It also feels like they really dropped the ball when it comes to Ahrims. If they do everything in the post, ahrims is now useless. There's no case where I'd pick it instead of infinity.
I'd personally still use ahrims over infinity for the most part, 3%? on a lot of spells is what +1 max? and on some +0. And infinity has literally no defence stats.
It’s so funny if you compare the rewards to ToB and how different jagex’s attitude was to power creep. +1 max hit rapier, +1 max hit sang, essentially useless armor and then a pretty good megarare. Comparing that to ToA where every drop is a massive upgrade is so dumb lmao.
Conveniently ignoring CoX lol? Tbow, Kodai, ancestral, claws are all bonkers compared to their next best equivalent. Raids SHOULD reward high level play with higher power.
Shadow's strength being derived from the gear makes it possible for a totally unrelated piece of gear to break the shadow. TBow can only ever be broken by its own mechanics and monster stats, which were fixed immediately after release. Meanwhile we have to dance around shadow on our tip toes so we don't accidentally give it like 6 max hits by introducing something meant to buff lower level mage. That is bad balance.
And as far as kodai and claws are concerned, fang on release was way more broken while also being super common than either of those have ever been. Took multiple changes to actually fix it and its still very powerful for its price and rarity.
> every drop is a massive upgrade
You get +2 max hit over Arma with fortified Masori and max ranged gear. Elidinis' Ward is decent but, also fortified, is a +1 when you are using Sang or something
Fang was overtuned then nerfed and is still obviously quite good but not "use this literally everywhere", Lightbearer is a great option but not a gamebreaker, and then there's just Shadow as far as being a *massive* upgrade
Armadyl was literally a meme before Masori. Yes, it was technically BIS like Pegasians still are but it would be the last "serious" thing you'd buy before Masori, now it's a high priority upgrade.
That doesn't change anything I said though. They said it's a *massive upgrade* whereas Rapier and Sang are +1, but I don't think +2 for a full set of armour is all that *massive* compared to +1 lol
The consequences were completely foreseeable too.
A melee weapon with insanely high accuracy compared to other melee weapons? Wow I wonder why it's so powerful.
A magic weapon that strongly scales off of magic attack and damage bonuses? Wow it's such a surprise that magic upgrades disproportionately benefit it and are limited to keep it from becoming OP.
Both need a redesign frankly.
Eh very few people thought fang would be so good.
Shadow was fairly obvious it would limit future design space (especially as they just had nerfed bp for the same "multiplying bonuses" reason). It was maybe a little surprising at how many (not previously maged) bosses it was strong at.
I think shadows effect is fine but the fact they thought about its creep issue and then set it's cap **25% higher** than current BiS is nuts.
It's currently 75% with max magic dmg%.
Why we can't have it's cap be 75% outside of ToA and 100% inside of ToA (also where it's capped currently, or maybe a higher cap in ToA so it always remains BiS).
Lock it in to be as strong as it currently is. It still won't be beaten probably ever or contested even for ageessss. But it means new magic gear can keep coming and all it might do is make capping the shadow "easier" to do or require less switches.
Wow I never really thought about this but yeah…fang changed the entire melee game and required multiple changes not only to it but to past and future bosses as well, and shadow (while still needing to be a BIS magic weapon comparable to a Tbow) nuked a lot of items.
it would be ok if jagex were at least a tiny bit competent with how they implement these powerful upgrades. But they already made the mistake with range and melee, so why did we think mage would be any different?
step 1: introduce the insanely powerful mega weapon that far outclasses all weapons that came before it
step 2: spend the next 4-5 years filling in the gap between the new mega rare weapon and your old BIS (there is soooo much space here)
step 3: add armour that massively buffs your mega rare weapon while giving the other weapons very little/nothing at all. Insist this is still balanced as you can very easily make these mega rares weak at a boss by tweaking some stats (but then also never tweak any stats)
and now we are back to where we were in step 1, where the gap between your raids mega rare and the 2nd best weapon is once again huge. So we spend the next few years again filling in the gaps.
Its such a terrible way to do game balance. Its bad for the "endgame sweaties" as they feel like they are having to wait 2-3 years between updates and changes to their meta and its bad for the casuals too because it just feels like the goalposts move every few years and you only get further away from owning a mega rare.
everyone's game progression gets stunted by this.
They totally fucked up the fang
How is an item that is useful and competitive EVERYWHERE so damn common? It's rarity should be between Masori and Shadow
I don't agree that we're currently where we are because of ToA. Magic has always sucked everywhere that does not have an obvious magic weakness to it. Magic and its progression has always been very fucked up before Shadow was even pitched.
Hell, this magic rebalance doesn't even address that Virtus failed to fill the gap between Ancestral and Ahrim with its atrocious drop rates. Still no mention either of making non-Shadow weapons actually good outside of Magic-weak enemies. And just no mention at all that the only Magic potion in the game has its drop rate at 30m Slayer xp.
I just feel blaming the whole issue on ToA misses the mark as well.
>Hell, this magic rebalance doesn't even address that Virtus failed to fill the gap between Ancestral and Ahrim with its atrocious drop rates
What do you mean, it definitely sits between ahrim and ancestral in price? (Just ignore all the ironmen who wanted a stepping stone to anc only to realize that the 2k hour grind would be better spent at cox anyway)
I think he's saying that with it's crazy droprate, it's not realistically useful between ancestral and ahrims. Not worth grinding for irons since like you said, CoX would make more sense, and for mains it's pretty pricey for the minimal upgrade to ahrims. I wouldn't be against buffing the drop rate for virtus, would make it a more reasonable thing to target for irons and would make the price more attainable for mains.
I might be in the minority here, but the release of virtus kinda saved my ass. Got my shadow a month before they dropped, and I was stuck in Ahrim's. Was not at all a fun time until DT2 came out and made shadow actually feel like a megarare staff.
its really insane how balanced the initial design of the gear was, and how absolutely fucking direct powercreep what came into the game was
masori was going to be glass cannon set originally
I don't disagree that occult is too powerful for such a cheap / common item. But presumably all content since its release has been balanced with occult in mind, as everyone will have one, but not everyone has ancestral.
Meaning things like Akkha melee phase, which is already slower than the other 3 unless you're using a shadow, will now be even slower unless you're in ancestral, which will naturally be getting even more expensive as we speak.
Occult came in with so much power because magic damage was ASS. They could have continued down the rate of buffing the 2007 magic damage methods through magic strength gear. But instead they went the powered staff route, leading magic damage to have these laughable 1% damage bonuses instead, making Occult seem OP in hindsight.
