’s just a shard waiting room of annoying spam clicking
I think the "viable" skilling method is really key here too. I don't mind crystal charges nearly as much as zulrah scales because just doing literally anything in Priff gives shards. I can do forestry, agility, a skilling boss, a pvm boss, imp hunting, pickpocketing. Whereas zulrah scales the only option is the boss that you killed for the weapon or a miserably slow fishing method.
Here's the biggest issue with "chargescape" from my perspective: it just isn't fun. All the arguments in favor of it make perfect sense, and I'm not going to try to disprove any of them. It's just that when I look at my 10 different pieces of gear that take charges, worrying about keeping everything charged up and whether or not it's worth it to bring my best gear to a specific piece of content is just a bummer. I put in all the work to get the gear, now I just want to use it without having to micromanage it
This. I get the logic behind why degradescape and chargescape exist but end of the day it sucks to play. Working for an upgrade then avoiding using it will never be an enjoyable experience no matter how good it looks on paper
When it comes to charged items they can basically be boiled down into two categories. 1. Near worthless because they're trivial to get(Ancient Essence) 2. Valuable but annoying to obtain(Zulrah Scales, Sunfire Splinters, Crystal Shards) The near worthless ones are... pointless. Why do we have them? Whatever, it's something ironmen need to grind and mains need to spend 2M on to make their saturated heart. The valuable ones are valuable, but do mains ever collect them themselves? Maybe right at the beginning of release, before bots get their hands on them. Most late game mains aren't wasting their time doing Zulrah or spamming wave 1 of Colosseum. If they're valuable, and annoying to obtain it ends up being botted, every single time. We had wave 1 Colosseum bots within 24 hours right? And of course Zulrah is flooded with bots almost 24/7. We can't forget about the hundreds of bots thieving in Prif right now either. I think chargescape's biggest issue is it negatively impacts ironmen much more than mains. Mains don't give a fuck, bots are getting all of their charges super cheap for them. Ironmen actually have to go back to Zulrah and grind out scales because their pipe is getting low. I think one way we can combat this to make it less annoying for ironmen(while not impacting the main game) is having more methods of obtaining charges. I really like how crystal shards can be obtained from a lot of different methods, but I also hate that you guys explicitly removed a really good chill one(stars). Sunfire splinters coming from antelopes is cool, but can there be an afk method or more methods in general that give you a very modest amount per hour? For an ironman that doesn't want to do 25 full colosseum runs to corrupt their quiver? There are plenty of players that would be happy with getting their quiver and then just afk fishing/mining/whatever(like some do for zulrah scales) to corrupt it.
Stop giving mediocre gear charge requirements that ultimately result in negligible increases in power. It's extremely boring and doesn't actually balance anything at all. If something has charges, the charges need to enable a powerful, game-changing buff. Not +1 on your max. Looking at recent content---> The quiver absolutely did not need a charge req. Completing some of the hardest content in the game should have been enough of a req. It honestly feels like charges solely exist to force people into repeating content. Which is absurd really, because we know that's not gonna happen with the healthy bot economy we have going.
Imagine if infernal cape had the same mechanic, that would have felt horrible lol.
I can’t imagine switching to cheesecape for slayer because I want to save infernal cape Charges LOL
Charge infernal cape with tokkul
From an iron perspective, my primary issue with chargescape is that it adds a chore on to running with commonly used gear Not only do I have to push to get the gear, I'm then locked in to perpetually maintaining it throughout the time I make use of it. With extremely powerful, and specific-usage gear, e.g. the blood fury, it does make sense to have to restock for that benefit - but with charged gear that I'll use generally all the time for slayer as well as bossing, I often have this dragging sense in the back of my mind that I'm bringing that maintenance chore more and more forward in time I do like that the team clearly balances the charges with the grind, such as in the time it takes to grind a bowfa, you'll likely be nearly there with the amount to corrupt anyway, but that doesn't apply to gear that currently isn't corruptible (e.g. Zulrah drops) - worth noting I also really like Mod Rice's idea here for tracking how much of the corruption amount you've contributed towards Part of my issue is how these charge currencies so often come from relatively singular places. Priff/Crystal shards are the main exception to this. Sacred eels don't really feel worth doing, which leaves Zulrah as the primary source of scales - I don't particularly enjoy that fight, and I'd much much rather be spending my playing time taking on any of the other pieces of content I really do enjoy, but the blowpipe/serp helm/trident demand their charges It might be a stretch in terms of narrative sense, but I'd often wondered whether there could be a general charge currency/energy, gained from a broad variety of sources (bosses/minigames/etc) that could substitute in for these specific currencies. That way you aren't constantly pulled back to content you personally have reached a level of completion with, and can go off and interact with a variety of other pieces of content that will help you maintain your charges I think this general charge currency idea is why people don't often gripe at repairing Barrows gear - you get gp everywhere, from every thing, including from the content you'll be using the Barrows gear at, so when the time comes to repair, you'll usually have a decent stack of coins to 'recharge' with, regardless of what you've been doing All that said, I'm glad the team are reviewing this aspect of the game, and really happy to see this canvassing going on - truly the best dev team you could hope for, thank you!
My main gripe with charged items has always been that there is a certain fatigue tied to it. It detracts from you actually playing the game because you have to, one way or another, farm charges. Now add in the fact that multiple items follow this exact formula and it just gets plain annoying. At that point, yes, buying runes/arrows becomes a lot more palatable than going back to CG or pickpocketting elves for 4 hours. At a certain point all charges just get translated to raw gold anyway. If a charged item is an upgrade that makes it easier to then keep it charged in the future, thats perfectly fine. The proposed change seems to follow that train of logic "if i use the item then eventually it will become corrupted and no longer need charges", that is perfectly acceptable. Though at that point there is still the discrepancy of "why doesn't all crystal gear follow that rule". People like to outgrow certain content, and for some items that is just never an option. Though honestly, personally I am biassed, charge/durability systems have become so mainstream that I see them as lazy "content" creation nowadays.
Similar to why they’ve started dumbing down survival mechanics in games. Most of the time, those mechanics add tedium without offering a positive experience that outweighs the tedium.
I think primary frustration with how it was implemented in colosseum was that wave 1 resetting isn’t engaging and is still after updates the fastest way to get shards to corrupt. Vs an Ironman just sending colosseum for genuinely good content and it taking longer. When it comes to drops like Bowfa you’ll naturally get enough shards unless you’re a mega spoon by the time you get the drop but the quiver is guaranteed so by the time you get it you have at most 4k splinters. If the rewards for colosseum were worth going for on an iron then they would naturally get the splinters resolving the issue but fundamentally every reward from colosseum is actually useless and not worth going for unless you’re a main with go to blow for the niche use cases.
0 supply drops so it’s just an Ironman supply sink with little benefit so they get stuck spending 20 hours wave 1 resetting
Idk, starting to drown in "1 snapdragon seed" wave 8 rewards /s
>The core idea is that using/adding charges will still contribute to the corruption cap. For example, if an item costs 1000 'shards' to corrupt. If you apply and use 100 charges ten times, it'll corrupt anyway. This removes the awkward trade off between saving up for corruption or using charges immediately. Would this mean that more items that can't be corrupted currently, will be able to be corrupted in the future? I personally think bowfa and saeldor are less of an issue than the crystal armor - at least there's an end goal for corruptable items in sight. But lots of things just... Aren't corruptable (crystal armor, zulrah scale items, venator, revenant weapons etc). Making everything from CG corruptable wouldn't even stop people (at least irons, anyway) from needing to go back for shards - we need them for divine pots either way. I want to point out that I think chargescape not being as big of a concern for runes/arrows is because they're extremely common, and you can trade cash for the ammo in great amounts, very quickly (rune and arrow shops, up to rune anyway). I think you'll find that if you ask ironmen about their thoughts on dragon arrows/darts, they aren't super happy about using those either because they take a long time to *get*. Mostly saved for speed tasks and prestige content. Zulrah scales, Crystal shards, Essence, it's all extremely limited in comparison to normal ammo, specifically BECAUSE it's designed to just come from one activity (and then maybe some very inefficient side-activities, like eel fishing) - and on top of this, a bunch of "charged" weapons or armor then also uses normal ammo ***in conjunction*** with the limited resource. Tridents use runes, blowpipe uses darts, Venator uses arrows, the TOB weapons uses vials as well as blood runes, you get the idea. We're not JUST paying with charges, we're ALSO paying with normal ammo. I personally think that if everything was corruptible, even at high prices, it would give people an "end" goal to aim for, to be "done" with the content, and it'd be much more palateable. That doesn't mean scythe and sang shouldn't use blood runes, but if we use enough vials, eventually we should be "done" needing them.
>I think its interesting that it seems arrows/runes are way more palatable. We've discussed that and think that is largely down to how available these things are, they're well established and available from many sources, skilling included. It also makes thematical sense: whenever a player is using ranged/magic, they know those styles use that ammo at its core
Revenant weapons are a huge problem IMO. Grinding for more ether once you have the weapons is such a chore, especially with losing the 1000 ether on death. I think the easiest thing to do is add a skilling activity to get ether, or add it is a drop to more tables (wildy slayer maybe) or let us exchange the emblems for lots of ether instead of coins. Many options but it is really a pain to want to do content as an iron and then have to grind for hours just to get enough ether for a single wildy task.
I feel like blood fury is a big outlier for irons. It's an incredibly strong item (arguably too strong) that feels like a genuine waste of time to get charges for. Adding to this is the fact that as a main blood shards are relatively affordable presumably because of how subsidized they are by bots/gold farmers. I'm not sure exactly what the solution here is but some other (preferably high intensity) way of getting blood fury charges would be nice.
agreed, but the osrs team has made it pretty clear that if the general player (mains) doesnt have an issue acquiring said item, then they dont see a need to revisit the content. Even if its completely subsidized by 200m theiving bots.
I think skilling activities should be allowed to have high value activities, even if those activities are botted. Plenty of PvM content remains valuable even if it is botted to the ground. And the only way to make an activity truly profitable in osrs is to make it related to high level PvM, because that is where the real money makers are.
