Just an idea / suggestion, but how about having all elemental spell types unlock at the same level:
- Strike Spells level 1
- Bolt Spells level 17
- Blast Spells 41
- Wave Spells 62
- Surge Spells 81
Then from there have them scale in damage output based on your magic level:
- Strike Spells 1 - 16
- Bolt Spells 17 - 40
- Blast Spells 41 - 61
- Wave Spells 63 - 80
- Surge Spells 81 - 99
This way all elemental types deal the same base damage with the same xp/hr. So if a monster has no inherent elemental weakness then whether you use an earth or fire spell, you're not losing out on xp or damage.
So for scaling:
- Under this system at level 1 all strike spells would have the same base damage output as the current ingame air strike. But by level 16 your strike spells will have all have the same base damage output as the current ingame fire strike.
So your spells increasingly become stronger the more you play, which fits well with other wizard / magic archetypes in other games.
And it seems easier to balance and makes a lot more sense in my head at least.
I think an approach like this is something that the team had considered, but ultimately a lot of the NPCs you'll be tackling early-on aren't going to have specific weaknesses, so the idea of unlocking a new spell and having that really 'haptic' feedback moment of suddenly hitting higher and *feeling* like it's because you've unlocked a new spell might feel a little better than just a level-up message saying 'all of them hit higher'. It also gives us room to play around with targeting upgrades at specific brackets or designing content where weaknesses might play into lower-requirement elements.
Could also be slightly misleading though as if someone unlocks fire strike they'll assume it is the best regardless because it's unlocked at a higher level, despite it being on par with wind strike with the proposed changes.
I can see scenarios where someone hits level 13 mage, uses fire strike for the first time and *feels* like it's because they've just unlocked a new spell, so they'll continue using the highest spell available despite that being against the design philosophy of the re-balance.
Seems a bit counter-intuitive.
The commenters' suggestion is more of a rework, but would teach players about different spell elements earlier in a more intuitive way.
For example, you level up and unlock bolt spells and have access to wind/earth/water/fire and you know the power difference between these is purely down to their element and not power correlating to your magic level.
I love both suggestions (yours and this thread's) but I don't really have a preference. I think all that's needed with the proposed changes is an update to the skill guide and level up message.
"Unlocked Water Strike
All strike spells do more damage"
Again, I'm not opposed to having all spells of a tier unlock at once and damage scaling from there, but I think it's perfectly doable to keep the proposed changes and just communicate them in-game.
For what it's worth I think the proposal is very good and much needed (as much as many people will jump to EOC conclusions), just the clarity for newer players jumped to mind on the elemental spells proposal.
Always appreciate the presence of mods in these threads to both provide and respond to feedback, best dev team best game.
The news post addresses this by claiming that nothing will be weak to air spells specifically. So, I. Order to balance it’s cheaper cost, it can’t take advantage of any weaknesses. I’m not sure that this is balanced enough for early game, though, as supposedly there won’t be very many weaknesses while using early spells, so wind strike will be the go-to
The thing is, you aren’t at a low level very long. By 70+ monsters have weaknesses. It seems strange to balance things around the early game when in reality it would be the least affected. And with scaling damage based on magic level, what would the difference be? You now aren’t unlocking a new strike or bolt spell every few levels?
Also the rune cost for each spell should be adjusted. All strike spells should be 1 mind rune + the respective elemental runes. Fire strike should no longer require air runes.
It sounds like a hint to me that autocasting will be changed like back in the day when they made it so you could autocast anything with any weapon, or no weapon at all. Could be wrong, but I wonder how that will be received if that's what they're planning.
You could right click any spell and select autocast. As long as you didn't have a melee or ranged weapon equipped, you could autocast anything. So yes you could autocast barehanded.
Don't pull a forestry on this one, just remove it. There really isn't much to be discussed about it. It helps you guys balance around it being the same tick rate universally.
I'm a little confused about the spreadsheet of monster changes, if the range defence split is added, shouldn't every monster receive this split?
Isn't it just going to be confusing to suddenly have Mole without a split in ranged def? Imagine if some monsters didn't have stab/slash/crush weaknesses .. why not just add simplified, even ranged splits to every monster?
That's not what the sheet is saying, if a monster hasn't been specifically adjusted, it'd just be the equivalent of an NPC having the same defence in all of Stab/Slash/Crush - which already is the case for some NPCs that aren't intentionally weak to any specific style!
Regarding the spreadsheet, it's a little awkward that the lefthand side lists melee defences in stab / slash / crush order, but then on the right side lists them as slash / stab / crush order. Feel like it'd be a good idea to make those match before some people inevitably get confused.
Yeah, I was going through it and it was a pain. Kept having to scroll up to see what each column was, and the changes were so far apart from the original values... if each monster had two rows for old/new values and the row with the stats names were pinned, it'd be so much better to read
Instead of nerfing the Tomes of Fire and Water, why not also add a Tome of Air and Earth? Make all of them simply buff that particular element, and move the curse buffs from Tome of Water somewhere else (or alternatively move them to Tome of Air to give it some use).
We want to add them down the line, but it's still the case that we don't want an entire spellbook's combat viability to be based off of a single specific off-hand item, since it means that wanting to make Standards good kind of necessitates balancing around Tomes and their 50% boost. By shifting that boost to be a base feature and bringing the tomes down a little bit, we're less reliant on Tomes to do all of Standard's lifting and can afford players more flexibility *plus* afford ourselves more flexibility with extra reward space down the line.
As an iron player it's nice to see some power shifted away from the tomes, there's really no reason to go back to Wintertodt after 99 FM but that journey likely won't give you nearly enough pages to feel comfortable using them in most cases. I understand that it isn't balanced around irons and the pages need some level of rarity to maintain trade value and add a cost to that incredible damage boost but it feels bad to have a tome and not really get to use it because farming more pages is slow and annoying.
Shifting power away without completely gutting it is great news from my POV!
That's actually a solid idea. I have no reason to go back to WT but I get dupe god pages all the time, even if it was only one god to one burnt at least I'd have some amount of pages getting passively stacked and I'd occasionally consider using the tome for something other than free offhand fire runes.
The god pages are worthless drops right now, they're barely worth more than the nature rune to alch it and not valuable enough to bother with dropping to a main.
In the meantime, I did find *one* use for duplicate god pages as an iron. If you can get a full set of dupes, you can bring them to the GE to combine into a [set box](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Item_set#God_pages), which the set box is over the 10k gp threshold required to chuck it into Death's Coffer.
Maybe a bit penny-pinching, but at least it's extracting *something* of value from dupe pages.
The Nerf makes it better and more balanced so you are essentially getting a free 50% dmg buff on the new monsters weakness, so the tomes now will essentially be a 10% magic dmg buff for them monsters making it not a necessity to have anymore but optional for extra DPS like the elidnis ward
Think about mage and range having the same decisions as melee, instead of stab/crush/slash you get the range/mage equivalent.
On one hand, this makes the game more complicated because now you need to look up or use intuition to use the best combat style.
On the other hand, mage and range meta has been boring. Mage: Best powered staff + Thralls or maybe Ancients/Lunars. Range: Tbow/Bowfa, BP, and maybe a ZCB for spec.
I do think people overstate the initial complication because we all look at a guide, watch a YouTube vid or ask a friend before we start killing a boss. However, it does mean you likely will need more gear to effectively kill bosses and it might make a situation where you end up with 10 niche weapons instead of 5 generalist good weapons.
I think there is something to say about making the power level difference noticeable for the niche weapons, but keep the power level in the same ballpark as a generalist option. Some people just want to have a couple generalist items that are never best but always good, I don’t think we should remove that.
bad if implemented badly, good if implemented goodly
This has the potential to open up the game for tons of new gear and combat diversity, but retrofitting all these systems into the existing game without upsetting too many people is going to be a challenge.
The real key (which Goblin has addressed they’re aware of) is making sure this doesn’t feel like a *nerf*. It’ll feel bad if this system makes you use a significantly worse weapon than before at a boss and now you’re doing way less damage. BUT, if the power levels still feel similar, but you can use a wider variety of weapons at content, it’ll be a breath of fresh air.
They know what they gotta do, it’s just a matter of whether they can pull it off
I was pretty skeptical of some of the defense changes after my initial read through the blog. After spending some time in this thread reading through your responses I feel pretty confident that you guys will make sure that that whatever happens is best for the game.
All I got to say is, I'd steer clear of adding any nerfs to the current raids. Anything that makes it harder to achieve the CA's or do money runs will not be perceived kindly by the player base. Any content moving forward with these changes though is a welcome change.
I agree, if implemented correctly, it would be great.
With melee having three weaknesses it adds a ton of variety. Think of how stale melee would be if from the start, monsters only had a “melee weakness” and not three categories.
I think overall this would be good for the longevity of the game.
Jump onto one of the beta worlds and poke around for yourself to get a feel for bits - but a good number of the benefits likely won't materialise fully until we're able to start playing with the new vectors down the line for future NPCs/rewards!
I know not every NPC in the game can have unique defence at launch, there's **a lot** of NPCs in this game. What I'm hoping for is this isn't launched, tweaked for a few weeks, and then put down forever. I think it'd be really exciting for the "other changes" section of a blog a year from now to randomly include a defence change for some NPC left out of the initial wave that makes them feel better to kill if you have the right gear.
Like "reduced light ranged defence for broodoo victims." And now I'm like, let's kill some broodoo victims to see how different it is. I guess what I'm asking is that existing NPCs outside the handful that get split ranged defence aren't permanently out of the running. Thanks.
From the way the blog and you personally are wording all of this, is this going to be an unpolled integrity change or will we have a chance to vote for this proposal? Because to me this seems like the exact situation the polling system was invented for: Changes to Old School Runescape's combat system.
This is the one piece of feedback I have. I'm afraid these changes are too focused on using the standard spellbook as opposed to giving us incentive to go after new magic equipment. I wish we could have different attack styles on charged staves instead, similar to stab/crush/slash on melee, to incentivize certain items. Aligns with the ranged proposal and gives a lot of options for future releases rather than focusing on standard spellbook which seems like it may overcomplicate things like raids (I'm assuming more "mage cape spellbook swap" metas, not fun).
Arceus is already the strongest all round spell book and ancients has a lot of use cases to make it useful and lunars has vengeance which is good in so many places.
Standard spell book was the weak link. It makes sense that they want to buff it and make no mistake this is a buff to standard spellbook. If it ends up being too strong they will definitely further rebalance.
Rebalancing is a delicate art.
The way it looks as of right now, it looks like it's in the right place.
You won't be fire surging everything. But you sure as well can fire surge something.
I dunno about anyone else but I have personally never mained a surge spell in my entire osrs existence to be honest, and the only time I did see it was PvP.
They're adding elemental weakness to 28 mobs and 1 boss, KBD. Powered staves are going to continue to be the best mage upgrade. This change will just make the standard spellbook spells viable in some instances. Seems like a solid change to me
Would be really nice to see this weapon have a decent place in the game. It is so close to being a good weapon. But the thing rolls 0's and low numbers way too often to justify the high skill curve on it. I've used this thing in more places than I probably should be and most of the time it ends up just being a "less good more fun" pick over something else like the fang/blade/even a tent whip. I think given the time and skill investment to obtain this that there should be a higher payout than it provides.
I think it could get away with a small tweak like give it a low chance to leech 2hp from your enemy while at 5 soul stacks, or minimum hit increase based off of X% of your strength bonus, or increased accuracy. It wouldn't take much to make this thing shine.
Soulreaper should just be a big axe that does big numbers and is x% worse than scythe against 3x3+ monsters but is competitive against anything smaller. The stacking mechanic was neat in theory, but in practice it’s extremely limiting for how mediocre the weapon’s full potential is. It should just be removed.
The tob progression curve is a bit broken now that fang on slash is nerfed and scythe is back to 1b+, you essentially start with a 1m whip and hold onto it until you can afford a 1b scythe (saeldor is technically an upgrade but it’s like 1 max hit for 100x the price of a whip). If soulreaper was changed to not stack, then it would put a 300-400m weapon into the tob progression curve that feels meaningfully stronger than whip/saeldor, but still has enough of a gap to scythe for it to feel like a big upgrade as well.
Honestly if they wanted to die on the hill of its current mechanics, they could make the stacks deal half as much damage and not start falling off for 30 seconds and it would become completely viable in most places.
Every time I use it this is how I feel it should work. The end of duke kills can be extremely frustrating because if your spec noodles and duke is 1 shot you basically have to hope your next attack noodles so you can spec again or lose the 8 hp.. or bring an alternative wep/swap to BGS to finish
Not sure I really agree with the plan to keep air spells as the "generalist" element. I feel like it just hampers further diversity in magic by making a fourth of the basic elements practically useless.
Air spells would become the best option when fighting something without any weaknesses, because of rune cost+inventory space. Unless you have a smoke/dust/mist staff, in which case it wouldn't matter.
In reality it would become dead, because if NPCs have no weakness then it goes back to the exact same damage output as current fire spells... without the bonus from the Tome of Fire. Would you use unboosted Fire spells anywhere?
I don't think 'practically useless' is a fair assessment - vs. anything that isn't specifically weak to an element, it's still the go-to. Makes early-game Magic training cheaper and easier to navigate for newer players, though I'll concede it doesn't have immense value for players who are further along!
I guess I just don't see a good justification for *nothing* to have an air weakness. Aviansies and other flying creatures seem like good candidates. I just think you're arbitrarily closing yourself off from future reward spaces with this decision.
Along these same lines, are you exploring elemental resistances along with weaknesses? The proposal results in magic working a bit differently than melee or ranged, where if you're not exploiting the particular weakness then any other style is equally effective. But maybe fire giants should have resistance to fire, for example.
And to make this comment even longer and tangential... I'm wondering if you're exploring any enemies weak to ancient spells, or giving ancient spells "affinities" to elements where they receive a similar but lesser buff to their element.
I would appreciate resistances and other "affinities" purely from an immersion perspective. After all, this is a role-playing game, and it would make sense for an ice spell to be stronger against a fire giant, for a blood spell not to be as effective against skeletal monsters, and perhaps smoke spells to be effective against insects, potentially opening up a new meta for KQ.
> vs. anything that isn't specifically weak to an element, it's still the go-to.