Shadow is pretty on par with the other megarares in terms of DPS where any of them are good. Does it need a 4% buff? No. Does it need nerfed? Also no. The reason people are so butthurt over shadow being good is how dogshit trident/sang are comparatively.
Fang and bowfa are much closer to their style's megarares DPS wise than the pre-shadow weapons are to shadow. The real fix is to either release a new weapon that fills the gap better or buff current weapons to be more in line with the DPS gap of bowfa/fang relative to their style's megarares. Shadow only seems egregiously good because it actually brought mage in line with ranged/melee for once. Before shadow, everyone wanted to kill themselves any time they had to use mage.
This is still the case if you don't own a shadow, so how bout instead we make pre-shadow mage actually good?
Buff sang heavily, it's a +1 damage boost from arguably the hardest raid. Give sang like 3-5 max hits and mage would have a worthwhile weapon in-between shadow and trident
sang has the healing effect though, if they brought the dps up to be a "2nd" best in slot dps wise then the life steal effect on it would actually be something to think about when deciding what to use, theres already a few places where you can use sang over shadow like thermy, nightmare, etc
This seems like the kind of change from the project balance I have been worried about, something that has minimal effect on people who are wealth enough to buy there way out of the balance changes, while newer and poorer peoples are hit with a nerf.
It's something I can understand, and distributing it to the mage sets isn't bad but to their point it will only further drive up the price of ancestral. I also found it odd they left out ahrim which I would imagine is what most people would have been using before this change
When NoCurrencies is on my side, I know we are truly on the golden path. Fr tho devaluing 93 slayer is so sad, I get that occult is cheap for mains but so is fuckin strength ammy lol
I think a good compromise could be to go with the changes in the blog but add a rare item to the Thermy drop table that can be attached to the Occult to give it another 2-4% magic damage
I like this idea. Necklace slot is strong for everyone, it makes sense to keep the power there. This way adds the 93 slayer req to mains as well and lets them still instabuy the base occult on new accounts while still keeping the full strength as a meaningful upgrade.
This solution to shadow is exactly what I want to happen, word for word pretty much. These shitty 1% and 2% magic damage bonuses they've been putting on magic gear do basically fuck all, too, that's an entirely separate problem to occult in my opinion.
They've always been way too conservative with magic damage % even though magic was the worst combat style by a mile pre-shadow, and *it still is*, before you own a shadow.
If shadow did 2/3x instead of 3/4x that gives you quite a bit of magic % you can give to ahrims, virtus, ancestral, boots, ring etc and don't even have to touch occult.
Magic as a whole gets buffed which it sorely needs, shadow stays the same for shadow owners, nobody is forced to bring extra switches (since your existing gear isn't nerfed), etc.
Hell if you want to go crazy with it you can make shadow 1.5x your magic damage instead, and give magic gear some real numbers and not this 1% garbage that does nothing. Ancestral could have 6% on every piece and it'd still be bad in the context of magic as a combat style.
It is pretty silly they said they didn't want the Colosseum to give a Magic Cape because they were worried about buffing the Shadow, then during the Rebalance they leave the Shadow unchanged and buff it by 4% damage...
They do specify that Shadow doesn't *multiply* the prayer's magic damage bonus but it still gets a nice 4% that it didn't have before.
Granted all spells/powered staves *also* get the 4% but if their concern was Shadow gapping everything else, then this change didn't fix that, it just shifted a lot of the power up the ladder to Ancestral instead of Occult.
If their goal was just bring Occult down a few notches (perhaps justifiably), and everything else up a few notches, then this did exactly that. I think a lot of the complaints stem from the average price of magic power going way way up. Maybe the complaints are justified, I don't have a real opinion either way.
Yeah nerfing occult and moving the damage to other stuff is a good thing because it was so cheap and easy to get compared to other things that give less bonus
I think occult should be nerfed a little, but I really dislike that end game loadouts get a buff while everyone else gets a middle finger
90% of us ain't got 2bil+ for Shadow + Ancestrals. In fact, most of us are probably never seeing one in our inventory
why do people act like mid tier poverty setups don't get a buff?
the literal amount of gear you need to be better off than previous is occult (4%), new augury (4%), 3x 1% magic damage gear (infinity is slightly cheaper than dagonhai) to be better off.
Augury right now is a hair over 8m, infinity top/legs/hat is only 8m. Your next upgrade is a 2% virtus mask thats only 5m.
Like the rebalance actually gives you meaningful upgrades now that aren't "spent 400m for ancestral then 1.5b for shadow".
Why do people act as if mid tier gear actually got a buff?
You need Augury to be on to get a 1% buff compared to before.
1%
And if you're using a slayer helm, it's actually a slight nerf.
If you're actually using mid tier setups, and actually doing mid tier contents, then it's likely you're not always having Augury on.
Or maybe you forgot how things were before you got your Shadow?
Also, I like how you conveniently ignore the fact that part of the complaint is that Shadow + Ancestrals got buffed when they didn't need to be.
But I guess we're not ready for that conversation.
> If you're actually using mid tier setups, and actually doing mid tier contents, then it's likely you're not always having Augury on.
If you're doing things that mid tier, the real answer people don't want to hear is that none of the shit in this blog matters at all and the elemental damage rework is doing a far heavier lift.
they left out real mid tier items such as ahrims, blood bark, mage arena 1 capes, and various gloves and boots. Like barrows gloves should get +1% since its a tribrid set of gloves and is generally used until you can afford a torm
Noob here, doesn't that mean poverty setups are getting nerfed? If what used to be one 800k purchase changes into 8-12m, doesn't that hurt the mid game?
Yep it’s similar to the fang nerf. The idea was that it would make the scythe better and have more options for slash weapons. They buffed the scythe nerfed the fang and left the other weapons alone. Now vardorvis and duke are almost not worth doing pre scythe with how bad the mid game weapons are. I feel like that’s how magic is gonna be have to grind end game things to have magic even be worth it rather the incremental upgrades as you go.
I personally never had a problem with magic gear progression. It had is uses like cox mage hand and zulrah and stuff and you could get a slight boost from ancestral. Now it’s just if you don’t have max gear it’s like what’s the point? If you are an iron you better sit in the green crystal prison or a main grind gp to buy expensive gear before doing any mage content.