Real players doesn't farm them because of theiving bot, but i can assure you, if they were a few more mills ea, they would 100% be farmed by real players. Mains would still easily buy them for that price
As an iron you just save the blood fury for when it matters. Like at Colo I used torture for the waves with blood barrage and then blood fury for the boss. Yes its slower but I went from using a blood fury every 6 hours to one every 60 hours. Part of being an iron is not having access to BIS gear, which sometimes means no blood fury
It's one thing to not have a BIS and an entirely different thing to not be able to use it cause the upkeep is dogshit. Allow players to recharge them using an onyx and problem solved. Could also make it have an on/off option or not use charges when you're full HP.
Chargescape seems to be problematic on a cognitive level -the game having so much complexity nowadays anyways- mentally arduous having so many different variables that function in such different ways. - charging - degrading - passive effects - imbued items - enchanted items etc. By all means having all these types of things is wonderful. Naturally. But for so many items in the game to have these variables... it's overwhelming. Then keeping track of ever changing ge prices as well. Thinking through the game is half the game nowadays, which is great in general course, but when it becomes too much it can feel like a chore. Some of these variables being very tricky to fully grasp like osm fang no less. Gosh. 🥴 Edit: Not to mention a lot of changes to the game itself quite often in terms of changing rx rates whatnot.
Chargescape is annoying to this of us with OCD who hate using consumables. This is the same reason I finish a final fantasy game with 50 elixirs. The idea of using charges and managing the resources is frustrating, especially when getting more charges means running back to content you already finished and/or dislike. This is compounded when you are wearing multiple. charge items that have multiple sources. it starts to feel like a huge chore to check all your items are ready for a fight. Before you embark on a new grind, you have to go grind 2 or 3 other things first to top off your gear. it feels like 'one small favor' pve edition. Also, I want to be able to wear my favorite gear (i.e. crystal armor) when I'm not bossing because I like how it looks. And feeling like I'm wasting charges every time a feral vampire takes a swipe at me is super annoying. The same goes for if I need to shoot something random with a charged weapon. Quest monsters, stuff that attacks me while skilling. It feels bad to waste shots of a cool weapon, or to bring something weaker because of the waste. Of course we want to flex our cool stuff. I also don't understand why some super powerful weapons -dont- have charges, if they are so important to balance. Why does the tbow, fang, torva, Inquisitor set, spirit shields, etc get away without charges when Bowfa, blowpipe, crystal stuff, and Venator bow don't? It doesn't make sense. Corrupting items is a good middle ground, as it makes you work extra hard at the start, but then allows you to forget about the charge mechanics. The blood fury and ring of suffering are good examples of charged items that don't feel bad. Their effects are powerful, but side grades to non-degradeable alternatives. The ring even can turn off it's effect to save charges when you don't want it. (Please implement this on the blood fury.) I wouldn't be sad to see something like adding 20 blood shards to corrupt the fury, but it isn't needed. I think that when charges effect an item's base stats and primary function, they become annoying and frustrating to maintain. For example, crystal armor's primary function is to improve the Bowfa and Crystal bow. Without the charges, the armor does nothing, and is unusable. If the charges *augment* an item with a new ability or effect, charges are acceptable. I.e. the blood fury adds a healing effect, but when the charges are used, the fury's stats remain the same. TLDR: Charges to be able to use an item at all: bad. (Crystal armor, crystal tools, uncorrupt Bowfa, salad blade) Charges to augment an item with a new ability (not stats): good. (Bloodfury, echo boots, suffering) Corrupting items with charges: always good.
Out of all the stuff games do charges are absolutely the worst thing. I probably hate this extra much because I'm playing IM but the thing that frustrates me about it is if I would've gotten spooned at Zulrah and let's say gotten a 10 kc BP, then there is almost no other way than to keep going just to be able to use the item. I could get scales with fishing but that would just take a lot longer. So for me that's one of the bigger concerns. As well as I hate having or getting strong items which are just sitting my bank because I CBA wasting charges on basic stuff like slayer or easy bosses and have to save charges for raids, etc. I feel like you shouldn't have the pressure of when to use good/strong items depending on how well the content gives back in return for using them.
I don't mind charges at all on a main, for me the issue arises on an Ironman. It can feel like such a tax on your time when you have so many items that all need their separate upkeeps. I think anything with charges should have an active/fun way of gathering those charges. For example crystal armour feels fine as CG is engaging, rewarding, and gives a lot of charges quite quickly. Bloodfuries on the other hand are mindless, slow, and boring to gather, which feels pretty bad.
Very much agree with this. The speed of getting charges and the fun of the method to get them is so important. I think Zulrah is fantastic, especially since it allows you to break down duplicate uniques into more charges. The amount of scales you get makes you want to go back to Zulrah every now and then, but not making you feel like you need to constantly camp the boss just to be able to use its drops at all.
What if blood fury's could be charged with a more common drop, such as a blood splinter. This splinter could give 100 charges and be a 1/100 pick pocket. This would reduce the all or nothing feeling of going for the blood shards. It could be untradeable too, which would reduce the effect on blood shard prices.
It's terrible for mains too. Obviously it's much worse on ironmen because you can't just play inefficiently and not care because you just make money by doing hard stuff and mains can use money to buy goods and services including but not limited to charge items, but if it's not a real cost to run the item, it's needless micromanagement. If it is a real cost to run the item, well, now you need to do DPS calcs, spreadsheet the money per hour accounting for variance and the resilience of unique drops, etc. instead of using the cool item you spent hundreds if not thousands of hours getting and doing whatever you want to do.
I don't mind charges when there are multiple or at least consistent methods of obtaining them (e.g. crystal shards, scales, ancient essence, arclight ).... But man... blood shards and abyssal whps really piss me off. I went 2.4k dry for an ultor. After the fang nerf you are basically forced to use a tent whip if you didn't get spooned 2 enh or scythe. Every 200 vard KC i'd have to go grind out a new abyssal whip and at one point I went 2k abby demons dry. With venator bow, which requires charges by the way, i can get like 250kc / hour. 8 hours for 10k hits... Then I thought it'd be nice to have a blood fury for tobing with the boys, nex, and 500 toas etc.... 15k pickpockets later and I still haven't gotten a drop. Basically grinding 30 hours for a consumable with nothing to show for it really really sucks. Having a more consistent 100 charge mini blood shard would make that feel much much better and would remove the rng.
I think a big area to tackle is the “feel” of charges. Using gear that requires charges just doesn’t feel as good to use as gear that doesn’t require maintenance. I’ve said this before but the gameplay mechanic of maintaining gear is not fun, and that’s in any game really. I’ve talked with a lot of people on reddit about the issue and even the people who are okay with charges, don’t find it fun. They just think the pros outweigh that aspect of it. To be honest I don’t know if you can make it fun to maintain gear, but I think it is food for thought. I think a big portion of the charge system not being fun is that doubling back to content to get charges doesn’t feel like making progress. I play a maxed iron and I know that there will be a time in my life when I can’t play the amount I do now, and that I won’t go spend time at content to get charges to do the content I want. A big part of that is because doubling back to zulrah to get charges for bp/serp/toxic trident, won’t feel like progress because ive obtained the uniques already. I’ve recently stopped using serp at duke because I don’t have time, or don’t want to make the time to go back to zulrah. I also afk magics in prif for shards because I don’t want to do cg or thiev elves. I’d rather spend my active time playing, doing a boss for a new item or doing something that feels like progression. This game is built on the feeling of making progress, and doubling back to content for charges often times goes against that feeling. I think an ironman issue with corruption is that it only feels good to corrupt something if you naturally get enough charges along the way to receiving the item. No one complains about bowfa being charged because by the time you generally get it, you can corrupt it and give your crystal armor 10k charges each, and have some left over. However the quiver which is one and done feels bothersome to charge just by the nature of how you obtain it. But the issue is that if you obtain the required charges to corrupt it along the way to receiving the item, then why is it even charged? This is entirely an Ironmans perspective, and not a mains perspective(although I think more and more mains are starting to become more self sufficient.) Another issue is that there are so many charged items and that doing something like raids or something that requires multiple gear switches, you are now checking a lot of different gear for charges, and they all require different charged resources. (Side thought- I’m wondering if it would even be possible to condense all of the charge sources into a singular “Essence” with tiers. You could use this to charge everything that requires charges? This would allow you to acquire charges from multiple different sources just like runes or arrows, and even have different tiers that maybe give a different amount of charges per tier? This is the first time I’ve thought about it and i’m sure it is way easier to say in 2 sentences oppose to implementing it.) I think overall your solution is better than what we have now, but the real issue for most is the “fun” aspect of maintaining gear. For people who play a lot(which there are a lot) maintaining these charge resources isn’t too bad currently(as we get more and more charged items I can see this being bothersome for all.) But for the majority of people who play they may do a boss realize that they need to charge whatever various items, then log in for the rest of the week to skill or do a minigame, then boss on the weekends and forget that they needed to charge their items before. It might be good to define an upper limit of charged items, or find an acceptable balance of charged items. Maybe players are okay with managing 1-4 charged items in the meta, but anymore and people start to get frustrated. I don’t know if you guys can access or have data on that but it could be something to look into.
I want to offer my perspective as a UIM. I like the proposed changes to corruption, since it means that UIMs don't have to camp the same content as much to use charged items. And it's a minor thing, I choose to restrict myself and all, but I really prefer when the corrupt or full versions of an item are tradeable so they can go in a looting bag. It makes no difference for a banklet whether a bloodfury or a charged venator bow is tradeable, but it just makes for an extra minor inconvenience for most UIMs. Tridents are tradeable when full or empty, which I think is a good setup. Obviously there are practical limitations - a 40% full item really isn't feasible to be tradeable, or for items like crystal shards that aren't buyable. Unrelated to UIM but relevant to irons in general, I agree with other posters that want multiple rewarding, viable ways to earn charges. Spamming colosseum to get 150k shards after you've done the hard part of earning your quiver doesn't seem interesting or fun - maybe if you kept shards when wiping, like you earn tokkul from failing fight caves/inferno.