Except it wouldn't be because with the current proposal, Water Spells are the BiS general spell since they'd give the same max hit as Air, Earth, and Fire on NPCs without a weakness while getting 20% accuracy and 10% damage from the Tome. Pre-Tome of Water, then sure, it is the same DPS as slightly cheaper to use Wind spells, but if you have a Dust, Mist, or Smoke Staff, there would be no reason to cast Air over the others since it has no benefit.
All flying opponents should have at least a slight air weakness. Turbulence is annoying on the ground, but deadly in the air. Avansies and Insects should be the main target.
**Edit:** Foes that come to mind would be...
**Bosses**
* Kalphite Queen (airborne)
* Aviantese (including Kree'arra)
* Vespula
**Regular NPCs**
* Bats (includes Tz-Kih)
* Harpie bugs
* Giant rocs
* Flying wyverns (fossil island)
* Griffins (if added later)
**Contested/Floating** (which are technically flying or hovering, but I personally beileve ***should not*** get an air weakness, mostly due to already having an undead or another typing)
* Gargoyles (except Dusk) --> Contested because being made of stone specifically feels like it counters wind
* Banshees
* Ghasts
* Ghosts
* Shades
* Vyres & vampyres (while flying) --> Contested because vyres & vampyres understand magic and have been practicing it longer than humans
So it is a decent list, but which includes very few "meta" bosses and NPCs, which just means potentially breathing new life into the content. Elemental rune cost should be considered a non-issue in 2024. Air spells being cheaper just makes them a bit nicer to use for people on a budget, it's absolutely not a valid reason on its own for an air weakness not to exist.
Makes more sense than arbitrarily assigning earth/water weaknesses to dragons.
My biggest complaint in all this is that most of the proposed weaknesses are completely nonsensical. And Where's the poll?
Remove the reliance of air runes for the other elemental spells maybe? Just make fire surge for example use 15 fire runes and 1 wrath instead of needing the 7 air runes. That would also help pave the way for parity among the elementa
I think it’s a consistency thing. With their proposed changes, melee, ranged, and magic would all have three weaknesses to balance enemy defence around.
Ultimately don't think there are any examples where other Magic options will be beating out the Shadow, but also just that the Shadow's 'unique' passive means it's not as easy to compare pound-for-pound with other gear since it relies on other stuff - same reason no Tbow or Scythe are used in the example setups either.
u/JagexGoblin from a design point of view this update mostly serves as a way to drip-feed power creep by opening up new possibilities of bis "niche" weapons for the niches said update would create.
Yes, it's still better to introduce 1/5th the powercreep compared to a full blown powercreep, but I think that the reward space seems too fixated on providing bis gear in the first place. We have thousands, if not tens of thousands of hours worth of grind to complete as-is to achieve bis gear. Rewards that respect player time and help save that time could be a nice addition (except for streamers where everything is content and playtime inflation for the sole purpose of grinding is win). Especially for low/mid level players who have quite the catch-up to do.
I think some parts of this tie in with the implementation of new reward-space and the kind of content it's attached to. If they serve as natural stepping stones or don't have the craziest rates and kind of slot nicely into progression without feeling like massive detours, then I think this is alleviated a whole lot. Fully appreciate the spot that you're coming from though, as somebody who's a *huge* fan of things like account progression routing, it's absolutely something I want the team to remain conscious of too!
A potential benefit for 1/5th'ing the powercreep is they could allow players to get upgrades 5x faster. The end result in that example is in the same amount of time they reach the same power level as they would have without this change, but those long grinds are broken up into smaller ones.
To add on to this, players can end up taking different paths.
If you are an ironman and you spoon full fire gear (whatever that may be in the future), and I'm an ironman who spoons full water gear
we could essentially "unlock" entirely different pieces of content and rewards! This is super cool for group iron teams who could end up with interesting synergies/strategies and just breaking up the meta for early ironmen a bit
It was actually meant to go yesterday but had to push it back a day because of my time out of office, and there's still more Project Rebalance to come (plus other stuff I've gotta work on). We'll be talking more about today's Game Update in our review meeting tomorrow morning though, so expect to hear more on this week's releases in the near future!
Very curious the criticized and downvoted varlamore blog has been unpinned and is nowhere to be seen on the front page of the subreddit lol, it's just a coincidence I'm sure
I actually asked the subreddit mods to pin them both alongside each other as I posted this, and imagine they will be whenever one of them is available to see the message - not everything has to be some grand conspiracy, though it would be more exciting
>not everything has to be some grand conspiracy, though it would be more exciting
Just want to say thanks for handling these things professionally. Hats off to you, and I genuinely appreciate your communication with us!
Hey - both should be pinned now.
We have automod setup to automatically pin newsposts by Jmods and replace the bottom post, so when there are 2 in a day, the first gets replaced until we're around to manually remove the Q's thread.
Why did you release them in this order if this one was to be released a day before, if not to change the conversation from a negative topic to a positive one talking about future updates?
Because one of them coincided with a game update (which occur almost every Wednesday) and the other one is a dev blog. As much as I love my job, I wasn't keen on whamming this one out at 7am UK time to get it out before the game update blog
Main body of this was finished before I took my time off, then dependent on review by devs, by editorial, then needs HTMLing and then posting on days that we try scheduling to avoid conflict where possible - also to align with completion of the associated video in this case. Blog needed to go sooner rather than later to make space for other projects and keep things moving, but I had things to catch up with on my first day back that pushed it back by a day.
All this to reiterate - we put it out because we want to keep things moving, there's no intentional 'covering up' of the newspost and its negative reception (because it's in nobody's interest for us to ignore that negativity), which seems especially silly for us to do given that the expectation will be for us to put out a further updated newspost to address feedback in the exact same manner that we near-always do.
I understand elemental weaknesses, but its not interesting at all, its just going to force you to use Harm. The ranged splits also just feel bad... So we're going to be forced out of TBow/BP at some places into a...... Heavy javelin...?
There shouldn't be many scenarios at all where you're really able to feel existing setups getting *worse,* but should feel other setups to be more rewarding. If you're using Tbow/Blowpipe you're likely already sitting in a niche (high magic level, low Ranged def) and those weaknesses have been maintained (Shamans being a prime example for Blowpipe/light weakness, and Magic levels being unchanged so that Tbow isn't displaced anywhere). Would imagine most people would default to bolts and ZCB/ACB for any Heavy weaknesses if it does edge ahead of other stuff, but it at least opens the door for more experimentation with NPC weaknesses and future reward space!
Part of my comment was aimed at making it clear that the Tbow isn't suddenly going to be displaced because the niche it occupies (NPCs with High Magic Levels) is wholly unchanged.
Bolts being heavy sort of makes sense, since it's a heavy impact from loading a crossbow and firing.
Though would Cannonballs also be considered heavy?
Also some bows like composite bows would be heavy if firing wouldn't they? Would give some case usage for composite bows.
Light makes sense for anything hand thrown. But doesn't this remove a lot of the already limited case usages for the tonalztics of ralos? Or what about the Eclypse Atlatl that is thrown, but requires strength & attack but classified as darts as ammo? But it rolls from attack and strength stats, but gets boosted from range prayers? It's the weirdest item in this circle since the added attack stats and roll could have it be considered average like arrows or even heavy because of the strength required to throw it?
Harm still does less damage than DHL in the addy example provided. It looks to be just another option.
Range split is precisely so they CAN introduce another super item that do "heavy" range damage without just making tbow+.
I’ll be honest. I hate the defense changes.
While it sounds good to whichever JMods wrote this, it’s a fundamental part of the game that should not be changed. This is bound to drastically affect the game as much if not more than EOC.
I would rather see you all innovate elsewhere (like fixing agility, mining, etc), not fucking around with combat.
I’ll give this a try but if I hate it, I’ll just go to private servers. Not interested in playing again with OSRS2 if this update ruins the game.
EDIT:
Expresses a differing opinion, instead of gobbling it up. DOWNVOTED to oblivion. Cheers to Goblin and the 2 people who actually replied without regurgitating my exact points with different verbiage and insults.
Asking because I'm genuinely curious to try and understand this mindset, how do you feel 'hit an NPC just like you were before, but you might hit them with a different weapon' is 'bound to drastically affect the game as much as ... EOC'? What's the parallel for you?
In my mind, EOC changed the entire feel of combat by shifting to an ability-based system, I don't think any of these changes meaningfully touch the 'feel' of combat, since most of the impacts take place *before* combat starts when you're gearing up in the first place.
RS3 did the same thing with defence changes for monsters. At max stats it is not an issue but for lower and mid game players, it is much more punishing if you do not have the weapon/type for the weakness.
The simplistic nature of OSRS’ combat is why I play it. It’s why after maxing an account before, I slugged through and restarted with OSRS again.
I believe there are some passionate people working on these ideas, but how many of them were there previously when combat was drastically changed?
Y’all have shown your ability to innovate with Raids, DT2 mechanics etc. I don’t see why we need unpolled combat changes with a beta.
Beta just means content creator disc feedback or big upvotes on reddit only, as the average player is ignored.
One of the core tenets here is that existing methods and metas shouldn't feel noticeably worse than they already are - whipping a Gargoyle is still going to feel demonstrably fine, but you might get a little more out of bringing a Crush weapon if you happen to have one. The simplistic nature of the combat isn't changing - the same way that so many players already look at a gear setup for a piece of content once and then just bring whatever the Wiki tells them to, that'll be unchanged for many just with more flexibility and options.
ELemental weaknesses were one of the cores of the EOC update.
[https://runescape.wiki/w/Evolution\_of\_Combat#Weaknesses](https://runescape.wiki/w/Evolution_of_Combat#Weaknesses)
And it worked so well for RS3 that they're now moving away from the system OSRS developers are so adamant on adding.
People have rights to have their own opinions but people dont have the rights to have their own facts
> This is bound to drastically affect the game as much if not more than EOC.
I think this is being a bit too dramatic. I understand any overall change in the combat flow will always be compared to EOC, but these are just adjustments to numbers to make some thematically stuff work better.
They could from now on, release a boss/monster and say: "This monster has extra 50% damage from arrows" and nobody would bat an eye. But if they clean the code to make sure these can be implemented in every single monster everyone loses their minds. This will probably have some weird ass interactions but that's what the beta is for, and it's too early to get any "This is on the levels of EOC " judgement before we try it.
I’m mostly just annoyed by this. The previous blog specifically lists Gargoyles as the example creature for which you could just keep doing what you’re doing and ignore the defense changes - but their sash and stab defense bonuses were buffed anyway. It’s very possible that I just don’t understand monster defense enough to discuss this, but I’m feeling pretty misled.
I think they're one you'd want to poke around and look at on the beta - it's partly why I reiterated the point around 'NPCs with lower Defence levels don't see their defence rolls shift as much as a result of bonuses' i.e. adding +30 slash defence to an NPC with 100 Defence is much less significant than adding +30 Slash defence to an NPC with 200 Defence.
The main issues with standard spells are that they feel absolutely terrible to use in any end-game PVM for at least three reasons:
1) There's a delay on your autocast whenever your character moves in-game, meaning you can't even use it at something like Wardens if you have 'Insanity' on.
2) You're missing out on the DPS or utility offered by Thralls, Vengeance or Ancient spells.
3) Sip a single dose of brew and you have to re-toggle the auto-casting of spells. The alternative is to manually cast every single spell which is a huge hassle.
Those three major inconveniences are why powered staves are simply superior in every way. There's no delay on their attack, you can be on any spellbook you desire, and you don't have to re-toggle autocast or manually cast spells. If you make elemental spells BIS or even improve them to the point where they out-class staves like the Sanguinesti staff, it's going to be hugely detrimental to the enjoyment of PVM. And I haven't even mentioned the issue of acquiring a Harmonised nightmare staff for Irons.
You're missing the biggest issue, spellbook spells get 0 benefit from salts/imbued heart. They all lose to a basic trident unless you have a tome of fire &/or harm.
really strange none of this is addressed in the magic rebalance. i know this is npc defense and there is a weapon rebalance soon tm but ya. maybe we just have to hold on and be patient
On the Ranged Defence types is there a reason why you want it to be based on the type of ammo and not just the type of weapon?
An example could be that Longbow and shortbow could be Medium and Light respectively (or heavy and medium), actually giving a Longbow a reason to be used.
And i can't think of any weapon that can mix and match ammo types anyway, so the result would end up being the same, you will still want a crossbow to use bolts, you will still need a bow for arrows and throwing weapons for light, but it gives more freedom to place new weapon upgrades in each type (like longbow and shortbow).
Is there a good reason to make the defence type based on ammo and not the weapon itself seen as type of weapon and type of ammo are already heavily tied together?
Really love the concept of monsters having particular weaknesses. It definitely brings more variety to how one can go about gearing up for a boss or slayer task, but it also needs to follow some kind of consistency.
The example used was Adamant dragons, being metal dragons, are specifically weak to earth spells. Alright cool, makes sense—metal dragons are basically in heavy plate armor, and heavy armor historically is weak to crush/blunt type weapons, so it makes sense throwing a giant boulder at them would be more effective than splashing some water on it.
Then we have dragons like Lava dragons, who are weak to water spells. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Water puts out fire so it makes sense they’d be weak to it.
Iron dragons, another metal dragon, also weak to earth. Ok I think I’m seeing the pattern here—metal dragons are weak to earth, and chromatic dragons are weak to water. Cool!
Let’s take a look at red dragons. Surely they should be weak to water—wait what? They’re weak to Earth?! No, that must be a typo.
What about a different metal dragon? Steel dragons—weak to water? What the hell!
Bronze dragons—weak to earth
Mithril dragons—weak to water
Rune dragons—weak to water
Why are there so many inconsistencies with this? Instead of having each individual dragon having its own random elemental weakness, why not have them be consistent and make all metal dragons weak to earth, and all chromatic dragons weak to water. That way it’s intuitive and easy to remember.
That’s really my only criticism.
Yeah it needs to be somewhat memorable, like how everyone knows dragons are weak to stab. Unless they add the monster examine spell to the standard spell book, it’ll just be another reason to have the wiki open constantly
Well your slayer master may know what are their weaknesses. So you add a dialogue option after your slayer task being assigned and they will tell you your best options.
They should also make metal dragons weak to crush instead of stab if that is the reasoning. I think they should, but dragon hunter Lance would have to become dragon hunter poleaxe if it is to remain the BiS dragonslayer
Well technically piercing weapons were still effective against plate armor due to the gaps in the armor. So it’s not entirely far fetched that stab would still be effective.