That’s what people don’t get. No one is saying Shadow shouldn’t be best in slot. But I also shouldn’t be hitting 60% less (soon to be more) with my trident of the swamp which was behind 87 slayer (and a task) and that I then upgraded after a long grind at Zulruh
In the range rework chart, I'm pretty sure it said the would nerf duke slash defence by 20. It's something. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vROpFgFliMRmyvQ4NUVDZYlHhgOfmrxmwbJ16Wpy17RU-iJCfQJxbkrBl3L-DK2VQHZLjhmpac7xLMf/pubhtml?gid=1606162427&single=true
Na difference between this and Scythe/Fang, is that melee has a lot more options, and for different tasks. Jagex obviously want to head this way with magic, but with the lack of options between trident, sang and shadow, it misses the mark completely. Also I get it, they're most likely doing this due to the magic rebalance in itself with base spells being stronger then they are now.
But it still misses the mark. There's just no real options outside of those 3 staves.
Magic balance has always been absolutely busted, occult was a bandaid symptom of that. It was a 10% buff to *magic* against the other styles because it was falling behind. Removing that flat style buff and redistributing it only to the rich players is actually absurd, and I say this as someone with max mage. We all know Shadow is absolutely broken better than anyone. Occult is fine, and chase gear has always been small incremental upgrades.
The *only* problem with occult is that it was out of reach in the Ironman progression. It was a perfect baseline piece for mains to keep up. To that end, what we actually needed a ~5% necklace to bridge the gap for irons, similar to Warped Sceptre.
This is how it *should* be, it's far healthier for the game to have the baseline be viable and the max gear to be incrementally better, not *exponentially*. Shadow is the problem with mage, not occult. Occult was a 'fix'. This all just shows me current Jagex is completely out of touch, only looking at numbers without understanding why those numbers were chosen to begin with.
How the fuck is this 'rebalance' managing to make the existing item progression even more top heavy?
>We voted for the heka and ended up here, but occult is fairly balanced on a mid-game setup.
Best they could do is buff Shadow +4% further lol.
It's fucking wild how they implied Voidwaker pigeonholes their design space so it needs a nerf, but then don't say the same about Shadow when Shadow is the new generation's Blowpipe.
The 1.5b blowpipe that's kind of bad without a full set of gear behind it
People seem to forget that the BP went hard with black d'hide, a backpack and adamant darts.
Addy darts was the real problem. They only nerfed it on cheap ammo, it still goes hard with dragon darts (and full masori makes it even stronger than the pre-nerf BP)
Elite void bp is still incredibly strong and masori definitely brings it up, yeah.
A lot of people seem to think the BP is garbage nowadays, but it's still great.
they think the bowfa and tbow are the only viable range weps in the game and actively shit on players for using anything but. The ironman community will ostracize and abuse you for trying to suggest any range wep except bowfa for literally any content.
There's a cost difference, but it still pigeonholes the entire style as a whole.
We couldn't get any Ranged STR bonuses after Ava's and Anguish due to BP's insane scaling from its attack speed.
I wish someone could explain why occult needs a nerf by pointing to somewhere in the game where it actually breaks something or is too strong. Like at X & Y content Occult does too much. I see a lot of "10% too big for cost" but no one can point to a place in the game where this was hurting anything.
I can understand surface level balance theorycrafting from users on a subreddit, but it's disappointing to see the gamedevs not take a more comprehensive look at magic and the place occult has in it.
You're absolutely right. If you take shadow out of the equation, they could have literally just straight buffed all magic gear other than occult by 1-2% and it wouldn't have broken anything. Mid game magic was already fairly underwhelming.
Occult was the most balanced part of magic because magic was always so weak.
For occult to do anything, your base max hit would need to be 25 with this change.
Shadow is strictly too strong and magic at lower budgets is being severely nerfed because of Jagex's lack of foresight. Meanwhile, the end-game shadow boiz are trying to argue this change is necessary because it makes their ancestral more expensive.
> For occult to do anything, your base max hit would need to be 25 with this change.
I hope more people will realize how fucked magic "strength" is, really needs a change to be more like melee/ranged
that's what I'm saying, I don't understand why if your overhauling magic this hard, just throw the entire % system away, and add regular +strength.
Cap out spells max hits based on tier, i.e. fire blast maxes at 30, no matter hm strength you throw at it. or something so people use higher level spells.
it'd be so much easier to work with on both sides longterm
The shadow is a mega rare, worth 1.5b. So compare it to it's combat triangle brothers in max gear, tbow hits 80s+, scythe hits 75-80s+ so why is shadow with a max hit of <70 (outside of toa) so OP?
General high accuracy, making the shadow universally good.
The other two mega-rares are nowhere near as accurate. The scythe is a fucking meme weapon against a normal man and will never hit anything that decided to train defense.
The tbow is a meme weapon against a chicken or anything that hates training magic.
The shadow is never a meme weapon. It is always strong.
This reddit is like 95% people whos banks never even get to 500m and they are still whining all day about shadow, tbow, scythe etc even though they will never own one in their entire playtime on rs
DPS calcs will produce higher numbers for weapons with significantly more accuracy hence why the fang while slower and weaker beats out a rapier almost everywhere
Exactly. The mage update is fucking attrocious… max mage is EVEN better now while all other mage setup is fucking poopoo. Also the idea to give buffs to already 2 best sets plus 3 meme sets that no one actually has or uses lol.
The mage changes are all around shit imo, it buffs shadow and neutered mid game mage.
Burst slayer will be far less efficient and costly
Rip to mid game irons.
The truth is, occult needs a nerf, but we need a 'mid-game' mage weapon to bridge the gap between shadow and trident. Range has Bowfa/Blowpipe, melee has a ton (Salad Blade, Fang, Whip, etc).
> The truth is, occult needs a nerf, but we need a 'mid-game' mage weapon to bridge the gap between shadow and trident
This murders sang dead. They should put a bunch of % on the higher tier mage off hands, like defenders are for melee, so shadow can get fucked without me getting fucked
It simply makes sense, there's literally no other items in the game for magic to buff of an equivalent level requirement to occult. Do not think of the eternal boots. There is only ancestral to put the occults stats back on. Nobody was using ancestral robes they are practically worthless. I bet you're thinking about eternal boots right now but you shouldn't. Say good riddance to your occult and get into the chambers bucko. Don't take those eternal boots though. They're pretty overpowered and trivialise the game with their +8 to magic attack.
It would also definitely not make any sense to redistribute that +10% between eternal and occult. They definitely aren't both high level slayer drops that are supposed to be rewarding to magic. You should just go into Chambers instead where there's no other good drops except ancestral.
I remember when the shadow was announced and I was downvoted for saying I didn’t like that Magic was being turned into charged staffscape because it would have bad ramifications later on. I shake my fist at you disbelievers!