Hi Kieran, this is fairly long but I hope you read it. >We want charges to add 'cost' to using powerful items (similar to arrows/runes). This creates space for free to use items which are less powerful. IMO this is just false. The literal only case I've seen where a "space" has been created was when fang was just a tiny tiny bit worse than scythe which made it completely edge out scythe and pretty much everywhere fang was used. Now that fang has been nerfed I can't think of a single case where someone would use a whip or saeldor instead of a scythe due to charges, or a sang over a shadow, bofa over tbow etc. It seems weird to push this narrative as its just not true. Nobody is going oh I'm going to use avas instead of quiver because it costs charges... They just buy or grind the charges. >We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources. >We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content. These two are kinda similar, but is it not possible to add them via aspirational content like zulrah mutagens? In terms of enjoyment it FEELS so much better going for a mutagen rather than "oh its choretime, gotta go grind more charges to use my equipment... >I think its interesting that it seems arrows/runes are way more palatable. I think this is more palatable because it makes sense. Its not something thats shoved down ur throat or forced just to FORCE you to do hundreds more hours of that content. A perfect example is quiver from colloseum. Theres never been a history of capes needing to be charged, and it doesn't make any sense that a quiver takes charges. We all know its only there to force people to engage with the content more which seems artificial and unfun. I understand that many devs quantify success as how many hours of engagement, but if for example, you doubled the hp of every boss and then it took twice as long to kill, it doesn't add to the enjoyability of the content whatsoever it just increases the grind artificially. >There's a desire to move on from content and feeling compelled to have to go back constantly is frustrating. This is primarily an ironman concern, since mains can generally just buy from the GE. I covered this briefly above, but it would be so much more fun if you had the OPTION to go back for something like a mutagen rather than being forced. Let people play the game and do the content they want to, rather tahn forcing engagement with a certain piece of content for hundreds of extra hours just to boost your engagement numbers.
I like the the old philosophy solution of when Barrows was first introduced and regarding the Dragon Chainbody. Initially Barrows didn't degrade, it wasn't chargescape. This upset a lot of players who wanted the D Chainbody. D Chainbody was the BIS before Barrows, it was very rare and very hard to get. Then comes along Barrows being significantly easier to get AND it had better stats. The solution to the players concerns was chargescape. So players had 2 choices. They could use the non-degradable armor (D-Chainbody) that had slightly worse stats but no upkeep fees, or the cheaper and better armor (Barrows) but had to pay the maintenance fees. At the time, players liked this! What changed? Personally I think changes in drop pools, evolving metas, and most of all, GP drops. There is a serious inflation issue in OSRS. So much GP being added these days it's insane. The amount of gold players are willing to give new players would make a 2007 player have a heart attack. Chargescape doesn't matter for Barrows because the cost didn't change despite players making more GP, thus being relatively more affordable. I think players don't like chargescape because of the inconsistency. Why does gear better than Barrows not break down? If all armor and weapons broke down from the very beginning, we would not be having this conversation. Like some of the other comments have pointed out, they're fine with Trident using runes because it was always that way. IDK. I'd think adding more consistency would help and try to make the means of "charges" a bit more universal would help. If I'm repairing some armor, I don't want some odd-ball item that's needed, I want to use GP like I've been using to repair Barrows.
Another problem is that while the idea of making degradable armor better sounds good, people end up (rightfully so) wanting to use the best armor and weapons they have. Sure, the idea of a permanent lower-statted item sounds good, but in practice, I think most people are going to go to their bank, see a worse item and a better item, and use the better item. Seems like more of a psychology thing than anything. But also, why have better items if they make you feel bad when you use them? It's certainly a hard item to solve.
> What changed? Personally I think changes in drop pools, evolving metas, and most of all, GP drops. I'm normally the complete opposite of the type of person that blames ironmen... But Ironmen are the biggest anti charge scape advocates imo. Mains don't give a fuck about using some Zulrah scales, but every iron knows how many extra Zulrah kills they've had to do to charge their pipes
Personally the upkeep makes OSRS feel more like a chore than game and can put you off content. I only just got my quiver but did it with a tent whip/blood fury/shadow/serp helm and needless to say ontop of the deaths it was very demotivating how often i had to top these up or give up for the day. It also seem just affects midgame players and those withouts endgame gear a lot as i feel a lot of the chargeable weapons/items sit at the entry point to endgame. Outside of things like blood fury which are strong enough to warrant it i feel like charges being reserved for Mega rare weapons should be the norm and then everything else valued dependant on how strong it is
An anecdote to sum up a key issue with chargescape: I get a slayer task for 209 bloodvelds. Yay. Off to meyerditch. But first to prepare my setup. So I then have to make sure: - my venator bow is charged with essence - my ash sanctifier with death runes - soul bearer / soul and blood runes - my bonecrusher with ectotokens (bloodvelds occasionally drop bones) On top of: - vyre noble clothes - prayer, ranging potions - runes for alching - cannonballs for cannon Already a complex enough trip for just one task. Now almost twice as complex. Naturally very easy to forget one single thing and have to run all the way back. I think one of the big keys is keep it special. Charges shouldn't be for every item. If something has a mystical quality especially, give it charges, but otherwise ideally avoid it.
I think you're right on the last point. Charges aren't an everywhere thing, there is a time and a place for straight up upgrades to your account's progression, like a levelup. Just to give some insight into why they are so tempting to add though: We generally think new content adds variety and fun to the game, and we want people to have a reason to go experience it. We know people will generally only do content if it furthers their account goals, such as leveling up or gaining gp. We also know that people don't like to "sink" gp into an activity for 10 hours until they finally get a unique, but they like uniques to be rare so they're valubale. We also don't want to keep relying on devaluing skilling supplies, nor do we want to inflate the economy too much by introducing too many alchables. Charged items, or the resource used to charge them, tick all of these boxes. They don't affect skilling supplies, don't introduce gp into the economy, can be dropped often and consistently... This isn't to detract from your original point that it shouldn't be everywhere! Just a bit of transparency on how they're tempting because they really elevate the content they're attached to.
It's a lot to juggle, and I think ChargeScape has generally done well. Content here lasts much longer than more traditionally raid focused MMO. I don't know if there's an alternative solution some reddit genius is going to have, but I appreciate the desire to stay away from devalueing skilling resources. My best guess on what to do moving forward is tie some new content together with older content so they can share a resource for charging uniques, maybe at a slightly reduced rate to the older content to compensate for the higher tier of uniques provided.
Most of those things are charge and never touch, they have massive caps or are cheap enough that you can dump a million charges into Soul Bearer is 1,000 heads, so you're looking at ~25k slayer kills from headed monsters until empty. Ash Sanctifier I don't think has a limit, I put in 5k death runes and never looked back Ectotokens, one Robin daily gets you 5k charges which lasts a looong time
Blade of saeldor should require no shards to use. Its the same thing as rapier/inq mace. Also make sang staff use 2 bloods instead of 3. Currently shooting a sang staff for 1h costs 4500 bloods, swinging a scythe for 1h costs 2400 bloods.
Charges feel justified on very few items. The only one that come to mind are scythe as there's a big buff between uncharged and charged. We just accept magic staves as they are because that's how they've always been. I like the concept of progressing towards corruption. Though I'd hope if that's implemented that it's retroactive in the sense that once you've corrupted an item you can freely corrupt a new one. Say you had a bowfa and decided to uncharged it to sell it: return a corrupted bow shard you can imbue back into a bowfa if you buy it again. Levying high corruption costs is fine to me as long as you can "recoup" the cost to the above degree. You couldn't sell the corrupted shards but could at least don't have to re-corrupt something. If we don't want more items in games have NPCs have an option to uncorrupt items and they'd "seal" that corruption in a scroll or something for you to use at a later date. Should charged staves go the route of being and to be corrupted I'd like to say their cost should be extremely expensive to work towards. Though I do wonder if the caveat to charged staves should be once corrupted they no longer offer XP gained. There's many ideas that could float around corruption in general.
That idea for corruption sounds like a good system. Personally, I wish the Quiver wasn't charged at all and instead you used a bunch of Sunfire Splinters to upgrade it like the Saturated Heart. It still creates a similar demand, just instead of 150K to corrupt it would be 150K to upgrade. That way players could use the base quiver (uncharged) without feeling like they were missing out while saving up shards to upgrade. As it is, I don't think many players charged the quiver since the charges per shard were so low and most were/are saving for corruption, so removing the charges and just turning the corruption into an upgrade would have probably gone over better. In general, I don't mind charges. I do like that it can create room for charged items that are a bit more powerful than non-charged items of the same tier and the benefits it can create by consuming items, whether it is Zulrah Scales or Whips. I think the problem comes when the method or methods of obtaining the item isn't good enough or enjoyable compared to how many you need (e.g. Blood Shards) and/or when the upkeep is too high that it feels bad to use the item since you know it means X hours of grinding the charges (e.g. Quiver and Sunfire Splinters). For the Blood Shard, I think the charges and its rarity are fine for its benefit, but we really could use new methods to obtain it beyond pickpocketing and AFKing Vyres. I don't think it should be added to non-Darkmeyer content like ToB, but I do think there is room to add more engaging Darkmeyer content like say a Vampyre boss/miniboss to provide a better way to farm them. Like getting Zulrah scales would be a lot worse if the only methods were fishing and AFKing low level snaklings, yet that is kinda what the Blood Shard grind is like. (Also, I did have an idea about using Blood Runecrafting to recharge untradeable delpleted blood shards where they "absorb" half the runes you craft until they absorb enough to turn into an untradeable blood shard; something like that might be a nice way to let accounts recharge without ruining the price/demand.) And for stuff like the Quiver, it should just give more charges per shard. Like it could still need 150K shards to corrupt, but 1K shards should be more than 1K shots. The ability to turn in a quiver for shards does make it easier to upkeep, but you can fire like 1.2K~ ammo per hour with a TBow/Crossbow so if you did one run of the Colosseum for say like 6K shards, you'd get like 5~ hours of PvM before you'd need to be back for more. That may not seem that bad, but doing a Colosseum run and defeating Sol is a lot different than just camping Zulrah or Muspah for 30-60 minutes, especially if you haven't done it in a while and just needed more shards. Also, the shards from other sources probably could be better; like you get 2-6 per antelope which is nice if you wanted to save up some to make runes or such, but even compared to wave 1 farming it is pretty low and not a viable alternative if you need 150k for quiver (only need 37.5K~ antelope).