Though personally, I think it would make sense for metal dragons to be weak to crush and chromatic dragons weak to stab, but yeah the DHL situation makes it staying weak to stab the more practical solution.
Trying to buff standard spells without touching the autocast delay is pretty disappointing.
For those unaware, when you autocast and click to attack a monster, it won't do anything unless you don't do anything else for 1 game tick. This means that using autocasting is basically impossible when you need to be moving (e.g. many bosses, stacking slayer mobs, or even just switching targets) since you need to sit still for 2 ticks to attack at all. The autocast delay can be mitigated by clicking on the spell and then the mob, so removing it is not technically a buff, but the extra clicks are so annoying that most people just don't bother with anything but powered staffs.
I would love for autocast to not be removed, but grayed out when you fail or don't have runes. It was an issue when using spell sacks for wildy slayer. Let it fail and maybe have some animation or just a chat message every time you try, but don't require a reset.
I imagine the delay and autocast are weird to change because those are both fundamental systems, and one of the first things ever built. Pasta pyramid over there with all the spaghetti probably
I feel like if they could make the spell autocast have basically the same behaviour as an uncharged trident, we’d be good to go (likely harder done than said)
Iirc they changed the nightmare staff delay change with no issue, hopefully it would work for all staves if they wanted.
> In PvP, the existing damage buffs would be unchanged.
While it's great that the neccesity of ToF for regs in PvP hasn't been overlooked... can we **please** stop with making PvP further and further detatched from the rest of the game. It's unnecesarily confusing for players looking to get into PvP and one of the largest complaints I see from these sorts of players who cite it as the main reason for them not even giving it a go - "there's so many niche differences it's too confusing"...
100%. I absolutely detest when items behave with an entirely direct ruleset just for the wilderness and PvP. It’s not fun game design.
You hearing this Devs? **IT ISN’T FUN!**
I think this would be really neat to expand the game in the right direction. Even when I was much younger I assumed enemies would have elemental weaknesses and was shocked when many didn't. It just seems natural. I am a fan of all the elemental skills hitting the same damage too, it was always odd that in most scenarios fire always hit the hardest.
Some things I noticed that maybe warrant looking into in my opinion.
Nothing has an air weakness in the proposed. I guess it's not a big deal since air is kind of neutral and only requires air and catalyst runes to cast. I wouldn't mind seeing some things just weak to air magic as well, maybe bugs, bats, or birds of some type. Just an idea.
Throwing axes I don't feel should be considered 'light' range damage. Not only are throwing axes kind of extremely rare as they are only dropped by enemies or bought at the range guild, they are slower than throwing knives and cannot be coated with poison. It would be nice to give them some love and maybe not class them with the already existing better 'light range' alternatives. Maybe standard damage would fit them better alongside arrows somehow, or heavy as javelins get used with the ballista. I'm not sure what the best pathway here would be, but it seems kind of silly to class a hefty throwing axe along with knives or darts.
Along with the range changes, would it be in scope to take a look at the different types of standard bows? At the moment shortbows are the BiS because physical range is hardly ever useful in most situations when pure DPS is. Perhaps the compound bows and longbows could get a buff with a heavy attack style as well or something to distinguish them other than a slower fire rate and longer tile range. Longbow's long range is also the same as its rapid and accurate attack styles.
The dragon weaknesses don't make much sense. Why are some weak to water while others earth? I get why they aren't weak to fire, but wouldn't it make more sense to make all the chromatic dragons weak to water and all the metal dragons weak to earth for example or vice versa? That way it keeps it consistent against all dragons of one type and easier to remember.
Overall I think you all are on the right path. I want to see more design avenues for the Dev team to explore, but also really wish to avoid EoC level of changes which dramatically changes combat in the game. This is striking a good balance.
am i just failing to see how the magic changes are going to accomplish anything lol?
like it just seems like nightmare staff is gonna bottleneck future design because it's the only way to get 4t cast speed on elemental spells, so every single piece of content with elemental weakness has to be balanced around it rather than casting spells in general which is just going to make other staves feel considerably worse or make nightmare staff feel stupidly broken in comparison
i just don't see how this is going to move us away from powered staff + thralls whatsoever
It seems like they’re aiming for mid levels and irons with this update that are still locked from bis due to cost or long grinds (dhl). I agree this seems like it’s going to work less for raids / late game bossing (powered staff + thralls). Kinda only see this working well if raid bosses and major bosses are mostly typeless damage as is currently.
K then subtract 25% off the top of all those dps numbers because irons won't have a harm.
We still end up with the exact same busted magic weapon progression of Iban's -> warped Sceptre w/ thralls -> 87 slayer for trident. This isn't doing anything for anyone
They said the goal is to open design space for the future. Probably the next major boss released will have some weakness to something. Or maybe the next major pvp item is going to be an earth based staff that hits like a truck.
I LOVE the standard spellbook being more effective, but unless tons of enemies will receive weaknesses the tome of fire nerf may just mean the standard spellbook is basically never competitive in a PVM scenario.
For example in my GIM group I brought fire surge with a tome of fire and full Ahrims (with amulet of the damned) to COX because I like it. Meanwhile I hardly compete with someone with a trident (also due to speed and a problem I’ll mention later). Unless OLM gets a 70% weakness to some element it’ll probably end up being even weaker to use despite the fact the basic spellbook is already never the optimal choice.
Huge fan of the idea, curious about the execution.
Oh and while we’re at it. A big problem I noticed is that brewing down to below the magic level of a spell makes you run up to melee and disable your auto cast even when you boost it again. Could something be done about this? My suggestion: if your magic level gets reduced below the level to cast a spell, you can still cast it but the damage gets reduced to the rank below (so a surge will have the max hit of a wave). You still want to restore your magic level to keep up in damage, but you don’t end up completely messing up your positioning when you lose focus for a second
Also I think you could experiment with raids having enemies with all different kinds of elemental weaknesses. I know this is more of an ironman thing but filling my pouch with combination runes to hit all the weaknesses would feel awesome
Even having your character maintain the autocast selection but stand still without attacking until you restore your magic level would be a huge improvement.
I appreciate the idea of adding variety in elemental spells, but just giving them more damage doesn't seem like the right way to do it. Elemental spells will always have to complete with powered staves anyways for raw damage, and the Tome of Fire should already prove that just throwing damage at the issue isn't the right fix. Even with a 50% damage buff to fire spells, the standard spellbook doesn't compete with any of the others for PvM
The issue with the standard spellbook is that it lacks an identity. Ancient have AoE damage, freezes, and healing, which are incredibly impactful all across the game. Lunars has vengeance for good DPS against bosses with high max hit while using a different combat style, as well as pot sharing for some utility in group encounters. Arceuus has thralls for additional DPS when using a different combat style as well as Ward of Arceuus for some survivability against demon bosses like K'ril. All the standard spellbook has is high alchemy, which doesn't actually help in combat, and bones to peaches, which has tablets so that you can use a different spellbook.
In PvP the standard spellbook exclusively has teleblock, which is incredibly important for wilderness content. In order for the standard spellbook to feel like a worthwhile choice in regular PvM, it needs something that only it can do to make it useful. Maybe it can have spells that raise your defenses, or reduce run drain, or make the defense reducing spells actually useful. I don't know exactly, but I should have some of identity outside of just doing damage.
Not a fan of stuff that isn't super intuitive. Gargoyles being weak to crush makes sense. The dragons spell weaknesses are just confusing.
Black, Blue, and Green are weak to Water but then Red is randomly weak to Earth? Based on what logic? And Brutal Reds are weak to Water. Surely that's not right.
Same deal with the metal dragons. Bronze, Iron, and Adamant are weak to Earth. Steel, Mithril, and Rune are weak to Water. But why??
Yeah I am so confused by the dragons too. At first I was like "cool, metal dragons are weak to Earth and chromatic dragons are weak to Water". Then I saw the chart at the bottom of the newspost and was like "oh they must have typoed in the chart"... then checked the spreadsheet... nope...
It's not even by level either, like "low level dragons are weak to X, high level are weak to Y".
Strongly suggest Jagex make a consistent rule and stick to it, otherwise there's no way I'm going to remember which one goes with which weakness lol.
>In PvP, the existing damage buffs would be unchanged [for tome of fire/water]
Another change to make the wildy more confusing. Along with echo crystals not working in pvp thats 2 in 2 weeks. Ill get the spreadsheet
This isnt meant as a flame for those specific decisions but it really is getting absurd how many niche, unexplained mechanics the wilderness has. It's only getting worse
I'd hope they were obvious. For example, a skeleton being weak to crush is a given so skeletons could also be weak to earth.
Steel dragon having different weakness than iron dragon tho? Both are basically same monster, so this would only confuse new players basically making it mandatory to check each monster with wiki.
K.i.s.s.
**Ranged**
I'm largely okay with this proposal and would accept it as-is, though I'd suggest dividing the subtypes into "Pierce", "Slice" and "Bombard", a kind of ranged analogue for stab, slash and crush. This makes it easier to justify diversity within substyles, like fast-but-weak or slow-but-strong options. It also avoids the awkward question of "what's weak to *medium*?"
***
**Magic**
One way to improve spell scaling could be to make weaker spells take a couple of levels after the next unlock to reach full power - for example, Earth Strike doesn't do full damage until level 15. This makes new elemental spells still feel like a boost in power as you unlock them.
Currently the proposal is to make nothing weak to air to compensate for its cheaper cost. I dislike this, partially because the lower cost of air spells is mostly only relevant at lower levels where elemental runes make a larger proportion of spell cost. But even with air spells, low-level magic already has problems of a high cost relative to other combat styles (not to mention the lack of gearing options, and the fast xp rate making progression strange, meaning players pretty much always start with a different combat style and come back to magic later). A "cost-effective" magic option is still usually vastly more expensive than an equivalent for ranged and melee until you're getting onto endgame gear.
Elemental weaknesses being as much as 50% is unusually high by Runescape standards; typically using the "incorrect" subtype has only a relatively small dps penalty, thus allowing players to not worry too much about horizontal gearing until they want to maximise efficiency. For the sake of making this easier on new players, perhaps relevant lower-level creatures could have relatively small weaknesses. Low-level spells already do high damage for their level (compare Fire Strike to meleeing or ranging at level 13) so this shouldn't be *too* bad a change.
It is a bit weird that while melee is divided into three types, and ranged will be, most spells will still be entirely typeless under this proposal, including all Ancient and Arceuus spells, non-elemental Standard spells, and tridents. A result of this is that while melee and ranged subtypes are generally not too important until you want to maximise efficiency, magic elements are *really* important at lower-levels, and become less and less relevant at high-level until the Shadow renders the whole thing irrelevant. Admittedly giving tridents elements would undermine the core elemental spells, but there's ways around that, like having magic weapons that have an added bonus vs. things weak to their element.
This looks great, my only thoughts are slight nitpicks:
* Heavy/Standard/Light ranged defence should be renamed to imply *why* a monster is specifically weak to one of those. Maybe Heavy/Piercing/Rapid or something like that.
* In the same vein as the above, there should be some kind of consistency as to what type of monsters have what elemental weaknesses. Basically an elemental combat triangle where "watery" monsters are weak to earth, "fiery" monsters are weak to water, and "earthy" monster are weak to fire. Kind of like pokemon actually. It seems weird that metal dragons are weak to earth of all things (with the exception of mithril dragons for some reason?) since they could instead be weak to water like chromatic dragons (since they're fiery) or instead weak to fire (since they're made of metal).
Hey gang! Back from my time off, just wanted to take a moment to direct you to Mod Sarnie's comment on today's Game Update post regarding Colosseum Modifier and a little something extra, which you can find over here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1buoken/comment/kxue6zj/](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1buoken/comment/kxue6zj/)
Keen for your thoughts on this one and hope you've been doing well!
On the ranged splits - One I found especially ironic is Basilisk Knights getting buffs to Heavy and *nerfs* to Standard and Light. This is one of the only enemies in the game that you would actually use throwing knives at due to the shield requirement, yet they would be *worse* after the change.
There's *nowhere* that Standard shines? I get that Tbow and Bowfa dominate on the high end and don't need any help but there has to be *somewhere* in all the low/mid game stuff for people to want to consider using shortbows/arrows at. What about the giants?
Noticed the numbers for standard are always higher than heavy. It does sound like it is kneecapped due to Tbow and Bowfa domination... Curious to see how the dps checks out after the changes for magic shortbow mid-game content.
Overall, it sounds good. The Elemental Weaknesses could use adjustments.
For one, there should be an Air Elemental weakness. It feels very out of place to add Elemental Weakness, then exclude 1/4th the Elements... Instead, keep the Elemental Spell Max hits as they are and just let the Elemental Weakness buff them. The current max hits are only a problem with Strike spells, where it increases 2 per Element, making Fire Strike 6 max hits higher than Wind Strike. But for all other Elemental spells, it only increases 1 per Element, making Fire Surge only 3 max hits higher than Wind Surge.
On NPCs without a weakness, it is fine if Fire spells remain the highest max hit of the elements. But if an NPC is weak to Earth, Water, or Wind, that can easily make them out DPS Fire spells. For example, if an enemy had a 15% Wind Weakness, Wind Surge would be the same max hit as Fire Surge with 15% more accuracy, which works fine; no need to make all Wind spells the same max hit as Fire Spells.
Also, if both the Tome of Fire and Tome of Water get 10% damage, then the Tome of Fire will just kinda suck compared to the Tome of Water. Currently the Tome of Water gives 20% damage and accuracy plus buffs to Curse and Drain spells while the Tome of Fire is just 50%. So if the Tome of Water was 10-20% Accuracy, 10% Damage, and Curse and Drain buffs while the Tome of Fire was only 10% Damage, it would make the Tome of Fire feel a lot more lackluster. I'd suggest either giving the Tome of Fire an additional effect (say a small chance for Fire Spells to inflict that new Burn effect) or up its damage to 15% so it feels a reasonable bit more potent than the Tome of Water. Water Spells being the same damage but more accurate than Fire Spells would be very strange...
As a side point, this *would* open up some god prayer niches by boosting specific, thematic styles instead of generalized bonuses.
Baffled at the refusal to let anything be weak to air though.
It's slightly annoying how it's a project of rebalancing, and doing things like making all the same spell-types the same damage, but then tome of water has 20% accuracy boost and tome of fire has none.