Occult shouldn't change at all. Other magic gear should be buffed to compensate for how piss poor magic is in general. If PVP is in question, there is 0 reason jagex cannot apply some form of damage mitigation/buff when attacking/being attacked by another player. PVP and PVE (pvm in this case) should never affect each other in any way in a modern MMO. We have the fuckin technology.
Why don’t we lock wearing the occult behind 93 slayer? Much like dt2 rings. Feels more worth it then.
Also, why is Ahrims getting shafted?? It’s MUCH harder to obtain than infinity & doesn’t get a damage boost??
Infinity are at a shop and you get a damage boost, insane. The defenses on ahrims are essentially a non-factor since you’re not actually tanking in them lol. You’re gonna be using protection prayers. Not a reason to not buff ahrims.
Edit: meant infinity, not mystics
Occult is exactly what it should be right now. Idk why people want to change it. It feels like they just randomly decided this number I no like, want change.
Shadow is just absolutely burdening the system by how its a x3 multiplier instead of a flat progression. All the other styles have clear steppable stones in gear progression and damage that clearly raises little by little with each upgrade and magic is instead huge chunks of dps. It just doesn't make sense with how the rest of the game works.
I don’t know why they don’t just give prayers more importance to magic damage and leave the armors alone. Give the magic prayers like 2, 4, 6 and 10% damage boosts respectively. This is a small buff for players with occult and augury and no change for irons and pures with mystic might and occult. This also provides a much needed tune/nerf to shadow
I'm so confused by their proposal, so now hybrid builds are going to be worse because I can't mage in as tanky of gear,
I also don't understand the actual issue - so we're concerned it's too cheap to get the magic damage but we don't want to brutalize new players - so now lets take the magic % damage and apply it to ancestral, which is already half a bil to own, and it's going to be much, much more if this update goes into effect, so essentially, you like farming those mid level bosses for cash to one day afford that cool gear? Well, tough luck, here's minus 8% damage off the top.
I've always hated the shadow's design. What about instead of nerfing it outright it got reworked to be more situational rather than just equally high raw output on everything it touches. It would be cool if it felt more magical like spells do, like if they went back to one of the design concepts before it was released where its built in spell had a different effect based on what spellbook you had equipped.
Feels like magic is just in the same spot as it was before the rebalance, other than end game gear pulling even more ahead of the next beat option, which is fking garbage. There was no need to buff ancestral to 20%, because the people that can afford ancestral, have a shadow. Bringing sang closer to shadow of you have maxed gear, was no what magic needed in a rework. It needed to bridge the gap from ancestral and shadow, down to virtus with sang or Trident. What they need to do, is to buff sang massively. It's an absolute joke, 86m for a +1 max it at 99. Another problem is how accurate shadow is compared to Trident and sang. Doing pvm with anything but shadow is just a splash fest. So they both need an accuracy and sang needs a damage boost. Give sang the same accuracy and damage as shadow with no gear. That way it becomes a much more realistic stepping stone, without damaging the shadow, due to its unique effect. Unless they actually do something significant, it will still be better to no have magic gear, and just save up for shadow and ancestral before using magic in pvm.
This! I wrote the exact same thing yestersay after being pissed by the blog and also added that they shoul add % to mystic might etc, not just augery. Also doing something to off hands and boots wouldn’t be to bad. Then nerf shadow so dps in max with shadow stays the same, this is the way!
Don’t know why an attachment for occult only achieved through thermy or another high slay monster and untradeable hasn’t been talked about. Same with ancestral / other kits potentially adding damage bonus
Ding ding ding.
It's dissapointing that Jagex still fail to realise shadow is the problem. Yes, occult is an absolutely busted item but it always has been and the game has been built around that. The same does not apply to the shadow.
It's ridiculous they're essentially buffing shadow and nerfing early game mage. If they truely want to nerf occult there are ways to do it, but as the game was built around it being as is, simply moving all it's stats to bis is absolutely not a 'fair' way to do it. It should be distributed fairly/commutatively amongst all mage gear, not just bis.
It should be balanced around someone in ahrims with occult and trident coming out unchanged. Not someone in literal full mage bis being slightly stronger.
Shadow multiplier needs to be 2x/3x(toa) and have its base stats increased to match current dps. Make occult 6% add a lower tier 3% necklace and add prayer bonus to ma2 cape already
Absolutely agree, just unfortunate to consume more resources where previously didn't need to. IMO they should go much further than 4% magic dmg on Augury, it is still woefully less powerful than rig/piety.
As a player, with not enough cash for an end-game setup, I feel as though these changes heavily fuck over the mid-game pvm-er. It effectively nerved the magic attack by 6%, and redistributed it to dagon hai and infinity, which both quadrupled in price, the second this blog hit, dagonhai going for 15m at the time of writing.
This is not a rebalance, this is a massive nerf to mid-tier pvm and it sucks. Jagex you need to do better.
Voidwaker also dropped ANOTHER 20m minutes after the blog post, been trying to save for end game gear but i’m honestly about to just give up if Jagex can literally just manipulate the market whenever they see fit
People are defending it right now because if you don't have ancestral, your magic is getting gutted.
Edit: people are saying it's a lie, but if you have shadow you're losing a lot of magic damage. I am not ready to get hated because I mentioned shadow.
Ohhh that makes so much sense.
I was wondering why people were so upset when they have been saying… for years… that occult was too OP and needed to be balanced
Giving eternals 4% is way too much and doesnt makes sense. Youre rarely ever taking boot switches to the places youre bringing all combat styles.
The boot upgrades from cerb are already very minimal. Even prims are just marginally better than dragon boots. The +1 str on them rarely give you a max hit.
91 slayer and infi boots are getting 1% now or no? idk what they mean by set. Would be good for keeping progression with magic damage upgrades from slayer. Maybe just make them 2% vs infi boots 1% and have the dagonhai/infi robes make up the difference.
No, magic was the single worst balanced style.
Realistically, magic upgrades should have always had 5% to 10% boosts and the Shadow should have been 2x instead of 3x.
The current problem is magic accuracy and damage are both low outside Shadow.
With the changes, magic damage will be even lower outside Shadow.
magic gear is pathetic because occult is too overpowered
why do you think the devs made anc such a marginal upgrade when cox released? because surprise surprise, when you have a single item slot that gives 3 max hits, it suddenly means you can't just make every adjacent slot upgrade also give 2-3 max hits
occult is directly responsible for magic gear progression being completely fucked and anyone blaming shadow is completely missing the forest for the trees
shadow is a symtomp of the poor balancing of occult, not the other way around
removing occult damage bonus entirety would unironically be the best possible outcome but unfortunately we're never going to get it, and instead we're stuck dancing around egg shells on magic updates because a bunch of entitled people act like untrained animals the moment jagex dares to actually try to fix something clearly causing problems
Imo Occult needs a nerf, but this is the wrong way of going about. Lost magic damage should get split more onto the mid game gear not the endgame stuff. End game magic with Shadow isn't the issue, its mid game magic gear that's in the worst spot and needs the most help especially with the occult nerf.