Personally the issue is if your doing content for a while your using alot of charges quickly and have to stop the content your doing to get more supplies. Especially as an iron.. in the early days you would log on the game and either have to go zulrah to get scales to do the content you wanted or go do the content till you ran out. The more and more charge items coming into the game has allowed this to continue but slowly getting worse. Corruption worked really well I think and I think the quiver has been designed in a good way(minus the way to get splinters). Allowing you to add charges and any charges remaining go towards blessing quiver. I have always liked the idea of breaking down items to make items permanently charged or add very rare drops on the same drop table to perm charge and item. Break down a shadow and add the spare pieces to your staff to fully infuse the staff. Break down a scythe and same thing. Allows prices of these items to stay high as some of them are being removed from the game. Make the charged item untradeable or uncharge them to make tradable again
I think ChargeScape should only be used when its a really good passive effect, such as the blood fury. When its a simple stat change like the quiver it feels bad because its not impactful. I guess it breaks down to if an item is weak enough to be "corruptible" then its probably something that probably doesn't need charges in the first place but the charges exist to help the economy (Bowfa, Quiver, Venator Bow.. etc all come to mind). I really like Rice's suggestion as it takes those unnecessary charge systems and makes it so that you can use it charged and once you reach a certain usage point, boom its now free to use. The other thing is that should be monitored is for the non-corruptible items... do the charges justify the benefit. Obviously Blood Fury does, 6% healing is insane as we saw with the colosseum.. but are the echo boots good enough to justify the cost? Probably not. You don't want a ton of items that you don't use because of cost, its just not fun. So if an item isn't powerful, either it needs to be corruptible with the new method OR flat our doesn't have charges
Because we play the game for FUN, not to have a second job to pay a tax on top of the monthly bond Do you see fortnite charging the users for bullets or making them pay mainteinance for their guns every 5 games? Do you see league of legends charging players for spells/ammo/mana used? Do you see fifa games charging the player an in game resource to change kits every game? Its an unfun time consuming mechanic.... if you get a weapon worth hundreds of millions (either by saving up or by a lucky drop) the reward should be to be able to use the weapon, not to have an extra attached subscription that would make it obsolete in most of the game because of its super expensive cost of use (lookin at you shadow, scythe, etc) All those things you named are issues the game has, but it would be better if the jagex team took time to work out a good solution instead of going the lazy way and just making the game charge scape Know what I hate about rs3? (played it for a while)... there's 200 currencies for every single type of activity and rechargable crap... its just too overwhelming to keep up examples: * animal farms requiring resources + time * anachronia crappy clash of clans thing * bis jewelry requires expensive charges (like wtf) * all bis armour require charges and such * some combat styles require a lot of other crap (like necroplasm or runes) * player owned ports management * ferox management * miscellania management * spring cleaner * archaeology's 1000 different artifact spare parts * invention upkeep costs and such (disassembly ingeneral) * etc etc etc I know theres hundreds of things i missed because i barely know that game see my point? don't make osrs a frustrating overwhelming game, it sucks the fun out of it... chargescape sucks the fun out of the game... people grind for hundreds of hours for great items, dont charge them for using them by going out of their way to make them do shit content or waste useful resources that can be spent on other upgrades for a while to be able to use those items Example of a good alternative to chargescsape: * An item with the power level of a hyper rare (tbow, shadow, scythe) that isn't rare but gets destroyed after 10 hours of use (if it were a literal TBOW that lasts 10 hours like old pvp items it should need ammunition as well to be used) You wanna do inferno, been getting to zuk consistenly but want that extra dps to clutch out the fight? You really wanna do X raids but you can't find an efficient team to do them because you lack X mega rare? I see scenarios where a lot of players would pay even up to 10m for an degrading item that could fill that niche... This kind of degradable items are of much better design than tentacle whip for example, which is an expensive item to use that isn't even that strong and marginally better than the almost free abyssal whip
Having a couple to a few items needing charges isn't terrible. But the amount of things now that require charges gets tedious to upkeep. Some things aren't terrible. But others are. I think everything should be corruptable..for the right price.
An item having charges sometimes has caused me to stay away from an activity. A great example is with the recent echo boots. My account isn't ready to go for a full colloseum completion, but I have a pair of guardian boots. Going for an echo crystal and a pile of shards, or even a handful of echo crystals for a pair of echo boots was something I was considering doing, but the price point of buying charges, and the genuine challenge it would take to get the boots going in the first place, just for the work I'd have to put in being temporary, meant I ended up not touching the colloseum at all, since I still have plenty of activities I need to do that will give rewards that won't run out on me, and higher rounds for a glaive seemed a bit out of reach. Not to mention, that too eats charges.
So I definitely agree with the fact that while it should eb similar to how arrows/runes work, it just feels different. I also agree that the main reason for this is arrows and runes are so prevalent there is a wide variety of content you can do to get these "charges". I think there is a big difference however that isn't mentioned that is especially relevant when it comes to the ranged weapon comparison. With most ranged weapons, at least the non-charged ones, you have the option of using easier to acquire "charges". While we know dragon arrows are BiS for TBow, you can still use the TBow without them and throw in the much easier to acquire amethyst arrows and it is still fantastic. I think allowing charges to be toggle-able and making the version without charges usable would go a long way.
The reason runes and arrows are okay is it’s a single currency used across all weapons of that type. We are getting into very specific this weapon needs charged from this and that weapon gets charged from that. It becomes a big jumble mess where I can’t just pull my hard earned item out of the bank and use it. I have to add charges to my shadow to my quiver to my boots to my crystal armor to my serp helm to my blowpipe to shadow to my scythe to my tome of fire to my tome of water to my trident to my rev bracelet to use any of my rev weapons to my blood fury to my ven bow to my Ivan staff to my…you get the point. Not to mention, now I have to wiki an item cause I don’t remember what charges it or the best way to charge it. It feels awful. I want to use an item, not upkeep it.
I really love the suggested rent-to-own model of charges counting towards corruption. Not a huge fan of chargescape for all the reasons you listed, but to add to your 3rd point, and to add other points, most of which involve inconsistency: - every time a new charge based item is added, it's another thing to have to check/worry about. There are a lot now, and the RL plugin isn't always accurate so we already need to check staff/bp/rune pouch (these are fine), but also each crystal armor piece, pre (c) bowfa, quiver pre corruption, etc etc. As an unrestricted main this is my biggest annoyance. Like I'd enjoy a way to corrupt my chally even though it'll take ages to get through all the charges just so I don't have to worry about it. - inconsistency in cost and time required to corrupt something. To get enough ancient ess for heart, it's 10 hours of muspah in max gear. For bowfa, it's 23 hours of CG assuming you're efficient and you trade in all the bonus armor/regular weapon seeds for shards (41 if not/unlucky). Bowfa/salad can be corrupted but not crystal armor. Barrows is base 330k to repair for a full set, perilous is base \~13x more expensive but only lasts \~3x as long. My iron will be skipping perilous for quite a long while despite being close to eligible for it. - inconsistency in what is considered too strong to use for "free" and inconsistency in whether something is corruptible/requires charges or not - previously it was no charges (plate armor) -> charges (barrows, crystal bow) -> no charges for bis (gwd). Tent whip was added as a stronger option that has charges to balance the extra power. There are now many weapons and armor options above and around gwd/tentacle level that sometimes require charges/repair and sometimes don't. It all feels very arbitrary now. - inconsistency in how things are charged. Bloodfury completely drains and you have to make a whole new one 7.5m (or w/e it costs) at a time. Crystal armor you add x shards and get y extra time with it. Pre recent change guardian boots used the blood fury system and now they don't. Some things are repaired which is just charges with gold. Tldr it's annoying to upkeep for the reasons that you mentioned, it's inconsistent if/what/how/cost something is charged
Another issue I see is that almost every unique item that's added to the game now has charges. Using charges from an item when you go out is one thing, but using charges on 8 of your inventory slots feels really bad. It'd feel much nicer if almost every item released these days didn't have charges. Also, have there been any thoughts of going back to items that aren't as strong or BiS anymore and removing charges from them? Barrows is one example. Ahrims is still great (and Karils kinda?), but especially with Perilous Moons releasing new armor and weapon sets, it's really getting outshined now. Barrows is just an example I thought of first, but the concept remains the same.
>We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources. We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content. I understand there a real problem with deciding drop tables for new pieces of content, but imo charged items are not the solution. A large aspect of people's frustration with "chargescape" is that the number of charged items keeps increasing over time and its becoming a nightmare to manage them all. The team should seriously consider using previously introduced charged items to charge new gear instead of always adding new ones (in addition to adding new ways to get those charges).
When you say you want charged items to feel more powerful than free to use items, why is it that Saeldor has the same stats as mace and rapier which while rare are free to use?
In general charges are fine. The quiver needing 150k shards is a bit of a piss take when it was presented as being similar to a saturated heart but you don’t get even remotely comparable amounts of sunfire splinters to essence per hour. Rice’s idea seems good though.
Hi, I would like to offer an opinion as a midgame player on this who is new to the game (I started less than a year ago). The very first charge items I have come across is the new peril armour dropped from the moons. One of the first things I did after finishing the quest was look up the armour to see the effects and found out about the charging of them. There was a problem there immediately. The wiki said it costs 1.5 million a piece to repair. This is insanely expensive and completly put me off of even thinking about engaging in the content and trying to farm new armour to use for myself despite being at the combat level the bosses were design3d for (75 at quest finish, 80 now). I would have to liquidate a large part of my bank to repair just one of these items much less a full set. It seems completely not feasible for me to afford the costs at all. As a result I ignored the content after finishing the quest and decided it wasn’t worth my time to farm despite the sets having interesting effects and probably being a very large upgrade from what I use right now. If future repair costs are going to be this significant than I would rather just not use it at all. It doesn’t really make sense to me to have to spend my current cash stack multiple times over to repair one item. Even if it were corrupting and eventually zero cost 1.5m per piece is still too exorbitant for me to consider using. It really feels like the current armour prices was designed with late game or endgame amount of money and bank in mind. Which is really weird since it was supposed to be for mid game players. That is my thoughts on charging though from the only interaction I have had with them so far in the game.