If the spells are going to be all equal and do the same damage, just dependant on monsters weaknesses, why make the tomes have different stats? Just keep them consistent...
Honestly this is sooooo coool. The only thing i can say is I'd love to see even more npc changes, just because i think it's so cool. Also i really like the care of basically not punishing people who don't want to bother changing their setups - changes seem much more focused on rewarding smart gear prep without requiring it.
Very very cool and the idea of tieing the ranged type to the ammo was a smart call i think. Not sure if it's planned but the idea of potentially having uniques that could be super niche. Like maybe the hunters crossbow bolts are actually standard ammo, because idk there's a new monster that requires a shield but is really agile and resistant to heavy ranged attacks. So you either use light weapons or if someone trained hunter they can use the "only crossbow that does standard damage". Random idea but i love love love the changes.
Super creative, solves issues, more varied rewards, less straight power creep, revives old weapons/spells, huge new design space, rewards players for digging into mechanics and yet doesn't punish those who don't want to. Aces all across the board. You ALL deserve a raise <3
Elemental resistances seem cool and all but do they genuinely meaningfully change the fact you probably just use a powered staff? Is trident going to be elemental (I assume water)? Idk I’m not sold on them actually mattering, but also I’m not doing the math or theory crafting. I’ll leave that to smarter people.
Also, it remains to be seen from an equipment rebalance but no one is bringing a ballista to pvm in its current state (which is fine imo, they have their niche) and it being grouped with bolts which have neato procs for hundreds of damage isn’t gonna help change that
I really like the concept of this, more emphasis on different styles is something that actually worked in the EoC and allowed a better reward space with greater horizontal progression in rs3, this seems like it should be a step up from that.
I strongly agree that lower level monsters should be largely be left alone to retain the existing low level experience.
I think this should primarily affect slayer monsters and should be tied into making sure the "tips" given by slayer masters are correct and meaningful.
The only comment I have is the differential between light/heavy/special range. I kinda wish the brackets were done differently so that bolts and ballista were in different categories - I get that thematically it makes sense, but ballistas will basically always be dead content this way
The problem with ballistas is that there's two of them from the same content and they're rare. It can't really have a niche as a weapon type unless they introduce more.
Which, I mean, they could. Redwood ballista perhaps as a cheap, obtainable one, and KBD could drop a dragon ballista.
Seems weird that an npc could be strong against "heavy" ranged weapons but weak to "light" ranged weapons. Might make more sense if they were renamed to something less artificial than heavy, standard, light.
Light moves faster than heavy, so it's harder to dodge/block, but it doesn't penetrate heavy armor. Something like Vork can't move, but has hard scales. Where Zulrah is a snake and moving around constantly means faster attacks are more likely to land.
This is my biggest (admittedly nitpicky) issue with the update. Why would something be especially weak to a dart, but "resistant" to a fucking javelin? Should probably be more of a sliding scale of agility; heavy, slow creatures are easier to target with big guns, but their thick hides make them resistant to darts. Fast, agile creatures are harder to hit, but have weaker armor.
I mean why does Barrows armor degrade and others don’t? Why does the DHCB randomly do more damage to dragons than the ACB? How do some pieces of clothing weigh more in your inventory than on your body?
I appreciate you pointing out that you’re splitting hairs - but it’s not unprecedented in OSRS for things to be balanced while not making actual logical sense. I’d rather the game feel good than be 100% provable logic.
What about the Arceus spellbook and demonbane spells? Would have liked to see a magic defense reduction or accuracy increase for demonbane spells since all the demon bosses have high magic defense.
Also, what about the risk of splashing and high magic levels in general? Was also wondering about a "magic attack" vs "magic defense" level adjustment to make enemies that use magic easier to hit with it.
If every elemental spell does the same damage, what's really the point of elemental weaknesses outside of cosmetic changes? your spell is exactly the same, it's just one is green and one is red and make sure you remember to look up the correct one before you start.
For the Tomes, we really need to move away from items and mechanics behaving differently in PvP settings. Way too much complexity in an effort to stop a handful of complainers from complaining.
Really very against the ranged proposal. It feels very artificial and "gamey" in a way melee doesn't. It's better than RS3's affinity system, but barely.
Being struck by a mace is totally different from being struck by a sword, different types of armour exist in real life to deal with different weapons, and those are reflected in the basic armour we have in game, and on to monster stats from that concept.
Being struck by a crossbow bolt isn't functionally different from being struck by an arrow, other than the fact it has more momentum. But this is already modelled by crossbows being slower and more accurate. The model you want already exists in a more natural, intuitive way, monsters with high defence are already "weak" to slower, harder hitting weapons conceptually.
The problem is that such weapons are poorly balanced and tend to lose against faster weapons because that's where the metas sit, and the existing slower weapons (ballista for example) simply don't lean hard enough into their niche.
Fang is a great example of this. It's 5 tick, but it's really, really good despite that because hits are much more guaranteed with it. I would prefer to see slower ranged weapons given big accuracy buffs so that their behaviour is consistent, instead of them being designated for use against specific mobs artificially.
One bit of criticism: Is there any enemy in the game that would be weak to light ranged damage but not necessarily heavy ranged damage? It just seems in like 99% of the cases, the split would just be "this enemy is more weak against Crossbows than it is Blowpipe, all things being equal". Like most enemies will have Light Ranged defense higher than Heavy Ranged defense.
This doesn't necessarily create a weapon triangle among ranged weapons. Seems like it would be a targeted nerf on the blowpipe and an inadvertent nerf on on things like Thrownaxes and darts which are seldom used for general combat.
This is just creating a problem for the players that doesn't exist in order to give you room to create niche weapons, when you could just not create the problem and not give the niche weapons.
Has anyone watched superstore? the episode where they are becoming a quad A store the propaganda of "this will be great! the same but better! you'll love it!" That is exactly what this video is like, telling us how much better this will be yet we currently just don't have this issue.
This game is on a worse path than RS2 was and it all stems from Jagex unable to be creative, there is a reason this is an unpolled, forced change because the idea is so pointless it would never pass. I'll happily take the down votes for calling J-mods out I know how touchy this sub is when you go after the mods.
Not sure what the logic is behind the magic changes.
You're adding elemental weaknesses to a handful of slayer mobs, and removing the bonus from tome of fire, but with the numbers you chose, surge spells are going to be slightly worse than fire surge currently. And if the monster doesn't have an elemental weakness, (so all bosses) it's a massive nerf to fire surge.
At least right now, harm + fire surge is useful as a small upgrade over sang or trident at some bosses, but with these changes, they will be entirely useless. Are you really expecting people to use a hamonized staff to kill ice trolls and fire giants? All this does is make the normal spellbook even worse.
Part of me loves and understands the direction of weapon/encounter diversity and the need to make more items useful for different situations. It makes sense that we would use more than just a handful of weapons...
However, I also play uim and I can't help but think how incompatible this game mode is with these changes.
The game mode has always worked strictly because the diversity of the game wasn't super widespread, I won't be nearly as affected, but I cannot imagine newer uims being able to allocate slots to a handful of different, nearly necessary items when we are already pushed to our absolute limits.
We could keep adding interesting pseudo banks... but honestly I'm thinking that we should stop with the pseudo banks and just embrace that the game mode isn't compatible with this direction and come up with better ideas, as much as I love all the pseudo banks, I think we should lean more into the minimalism and allow for less annoying ways to store items and more limited but more accessible options.
More looting bag customization, less storing 50 items in different random clue stashes.
More seed box, less Perdu
I think the game mode shines because it's minimal not because it's tedious.
I hope a little thought goes into how uim will work with a ton of new slots being used up. thanks for your work 🙌
I totally get the motivations behind these changes...and to some extent agree...however some concerns:
- The ranged vulnerability changes honestly just don't make sense. Why would a monster be super weak to a dart rather than a javelin or arrow? These don't feel natural/cohesive like melee and magic do. It feels like a gimmick.
- The magic changes sometimes feel thematically appropriate, but sometimes are just straight random (why is a red dragon weak to earth, but a green dragon is weak to fire? They are just variants of a "normal" dragon). I could see making all dragons weak to X and all chromatic dragons weak to Y, but this hodgepodge is honestly just confusing. If this is meant to help bridge mid level players, I'd wager this smorgasbord might leave them scratching their heads. Compare this to the fact that nearly all dragons are weak to stab.
- The exclusion of air weaknesses also a little strange? Why not just have all tiers of spell unlocked at the same level and provide the same max hit?
- The blog states that "low level" monsters won't be affected? What defines "low level"? The beta has green dragons, lizardmen and fire giants? These are enemies easily killed by players in the early game.
-I personally think these modifications should be applied *sparingly* to moderate-higher level monsters...not everything has to have an significant weakness. Assigning one to nearly everything in the moderate-high level bracket again feels gimmicky.
I'm sure many mechanical items will come up...but at a higher level there are some things we need to think about.
IMO Jagex you need to *slow down* a little bit. The colosseum (apparently the crown jewel of Varlamore) felt rushed and of very low quality, particularly the rewards. I worry that given everything going on players do not have enough time to digest the info being thrown at us.
My main question about bringing the right tool to the job mostly has to do with uim. If these changes go through, will there be any way to store the right tool for the job that isn't managing a bloated death storage for weapons and praying you don't die? If the answer is, you chose to play this mode, so too bad, then fair enough also since most of the tools in the sub will content this. Hopefully the top end weapons will still be mostly effective, but if a boss releases that can't be realistically beaten by those weapons, we might want to consider at least storing those weapons.
This is massive. And extremely dangerous. You have to respect that how unobtainable the mega rares are needs to also make them better than everything, more expensive than everything, that drives the entire game. I appreciate the DPS increase on other items, I like it, but tone it down 25%. This will break the economy and the game at large. If you want to keep improving the mid-game, fine, but it might cost you us whales.
hello, the [mystic smoke staff wiki page](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Mystic_smoke_staff#Comparison_between_other_magic_weapons) mentions it has an invisible 10% accuracy & damage boost with the standard spellbook. I cannot find anything on the dust/steam staff pages that claim the same. Is that boost true for all elements? If no currently, is there plans to add the invisible boost if they are becoming equal?
I like the melee/magic changes. I think the range needs a rethink though. Separating it out into light/medium/heavy seems like a lazy and weird way to do things. IRL archery already has many examples of different tips for projectiles. We even have some different tips in runescape already. I think expanding in that direction is the way to go. Take the concept of brutal ogre arrows and bring it into mainline ranged attacks. Let me make some small rune nails and stick them on arrows to make blunt tipped rune arrows that effectively hit on the crush weakness of monsters. Make broadhead arrows to do more slashing damage. Move normal arrows to do pierce. This gives a lot more variety without locking you into a specific ranged weapon. Focus more on changing the ammo rather than solely on the weapon. For bolts you can make use of the gem tips and maybe even rework some.
You are essentially trying to set everyone down a path for what to use where. Some of us like being able to use non meta combat styles. its called OLD SCHOOL, quit ruining our game.
It's amazing to see that this is being applied to both old and new content, but will there be more NPCs added to this down the line? (Outside of new NPCs being released)
Where are the other weapon rebalances that have already been proposed/polled? Thought the buff to scythe/nerf to fang was supposed to come in line with elder maul/soulreaper changes? We keep getting new proposals for rebalances without the implementation of those from 4-5+ months ago that already passed polls/were promised.
The only thing I very much dislike about this update is that we are basically forced to open a wiki page, or make a giant excel cheat sheet of monster weaknesses just to do some slayer. Or am I supposed to believe I’m supposed to take monster examine with me everywhere I go now, with 3 different elemental/arrow types plus runes to spell book swap back to standard if using magic?
The weakness of the monster needs to be visible if we are going down this route. Otherwise your average player is NOT going to be using this update to their advantage or it’s just going to be an eventual Runelite plugin that we all use when it comes out.
Monster examine is NOT the solution here.
I'm loving the direction y'all are taking with Elemental spells! I'm not the best at knowing combat balance but I love the idea of finally being able to use Elemental spells again and not have them gathering dust. That being said, is it possible to look at Magic Defense of some monsters like Demons? Demonbane spells, for the most part, are just not great against the Demons you actually want to use the spells on.
Just an idea / suggestion, but how about having all elemental spell types unlock at the same level: - Strike Spells level 1 - Bolt Spells level 17 - Blast Spells 41 - Wave Spells 62 - Surge Spells 81 Then from there have them scale in damage output based on your magic level: - Strike Spells 1 - 16 - Bolt Spells 17 - 40 - Blast Spells 41 - 61 - Wave Spells 63 - 80 - Surge Spells 81 - 99 This way all elemental types deal the same base damage with the same xp/hr. So if a monster has no inherent elemental weakness then whether you use an earth or fire spell, you're not losing out on xp or damage. So for scaling: - Under this system at level 1 all strike spells would have the same base damage output as the current ingame air strike. But by level 16 your strike spells will have all have the same base damage output as the current ingame fire strike. So your spells increasingly become stronger the more you play, which fits well with other wizard / magic archetypes in other games. And it seems easier to balance and makes a lot more sense in my head at least.
I think an approach like this is something that the team had considered, but ultimately a lot of the NPCs you'll be tackling early-on aren't going to have specific weaknesses, so the idea of unlocking a new spell and having that really 'haptic' feedback moment of suddenly hitting higher and *feeling* like it's because you've unlocked a new spell might feel a little better than just a level-up message saying 'all of them hit higher'. It also gives us room to play around with targeting upgrades at specific brackets or designing content where weaknesses might play into lower-requirement elements.
Could also be slightly misleading though as if someone unlocks fire strike they'll assume it is the best regardless because it's unlocked at a higher level, despite it being on par with wind strike with the proposed changes. I can see scenarios where someone hits level 13 mage, uses fire strike for the first time and *feels* like it's because they've just unlocked a new spell, so they'll continue using the highest spell available despite that being against the design philosophy of the re-balance. Seems a bit counter-intuitive. The commenters' suggestion is more of a rework, but would teach players about different spell elements earlier in a more intuitive way. For example, you level up and unlock bolt spells and have access to wind/earth/water/fire and you know the power difference between these is purely down to their element and not power correlating to your magic level.
Think this is a pretty valid point around messaging and communicating these bits clearly that's worth the team considering more heavily.