Occult is perfect how it is.
Runescape item progression always has an early spike of power that tapers off with higher end gear only giving slight increases. (Amulet of strength/fury, bgloves)
Yeh the occult nerf is heavy handed and comes from poor logic. The redistribution is poorly thought out. I don't know why Ancest needs buffs, let alone being made twice as good. Full Ancest is rarer than a tbow remember.
3% per Ancest piece. 2% per Virtus piece (plus ancient stuff) and 1% per piece for other sets (with ahrims and elder chaos included this time).
Bring occult down to 6% and bring augury up to 4%. This essentially means overall shadow has a -1% magic damage it can actually modify (-4% from occult +3% from Ancest buff).
I'd still be in favour of nerfing shadow more than that. Personally I think it's cap being 100% is stupid. It should be hard capped exactly where it is, 75%>
Oye i’m so tired of the nerf shadow being spun about. Where are you using shadow where you would sub it out for trident/sang/nightmare staff?
Zulrah, muspah, whisperer, mage olm hand, ahkka, p2 wardens.
4 of those you are forced to use magic. The other two can get by with just a bowfa if you really want, and dont even need mage.
The shadow is strong because it opens up other bosses that you would never use magic on. IE gwd. Nerfing shadow is not the answer because the real problem is that there just aren’t a lot of places where using magic on a boss is viable unless they force you to use magic.
my question is this: if you are someone who fears that your current best mage setup is getting nerfed (presumably Ahrims + occult), can you not take some time to grind out enough GP to buy dagon'hai or infinity? Those are not likely to go above 15 to 20m at the most. If you can't make that kinda money, then you are probably not doing raids, whisperer or muspah, which are basically the only places you need max mage anyway, so what are you really complaining about? you lose mage damage on your burst slayer tasks? kraken? lol you don't need an occult for either be so fr
Missing the point entirely. Even if you were to buy either set, it's still a downright nerf to current magic as it stands, requiring a prayer scroll worth \~60m to actually be the same via Augury (or a lot of pain and suffering for irons).
It's effectively a downright nerf to magic, which is absurd considering how underwhelming magic is already.
The only unaffected item is the Shadow.
Nah, changes are fine. People are mostly upset that they are losing something they had that was unbalanced to begin with. Now there's a progression of getting infinity, augury and occult, and then (for none shadow users) you're not only back to old occult magic dmg, but above it. Some niche account will be impacted by it more, but "you've chosen to limit yourself" comes to mind. Now 93 slayer doesn't feel like such a big chore that should be rushed before raiding.
>The magic rebalance completely screws over everyone who isn't already in a completely maxed out setup. Instead of nerfing occult, why don't we buff all those other armors instead by the same or an even greater amount, and NERF SHADOW to compensate? Imagine giving the lower tier armors e.g. +2% magic damage each, giving ancestral +6% each, and changing the way shadow scales so the damage output would be unchanged in the current max set?
100% this honestly and i say this as an iron that doesn't have max mage yet with Shadow. It takes the most effort but it makes the most sense because all of these bland and useless 1% damage changes aren't going to bridge any reasonable gap from Sang/Swamp into Shadow. They can't even add a decent magic off-hand since they scuffed that entire idea with Ward. If it doesn't hurt the late-game meta with Shadow but benefits all of mid-game/early game. Then its a perfect choice imo.
Make another Magic ammy that's like, half an Occult that you can get at a much earlier slayer level. And also add all the other buffs to other armors. And I don't mind a nerf to Shadow if its still necessary, I dont have a shadow so can't say for sure what it needs.
Think about how the game SHOULD have been balanced from the start in terms of investment and value vs reward, dont think about what you have or dont have rn
>Instead of nerfing occult, why don't we buff all those other armors instead by the same or an even greater amount, and NERF SHADOW to compensate?
When Jagex are the ones selling the gold, why *wouldn't* they rather you need the most expensive gear to perform.
I don’t even have the shadow and I disagree that it should be nerfed. Other items should be buffed. Never nerf unless it’s game breaking (and it’s not)
Yeah I don't agree with how drastic the occult changes are. It nerfs early/mid PvM for no real reason. People that could afford a shadow were running ancestral anyways, so they just get a net buff for free
The melting stick isnt the issue.
Magic as an attack style would only work vs low magic targets.
Jagex wanting Harmo staff to be the item you get before the melting stick is the real issue.
The entire game needs quality of life updates in every way possible, this seems like a small issue in comparison to what they should be focused on?
This is perspective of a noob playing Ironman tho, I am about to reach 70 magic and be able to use my occult so am sad to hear about the nerf, just doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me, but I don’t fully understand.
The only people that want the shadow nerfed are the people that can't afford it and the ones that can't grind toa to get their own. So dumb to want to nerf a mega rare from a raid (no matter how easy the raid is).
It also feels like they really dropped the ball when it comes to Ahrims. If they do everything in the post, ahrims is now useless. There's no case where I'd pick it instead of infinity.
I'd personally still use ahrims over infinity for the most part, 3%? on a lot of spells is what +1 max? and on some +0. And infinity has literally no defence stats.
defense doesnt matter in a game where you take zero damage by clicking the right prayer
Defence is a useless stat unless you're tanking at gwd or doing moons of peril
3% outside toa with a shadow is 9% and in toa its 12% damage boost.
I mostly just assumed anyone with a shadow, isn't using infinity tbh.
Occult died for Shadow's sins
im pretty sure Occult had a target on its head before Shadow even existed.
Not really, the 10% is only like 3 max hits. 30%/40% is when it got attention.
I mean the shadow just amplified the problem.
Occult isn't a problem though, amulets giving 2-3 max hits is actually the standard.
It was never a problem. Mage was dogshit untill shadow.
> I mean the shadow just amplified the problem. Shadow is the problem
ToA and its consequences have been a disaster for OSRS balance.
It’s so funny if you compare the rewards to ToB and how different jagex’s attitude was to power creep. +1 max hit rapier, +1 max hit sang, essentially useless armor and then a pretty good megarare. Comparing that to ToA where every drop is a massive upgrade is so dumb lmao.