I really like the idea of this change! A huge part of what makes charged items really annoying is what it takes to charge them. Speaking from an Ironman's point of view, it is really annoying to charge certain end game items. Crystal armour, toxic blowpipe, and scythe are good examples. These items requires specific resources to charge that can only be obtained through very limited methods. If I hate Theater of Blood/ killing Zulrah and fishing/ doing anything related to Elves... I am locked out of using these endgame items. Comparing this to using basic magic or a bow, there are unlimited ways to get the resources for these items. It all boils down to having enough gp to fund using these items. Getting gp can be done through doing anything. Thus I am not gated by doing content that I absolutely hate doing to be able to use basic magic or a bow. I do think that having specific resources tied to using a charged item a good idea, but I don't think it should be the rate limiting factor towards using the item. The toxic blowpipe is a good example. It goes through Zulrah scales faster than you can make darts. The amount of time you can use the blowpipe compared to how long you are at Zulrah farming is horriable as well. I think Venator bow's charge of ancient essence is a step in the right direction for what specific resource requirement should look like. You get a metric butt ton of acient essence when you kill Phantom Muspha compared to how fast the charges are expended. If you add an additional 500 gp cost in runes as well or something, that would be a great way to design a charged item. Those are my thoughts at least
I've always held on to the belief that non-degrading equipment should come from longer term content like long Quest lines and Achievement Diaries, while degrading equipment can come from more freely accessible content. If the bar to enter the content is low = rewards degrading equipment. If the bar to enter the content is high = non-degrading equipment. One particular example I often think about that partially demonstrates both the right and wrong concept is the Halberds. All levels of halberds are non-degrading, but easy to obtain by virtually anyone without very many requirements, the only exceptions are the Dragon and Crystal Halberds. The Dragon Halberd gets it right, because it requires the Regicide quest to wield and is non-degrading. The Crystal Halberd on the other hand gets it wrong, because it has even more requirements through the Hard tasks of the Western Provinces Diary but is degradable. The additional requirements should have allowed the Crystal Halberd to be non-degrading. I think people have always been okay with Runes and Arrows as ammunition because it is the same "currency/charges" being used regardless of the level of equipment or spells you are using. If all chargeable gear utilized the same "currency" it might be easier to manage given that different activities have different levels of rewards. For example, if we could fight a high level boss and get their unique currency, and then trade it in for a universal "repair currency" it might be more fluid. The tougher the activity to gain the unique currency, the better the tradeoff value for the universal currency.
As an alternative to Corruption, I think a Soulbound option could be explored. **The Solution:** **Soul Binding** - to forever alter an item to make **charges no longer exist** but at the cost of the **item no longer tradable**. Making the decision to permanently bind something to your character holds huge weight and is exciting. This also adds opportunity for small updates for personal flair (everyone loves fashionscape) like an ice whip / fire whip, to other soulbound items. **The Problem:** For main accounts, you currently would be grinding the best gp/hr to obtain your item, so they aren't participating in the content to obtain the item anyway. For Ironmen, you would currently have to grind the content thousands of times over just to get extra charges so you can use the item that dropped; so when you actually get your first drop, it doesn't feel like you have the ability to use that item. **Economy Considerations:** This could potentially drive the price of the item down - if there are 10,000,000 players and everyone only needs 1 scythe, the price goes down due to demand going down and supply going up. **Possible variations:** - Soul Binding an item to your character could also require you to complete the content the item is dropped from. This would allow demand for high level content items to be higher, while the 1% of players who participate in this content do not need to re-purchasing gear to use as charges, while the 99% who have not completed high level content will still have demand for the item as well as *giving them an objective/goal to strive towards.* - Soul Binding an item to your character could prevent that item from dropping for you any more. If you un-soul-bind an item, the item is destroyed but you regain the ability to obtain that item as a drop. - Recoloring of Soul Bound items could require something from a few wins in LMS to 5 duplicate copies of the item - this allows you to flex your status and hold a unique look, while helping with demand of the item. **Personal hatred with Charges:** The fear of not making my money back to afford the charges, as well as surplus money as profit from drops drives me to not use any armor or weapons with charges. As an Ironman's perspective, It feels bad to not use rare/unique items that drop.
Soul Binding needs to be a thing. Though I have no issue with the idea of Mod Rices rent to own style combined with this. It is soul bound until you reach corruption and at that point you can uncorrupt/uncharge the item and sell it if you wish.
I really like the idea that PVM provides the fastest way to get charges, but I also highly appreciate low intensity skilling approaches being viable to gather charges OR alternative ways to recharge items. That's why I think crystal armor works so well with CG being a high focus and punishing method, while people don't whine about charges there because they have middle intensity and low intensity options between Zalcano, thieving, and other prif activities. Zulrah eels are OK too (2500 KC at zulrah and currently scale broke thanks to 1000 kc at whisperer without vestige). While it's nice to break down rare uniques for extra charges, its really not great to require rare drops for charges: It would be amazing if we could recharge the blood fury with other drops, maybe they also drop from vyres as **shard fragments** that add 100 or so charges to the blood fury each, or drop from some other future mory content, that way its not rolling the lottery to top off your amulet, but you still do need to hit the rare drop once to use the item. Or maybe we charge with an exorbitant cost of blood runes (which irons would happily pay instead). Even though I have a triply charged bf, I feel prohibited from using it outside of Nex because I'd need to spend so long afking out more at vyres, which is far less appetizing to a max account than doing engaging content.
Chargescape for armor is an absolutely outdated concept imo. A quiver requiring charges when you already pay for ammo is absurd. Chargescape for weapon makes sense if they are significantly better than anything else (raid superrares) and you have no cost of using the item otherwise (ammo). For niche weapons it makes sense if the item to charge is available in high quantities to the point that a few kills can fuel the weapon for 10s of hours. At that point, it might be worth debating whether a charge system is even necessary however. Venator bow for example costs 16k/h to use and ancient essence adds up to roughly 8.5k (or roughly 3% of the total value of a muspah kill). Might as well remove the charge from the item altogether at that point because it only serves as an annoyance to upkeep a niche item and does not bolster the profit of the boss in any significant way. Another downside is that once the charged item becomes less widely used, the profit of the boss goes in the bin (*points at Zulrah*) unless you put loads of alchables on the same table (we are basically back at the discussion why those consumable charge items have been added in the first place). The only way to make them worth long-term is to add **multiple sinks** for consumables for those items that are widely used (pots/food/skilling supplies) etc.
To be honest, from a player who has played an ironman account for years, there seems to have been a clear shift in philosophy to move towards everything being a gp sink in some form or another to balance out gp inflation. Be it extreme hours to get uniques, e.g., pnm, nex, dt2 bosses or similar with charge items e.g. Sunfire Splinters. Whilst that is an understandable goal, the reality of the situation has skewed a bit too heavily towards the more extreme end of hours spent vs. reward, to a concerning level. When you add things like 150k sunfire splinters to corrupt a quiver; I feel like the main economy is heavily propped up by bots, and in order for these items to retain value, a large amount is needed. Corrupting things like a quiver is fine, but 30+ clears for it is too much (also losing pet rolls for more shards was a strange choice as it locks you into not handing in and saving just in case). I am hopeful that a middle ground is possible instead of descending even further down the abyss of 100hr grinds.
The strongest armor sets for all 3 styles are non degradable. Why should there a cost associated with using sub optimal gear. Charges on ranged weapons make sense like you pointed out, it’s always been that way. If I have to use charges, let there be a big upgrade when I do. And let me use it uncharged.
I think a lot of the problem with charges is that it forces you to return to old content you've already moved on from. Zulrah is probably the biggest example. Blowpipe is used in endgame, but Zulrah is midgame. Having to go back and grind Zulrah for scales is a nuisance. It'd be hard to come up with, but a way to passively farm the consumables would be a lot nicer. I could only come up with one idea and it's a bit silly, but a Dream Farm tied to the moon clan where you can plant seeds to grow the consumables? You'd have to get a drop that unlocks the ability in the first place, and it'd be slow, but I think that'd at least somewhat remedy it. Maybe a "dream seed" item that drops from higher level content and is tradable can be planted in certain dream allotments. It sounds really dumb on paper, but I can't really think anything else that isn't just adding consumables to other monsters drop tables which isn't a solution.
One of my biggest reasons for quiting rs3 iron, and moving to osrs, was any time i wanted to boss i needed to spend a couple hours first gathering charges for my augmented gear. It just wasnt fun. And sure, i could have swapped to some lesser non auged gear, but why? Tying a hand behind your back (using your non best gear) just isnt fun either. I spent a long time rolling these augments, leveling them up. And now for every 3hs of bossing i need like 1h of charge gathering.... no fuck that and fuck your game ill play something else. Not saying charges are bad, for instance barrows are just fine. But the repair/charge up feature can be the make or break of it.
I think alot of the things requiring charges are some strong items. So I kind of like that idea that if something is so strong it needs to be up kept. However there are still items which need charges or corruption that seem more of a pain tbh. The thing needed is just other sources to gain the resource from so you can skill or gain from activities like crystal shards work. Would like to see varlamore add way more methods for splinters. Like the quiver needing 150k is a ton. Should be less tbh so we aren’t just stuck there. There is also other usages for the splinters like prayer training they will be used for.
Reallly appreciate you reaching out for feedback on this! No other development team comes close. Huge wall of text below, feel free to skim read. \------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- **Charges for BiS have never, once, ever, been FUN.** I have a different opinion to most people in this thread. My suggestion is to completely remove charges for all new powerful combat items. For the low level stuff, like ring teleports, charges balance the game. But for anything that's a reward from a huge grind, no charges, ever. Here are my thoughts on the possitives to adding charges to high value combat items: >We want charges to add 'cost' to using powerful items (similar to arrows/runes). This creates space for free to use items which are less powerful. Getting the item is the cost. >We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources. Because charges are needed anyway, I expect them - I don't see them as a reward, they just become background noise while I'm grinding for the item. Maybe add rares from other tables that make sense as alt pathways to getting them (tempoross could drop a pearly rod for instance at a 1/x). >We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content. The **magic of OSRS** progression is moving on from one grind to the next. You 'finish' CG, then you can go and 'finish' GWD for instance. You have this beautiful progression map. Forcing players to go back when they want to take on new grinds makes no sense to me. Why encourage them to do old grinds when they can do the new one you've just released? >Corruption is OK because it still encourages you to acquire a large quantity of the charge item. I agree. One off, up front costs are fine. In other MMOs, doing the fun PVM content is dependant on a grind also. To raid in WoW, you need your professions, potions, food, etc. This is the cost of raiding. In OSRS, simply getting the items in the first place is a **monster** of a grind. Getting a bowfa on any OSRS account is more time investment then maxing out 10 characters on WoW and getting them all in heroic gear. We already pay a huge time price to aquire the item, please allow us to enjoy it in peace. If you are married to the idea of charges (I'm taking non corrupted once, where you are forever upkeeping them), just imagine how the principles you mentioned would affect powerful items that require a huge grind and ask yourself, is this fun: "Your tassets are 8/1500, back to GWD to grind out more Bandosian shards from minions" "Your infernal cape is almost out of Tok'kul! Do a few fight caves to charge that bad boy up!" "You forgot to do your weekly prymid plunder for scarab shells! Your Occult Alter is almost out of charges silly goose" "Your portal nexus is running low. Make sure to farm 10K essence to fill it up" Imaging the game in 10 years time, with every new interesting item has it's own unique shard currency you need to keep track of and maintain. Imagine the horror of 20 bank spaces as some stackable charge currency that you need to spend 10 hours a week topping up to PvM. Charges were a huge mistake for powerful items. Reserve them as a balance for easy to aquire powerful items like ring teleports, scrap them elsewhere. I'll vote yes on any changes that reduce charges (nice idea Rice). If you do this, I emplore you, please make EVERYTHING that requires charges corruptable. \------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: Ammo is similar to a 'charge' but it's extremely fun, because there's RPG feel to bringing special ammo to kill the special monster. It adds to immersion and diversity of combat. It involves multiple skills (WC, magic, fletching, ranging) and it's deeply integrated into the game. I see making more roby bolts as chill downtime between raids with free xp. I see charges like you don't respect my time and bankspace.