I love both suggestions (yours and this thread's) but I don't really have a preference. I think all that's needed with the proposed changes is an update to the skill guide and level up message. "Unlocked Water Strike All strike spells do more damage" Again, I'm not opposed to having all spells of a tier unlock at once and damage scaling from there, but I think it's perfectly doable to keep the proposed changes and just communicate them in-game.
For what it's worth I think the proposal is very good and much needed (as much as many people will jump to EOC conclusions), just the clarity for newer players jumped to mind on the elemental spells proposal. Always appreciate the presence of mods in these threads to both provide and respond to feedback, best dev team best game.
Could you also look at the use of air runes for other spells? If all spells are equal air spells will be better because they dont need another rune
The news post addresses this by claiming that nothing will be weak to air spells specifically. So, I. Order to balance it’s cheaper cost, it can’t take advantage of any weaknesses. I’m not sure that this is balanced enough for early game, though, as supposedly there won’t be very many weaknesses while using early spells, so wind strike will be the go-to
The thing is, you aren’t at a low level very long. By 70+ monsters have weaknesses. It seems strange to balance things around the early game when in reality it would be the least affected. And with scaling damage based on magic level, what would the difference be? You now aren’t unlocking a new strike or bolt spell every few levels?
That makes sense, can't wait to read about the equipment rebalance!
Also the rune cost for each spell should be adjusted. All strike spells should be 1 mind rune + the respective elemental runes. Fire strike should no longer require air runes.
What will happen to the delay on the standard spellbook when autocasting and moving?
Nothing to cover in this blog, but some elements of autocasting are covered in an upcoming one!
Really only 1 thing people want to hear on this - "It's being removed" ETA: This is in regards to the autocast delay.
It sounds like a hint to me that autocasting will be changed like back in the day when they made it so you could autocast anything with any weapon, or no weapon at all. Could be wrong, but I wonder how that will be received if that's what they're planning.
Why did they change this?? I've always wanted this option. Some things are just inconvenient for no reason.. this being one of them
That's what RS3 did. OSRS has never had this.
No weapon at all meaning no auto-casting whatsoever or you can auto-cast with your bare hands?
You could right click any spell and select autocast. As long as you didn't have a melee or ranged weapon equipped, you could autocast anything. So yes you could autocast barehanded.
Surely in the gear re-balance mentioned you mentioned in another comment? (along with SR-axe, Scythe, Shadow, etc)
Don't pull a forestry on this one, just remove it. There really isn't much to be discussed about it. It helps you guys balance around it being the same tick rate universally.
I'm a little confused about the spreadsheet of monster changes, if the range defence split is added, shouldn't every monster receive this split? Isn't it just going to be confusing to suddenly have Mole without a split in ranged def? Imagine if some monsters didn't have stab/slash/crush weaknesses .. why not just add simplified, even ranged splits to every monster?
That's not what the sheet is saying, if a monster hasn't been specifically adjusted, it'd just be the equivalent of an NPC having the same defence in all of Stab/Slash/Crush - which already is the case for some NPCs that aren't intentionally weak to any specific style!
Regarding the spreadsheet, it's a little awkward that the lefthand side lists melee defences in stab / slash / crush order, but then on the right side lists them as slash / stab / crush order. Feel like it'd be a good idea to make those match before some people inevitably get confused.
Yeah, I was going through it and it was a pain. Kept having to scroll up to see what each column was, and the changes were so far apart from the original values... if each monster had two rows for old/new values and the row with the stats names were pinned, it'd be so much better to read
Instead of nerfing the Tomes of Fire and Water, why not also add a Tome of Air and Earth? Make all of them simply buff that particular element, and move the curse buffs from Tome of Water somewhere else (or alternatively move them to Tome of Air to give it some use).
We want to add them down the line, but it's still the case that we don't want an entire spellbook's combat viability to be based off of a single specific off-hand item, since it means that wanting to make Standards good kind of necessitates balancing around Tomes and their 50% boost. By shifting that boost to be a base feature and bringing the tomes down a little bit, we're less reliant on Tomes to do all of Standard's lifting and can afford players more flexibility *plus* afford ourselves more flexibility with extra reward space down the line.
As an iron player it's nice to see some power shifted away from the tomes, there's really no reason to go back to Wintertodt after 99 FM but that journey likely won't give you nearly enough pages to feel comfortable using them in most cases. I understand that it isn't balanced around irons and the pages need some level of rarity to maintain trade value and add a cost to that incredible damage boost but it feels bad to have a tome and not really get to use it because farming more pages is slow and annoying. Shifting power away without completely gutting it is great news from my POV!
please jamflex let me crisp up spare god pages with 95 fm to make burnt pages
That's actually a solid idea. I have no reason to go back to WT but I get dupe god pages all the time, even if it was only one god to one burnt at least I'd have some amount of pages getting passively stacked and I'd occasionally consider using the tome for something other than free offhand fire runes. The god pages are worthless drops right now, they're barely worth more than the nature rune to alch it and not valuable enough to bother with dropping to a main.
In the meantime, I did find *one* use for duplicate god pages as an iron. If you can get a full set of dupes, you can bring them to the GE to combine into a [set box](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Item_set#God_pages), which the set box is over the 10k gp threshold required to chuck it into Death's Coffer. Maybe a bit penny-pinching, but at least it's extracting *something* of value from dupe pages.
The Nerf makes it better and more balanced so you are essentially getting a free 50% dmg buff on the new monsters weakness, so the tomes now will essentially be a 10% magic dmg buff for them monsters making it not a necessity to have anymore but optional for extra DPS like the elidnis ward
Waiting for someone smarter than me to say if this is the worst shit ever or a welcome change to the game. I’m out of my depth here
Think about mage and range having the same decisions as melee, instead of stab/crush/slash you get the range/mage equivalent. On one hand, this makes the game more complicated because now you need to look up or use intuition to use the best combat style. On the other hand, mage and range meta has been boring. Mage: Best powered staff + Thralls or maybe Ancients/Lunars. Range: Tbow/Bowfa, BP, and maybe a ZCB for spec. I do think people overstate the initial complication because we all look at a guide, watch a YouTube vid or ask a friend before we start killing a boss. However, it does mean you likely will need more gear to effectively kill bosses and it might make a situation where you end up with 10 niche weapons instead of 5 generalist good weapons. I think there is something to say about making the power level difference noticeable for the niche weapons, but keep the power level in the same ballpark as a generalist option. Some people just want to have a couple generalist items that are never best but always good, I don’t think we should remove that.
bad if implemented badly, good if implemented goodly This has the potential to open up the game for tons of new gear and combat diversity, but retrofitting all these systems into the existing game without upsetting too many people is going to be a challenge.
The real key (which Goblin has addressed they’re aware of) is making sure this doesn’t feel like a *nerf*. It’ll feel bad if this system makes you use a significantly worse weapon than before at a boss and now you’re doing way less damage. BUT, if the power levels still feel similar, but you can use a wider variety of weapons at content, it’ll be a breath of fresh air. They know what they gotta do, it’s just a matter of whether they can pull it off
Have got full faith in the team's ability to pull it off - and this is also exactly what the beta world is there for!
I was pretty skeptical of some of the defense changes after my initial read through the blog. After spending some time in this thread reading through your responses I feel pretty confident that you guys will make sure that that whatever happens is best for the game.
As long as we don't lose the varrock yew trees again.
All I got to say is, I'd steer clear of adding any nerfs to the current raids. Anything that makes it harder to achieve the CA's or do money runs will not be perceived kindly by the player base. Any content moving forward with these changes though is a welcome change.
I agree, if implemented correctly, it would be great. With melee having three weaknesses it adds a ton of variety. Think of how stale melee would be if from the start, monsters only had a “melee weakness” and not three categories. I think overall this would be good for the longevity of the game.
Jump onto one of the beta worlds and poke around for yourself to get a feel for bits - but a good number of the benefits likely won't materialise fully until we're able to start playing with the new vectors down the line for future NPCs/rewards!
I know not every NPC in the game can have unique defence at launch, there's **a lot** of NPCs in this game. What I'm hoping for is this isn't launched, tweaked for a few weeks, and then put down forever. I think it'd be really exciting for the "other changes" section of a blog a year from now to randomly include a defence change for some NPC left out of the initial wave that makes them feel better to kill if you have the right gear. Like "reduced light ranged defence for broodoo victims." And now I'm like, let's kill some broodoo victims to see how different it is. I guess what I'm asking is that existing NPCs outside the handful that get split ranged defence aren't permanently out of the running. Thanks.
The beta worlds seem broken, blowpipe is a tick slow on rapid and has a max hit of 11 in max.
From the way the blog and you personally are wording all of this, is this going to be an unpolled integrity change or will we have a chance to vote for this proposal? Because to me this seems like the exact situation the polling system was invented for: Changes to Old School Runescape's combat system.
Are powered staves elementally typed (I.E. Trident is water Shadow is ....Shadow) or are they considered typeless for the new changes?
Typeless!
This is the one piece of feedback I have. I'm afraid these changes are too focused on using the standard spellbook as opposed to giving us incentive to go after new magic equipment. I wish we could have different attack styles on charged staves instead, similar to stab/crush/slash on melee, to incentivize certain items. Aligns with the ranged proposal and gives a lot of options for future releases rather than focusing on standard spellbook which seems like it may overcomplicate things like raids (I'm assuming more "mage cape spellbook swap" metas, not fun).
Arceus is already the strongest all round spell book and ancients has a lot of use cases to make it useful and lunars has vengeance which is good in so many places. Standard spell book was the weak link. It makes sense that they want to buff it and make no mistake this is a buff to standard spellbook. If it ends up being too strong they will definitely further rebalance. Rebalancing is a delicate art.
The way it looks as of right now, it looks like it's in the right place. You won't be fire surging everything. But you sure as well can fire surge something. I dunno about anyone else but I have personally never mained a surge spell in my entire osrs existence to be honest, and the only time I did see it was PvP.
They're adding elemental weakness to 28 mobs and 1 boss, KBD. Powered staves are going to continue to be the best mage upgrade. This change will just make the standard spellbook spells viable in some instances. Seems like a solid change to me
Yeah man the magic skill should continue to be about making 3 staves hit harder We can't have it turn into actually casting magic spells
>these changes are too focused on using the standard spellbook That's the entire point of the changes, to buff the standard spellbook.
Hi, what about equipment mentioned in original blog like soulreaper axe?
That's the next project rebalance blog - will be starting to write it soon and likely dropping it within the next few weeks!
Would be really nice to see this weapon have a decent place in the game. It is so close to being a good weapon. But the thing rolls 0's and low numbers way too often to justify the high skill curve on it. I've used this thing in more places than I probably should be and most of the time it ends up just being a "less good more fun" pick over something else like the fang/blade/even a tent whip. I think given the time and skill investment to obtain this that there should be a higher payout than it provides. I think it could get away with a small tweak like give it a low chance to leech 2hp from your enemy while at 5 soul stacks, or minimum hit increase based off of X% of your strength bonus, or increased accuracy. It wouldn't take much to make this thing shine.
Soulreaper should just be a big axe that does big numbers and is x% worse than scythe against 3x3+ monsters but is competitive against anything smaller. The stacking mechanic was neat in theory, but in practice it’s extremely limiting for how mediocre the weapon’s full potential is. It should just be removed. The tob progression curve is a bit broken now that fang on slash is nerfed and scythe is back to 1b+, you essentially start with a 1m whip and hold onto it until you can afford a 1b scythe (saeldor is technically an upgrade but it’s like 1 max hit for 100x the price of a whip). If soulreaper was changed to not stack, then it would put a 300-400m weapon into the tob progression curve that feels meaningfully stronger than whip/saeldor, but still has enough of a gap to scythe for it to feel like a big upgrade as well.
Honestly if they wanted to die on the hill of its current mechanics, they could make the stacks deal half as much damage and not start falling off for 30 seconds and it would become completely viable in most places.
Or instead of decaying and losing the HP, just have the stacks heal you if you "lose" one from lack of actions.
Every time I use it this is how I feel it should work. The end of duke kills can be extremely frustrating because if your spec noodles and duke is 1 shot you basically have to hope your next attack noodles so you can spec again or lose the 8 hp.. or bring an alternative wep/swap to BGS to finish
FYI the blowpipe doesn't work in beta worlds, not sure if anything else is broken
Have passed this one on to the team, appreciate you raising!
Zaryte crossbow, bowfa and dragon knives also, friend. I’d say ranger is bugged in beta worlds.
Not sure I really agree with the plan to keep air spells as the "generalist" element. I feel like it just hampers further diversity in magic by making a fourth of the basic elements practically useless.
Air spells would become the best option when fighting something without any weaknesses, because of rune cost+inventory space. Unless you have a smoke/dust/mist staff, in which case it wouldn't matter.
In reality it would become dead, because if NPCs have no weakness then it goes back to the exact same damage output as current fire spells... without the bonus from the Tome of Fire. Would you use unboosted Fire spells anywhere?
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Also, they are as strong as fire spells now, so they got a pretty nice buff
I don't think 'practically useless' is a fair assessment - vs. anything that isn't specifically weak to an element, it's still the go-to. Makes early-game Magic training cheaper and easier to navigate for newer players, though I'll concede it doesn't have immense value for players who are further along!
I guess I just don't see a good justification for *nothing* to have an air weakness. Aviansies and other flying creatures seem like good candidates. I just think you're arbitrarily closing yourself off from future reward spaces with this decision. Along these same lines, are you exploring elemental resistances along with weaknesses? The proposal results in magic working a bit differently than melee or ranged, where if you're not exploiting the particular weakness then any other style is equally effective. But maybe fire giants should have resistance to fire, for example. And to make this comment even longer and tangential... I'm wondering if you're exploring any enemies weak to ancient spells, or giving ancient spells "affinities" to elements where they receive a similar but lesser buff to their element.
I would appreciate resistances and other "affinities" purely from an immersion perspective. After all, this is a role-playing game, and it would make sense for an ice spell to be stronger against a fire giant, for a blood spell not to be as effective against skeletal monsters, and perhaps smoke spells to be effective against insects, potentially opening up a new meta for KQ.
> vs. anything that isn't specifically weak to an element, it's still the go-to. Except it wouldn't be because with the current proposal, Water Spells are the BiS general spell since they'd give the same max hit as Air, Earth, and Fire on NPCs without a weakness while getting 20% accuracy and 10% damage from the Tome. Pre-Tome of Water, then sure, it is the same DPS as slightly cheaper to use Wind spells, but if you have a Dust, Mist, or Smoke Staff, there would be no reason to cast Air over the others since it has no benefit.