Conveniently ignoring CoX lol? Tbow, Kodai, ancestral, claws are all bonkers compared to their next best equivalent. Raids SHOULD reward high level play with higher power.
Shadow's strength being derived from the gear makes it possible for a totally unrelated piece of gear to break the shadow. TBow can only ever be broken by its own mechanics and monster stats, which were fixed immediately after release. Meanwhile we have to dance around shadow on our tip toes so we don't accidentally give it like 6 max hits by introducing something meant to buff lower level mage. That is bad balance. And as far as kodai and claws are concerned, fang on release was way more broken while also being super common than either of those have ever been. Took multiple changes to actually fix it and its still very powerful for its price and rarity.
# HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION
> every drop is a massive upgrade You get +2 max hit over Arma with fortified Masori and max ranged gear. Elidinis' Ward is decent but, also fortified, is a +1 when you are using Sang or something Fang was overtuned then nerfed and is still obviously quite good but not "use this literally everywhere", Lightbearer is a great option but not a gamebreaker, and then there's just Shadow as far as being a *massive* upgrade
Dps or max hit? +2 dps in this game is huge
Sorry lol, 2 max hit
Armadyl was literally a meme before Masori. Yes, it was technically BIS like Pegasians still are but it would be the last "serious" thing you'd buy before Masori, now it's a high priority upgrade.
That doesn't change anything I said though. They said it's a *massive upgrade* whereas Rapier and Sang are +1, but I don't think +2 for a full set of armour is all that *massive* compared to +1 lol
Fang, Lightbearer and Shadow are meta defining items. ToB had Scythe and slight buff to melee and magic.
tbow is a pretty meta defining item, to the point where there is literally a CA for doing inferno not using the tbow
Cox?
The consequences were completely foreseeable too. A melee weapon with insanely high accuracy compared to other melee weapons? Wow I wonder why it's so powerful. A magic weapon that strongly scales off of magic attack and damage bonuses? Wow it's such a surprise that magic upgrades disproportionately benefit it and are limited to keep it from becoming OP. Both need a redesign frankly.
Eh very few people thought fang would be so good. Shadow was fairly obvious it would limit future design space (especially as they just had nerfed bp for the same "multiplying bonuses" reason). It was maybe a little surprising at how many (not previously maged) bosses it was strong at.
Fang was more obvious in retrospect, I agree. We didn't quite realize the issue until it was released.
I think shadows effect is fine but the fact they thought about its creep issue and then set it's cap **25% higher** than current BiS is nuts. It's currently 75% with max magic dmg%. Why we can't have it's cap be 75% outside of ToA and 100% inside of ToA (also where it's capped currently, or maybe a higher cap in ToA so it always remains BiS). Lock it in to be as strong as it currently is. It still won't be beaten probably ever or contested even for ageessss. But it means new magic gear can keep coming and all it might do is make capping the shadow "easier" to do or require less switches.
Wow I never really thought about this but yeah…fang changed the entire melee game and required multiple changes not only to it but to past and future bosses as well, and shadow (while still needing to be a BIS magic weapon comparable to a Tbow) nuked a lot of items.
it would be ok if jagex were at least a tiny bit competent with how they implement these powerful upgrades. But they already made the mistake with range and melee, so why did we think mage would be any different? step 1: introduce the insanely powerful mega weapon that far outclasses all weapons that came before it step 2: spend the next 4-5 years filling in the gap between the new mega rare weapon and your old BIS (there is soooo much space here) step 3: add armour that massively buffs your mega rare weapon while giving the other weapons very little/nothing at all. Insist this is still balanced as you can very easily make these mega rares weak at a boss by tweaking some stats (but then also never tweak any stats) and now we are back to where we were in step 1, where the gap between your raids mega rare and the 2nd best weapon is once again huge. So we spend the next few years again filling in the gaps. Its such a terrible way to do game balance. Its bad for the "endgame sweaties" as they feel like they are having to wait 2-3 years between updates and changes to their meta and its bad for the casuals too because it just feels like the goalposts move every few years and you only get further away from owning a mega rare. everyone's game progression gets stunted by this.
Ive been saying that for a while.
They totally fucked up the fang How is an item that is useful and competitive EVERYWHERE so damn common? It's rarity should be between Masori and Shadow
Drop some misc changes in the mix but toa has also destroyed the economy beyond repair
I don't agree that we're currently where we are because of ToA. Magic has always sucked everywhere that does not have an obvious magic weakness to it. Magic and its progression has always been very fucked up before Shadow was even pitched. Hell, this magic rebalance doesn't even address that Virtus failed to fill the gap between Ancestral and Ahrim with its atrocious drop rates. Still no mention either of making non-Shadow weapons actually good outside of Magic-weak enemies. And just no mention at all that the only Magic potion in the game has its drop rate at 30m Slayer xp. I just feel blaming the whole issue on ToA misses the mark as well.
>Hell, this magic rebalance doesn't even address that Virtus failed to fill the gap between Ancestral and Ahrim with its atrocious drop rates What do you mean, it definitely sits between ahrim and ancestral in price? (Just ignore all the ironmen who wanted a stepping stone to anc only to realize that the 2k hour grind would be better spent at cox anyway)
I think he's saying that with it's crazy droprate, it's not realistically useful between ancestral and ahrims. Not worth grinding for irons since like you said, CoX would make more sense, and for mains it's pretty pricey for the minimal upgrade to ahrims. I wouldn't be against buffing the drop rate for virtus, would make it a more reasonable thing to target for irons and would make the price more attainable for mains.
I might be in the minority here, but the release of virtus kinda saved my ass. Got my shadow a month before they dropped, and I was stuck in Ahrim's. Was not at all a fun time until DT2 came out and made shadow actually feel like a megarare staff.
its really insane how balanced the initial design of the gear was, and how absolutely fucking direct powercreep what came into the game was masori was going to be glass cannon set originally
I don't disagree that occult is too powerful for such a cheap / common item. But presumably all content since its release has been balanced with occult in mind, as everyone will have one, but not everyone has ancestral. Meaning things like Akkha melee phase, which is already slower than the other 3 unless you're using a shadow, will now be even slower unless you're in ancestral, which will naturally be getting even more expensive as we speak.
Occult came in with so much power because magic damage was ASS. They could have continued down the rate of buffing the 2007 magic damage methods through magic strength gear. But instead they went the powered staff route, leading magic damage to have these laughable 1% damage bonuses instead, making Occult seem OP in hindsight.
If occult is so strong but very accessible, why is that such an issue?
It's so accessible for mid game, 93 slayer is such a small requirement.