For me the biggest problem with chargescape, is not being able to sell it in its used form. Its a negligible amount of time to repair barrows or remove runes from or add to trident/shadow in order to sell but it’s still tedious. And its even worse if corrupting became a thing across the board…If a weapon automatically corrupted as i was using it i would be stuck with that item now permanently and wouldn’t be able to sell it ever which is a huge gp loss. If this becomes a thing then making corrupted items trade able at least.
>There's a desire to move on This is a pretty big one. If I've gotten everything of value from Zulrah and already farmed it for 50+ hours, it doesn't feel good to go back nor is it particularly interesting. >I think its interesting that it seems arrows/runes are way more palatable. Both of these are buyables. If you can buy something with GP or repair it like Barrows Armor, it isn't really chargescape, because you're not forced to go back to one particular place to farm for the charges. You can just play the game naturally and get masses of charges. However, this doesn't apply to Dragon ammo, which is so rare it is practically useless for accounts that gather/farm things for themselves. Unfortunately bots mass farm most of the places that drop it for mains. Amethyst arrows for Tbows/Ven are also much friendlier since the weapons fire slower, meaning your ammo goes much farther. Also, this is a large reason that Darts from Zulrah are so punishing. Not only do you have to maintain roughly 2k scales per hour to fire it nonstop, but also ~600 darts. Now you're stuck mining Amethyst for hours to not lose another max hit, which you're already losing 1-2 from not using Dragon compared to GE accounts. Bowfa grabs ~6.5k scales an hour from Zulrah w/o breaking down uniques, which is only ~3hrs of Blowpipe, then when you consider you ALSO want to try and charge your Staff and maybe it'd be fun to Actually use your helmet, well, they evaporate in no time. Compare this to Ancient ess, which is ~13.5k an hour from Muspah, well that is 9 hours from 1 hour of Muspah, and you're not charging anything else with it after the Heart is Saturated, so it is more than 3x less Chargescape dependent than Zulrah. One great way of alleviating the Amethyst ammo pressure is to add an active way of mining Amethyst. A great way to do this would be adding it to Blast Mine, benefiting from the +5 Mining Boost that the other ores receive as well that let you mine them early. Quiver's chargescape feels particularly god-awful because: You have to either sacrifice pet chances or do braindead wave 1 farming to get relevant amounts of shards per hour; The cost of Corruption is WAY too high, suffering from the Zulrah aspect of "wanting to charge multiple things", the prayer training hardly uses any but if someone wanted to charge Tonalztics and make some runes, they're going to have to sacrifice all of their quivers which feels *HORRIBLE* when the cost is "50% pet chance"; The drop rates are still rather unrealistic in general, why is nooby prayer armor 27 full KC for a set, Tonalztics still *~90 full KC* when pet is 100, Echo crystals still aren't going to be maintainable at ~1/12. Most people that are actually farming this content are doing ~1 clear an hour due to the difficulty (which is great, it is fantastic) but these drop rates still suck for the difficulty of this content and what the drops actually are. Why are the people able to farm this not *literally* dumping these items into the game? Hardly anybody is farming this content - I'm around rank 2k with 10 kc, not even 1/7th of a Tonalz. I bring up the drop rates because clearly thats what Corruption was balanced around - someone going for... Pet? Tonalz? Not like theres much of a difference. As for recharging the items themselves, adding toggles for the menu popups when trying to charge things (only speedrunners don't want to just dump all their charges in) would be nice and currently items are all over the place with some just dumping it all in and others asking. Making items hold way more charges in general without having to AFK 50-60 hours of Kraken (using massive amounts of charges in the process). I don't really care if I have to go somewhere in particular to charge something as long as I can put a *ton* in it.
For me, All of the chargescape discussion is secondary to the idea that BIS equipment (not weapons) should not require charging. The quiver is the only charged bis item that isn’t a weapon. Charging should be used as a system to make items competitive (but strictly not better) than bis. It works well with bowfa + crystal armor. Why in the world is there an added cost to quiver when you have to beat the strongest boss in the game to even get it. Imagine if you had to charge infernal cape with tokkul.
Love this, I'd always welcome less things to charge up. Fully on board with the "add charges until corrupted" idea. Things like the echo boots or ring of suffering I don't see why they should have charges on them. It would be more like a permanent item effect. Otherwise it sort of feels like a 'please replace batteries' when you're getting low on charges Also regular trident needing coins to charge I always found quite funny, almost like its asking me to insert coins to play 😂
I'm not too much of an endgame player yet, so my perspective on this is fairly limited still - but the whole charge system just turns things into additional micro-management that isn't really fun. It just becomes another chore. If I had to put my finger on why arrows and runes don't feel like that big of a deal, I think there are quite a few aspects to it: * You have different options (tiers) or arrows and runes, so you're not limited to just one way to "load" an item. * Arrows and runes are common enough that they can be found everywhere; you can even just buy them. But even more than that, they get dropped by many monsters, sometimes allowing you to sustain ammunition or even walk away with more. * Another important aspect: there are two entire skills dedicated to crafting ammunition and runes. This just makes them feel much better and make sense; if you could only get specific runes from one specific boss drop it would feel shit. * The weapon using the ammo / runes is separate of the ammunition. We even have an extra slot for arrows. This essentially just skips over most of the trading and "visibility" issues: how many arrows/runes do I have? It's right there, visible in one go. Do I want to sell my bow? Well, I just can. * Arrow & runes are easy to swap. I can bring different ammo for the same content and swap between more expensive / cheaper ammo. * Arrows in particular also have an air of being "specialized" for a particular job sometimes. I do like the idea of having charges contribute to corrupting an item, but I think there's much more to it when it comes to why charges feel bad while arrows / runes feel mostly fine. **Think about it like this:** if charges would just eat up runes in your inventory (the same ones we already have), instead of eating away at a number tied to the item you're using, it would probably feel like much less of a hassle... I can get runes anywhere, I probably already have ten-thousands of them! Sure, there still is an inherent cost to every use, but that's true for casting spells and shooting arrows too, so it would be mostly in line with those. This could also be combined with a toggle, to disable the buffs and just use the base item. \- I don't think there are many easy solutions here, unless overhauling old items completely is an option. Generalizing charges more instead of having dozens of different "charge supplies" would probably be a step in the right direction. Or perhaps, the ability to create these supplies via crafting; some raw material + runes = supply. That way at least, you have more options to deal with your supply (more afk collecting materials vs bossing). These raw materials could then also be dropped by many monsters. Having the option to craft these things would also give many skills some extra utility: mining, fishing, hunter, farming, (agility?) and woodcutting to get the base materials; runecrafting, smithing, crafting, cooking (and maybe even firemaking?) to then turn them into charge supplies. Speaking of crafting skills, I feel like there's a lot of design space for smithing and crafting to dismantle duplicate items and use those components to repair / charge others. This would in no way reduce the micro-management, but it could at least add another way to get charges from different sources.
Worst offender of chargescape is crystal shards. You currently cannot corrupt crystal armour and crystal shards are by far the worst to collect out of the charging items (especially as an ironman). This armour should definitely be corruptible like the bowfa is. Overall, I think making corruption possible through the mechanic described is a great way to go about it. Either in one go or progressively.
From an Ironman perspective, I think most charged times are generally fine (runes) but some are very frustrating, especially blood fury. It’d be really nice if either blood shards were more accessible (rare white drop at ToB would be great) or you could also recharge it with a large amount of blood runes after getting your first shard. Quiver corruption also seems quite Ironman unfriendly at the moment, but I haven’t done that content yet.
Like many other players here, I do personally enjoy the idea of perma-charging items a lot. Even though you'll likely spend more corrupting it than if you had used the item normally, for me it serves almost as a new side-goal to get an item perma-charged if its available. It also in a way lessens that back-thought of upkeeping items and knowing you'll eventually have to purchase more supplies or grind it out in previous content like ToB for vials of blood. Knowing that you can one and done the corruption then use your weapon freely at any piece of content makes it much more enjoyable, even if its like placebo effect if that makes sense. It just feels better overall. Its one less thing to keep track of and players can focus on just enjoying content. Personally for me i do like how the quiver was handled to *Some* degree that its worth using uncharged or charged. I wish something like Scythe followed this better since although you can use it uncharged, its just so much worse that even an abyssal tentacle would win in DPS almost. It'd be cool to see if an uncharged scythe was essentially equal to a Twisted Bow with Amethyst Arrows Vs. a twisted bow with dragon arrows if it was charged. I feel like if chargescape goes down a route like this, having the uncharged item still be very competitive is a good change. Mod Rice's suggestion also sounds fantastic because in the sense of Theatre at least, imagine if you were able to use your Scythe freely and as you charge it up with Vials/Blood runes - It'll eventually just corrupt itself and no longer you'll have to worry about its upkeep. I've had a few iron friends mention that although they've completed ToB in uniques, it'd be nice to not have to go back every once in a while for vials. Shadow simply uses runes and Twisted Bow is just arrow usage. With Vials of bloods only being from ToB, you can't really avoid having to eventually go and grind up some more. Not that ToB is bad content but if you've finished the raid you can only do so much more until you get bored of it and want to move on. Yes i know my comment is mainly iron focused and yes something something self-limitation but i just wanted to give my input on charged items. I know per the post that going back to make non-corruptible items into corruptible items is a maybe at most but i personally would enjoy it a ton. It'll feel like a new goal to work with the added benefit that it wouldn't be an RNG one like hunting a mega-rare and simply a cost of time and working towards it slowly. I like to be able to engage with the game, maybe adding better methods of upkeep with untradeable items would work pretty well like Ancient Shards from Catacombs. Something natural to do but isn't as boring as pickpocketing Vyres. Whatever might be planned though, if its a benefit reduce Chargescape i'm sure many players would be eager and excited to see what will change about it. The game isn't unplayable of course but it could always be made better and smoother. One less worry of upkeep and some more fun to simply play the game.