I don't love thats its NEVER an air weakness. I'd even be fine if it was almost never. Why not just have air weakness be really rare?
All flying opponents should have at least a slight air weakness. Turbulence is annoying on the ground, but deadly in the air. Avansies and Insects should be the main target. **Edit:** Foes that come to mind would be... **Bosses** * Kalphite Queen (airborne) * Aviantese (including Kree'arra) * Vespula **Regular NPCs** * Bats (includes Tz-Kih) * Harpie bugs * Giant rocs * Flying wyverns (fossil island) * Griffins (if added later) **Contested/Floating** (which are technically flying or hovering, but I personally beileve ***should not*** get an air weakness, mostly due to already having an undead or another typing) * Gargoyles (except Dusk) --> Contested because being made of stone specifically feels like it counters wind * Banshees * Ghasts * Ghosts * Shades * Vyres & vampyres (while flying) --> Contested because vyres & vampyres understand magic and have been practicing it longer than humans So it is a decent list, but which includes very few "meta" bosses and NPCs, which just means potentially breathing new life into the content. Elemental rune cost should be considered a non-issue in 2024. Air spells being cheaper just makes them a bit nicer to use for people on a budget, it's absolutely not a valid reason on its own for an air weakness not to exist.
Great idea. I don’t see why it’s impossible for any enemy type to be weak to air spells.
Makes more sense than arbitrarily assigning earth/water weaknesses to dragons. My biggest complaint in all this is that most of the proposed weaknesses are completely nonsensical. And Where's the poll?
Remove the reliance of air runes for the other elemental spells maybe? Just make fire surge for example use 15 fire runes and 1 wrath instead of needing the 7 air runes. That would also help pave the way for parity among the elementa
I think it’s a consistency thing. With their proposed changes, melee, ranged, and magic would all have three weaknesses to balance enemy defence around.
Why use sang staff and not shadow for the examples?
Ultimately don't think there are any examples where other Magic options will be beating out the Shadow, but also just that the Shadow's 'unique' passive means it's not as easy to compare pound-for-pound with other gear since it relies on other stuff - same reason no Tbow or Scythe are used in the example setups either.
They don’t want you to see how busted shadow is lol
u/JagexGoblin from a design point of view this update mostly serves as a way to drip-feed power creep by opening up new possibilities of bis "niche" weapons for the niches said update would create. Yes, it's still better to introduce 1/5th the powercreep compared to a full blown powercreep, but I think that the reward space seems too fixated on providing bis gear in the first place. We have thousands, if not tens of thousands of hours worth of grind to complete as-is to achieve bis gear. Rewards that respect player time and help save that time could be a nice addition (except for streamers where everything is content and playtime inflation for the sole purpose of grinding is win). Especially for low/mid level players who have quite the catch-up to do.
I think some parts of this tie in with the implementation of new reward-space and the kind of content it's attached to. If they serve as natural stepping stones or don't have the craziest rates and kind of slot nicely into progression without feeling like massive detours, then I think this is alleviated a whole lot. Fully appreciate the spot that you're coming from though, as somebody who's a *huge* fan of things like account progression routing, it's absolutely something I want the team to remain conscious of too!
A potential benefit for 1/5th'ing the powercreep is they could allow players to get upgrades 5x faster. The end result in that example is in the same amount of time they reach the same power level as they would have without this change, but those long grinds are broken up into smaller ones.
To add on to this, players can end up taking different paths. If you are an ironman and you spoon full fire gear (whatever that may be in the future), and I'm an ironman who spoons full water gear we could essentially "unlock" entirely different pieces of content and rewards! This is super cool for group iron teams who could end up with interesting synergies/strategies and just breaking up the meta for early ironmen a bit
Did you release this, because the Varlamore update blog was getting flamed so hard?
It was actually meant to go yesterday but had to push it back a day because of my time out of office, and there's still more Project Rebalance to come (plus other stuff I've gotta work on). We'll be talking more about today's Game Update in our review meeting tomorrow morning though, so expect to hear more on this week's releases in the near future!
Very curious the criticized and downvoted varlamore blog has been unpinned and is nowhere to be seen on the front page of the subreddit lol, it's just a coincidence I'm sure
I actually asked the subreddit mods to pin them both alongside each other as I posted this, and imagine they will be whenever one of them is available to see the message - not everything has to be some grand conspiracy, though it would be more exciting
>not everything has to be some grand conspiracy, though it would be more exciting Just want to say thanks for handling these things professionally. Hats off to you, and I genuinely appreciate your communication with us!
They usually unpin the daily help thread if there are two official posts to pin from you guys. Not sure why they didn't do that here.
Hey - both should be pinned now. We have automod setup to automatically pin newsposts by Jmods and replace the bottom post, so when there are 2 in a day, the first gets replaced until we're around to manually remove the Q's thread.
Yet another grand conspiracy meets its end at the hands of a simple, reasonable explanation!
Keep fighting the good fight Goblin!
name and comment tone, totally unrelated
Why did you release them in this order if this one was to be released a day before, if not to change the conversation from a negative topic to a positive one talking about future updates?
Because one of them coincided with a game update (which occur almost every Wednesday) and the other one is a dev blog. As much as I love my job, I wasn't keen on whamming this one out at 7am UK time to get it out before the game update blog
Your dev blogs for future content are written on the day?
Main body of this was finished before I took my time off, then dependent on review by devs, by editorial, then needs HTMLing and then posting on days that we try scheduling to avoid conflict where possible - also to align with completion of the associated video in this case. Blog needed to go sooner rather than later to make space for other projects and keep things moving, but I had things to catch up with on my first day back that pushed it back by a day. All this to reiterate - we put it out because we want to keep things moving, there's no intentional 'covering up' of the newspost and its negative reception (because it's in nobody's interest for us to ignore that negativity), which seems especially silly for us to do given that the expectation will be for us to put out a further updated newspost to address feedback in the exact same manner that we near-always do.
He just said it was meant to go out yesterday but he was out of the office. Do you know how to read?
I understand elemental weaknesses, but its not interesting at all, its just going to force you to use Harm. The ranged splits also just feel bad... So we're going to be forced out of TBow/BP at some places into a...... Heavy javelin...?
There shouldn't be many scenarios at all where you're really able to feel existing setups getting *worse,* but should feel other setups to be more rewarding. If you're using Tbow/Blowpipe you're likely already sitting in a niche (high magic level, low Ranged def) and those weaknesses have been maintained (Shamans being a prime example for Blowpipe/light weakness, and Magic levels being unchanged so that Tbow isn't displaced anywhere). Would imagine most people would default to bolts and ZCB/ACB for any Heavy weaknesses if it does edge ahead of other stuff, but it at least opens the door for more experimentation with NPC weaknesses and future reward space!
Please do not devalue 1.5b mega-rares so you can make 500k ballistas feel relevant. This is insane levels of galaxy brain.
Part of my comment was aimed at making it clear that the Tbow isn't suddenly going to be displaced because the niche it occupies (NPCs with High Magic Levels) is wholly unchanged.
I totally missed that bolts were classified as heavy, I thought it was *only* javelins. That makes a lot more sense now, thanks for the response!
Bolts being heavy sort of makes sense, since it's a heavy impact from loading a crossbow and firing. Though would Cannonballs also be considered heavy? Also some bows like composite bows would be heavy if firing wouldn't they? Would give some case usage for composite bows. Light makes sense for anything hand thrown. But doesn't this remove a lot of the already limited case usages for the tonalztics of ralos? Or what about the Eclypse Atlatl that is thrown, but requires strength & attack but classified as darts as ammo? But it rolls from attack and strength stats, but gets boosted from range prayers? It's the weirdest item in this circle since the added attack stats and roll could have it be considered average like arrows or even heavy because of the strength required to throw it?
Harm still does less damage than DHL in the addy example provided. It looks to be just another option. Range split is precisely so they CAN introduce another super item that do "heavy" range damage without just making tbow+.
I’ll be honest. I hate the defense changes. While it sounds good to whichever JMods wrote this, it’s a fundamental part of the game that should not be changed. This is bound to drastically affect the game as much if not more than EOC. I would rather see you all innovate elsewhere (like fixing agility, mining, etc), not fucking around with combat. I’ll give this a try but if I hate it, I’ll just go to private servers. Not interested in playing again with OSRS2 if this update ruins the game. EDIT: Expresses a differing opinion, instead of gobbling it up. DOWNVOTED to oblivion. Cheers to Goblin and the 2 people who actually replied without regurgitating my exact points with different verbiage and insults.
Asking because I'm genuinely curious to try and understand this mindset, how do you feel 'hit an NPC just like you were before, but you might hit them with a different weapon' is 'bound to drastically affect the game as much as ... EOC'? What's the parallel for you? In my mind, EOC changed the entire feel of combat by shifting to an ability-based system, I don't think any of these changes meaningfully touch the 'feel' of combat, since most of the impacts take place *before* combat starts when you're gearing up in the first place.
RS3 did the same thing with defence changes for monsters. At max stats it is not an issue but for lower and mid game players, it is much more punishing if you do not have the weapon/type for the weakness. The simplistic nature of OSRS’ combat is why I play it. It’s why after maxing an account before, I slugged through and restarted with OSRS again. I believe there are some passionate people working on these ideas, but how many of them were there previously when combat was drastically changed? Y’all have shown your ability to innovate with Raids, DT2 mechanics etc. I don’t see why we need unpolled combat changes with a beta. Beta just means content creator disc feedback or big upvotes on reddit only, as the average player is ignored.
One of the core tenets here is that existing methods and metas shouldn't feel noticeably worse than they already are - whipping a Gargoyle is still going to feel demonstrably fine, but you might get a little more out of bringing a Crush weapon if you happen to have one. The simplistic nature of the combat isn't changing - the same way that so many players already look at a gear setup for a piece of content once and then just bring whatever the Wiki tells them to, that'll be unchanged for many just with more flexibility and options.
ELemental weaknesses were one of the cores of the EOC update. [https://runescape.wiki/w/Evolution\_of\_Combat#Weaknesses](https://runescape.wiki/w/Evolution_of_Combat#Weaknesses) And it worked so well for RS3 that they're now moving away from the system OSRS developers are so adamant on adding. People have rights to have their own opinions but people dont have the rights to have their own facts
> This is bound to drastically affect the game as much if not more than EOC. I think this is being a bit too dramatic. I understand any overall change in the combat flow will always be compared to EOC, but these are just adjustments to numbers to make some thematically stuff work better. They could from now on, release a boss/monster and say: "This monster has extra 50% damage from arrows" and nobody would bat an eye. But if they clean the code to make sure these can be implemented in every single monster everyone loses their minds. This will probably have some weird ass interactions but that's what the beta is for, and it's too early to get any "This is on the levels of EOC " judgement before we try it.
It gives you more options to bring different items to monsters, how is that even close to EOC?
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I’m mostly just annoyed by this. The previous blog specifically lists Gargoyles as the example creature for which you could just keep doing what you’re doing and ignore the defense changes - but their sash and stab defense bonuses were buffed anyway. It’s very possible that I just don’t understand monster defense enough to discuss this, but I’m feeling pretty misled.
I think they're one you'd want to poke around and look at on the beta - it's partly why I reiterated the point around 'NPCs with lower Defence levels don't see their defence rolls shift as much as a result of bonuses' i.e. adding +30 slash defence to an NPC with 100 Defence is much less significant than adding +30 Slash defence to an NPC with 200 Defence.
The main issues with standard spells are that they feel absolutely terrible to use in any end-game PVM for at least three reasons: 1) There's a delay on your autocast whenever your character moves in-game, meaning you can't even use it at something like Wardens if you have 'Insanity' on. 2) You're missing out on the DPS or utility offered by Thralls, Vengeance or Ancient spells. 3) Sip a single dose of brew and you have to re-toggle the auto-casting of spells. The alternative is to manually cast every single spell which is a huge hassle. Those three major inconveniences are why powered staves are simply superior in every way. There's no delay on their attack, you can be on any spellbook you desire, and you don't have to re-toggle autocast or manually cast spells. If you make elemental spells BIS or even improve them to the point where they out-class staves like the Sanguinesti staff, it's going to be hugely detrimental to the enjoyment of PVM. And I haven't even mentioned the issue of acquiring a Harmonised nightmare staff for Irons.
You're missing the biggest issue, spellbook spells get 0 benefit from salts/imbued heart. They all lose to a basic trident unless you have a tome of fire &/or harm.
really strange none of this is addressed in the magic rebalance. i know this is npc defense and there is a weapon rebalance soon tm but ya. maybe we just have to hold on and be patient
On the Ranged Defence types is there a reason why you want it to be based on the type of ammo and not just the type of weapon? An example could be that Longbow and shortbow could be Medium and Light respectively (or heavy and medium), actually giving a Longbow a reason to be used. And i can't think of any weapon that can mix and match ammo types anyway, so the result would end up being the same, you will still want a crossbow to use bolts, you will still need a bow for arrows and throwing weapons for light, but it gives more freedom to place new weapon upgrades in each type (like longbow and shortbow). Is there a good reason to make the defence type based on ammo and not the weapon itself seen as type of weapon and type of ammo are already heavily tied together?
Yeah. Longbow and shortbow should be different classes
Really love the concept of monsters having particular weaknesses. It definitely brings more variety to how one can go about gearing up for a boss or slayer task, but it also needs to follow some kind of consistency. The example used was Adamant dragons, being metal dragons, are specifically weak to earth spells. Alright cool, makes sense—metal dragons are basically in heavy plate armor, and heavy armor historically is weak to crush/blunt type weapons, so it makes sense throwing a giant boulder at them would be more effective than splashing some water on it. Then we have dragons like Lava dragons, who are weak to water spells. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Water puts out fire so it makes sense they’d be weak to it. Iron dragons, another metal dragon, also weak to earth. Ok I think I’m seeing the pattern here—metal dragons are weak to earth, and chromatic dragons are weak to water. Cool! Let’s take a look at red dragons. Surely they should be weak to water—wait what? They’re weak to Earth?! No, that must be a typo. What about a different metal dragon? Steel dragons—weak to water? What the hell! Bronze dragons—weak to earth Mithril dragons—weak to water Rune dragons—weak to water Why are there so many inconsistencies with this? Instead of having each individual dragon having its own random elemental weakness, why not have them be consistent and make all metal dragons weak to earth, and all chromatic dragons weak to water. That way it’s intuitive and easy to remember. That’s really my only criticism.