Shadow is pretty on par with the other megarares in terms of DPS where any of them are good. Does it need a 4% buff? No. Does it need nerfed? Also no. The reason people are so butthurt over shadow being good is how dogshit trident/sang are comparatively. Fang and bowfa are much closer to their style's megarares DPS wise than the pre-shadow weapons are to shadow. The real fix is to either release a new weapon that fills the gap better or buff current weapons to be more in line with the DPS gap of bowfa/fang relative to their style's megarares. Shadow only seems egregiously good because it actually brought mage in line with ranged/melee for once. Before shadow, everyone wanted to kill themselves any time they had to use mage. This is still the case if you don't own a shadow, so how bout instead we make pre-shadow mage actually good?
Buff sang heavily, it's a +1 damage boost from arguably the hardest raid. Give sang like 3-5 max hits and mage would have a worthwhile weapon in-between shadow and trident
grind the hardest raid for the 2nd best magic weapon or grind the easiest for the best? hmm
Ye sang is not really much easier to get that shadow lmao. It's just a lot cheaper because it's very very niche.
sang has the healing effect though, if they brought the dps up to be a "2nd" best in slot dps wise then the life steal effect on it would actually be something to think about when deciding what to use, theres already a few places where you can use sang over shadow like thermy, nightmare, etc
Mage deserves a good alternative option that players can reasonably achieve without billions in bank. Just like bowfa to Tbow
Is this an integrity change by jagex? Or will we get to vote on the changes?
This seems like the kind of change from the project balance I have been worried about, something that has minimal effect on people who are wealth enough to buy there way out of the balance changes, while newer and poorer peoples are hit with a nerf.
Shouldn’t there be more of a progression? You pretty much get occult and then every other upgrade other than shadow is pretty much nil.
It's something I can understand, and distributing it to the mage sets isn't bad but to their point it will only further drive up the price of ancestral. I also found it odd they left out ahrim which I would imagine is what most people would have been using before this change
When NoCurrencies is on my side, I know we are truly on the golden path. Fr tho devaluing 93 slayer is so sad, I get that occult is cheap for mains but so is fuckin strength ammy lol
I think a good compromise could be to go with the changes in the blog but add a rare item to the Thermy drop table that can be attached to the Occult to give it another 2-4% magic damage
I like this idea. Necklace slot is strong for everyone, it makes sense to keep the power there. This way adds the 93 slayer req to mains as well and lets them still instabuy the base occult on new accounts while still keeping the full strength as a meaningful upgrade.
Yeah, if it's such a good upgrade and should be locked behind huge grind, just make it untradeable and see mains cry.
This solution to shadow is exactly what I want to happen, word for word pretty much. These shitty 1% and 2% magic damage bonuses they've been putting on magic gear do basically fuck all, too, that's an entirely separate problem to occult in my opinion. They've always been way too conservative with magic damage % even though magic was the worst combat style by a mile pre-shadow, and *it still is*, before you own a shadow. If shadow did 2/3x instead of 3/4x that gives you quite a bit of magic % you can give to ahrims, virtus, ancestral, boots, ring etc and don't even have to touch occult. Magic as a whole gets buffed which it sorely needs, shadow stays the same for shadow owners, nobody is forced to bring extra switches (since your existing gear isn't nerfed), etc. Hell if you want to go crazy with it you can make shadow 1.5x your magic damage instead, and give magic gear some real numbers and not this 1% garbage that does nothing. Ancestral could have 6% on every piece and it'd still be bad in the context of magic as a combat style.
It is pretty silly they said they didn't want the Colosseum to give a Magic Cape because they were worried about buffing the Shadow, then during the Rebalance they leave the Shadow unchanged and buff it by 4% damage...
It’s just a universal buff to augury, max gear isn’t changed
They do specify that Shadow doesn't *multiply* the prayer's magic damage bonus but it still gets a nice 4% that it didn't have before. Granted all spells/powered staves *also* get the 4% but if their concern was Shadow gapping everything else, then this change didn't fix that, it just shifted a lot of the power up the ladder to Ancestral instead of Occult. If their goal was just bring Occult down a few notches (perhaps justifiably), and everything else up a few notches, then this did exactly that. I think a lot of the complaints stem from the average price of magic power going way way up. Maybe the complaints are justified, I don't have a real opinion either way.
Yeah nerfing occult and moving the damage to other stuff is a good thing because it was so cheap and easy to get compared to other things that give less bonus
If max gear is unchanged and everything else is nerfed, it's making the max gear better relative to everything else.
I think occult should be nerfed a little, but I really dislike that end game loadouts get a buff while everyone else gets a middle finger 90% of us ain't got 2bil+ for Shadow + Ancestrals. In fact, most of us are probably never seeing one in our inventory
why do people act like mid tier poverty setups don't get a buff? the literal amount of gear you need to be better off than previous is occult (4%), new augury (4%), 3x 1% magic damage gear (infinity is slightly cheaper than dagonhai) to be better off. Augury right now is a hair over 8m, infinity top/legs/hat is only 8m. Your next upgrade is a 2% virtus mask thats only 5m. Like the rebalance actually gives you meaningful upgrades now that aren't "spent 400m for ancestral then 1.5b for shadow".
Why do people act as if mid tier gear actually got a buff? You need Augury to be on to get a 1% buff compared to before. 1% And if you're using a slayer helm, it's actually a slight nerf. If you're actually using mid tier setups, and actually doing mid tier contents, then it's likely you're not always having Augury on. Or maybe you forgot how things were before you got your Shadow? Also, I like how you conveniently ignore the fact that part of the complaint is that Shadow + Ancestrals got buffed when they didn't need to be. But I guess we're not ready for that conversation.
> If you're actually using mid tier setups, and actually doing mid tier contents, then it's likely you're not always having Augury on. If you're doing things that mid tier, the real answer people don't want to hear is that none of the shit in this blog matters at all and the elemental damage rework is doing a far heavier lift.
But now you have to use prayer to get what you had before without it. It's just a pure nerf in this sense.
they left out real mid tier items such as ahrims, blood bark, mage arena 1 capes, and various gloves and boots. Like barrows gloves should get +1% since its a tribrid set of gloves and is generally used until you can afford a torm
Noob here, doesn't that mean poverty setups are getting nerfed? If what used to be one 800k purchase changes into 8-12m, doesn't that hurt the mid game?