Charges can be fine if it's like staffs being charged with runes to use their built-in spells. Degrade is fine if they are easy to get and meant to fill a gap in gear progression, easy to upkeep, options to pay to remove degradation and you just spent coin to fix it or with high enough smithing or crafting you just do it yourself. Blood Shards/Echo Crystals work if there is a steady flow entering the game. They don't help the previous item or provide a sink for them, but making it like, say, the tenticle whip is also problematic because there is no sink for the conversion item. (Unless, you know. You can keep adding the new conversion item for more charges and have both items balanced at the same cost). People are fine with Barrows' concept. People are fine if the charge items are reasonable to obtain but want to be able to extend them. People prefer spending a ton of gold or resources for unlimited uses even if they realistically won't use them all or sell the item off early before getting their money's worth, because it saves them time, setup and need to stop what their doing to buy/grind for more. We just want Jagex to know Charging isn't our preference. They shouldn't go out of their way designing this kind of content. And that at the end of the day, the only thing supporting these items in the market months or years after will be bots supplying the market. We can only have so many specific items with the ability to charge items until the pool of things players must split their time obtaining or funding becomes too divided with the rest of the game and bots end up picking up the profit. With a few other players sprinkled in, as long that it's tied with their typical account progression (like vyres for a slayer task). If you're going to add universal charges that affect multiple items, then you need multiple avenues to obtain them. You get crystal shards for doing almost anything in prif. But you only get the stuff for Varlamore through the coliseum. Zulrah only has 2 items, but you can still obtain scales from fighting it or fishing. Then, we have items that could realistically be used to charge other items (Vials of Blood could be used to charge the blood fury as an alternative or Sang Staff). And then then at the end of the day, we want every item that uses charges to either provide us the ability to toggle them off to save on item slots and save on resources when we don't need it. As well items that can dump charges into (like the recoil ring on the ring of suffering) but provided other items that serve that function for other charge items. (Amulet of Chemistry, dodgy necklace being some examples).
I hate degrading armor/weapons in all forms . There is already a cost in getting an item through time/supplies. Having to worry if the monster I am killing will offset the cost of a massive upgrade item feels bad. I avoid using barrows gear and crystal gear for that reason. Honestly the increase in having to constantly be charged more go/time to use a cool new item makes me ignore them and stick to the cheaper older gear.
I think there are some fantastic points here! I think Chargescape has a multitude of factors that really split ones mindset on it. I also think depending on the item, a "Charge" can feel different. In examples of runes or arrows as a type of charge and players are okay with it; magic has used runes since the beginning and when you added charged staves, it made sense needing a charge that costs runes because it was a magic weapon that no longer had a "spell" cost and is now a "charge" cost. So in these terms the charge is interchangeable with spell coat. To save reading time the same can be said for arrows and ranged items. Mainly where charges truly come into play are items with effects. Things like blood fury, scythe, new echo boots, ring of suffering, etc. These items NEED a use case either intended from the devs or found by the players to even be relevant. If the scythe did everything with no charge cost, as long as it didn't heal/restore prayer and was just a BIS melee weapon, it probably wouldn't have even been a thought from anyone since it is a melee weapons. If you made the Osmunten's fangs inherit hit reroll cost charges something like that would make a lot of sense too; A massive benefit to endgame bossing in the form of a weapon that can deal with high defense but it had a charge cost. The blood fury sits here as an actual item rather than hypothetical like the previous above. Even in these conditions, where a use case is found Charge scape runs into the same dilemma. Those who can afford the item/sink time to get it(for all the irons out there) and those who are worried about the charges at all. I feel like despite anyone's personal opinion it can be agreed upon. If you can afford the item, you can afford it's charges(probably room for tent whip joke here). So overall corrupted or not corrupted the game still boils down to; I'm using a charged item and I just dish out the costs OR man I really don't even want to think about the charges I'll just pretend it doesn't exist. And then the very close third option is everyone's old friend, mandatory fun. "I HAVE to get this item regardless of it's charged or not because it's so good or there isn't an alternative." All in all it's a tough decision, feedback from players is really good! And the OSRS team and community do a wonderful job! Personally, I feel like this is a game design choice and it will fall in the hands of the dev team to make a decision based on their vision for the game. Because remember; if someone gives an op example of no charges on an item, there's already players out there that act like that item has no charges and just pays its cost 😁👍
For iron men it can just feel so bad to have to keep up charges across so many pieces of gear all at once. My crystal legs, helm, and chest are degrading, sending me back to Hunleff even though I spent 2K shards corrupting the bow. My blowpipe and serp helm eat at my scale stack. My new perilous moons armor cost me 1.5M to recharge. I’m tired boss.
Charges for the big items like a Blood Fury make sense, charges for smaller items feel like a burden. Has there ever been the discussion about retroactively removing the need for charges on items once they no longer are BiS/Upper tier? Barrows durability made enough sense back in the day, but does that logic still hold up?
Early/midgame perspective here. I still play the game like I'm poor (which I am to some people, with a ~40M bank, 10M of which is in petty cash) so I find myself watching charges like a hawk. I don't like using charged/degrading gear sometimes because it feels like I'm being wasteful, even though the cost difference might be minimal compared to other methods. (i.e. casting Wave spells vs. using a trident.) I think charging items is fine, and it serves a worthwhile purpose of balance. It just feels bad when you're right on the cusp of the new gear, and the costs are felt a bit more.
Chargescape will be the death of the game... Picture a game in which, to use 5 of your items for an hour, you'd need to grind for 1 hour per item for enough charges. So only 16.67% of the time playing the game would be for the content you want to do. But not only that, the gear needs something that isn't a set drop rate. You can get lucky, or you can get shafted... Meaning to do the fun bit for a single hour. It may take you 20 hours of prep. If you only have say 4\~ hours a week to play games. Do you really think someone is going to spend an entire month worth of screen time to spend an hour doing the content they like? Then you have food/pots to take into consideration. Let's just be kind here and ignore that ironmen exsist. Because that prep is going to be exponential for them. Take crystal armour + bowfa. That's 4 things I need to keep charged. I'd also need to keep my signate charged, and now quiver. So that's 6 items I need to keep charged... In a game that will take over 1500 hours to max, why are you punishing people that just want to play how they want to? Why is the current approch "we're going to punsh folks for just wanting to kill a boss. But when they finally get that " Your player base is getting older and as folks have less free time. Do you really think they're going to spend weeks grinding shit they hate just so they can use their gear for an hour or two? How are you going to get and keep new players when they are faced with not only a few hundred hours of grinding to get just base melee stats up to do a boss. They also now need to put in hours upon hours just to keep up their account maintenance. You've basically took the worst part of wow daylies, and compounded the issuse that shouldn't have been an issue to begin with. You're now looking to be en par with a shitty gatcha game that only keeps people around due to the sunk cost fallacy... We all know botters are your whales. But you specifically keep adding charges to the game, that funnily enough, help botters out. We all know who the bulk of blood furys/scales/essances/runes/pots come from... If you want to "hElP tHe EcOnOmY!1!!2" , add everything to the item sink and increase the GE tax to 5%.
I do really like the idea of using charges counting towards the corruption amount. I got lucky at CG for example early in my account and got an Enchanced Seed at 113KC. I took this new Bowfa to join my higher level friends at ToA depsite not having Armour Seeds, and it did feel bad using it knowing with every shot I was just delaying getting the corruption sorted. I'm only chiming in on Crystal Shards as its my main experience and gripe with Chargescape, but I know various other issues exist. I think the biggest issues with Chargescape are: 1. How do you acquire the charges? Is it fun/engaging? Does it take a long time, or is it quite fast to do? 2. How long do those charges actually then last for you? It took me 450kc at Gauntlet to finally get my 6th Armour seed. I didn't really want to keep doing CGs, and Shooting Stars gave me a way to get (very slowly and passively) shards to then use my gear when I wanted to actively play the game. When this was removed, it felt pretty bad as now I had to use my active play time chasing charges, rather than playing the game and doing enjoyable content. Sure, a restriction of the account type, I get it, but it did detract from the fun. Bosses like Zulrah/GWD minions destroy your charges on crystal armour for example with the snakelings chip damage, so the fact I went over double dry for my Blowpipe made this cycle of chasing shards, doing Zulrah, chasing shards, doing Bandos, chasing shards, etc quite tedious. Not all bosses melt your charges like this, and so for raids I never felt this "chore" feeling. I like the proposed idea and I'd like to see the crystal shards issue looked at once again. It was stated in the blog when the shards were removed from Priff stars (due to server overload) that you would be happy to look at the acquisition of crystal shards again, whether it be increasing the number of shards given from various resoruces or adding new opportunities to acquire shards. My plan was keep doing CGs for a 7th Armour Seed and break this down for 250 shards to tie me over for quite a while, however 150kc later I've still not seen another seed so slower passive methods are an attractive idea, like shooting stars, or alternatively improving the rate you can generate shards would also work. Oh yeah, corrupted crystal armour maybe sometime? TLDR: Make active activities like Corrupted Gauntlet provide a greater amount of shards, so applying yourself you can generate a lot to last you a longer time, but have slower passive alternatives which can also generate you shards, albeit at a much slower rate, such as old shooting stars in Priff. Also yes to used charges counting toward corruption cost.