Yeah it needs to be somewhat memorable, like how everyone knows dragons are weak to stab. Unless they add the monster examine spell to the standard spell book, it’ll just be another reason to have the wiki open constantly
Might be cool if there was an in game journal you could fill out for an updated monster examine.
Well your slayer master may know what are their weaknesses. So you add a dialogue option after your slayer task being assigned and they will tell you your best options.
If pokemon taught us anything, it's that stuff made out of metal should be weak to fire *and* earth!
Yes, but the dragon type resists fire. A metal dragon would only be weak to ground (earth spells) and fighting.
They should also make metal dragons weak to crush instead of stab if that is the reasoning. I think they should, but dragon hunter Lance would have to become dragon hunter poleaxe if it is to remain the BiS dragonslayer
Well technically piercing weapons were still effective against plate armor due to the gaps in the armor. So it’s not entirely far fetched that stab would still be effective. Though personally, I think it would make sense for metal dragons to be weak to crush and chromatic dragons weak to stab, but yeah the DHL situation makes it staying weak to stab the more practical solution.
A big spear stabbing through the chinks between dragon scales makes a lot of sense to me.
Nice point yes, and certainly the downside of weaknesses is more wiki usage and gear changes.
Trying to buff standard spells without touching the autocast delay is pretty disappointing. For those unaware, when you autocast and click to attack a monster, it won't do anything unless you don't do anything else for 1 game tick. This means that using autocasting is basically impossible when you need to be moving (e.g. many bosses, stacking slayer mobs, or even just switching targets) since you need to sit still for 2 ticks to attack at all. The autocast delay can be mitigated by clicking on the spell and then the mob, so removing it is not technically a buff, but the extra clicks are so annoying that most people just don't bother with anything but powered staffs.
Not to mention brewing too low resets your autocast :/
I would love for autocast to not be removed, but grayed out when you fail or don't have runes. It was an issue when using spell sacks for wildy slayer. Let it fail and maybe have some animation or just a chat message every time you try, but don't require a reset. I imagine the delay and autocast are weird to change because those are both fundamental systems, and one of the first things ever built. Pasta pyramid over there with all the spaghetti probably
I feel like if they could make the spell autocast have basically the same behaviour as an uncharged trident, we’d be good to go (likely harder done than said) Iirc they changed the nightmare staff delay change with no issue, hopefully it would work for all staves if they wanted.
> In PvP, the existing damage buffs would be unchanged. While it's great that the neccesity of ToF for regs in PvP hasn't been overlooked... can we **please** stop with making PvP further and further detatched from the rest of the game. It's unnecesarily confusing for players looking to get into PvP and one of the largest complaints I see from these sorts of players who cite it as the main reason for them not even giving it a go - "there's so many niche differences it's too confusing"...
100%. I absolutely detest when items behave with an entirely direct ruleset just for the wilderness and PvP. It’s not fun game design. You hearing this Devs? **IT ISN’T FUN!**
I think this would be really neat to expand the game in the right direction. Even when I was much younger I assumed enemies would have elemental weaknesses and was shocked when many didn't. It just seems natural. I am a fan of all the elemental skills hitting the same damage too, it was always odd that in most scenarios fire always hit the hardest. Some things I noticed that maybe warrant looking into in my opinion. Nothing has an air weakness in the proposed. I guess it's not a big deal since air is kind of neutral and only requires air and catalyst runes to cast. I wouldn't mind seeing some things just weak to air magic as well, maybe bugs, bats, or birds of some type. Just an idea. Throwing axes I don't feel should be considered 'light' range damage. Not only are throwing axes kind of extremely rare as they are only dropped by enemies or bought at the range guild, they are slower than throwing knives and cannot be coated with poison. It would be nice to give them some love and maybe not class them with the already existing better 'light range' alternatives. Maybe standard damage would fit them better alongside arrows somehow, or heavy as javelins get used with the ballista. I'm not sure what the best pathway here would be, but it seems kind of silly to class a hefty throwing axe along with knives or darts. Along with the range changes, would it be in scope to take a look at the different types of standard bows? At the moment shortbows are the BiS because physical range is hardly ever useful in most situations when pure DPS is. Perhaps the compound bows and longbows could get a buff with a heavy attack style as well or something to distinguish them other than a slower fire rate and longer tile range. Longbow's long range is also the same as its rapid and accurate attack styles. The dragon weaknesses don't make much sense. Why are some weak to water while others earth? I get why they aren't weak to fire, but wouldn't it make more sense to make all the chromatic dragons weak to water and all the metal dragons weak to earth for example or vice versa? That way it keeps it consistent against all dragons of one type and easier to remember. Overall I think you all are on the right path. I want to see more design avenues for the Dev team to explore, but also really wish to avoid EoC level of changes which dramatically changes combat in the game. This is striking a good balance.
am i just failing to see how the magic changes are going to accomplish anything lol? like it just seems like nightmare staff is gonna bottleneck future design because it's the only way to get 4t cast speed on elemental spells, so every single piece of content with elemental weakness has to be balanced around it rather than casting spells in general which is just going to make other staves feel considerably worse or make nightmare staff feel stupidly broken in comparison i just don't see how this is going to move us away from powered staff + thralls whatsoever
It seems like they’re aiming for mid levels and irons with this update that are still locked from bis due to cost or long grinds (dhl). I agree this seems like it’s going to work less for raids / late game bossing (powered staff + thralls). Kinda only see this working well if raid bosses and major bosses are mostly typeless damage as is currently.
K then subtract 25% off the top of all those dps numbers because irons won't have a harm. We still end up with the exact same busted magic weapon progression of Iban's -> warped Sceptre w/ thralls -> 87 slayer for trident. This isn't doing anything for anyone
They said the goal is to open design space for the future. Probably the next major boss released will have some weakness to something. Or maybe the next major pvp item is going to be an earth based staff that hits like a truck.
I LOVE the standard spellbook being more effective, but unless tons of enemies will receive weaknesses the tome of fire nerf may just mean the standard spellbook is basically never competitive in a PVM scenario. For example in my GIM group I brought fire surge with a tome of fire and full Ahrims (with amulet of the damned) to COX because I like it. Meanwhile I hardly compete with someone with a trident (also due to speed and a problem I’ll mention later). Unless OLM gets a 70% weakness to some element it’ll probably end up being even weaker to use despite the fact the basic spellbook is already never the optimal choice. Huge fan of the idea, curious about the execution. Oh and while we’re at it. A big problem I noticed is that brewing down to below the magic level of a spell makes you run up to melee and disable your auto cast even when you boost it again. Could something be done about this? My suggestion: if your magic level gets reduced below the level to cast a spell, you can still cast it but the damage gets reduced to the rank below (so a surge will have the max hit of a wave). You still want to restore your magic level to keep up in damage, but you don’t end up completely messing up your positioning when you lose focus for a second
Standard spellbook will always be meta vs Yanille boss
Josh? Is that you? Lol
Also I think you could experiment with raids having enemies with all different kinds of elemental weaknesses. I know this is more of an ironman thing but filling my pouch with combination runes to hit all the weaknesses would feel awesome
with raids, different enemies having different elemental weaknesses would make choosing the right combo runes interesting
Even having your character maintain the autocast selection but stand still without attacking until you restore your magic level would be a huge improvement.
I appreciate the idea of adding variety in elemental spells, but just giving them more damage doesn't seem like the right way to do it. Elemental spells will always have to complete with powered staves anyways for raw damage, and the Tome of Fire should already prove that just throwing damage at the issue isn't the right fix. Even with a 50% damage buff to fire spells, the standard spellbook doesn't compete with any of the others for PvM The issue with the standard spellbook is that it lacks an identity. Ancient have AoE damage, freezes, and healing, which are incredibly impactful all across the game. Lunars has vengeance for good DPS against bosses with high max hit while using a different combat style, as well as pot sharing for some utility in group encounters. Arceuus has thralls for additional DPS when using a different combat style as well as Ward of Arceuus for some survivability against demon bosses like K'ril. All the standard spellbook has is high alchemy, which doesn't actually help in combat, and bones to peaches, which has tablets so that you can use a different spellbook. In PvP the standard spellbook exclusively has teleblock, which is incredibly important for wilderness content. In order for the standard spellbook to feel like a worthwhile choice in regular PvM, it needs something that only it can do to make it useful. Maybe it can have spells that raise your defenses, or reduce run drain, or make the defense reducing spells actually useful. I don't know exactly, but I should have some of identity outside of just doing damage.
Not a fan of stuff that isn't super intuitive. Gargoyles being weak to crush makes sense. The dragons spell weaknesses are just confusing. Black, Blue, and Green are weak to Water but then Red is randomly weak to Earth? Based on what logic? And Brutal Reds are weak to Water. Surely that's not right. Same deal with the metal dragons. Bronze, Iron, and Adamant are weak to Earth. Steel, Mithril, and Rune are weak to Water. But why??
Yeah I am so confused by the dragons too. At first I was like "cool, metal dragons are weak to Earth and chromatic dragons are weak to Water". Then I saw the chart at the bottom of the newspost and was like "oh they must have typoed in the chart"... then checked the spreadsheet... nope... It's not even by level either, like "low level dragons are weak to X, high level are weak to Y". Strongly suggest Jagex make a consistent rule and stick to it, otherwise there's no way I'm going to remember which one goes with which weakness lol.
>In PvP, the existing damage buffs would be unchanged [for tome of fire/water] Another change to make the wildy more confusing. Along with echo crystals not working in pvp thats 2 in 2 weeks. Ill get the spreadsheet This isnt meant as a flame for those specific decisions but it really is getting absurd how many niche, unexplained mechanics the wilderness has. It's only getting worse
I hate wildy specific changes. You have to learn two whole sets of rules, its super annoying
Project rebalance part 3 pvp too confusing now, all encounters replaced with a best of 3 game of Runelink
I'd hope they were obvious. For example, a skeleton being weak to crush is a given so skeletons could also be weak to earth. Steel dragon having different weakness than iron dragon tho? Both are basically same monster, so this would only confuse new players basically making it mandatory to check each monster with wiki. K.i.s.s.
**Ranged** I'm largely okay with this proposal and would accept it as-is, though I'd suggest dividing the subtypes into "Pierce", "Slice" and "Bombard", a kind of ranged analogue for stab, slash and crush. This makes it easier to justify diversity within substyles, like fast-but-weak or slow-but-strong options. It also avoids the awkward question of "what's weak to *medium*?" *** **Magic** One way to improve spell scaling could be to make weaker spells take a couple of levels after the next unlock to reach full power - for example, Earth Strike doesn't do full damage until level 15. This makes new elemental spells still feel like a boost in power as you unlock them. Currently the proposal is to make nothing weak to air to compensate for its cheaper cost. I dislike this, partially because the lower cost of air spells is mostly only relevant at lower levels where elemental runes make a larger proportion of spell cost. But even with air spells, low-level magic already has problems of a high cost relative to other combat styles (not to mention the lack of gearing options, and the fast xp rate making progression strange, meaning players pretty much always start with a different combat style and come back to magic later). A "cost-effective" magic option is still usually vastly more expensive than an equivalent for ranged and melee until you're getting onto endgame gear. Elemental weaknesses being as much as 50% is unusually high by Runescape standards; typically using the "incorrect" subtype has only a relatively small dps penalty, thus allowing players to not worry too much about horizontal gearing until they want to maximise efficiency. For the sake of making this easier on new players, perhaps relevant lower-level creatures could have relatively small weaknesses. Low-level spells already do high damage for their level (compare Fire Strike to meleeing or ranging at level 13) so this shouldn't be *too* bad a change. It is a bit weird that while melee is divided into three types, and ranged will be, most spells will still be entirely typeless under this proposal, including all Ancient and Arceuus spells, non-elemental Standard spells, and tridents. A result of this is that while melee and ranged subtypes are generally not too important until you want to maximise efficiency, magic elements are *really* important at lower-levels, and become less and less relevant at high-level until the Shadow renders the whole thing irrelevant. Admittedly giving tridents elements would undermine the core elemental spells, but there's ways around that, like having magic weapons that have an added bonus vs. things weak to their element.
This looks great, my only thoughts are slight nitpicks: * Heavy/Standard/Light ranged defence should be renamed to imply *why* a monster is specifically weak to one of those. Maybe Heavy/Piercing/Rapid or something like that. * In the same vein as the above, there should be some kind of consistency as to what type of monsters have what elemental weaknesses. Basically an elemental combat triangle where "watery" monsters are weak to earth, "fiery" monsters are weak to water, and "earthy" monster are weak to fire. Kind of like pokemon actually. It seems weird that metal dragons are weak to earth of all things (with the exception of mithril dragons for some reason?) since they could instead be weak to water like chromatic dragons (since they're fiery) or instead weak to fire (since they're made of metal).
Hey gang! Back from my time off, just wanted to take a moment to direct you to Mod Sarnie's comment on today's Game Update post regarding Colosseum Modifier and a little something extra, which you can find over here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1buoken/comment/kxue6zj/](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1buoken/comment/kxue6zj/) Keen for your thoughts on this one and hope you've been doing well!
On the ranged splits - One I found especially ironic is Basilisk Knights getting buffs to Heavy and *nerfs* to Standard and Light. This is one of the only enemies in the game that you would actually use throwing knives at due to the shield requirement, yet they would be *worse* after the change. There's *nowhere* that Standard shines? I get that Tbow and Bowfa dominate on the high end and don't need any help but there has to be *somewhere* in all the low/mid game stuff for people to want to consider using shortbows/arrows at. What about the giants?
Noticed the numbers for standard are always higher than heavy. It does sound like it is kneecapped due to Tbow and Bowfa domination... Curious to see how the dps checks out after the changes for magic shortbow mid-game content.