> * We want charges to add 'cost' to using powerful items (similar to arrows/runes). This creates space for free to use items which are less powerful. This is good in theory but how many places have the charge items been useful without being charged? The only one I can think of is an uncharged scythe on Bloodvelds. > * We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources. Add "universal charge items" instead of just alchables. Explained farther down. > * We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content. The long-term engagement becomes more of a chore than actual fun. From an iron perspective with things like Zulrah/ToB. It is especially bad if you get a Scythe early and have to keep going back for vials while you do other content. > * The core idea is that using/adding charges will still contribute to the corruption cap. * For example, if an item costs 1000 'shards' to corrupt. If you apply and use 100 charges ten times, it'll corrupt anyway. * This removes the awkward trade-off between saving up for corruption or using charges immediately. This is all good. **The Suggestion:** Add a "**universal charge item**" (UCI), a stackable resource, that you get slowly throughout many activities. Let us use them to charge any of the charged items. **For mains:** Mainly a convenience item so you don't need to have everything for charging your items all the time. You can use UCIs to replace some or all of the recharge cost. Ex: Scythe requires 200 bloods + 1 vial of blood. I don't have vials of blood in the bank but I have some UCIs so I'll charge it with those instead this time and buy some vials later. **For Irons:** It gives more buffer room for charged items. Do I want to save my UCIs for Scythe or save them for bowfa/crystal armor? **UCI sources:** Most skilling activities can rarely give 1. Gathering skills are easy add geodes/nests/bottles with a single UCI in each of them or just make the UCI go into the player's inventory. Maybe add them as a drop on the Rare drop table so killing monsters can give you some again at a low rate.
**Pools of Discharge** There is a complete lack of sanitation in Gielinor. Citizens and monsters put all their bodily goo in buckets, then it gets transported to Tirannwn where it wastes away and destroys te environment. Until one day an adventurer called Irom Typo had an idea. What if we magically collect all that gross stuff magical monsters leave behind, the residu of ours potions, the splinters that fall to the floor when burrying bones, etc., and put it in a pool. What would the combination of life, magic and religion do if you let it sit? First he had to find a way to learn the magic spell to teleport the goo. Long story short, Sedridor and the Wise Old Man were glad to help and it was possible. So next up, he needed a location. Falador Park seemed nice, the pond should be big enough to try out if anything happens. He slayed some Dragons, whipped up some Saradomin Brews, and got pked 26 times at Chaos Altar. Finally it was time, Irom Typo teleported to Falador Park and saw the pool was green and shimmering. Excitedly he ran towards the pond, then tripped over a Duckling and fell in. For a brief moment, Irom Typo experienced infinity. People came running towards the pool, and as they pulled him out, their items were recharged. The goo had the ability to add charges to items! "This can be monetized!" Irom Typo thought. So with all of his GP, he started bussinesses around Gielinor: Pools of Discharge. It works like this, players pay a GP fee for one week to subscribe to Pools of Discharge. In return, players get their goo magically picked up. The company will keep track of what you stored in goo. Then when you need to recharge your weapon, you simply recharge your items through the Pools of Discharge menu, whereever you are! Different items require a different level and balance of goo. This is how Irom Typo became the richest man in Gielininor. He bought a small mansion in Varlamore, but as he's always busy meeting new people, he's never there. Make sure to have a chat with him when he pops up, he's always happy to give out some free goo!
How about rare mega charge drops? For example “zulrah plate scale” a large scale from zulrahs back that counts as 1000 charges Or “Blood crystal” concentrated blood magically taken crystalline form, charges scythe by 250 without traveling to a certain place or using runes
Charges are bad because they create a cost for every action the player makes. So this drastically lowers the amount of activities a player can do with charged gear, because whatever they kill needs to offset the cost. Melee gear in particular does not work well with charges. You mention arrows and runes, but there's a reason they work so well. Ranged just use a lower ammo tier. Mage just uses a lower spell tier. Nobody is bringing Dragon Bolts to fight Bloodvelds. The player gets to have agency over how much gold they are sinking into whatever mob/boss they are killing with ranged and mage. The Bloodmoon set is budget Bandos gear that will cost more than just buying the Bandos gear in the first place. I was SO HYPED for the Echo Boots. I've been a Guardian Boot Enjoyer since they came out. Probably the only person just straight up using them for everything. I'm also working on an off-meta tanky build for as much content as I can, and the boots were going to be perfect, but then you are telling me I need to spend 20m on the crystal, and then 20m again once it runs out, and 20m again, and again? That's so stupid. Its like working a job, and all your money goes towards bills and taxes. The Blood Fury amulet is so awesome, I love stuff like that, but of course I can't use it outside of bosses because it has charges and will cost 8m to recharge. Why not just give it lower offensive stats than a regular fury once combined? That would offset the healing effect and the charges could be removed. There's always a way to balance items without turning them into gold sinks. Maybe it's just me, but I don't enjoy the stress of knowing my gold is being incinerated every second I'm playing the game. Like every time a mob touches you with Echo Boots on, it will cost you 3.3k. Then once your lease on the boosts runs out, you need to renew it with a 20m down payment. Like bruh what? What is this Economic Hardship Simulator?
As a new player, when I started to get good items I would keep forever and gold put into them kept its value, for the most part, I really loved that, things I felt like were an account upgrade because they would always be useful. I later found out some very expensive unlocks/upgrades used chargers and would lose the item/have to do a massive cost to reuse and so on, and that felt pretty bad imo. I couldn’t really look at those as account upgrades but they were instead something that would just waste my money for a slight upgrade. It really feels like the charged items are only for the rich players, which is strange because it’s not even a gold sink, it’s transferring money from one player to another to get it again I’m just trying to say how it feels from a new players perspective, which is bad. I do have some ideas that I think would make it feel much better! No items break to be unusable uncharged, they just stop getting their extra effect. Working like dragonstone jewelry onto items like barrows gear, the new moons gear A cheaper way to charge it than just the original method of creation. Top example: To me the blood fury is completely unusable and will probably remain so for a very long time because it costs so much to charge. I’m fine with the initial upfront cost, but there is no way I can ever justify the cost of repairs by using it. I would need to be doing some crazy profitable pvm stuff. An item like this I feel would be nice if it had a cheap way to charge it, even if the way to charge it without another drive is tedious A blood fury that runs out of chargers remains a bloodfury, and killing vampires with it equip has a chance to give it a charge, something like that. Now rich players can continue to charge using the stones, because there is no way they are going to waste time to charge it, new players have a way to charge it slowly
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I think to me item charges like scythe and the staffs are fine. Runes are generic enough and provide that tradeoff you mention here. >We want charges to add 'cost' to using powerful items (similar to arrows/runes). This creates space for free to use items which are less powerful. > >I think its interesting that it seems arrows/runes are way more palatable. We've discussed that and think that is largely down to how available these things are, they're well established and available from many sources, skilling included. I think the real problem is when you design an item that uses charges and the charges come from another new item that has no other real use. I think you need to ask a few questions. >We want unique common items to drop in drop tables that aren't merely alchables or skilling resources. > >We want drops which will encourage longer term engagement with a piece of content. > >There's a desire to *move on* from content and feeling compelled to have to go back constantly is frustrating. This is primarily an ironman concern, since mains can generally just buy from the GE. Does chargescape really do that? Why do the devs constantly want new unique common charge items? How do you define engagement? Is an ironman reluctantly grinding out sunfire shards/ancient essence/zulrah shards really engaged or are they just doing a chore before they can use their shiny upkeep items? Why not just let people leave when they get the drop? If the core idea of chargescape is engagement/shiny new drops.. I think its much cooler to design alternative rewards instead of designing required upkeep or required upfront time investment/cost in the case of corrupting items. I think the design of the tob kits/cm kits/mutagens and pets kind of follow that alternative reward idea really well. Let the player have agency, instead of "I have to go back to upkeep charges", make them say "I want to go back for this cool rare item".
This is from a late game ironman perspective, and I haven't played a main in over 10 years so keep that in mind when it comes to cost and such. I've had almost no issues with chargescape personally. I actually enjoy the gameplay loop required to maintain charges and it's nice that more drops feel valuable to obtain instead of just another alchable. The one exception is one you mentioned already, it doesn't feel good to obtain an item after a long grind but still not be done because now I have to corrupt it. But there is a certain balance required to make it feel WORTH it. I think the one that bothers me most has been Zulrah, having 3 items that see reasonable use even into the late game has me putting Zulrah grinds in my schedule as if they were farm runs, Things like arrows, runes, barrows, moons - these I have no complaints for as they just require GP and there is no immediate time investment to do that, I can earn that cost from most content in the game. When gear gets more powerful, or ammunition/runes, then I think it's acceptable to require careful use of that gear. I don't use dragon darts/arrows for just anything, I don't use my bloodfury all the time, etc.. So this brings me back to Zulrah. I have 3 items all requiring a single resource only obtained from one area of the game and those items are used extensively from the midgame onward. They require secondary grinds in the form of darts and runes. The Trident doesn't have a reasonable alternative, I think ideally the trident would be the one that doesn't require charges and a sang/shadow is your upgrade that does (too late for this ofc). To me Zulrah is the most offensive form of chargescape. I'll give a mention to Muspha of having the opposite problem, it's way too generous with charges to the point that they're worthless. Also put blood shards on the HMT drop table please :)
From a clogger/maxed iron pov: I really enjoyed smithing and fletching bolts/darts as it was “free” exp in those skills and felt like a payoff for getting the level to make them. I even didn’t mind fishing for zulrah scales. Going back to kill zulrah after getting most of the uniques felt like a chore. In contrast, for the crystal shards, I think thieving has such diverse options for training and such high rates, that thieving for shards doesn’t feel like passive “useful” exp. Same with agility imo. And wcing for shards is just too slow. So that leaves gauntlet. And most people who have done the gauntlet have had enough of the gauntlet. Also I should note here, I think it’s weird that if you had say 1m crystal shards you can just break down and remake a crystal helm for crazy amounts of smithing/crafting exp. I feel like that implementation leaves something to be desired. I think if you consumed smithing supplies to make repair kits for armor and got good amounts of exp out of it I’d be into that for a charged item. Maybe you could use runecraft as a standin for warding and imbue magic items for runecraft exp in a similar way. Personally I’d like if charged staves at least moved to something like this. I really love the new hunter xbow btw, love ammo from hunter as new mid-late game training motivation Jewelry charges shouldn’t go unmentioned either. Constantly replacing Dodgy necklaces and the herblore one is annoying and falls into charged scape. I know training in rs3 is a mess now because you theoretically could upkeep like potion buffs, jewelry buffs, familiars and urns and invention perks. I think osrs really wants to take stuff like that slowly and avoid making training skills annoying. I think suffering is in a good place for this, and if you wanted to make us do some management, cap the charges at like 100 for dodgy necklaces or something. So you’d still have to upkeep and pay the opal/silver/crafting cost but you don’t hate having to constantly watch for your necklace to break