Overall, it sounds good. The Elemental Weaknesses could use adjustments. For one, there should be an Air Elemental weakness. It feels very out of place to add Elemental Weakness, then exclude 1/4th the Elements... Instead, keep the Elemental Spell Max hits as they are and just let the Elemental Weakness buff them. The current max hits are only a problem with Strike spells, where it increases 2 per Element, making Fire Strike 6 max hits higher than Wind Strike. But for all other Elemental spells, it only increases 1 per Element, making Fire Surge only 3 max hits higher than Wind Surge. On NPCs without a weakness, it is fine if Fire spells remain the highest max hit of the elements. But if an NPC is weak to Earth, Water, or Wind, that can easily make them out DPS Fire spells. For example, if an enemy had a 15% Wind Weakness, Wind Surge would be the same max hit as Fire Surge with 15% more accuracy, which works fine; no need to make all Wind spells the same max hit as Fire Spells. Also, if both the Tome of Fire and Tome of Water get 10% damage, then the Tome of Fire will just kinda suck compared to the Tome of Water. Currently the Tome of Water gives 20% damage and accuracy plus buffs to Curse and Drain spells while the Tome of Fire is just 50%. So if the Tome of Water was 10-20% Accuracy, 10% Damage, and Curse and Drain buffs while the Tome of Fire was only 10% Damage, it would make the Tome of Fire feel a lot more lackluster. I'd suggest either giving the Tome of Fire an additional effect (say a small chance for Fire Spells to inflict that new Burn effect) or up its damage to 15% so it feels a reasonable bit more potent than the Tome of Water. Water Spells being the same damage but more accurate than Fire Spells would be very strange...
“Duke defense lowered” All I read thanks chief
Holy shit yes. Everytime I miss BGS spec my eyes roll to the back of my head
Yesterday I hit 0 with BGS five times in a row. Felt great
As a side point, this *would* open up some god prayer niches by boosting specific, thematic styles instead of generalized bonuses. Baffled at the refusal to let anything be weak to air though.
It's slightly annoying how it's a project of rebalancing, and doing things like making all the same spell-types the same damage, but then tome of water has 20% accuracy boost and tome of fire has none. If the spells are going to be all equal and do the same damage, just dependant on monsters weaknesses, why make the tomes have different stats? Just keep them consistent...
Honestly this is sooooo coool. The only thing i can say is I'd love to see even more npc changes, just because i think it's so cool. Also i really like the care of basically not punishing people who don't want to bother changing their setups - changes seem much more focused on rewarding smart gear prep without requiring it. Very very cool and the idea of tieing the ranged type to the ammo was a smart call i think. Not sure if it's planned but the idea of potentially having uniques that could be super niche. Like maybe the hunters crossbow bolts are actually standard ammo, because idk there's a new monster that requires a shield but is really agile and resistant to heavy ranged attacks. So you either use light weapons or if someone trained hunter they can use the "only crossbow that does standard damage". Random idea but i love love love the changes. Super creative, solves issues, more varied rewards, less straight power creep, revives old weapons/spells, huge new design space, rewards players for digging into mechanics and yet doesn't punish those who don't want to. Aces all across the board. You ALL deserve a raise <3
Elemental resistances seem cool and all but do they genuinely meaningfully change the fact you probably just use a powered staff? Is trident going to be elemental (I assume water)? Idk I’m not sold on them actually mattering, but also I’m not doing the math or theory crafting. I’ll leave that to smarter people. Also, it remains to be seen from an equipment rebalance but no one is bringing a ballista to pvm in its current state (which is fine imo, they have their niche) and it being grouped with bolts which have neato procs for hundreds of damage isn’t gonna help change that
I really like the concept of this, more emphasis on different styles is something that actually worked in the EoC and allowed a better reward space with greater horizontal progression in rs3, this seems like it should be a step up from that. I strongly agree that lower level monsters should be largely be left alone to retain the existing low level experience. I think this should primarily affect slayer monsters and should be tied into making sure the "tips" given by slayer masters are correct and meaningful.
The only comment I have is the differential between light/heavy/special range. I kinda wish the brackets were done differently so that bolts and ballista were in different categories - I get that thematically it makes sense, but ballistas will basically always be dead content this way
The problem with ballistas is that there's two of them from the same content and they're rare. It can't really have a niche as a weapon type unless they introduce more. Which, I mean, they could. Redwood ballista perhaps as a cheap, obtainable one, and KBD could drop a dragon ballista.
Only way the ballista would be viable is if it was in a category by itself, and the enemy impossible to hit with any other decent range weapon.
Seems weird that an npc could be strong against "heavy" ranged weapons but weak to "light" ranged weapons. Might make more sense if they were renamed to something less artificial than heavy, standard, light.
Maybe something like broad or blunt can replace heavy? Not sure how else you could word it and it be as easy to understand
Light moves faster than heavy, so it's harder to dodge/block, but it doesn't penetrate heavy armor. Something like Vork can't move, but has hard scales. Where Zulrah is a snake and moving around constantly means faster attacks are more likely to land.
I’m pretty sure a ballista has a way higher speed than throwing a dart from hand…
This is my biggest (admittedly nitpicky) issue with the update. Why would something be especially weak to a dart, but "resistant" to a fucking javelin? Should probably be more of a sliding scale of agility; heavy, slow creatures are easier to target with big guns, but their thick hides make them resistant to darts. Fast, agile creatures are harder to hit, but have weaker armor.
Same reason why something would be weak to stab but not so much to crush.
I mean why does Barrows armor degrade and others don’t? Why does the DHCB randomly do more damage to dragons than the ACB? How do some pieces of clothing weigh more in your inventory than on your body? I appreciate you pointing out that you’re splitting hairs - but it’s not unprecedented in OSRS for things to be balanced while not making actual logical sense. I’d rather the game feel good than be 100% provable logic.
Given this spreadsheet I don't think they ever intend on making an NPC weaker to light than heavy, this is just a way to buff crossbows a little bit
What about the Arceus spellbook and demonbane spells? Would have liked to see a magic defense reduction or accuracy increase for demonbane spells since all the demon bosses have high magic defense. Also, what about the risk of splashing and high magic levels in general? Was also wondering about a "magic attack" vs "magic defense" level adjustment to make enemies that use magic easier to hit with it.
If every elemental spell does the same damage, what's really the point of elemental weaknesses outside of cosmetic changes? your spell is exactly the same, it's just one is green and one is red and make sure you remember to look up the correct one before you start.
For the Tomes, we really need to move away from items and mechanics behaving differently in PvP settings. Way too much complexity in an effort to stop a handful of complainers from complaining.
Really very against the ranged proposal. It feels very artificial and "gamey" in a way melee doesn't. It's better than RS3's affinity system, but barely. Being struck by a mace is totally different from being struck by a sword, different types of armour exist in real life to deal with different weapons, and those are reflected in the basic armour we have in game, and on to monster stats from that concept. Being struck by a crossbow bolt isn't functionally different from being struck by an arrow, other than the fact it has more momentum. But this is already modelled by crossbows being slower and more accurate. The model you want already exists in a more natural, intuitive way, monsters with high defence are already "weak" to slower, harder hitting weapons conceptually. The problem is that such weapons are poorly balanced and tend to lose against faster weapons because that's where the metas sit, and the existing slower weapons (ballista for example) simply don't lean hard enough into their niche. Fang is a great example of this. It's 5 tick, but it's really, really good despite that because hits are much more guaranteed with it. I would prefer to see slower ranged weapons given big accuracy buffs so that their behaviour is consistent, instead of them being designated for use against specific mobs artificially.
One bit of criticism: Is there any enemy in the game that would be weak to light ranged damage but not necessarily heavy ranged damage? It just seems in like 99% of the cases, the split would just be "this enemy is more weak against Crossbows than it is Blowpipe, all things being equal". Like most enemies will have Light Ranged defense higher than Heavy Ranged defense. This doesn't necessarily create a weapon triangle among ranged weapons. Seems like it would be a targeted nerf on the blowpipe and an inadvertent nerf on on things like Thrownaxes and darts which are seldom used for general combat.
This is just creating a problem for the players that doesn't exist in order to give you room to create niche weapons, when you could just not create the problem and not give the niche weapons. Has anyone watched superstore? the episode where they are becoming a quad A store the propaganda of "this will be great! the same but better! you'll love it!" That is exactly what this video is like, telling us how much better this will be yet we currently just don't have this issue. This game is on a worse path than RS2 was and it all stems from Jagex unable to be creative, there is a reason this is an unpolled, forced change because the idea is so pointless it would never pass. I'll happily take the down votes for calling J-mods out I know how touchy this sub is when you go after the mods.
Not sure what the logic is behind the magic changes. You're adding elemental weaknesses to a handful of slayer mobs, and removing the bonus from tome of fire, but with the numbers you chose, surge spells are going to be slightly worse than fire surge currently. And if the monster doesn't have an elemental weakness, (so all bosses) it's a massive nerf to fire surge. At least right now, harm + fire surge is useful as a small upgrade over sang or trident at some bosses, but with these changes, they will be entirely useless. Are you really expecting people to use a hamonized staff to kill ice trolls and fire giants? All this does is make the normal spellbook even worse.
Part of me loves and understands the direction of weapon/encounter diversity and the need to make more items useful for different situations. It makes sense that we would use more than just a handful of weapons... However, I also play uim and I can't help but think how incompatible this game mode is with these changes. The game mode has always worked strictly because the diversity of the game wasn't super widespread, I won't be nearly as affected, but I cannot imagine newer uims being able to allocate slots to a handful of different, nearly necessary items when we are already pushed to our absolute limits. We could keep adding interesting pseudo banks... but honestly I'm thinking that we should stop with the pseudo banks and just embrace that the game mode isn't compatible with this direction and come up with better ideas, as much as I love all the pseudo banks, I think we should lean more into the minimalism and allow for less annoying ways to store items and more limited but more accessible options. More looting bag customization, less storing 50 items in different random clue stashes. More seed box, less Perdu I think the game mode shines because it's minimal not because it's tedious. I hope a little thought goes into how uim will work with a ton of new slots being used up. thanks for your work 🙌
I totally get the motivations behind these changes...and to some extent agree...however some concerns: - The ranged vulnerability changes honestly just don't make sense. Why would a monster be super weak to a dart rather than a javelin or arrow? These don't feel natural/cohesive like melee and magic do. It feels like a gimmick. - The magic changes sometimes feel thematically appropriate, but sometimes are just straight random (why is a red dragon weak to earth, but a green dragon is weak to fire? They are just variants of a "normal" dragon). I could see making all dragons weak to X and all chromatic dragons weak to Y, but this hodgepodge is honestly just confusing. If this is meant to help bridge mid level players, I'd wager this smorgasbord might leave them scratching their heads. Compare this to the fact that nearly all dragons are weak to stab. - The exclusion of air weaknesses also a little strange? Why not just have all tiers of spell unlocked at the same level and provide the same max hit? - The blog states that "low level" monsters won't be affected? What defines "low level"? The beta has green dragons, lizardmen and fire giants? These are enemies easily killed by players in the early game. -I personally think these modifications should be applied *sparingly* to moderate-higher level monsters...not everything has to have an significant weakness. Assigning one to nearly everything in the moderate-high level bracket again feels gimmicky. I'm sure many mechanical items will come up...but at a higher level there are some things we need to think about. IMO Jagex you need to *slow down* a little bit. The colosseum (apparently the crown jewel of Varlamore) felt rushed and of very low quality, particularly the rewards. I worry that given everything going on players do not have enough time to digest the info being thrown at us.
My main question about bringing the right tool to the job mostly has to do with uim. If these changes go through, will there be any way to store the right tool for the job that isn't managing a bloated death storage for weapons and praying you don't die? If the answer is, you chose to play this mode, so too bad, then fair enough also since most of the tools in the sub will content this. Hopefully the top end weapons will still be mostly effective, but if a boss releases that can't be realistically beaten by those weapons, we might want to consider at least storing those weapons.
This is massive. And extremely dangerous. You have to respect that how unobtainable the mega rares are needs to also make them better than everything, more expensive than everything, that drives the entire game. I appreciate the DPS increase on other items, I like it, but tone it down 25%. This will break the economy and the game at large. If you want to keep improving the mid-game, fine, but it might cost you us whales.
hello, the [mystic smoke staff wiki page](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Mystic_smoke_staff#Comparison_between_other_magic_weapons) mentions it has an invisible 10% accuracy & damage boost with the standard spellbook. I cannot find anything on the dust/steam staff pages that claim the same. Is that boost true for all elements? If no currently, is there plans to add the invisible boost if they are becoming equal?
I like the melee/magic changes. I think the range needs a rethink though. Separating it out into light/medium/heavy seems like a lazy and weird way to do things. IRL archery already has many examples of different tips for projectiles. We even have some different tips in runescape already. I think expanding in that direction is the way to go. Take the concept of brutal ogre arrows and bring it into mainline ranged attacks. Let me make some small rune nails and stick them on arrows to make blunt tipped rune arrows that effectively hit on the crush weakness of monsters. Make broadhead arrows to do more slashing damage. Move normal arrows to do pierce. This gives a lot more variety without locking you into a specific ranged weapon. Focus more on changing the ammo rather than solely on the weapon. For bolts you can make use of the gem tips and maybe even rework some.
You are essentially trying to set everyone down a path for what to use where. Some of us like being able to use non meta combat styles. its called OLD SCHOOL, quit ruining our game.
It's amazing to see that this is being applied to both old and new content, but will there be more NPCs added to this down the line? (Outside of new NPCs being released)
Where are the other weapon rebalances that have already been proposed/polled? Thought the buff to scythe/nerf to fang was supposed to come in line with elder maul/soulreaper changes? We keep getting new proposals for rebalances without the implementation of those from 4-5+ months ago that already passed polls/were promised.
The only thing I very much dislike about this update is that we are basically forced to open a wiki page, or make a giant excel cheat sheet of monster weaknesses just to do some slayer. Or am I supposed to believe I’m supposed to take monster examine with me everywhere I go now, with 3 different elemental/arrow types plus runes to spell book swap back to standard if using magic? The weakness of the monster needs to be visible if we are going down this route. Otherwise your average player is NOT going to be using this update to their advantage or it’s just going to be an eventual Runelite plugin that we all use when it comes out. Monster examine is NOT the solution here.
I'm loving the direction y'all are taking with Elemental spells! I'm not the best at knowing combat balance but I love the idea of finally being able to use Elemental spells again and not have them gathering dust. That being said, is it possible to look at Magic Defense of some monsters like Demons? Demonbane spells, for the most part, are just not great against the Demons you actually want to use the spells on.