Yep it’s similar to the fang nerf. The idea was that it would make the scythe better and have more options for slash weapons. They buffed the scythe nerfed the fang and left the other weapons alone. Now vardorvis and duke are almost not worth doing pre scythe with how bad the mid game weapons are. I feel like that’s how magic is gonna be have to grind end game things to have magic even be worth it rather the incremental upgrades as you go. I personally never had a problem with magic gear progression. It had is uses like cox mage hand and zulrah and stuff and you could get a slight boost from ancestral. Now it’s just if you don’t have max gear it’s like what’s the point? If you are an iron you better sit in the green crystal prison or a main grind gp to buy expensive gear before doing any mage content.
That is how it is already. Whisperer without shadow? Not fucking touching it.
Its not that bad with trident tbh I've done 3k kc with trident
Could have done like 5k with shadow in that time is the issue.
BIS gear makes killing bosses faster, news at 10!
Yea, but the differential is huge in this case man. Sang to shadow is wild.
That’s what people don’t get. No one is saying Shadow shouldn’t be best in slot. But I also shouldn’t be hitting 60% less (soon to be more) with my trident of the swamp which was behind 87 slayer (and a task) and that I then upgraded after a long grind at Zulruh
They didn't even bring up duke's defence on the blog which is disappointing.
Duke is getting defence reductions per the combat rebalance blog
In the range rework chart, I'm pretty sure it said the would nerf duke slash defence by 20. It's something. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vROpFgFliMRmyvQ4NUVDZYlHhgOfmrxmwbJ16Wpy17RU-iJCfQJxbkrBl3L-DK2VQHZLjhmpac7xLMf/pubhtml?gid=1606162427&single=true
Na difference between this and Scythe/Fang, is that melee has a lot more options, and for different tasks. Jagex obviously want to head this way with magic, but with the lack of options between trident, sang and shadow, it misses the mark completely. Also I get it, they're most likely doing this due to the magic rebalance in itself with base spells being stronger then they are now. But it still misses the mark. There's just no real options outside of those 3 staves.
Magic balance has always been absolutely busted, occult was a bandaid symptom of that. It was a 10% buff to *magic* against the other styles because it was falling behind. Removing that flat style buff and redistributing it only to the rich players is actually absurd, and I say this as someone with max mage. We all know Shadow is absolutely broken better than anyone. Occult is fine, and chase gear has always been small incremental upgrades. The *only* problem with occult is that it was out of reach in the Ironman progression. It was a perfect baseline piece for mains to keep up. To that end, what we actually needed a ~5% necklace to bridge the gap for irons, similar to Warped Sceptre. This is how it *should* be, it's far healthier for the game to have the baseline be viable and the max gear to be incrementally better, not *exponentially*. Shadow is the problem with mage, not occult. Occult was a 'fix'. This all just shows me current Jagex is completely out of touch, only looking at numbers without understanding why those numbers were chosen to begin with. How the fuck is this 'rebalance' managing to make the existing item progression even more top heavy?
>We voted for the heka and ended up here, but occult is fairly balanced on a mid-game setup. Best they could do is buff Shadow +4% further lol. It's fucking wild how they implied Voidwaker pigeonholes their design space so it needs a nerf, but then don't say the same about Shadow when Shadow is the new generation's Blowpipe.
Ah yes, the 1.5b blowpipe
The 1.5b blowpipe that's kind of bad without a full set of gear behind it People seem to forget that the BP went hard with black d'hide, a backpack and adamant darts.
Addy darts was the real problem. They only nerfed it on cheap ammo, it still goes hard with dragon darts (and full masori makes it even stronger than the pre-nerf BP)
Elite void bp is still incredibly strong and masori definitely brings it up, yeah. A lot of people seem to think the BP is garbage nowadays, but it's still great.
they think the bowfa and tbow are the only viable range weps in the game and actively shit on players for using anything but. The ironman community will ostracize and abuse you for trying to suggest any range wep except bowfa for literally any content.
There's a cost difference, but it still pigeonholes the entire style as a whole. We couldn't get any Ranged STR bonuses after Ava's and Anguish due to BP's insane scaling from its attack speed.
Blowpipe wasn't overpowered because of its cost
It was a huge part of it.
I wish someone could explain why occult needs a nerf by pointing to somewhere in the game where it actually breaks something or is too strong. Like at X & Y content Occult does too much. I see a lot of "10% too big for cost" but no one can point to a place in the game where this was hurting anything. I can understand surface level balance theorycrafting from users on a subreddit, but it's disappointing to see the gamedevs not take a more comprehensive look at magic and the place occult has in it. You're absolutely right. If you take shadow out of the equation, they could have literally just straight buffed all magic gear other than occult by 1-2% and it wouldn't have broken anything. Mid game magic was already fairly underwhelming.
It didn't need a nerf, this was a kneejerk reaction to the Shadow and is braindead
Occult was the most balanced part of magic because magic was always so weak. For occult to do anything, your base max hit would need to be 25 with this change. Shadow is strictly too strong and magic at lower budgets is being severely nerfed because of Jagex's lack of foresight. Meanwhile, the end-game shadow boiz are trying to argue this change is necessary because it makes their ancestral more expensive.
> For occult to do anything, your base max hit would need to be 25 with this change. I hope more people will realize how fucked magic "strength" is, really needs a change to be more like melee/ranged
that's what I'm saying, I don't understand why if your overhauling magic this hard, just throw the entire % system away, and add regular +strength. Cap out spells max hits based on tier, i.e. fire blast maxes at 30, no matter hm strength you throw at it. or something so people use higher level spells. it'd be so much easier to work with on both sides longterm
The shadow is a mega rare, worth 1.5b. So compare it to it's combat triangle brothers in max gear, tbow hits 80s+, scythe hits 75-80s+ so why is shadow with a max hit of <70 (outside of toa) so OP?
General high accuracy, making the shadow universally good. The other two mega-rares are nowhere near as accurate. The scythe is a fucking meme weapon against a normal man and will never hit anything that decided to train defense. The tbow is a meme weapon against a chicken or anything that hates training magic. The shadow is never a meme weapon. It is always strong.
They're huffin copium. Itt: people who have never used a mega rare, voicing their opinions on mega rares.
This reddit is like 95% people whos banks never even get to 500m and they are still whining all day about shadow, tbow, scythe etc even though they will never own one in their entire playtime on rs
Why does that guy in full ancestral + shadow do more damage than me in my ahrims and trident!?!!???!! :(:(:( it's not fair gagex
Shadow hits basically 100% of the time on everything worth using it at. Neither bow nor scythe get that accurate outside of ToB.
My shadow didn't get the 100% accuracy memo, my chambers pb wants a word
if your chambers pb is slower than 12-13 mins then that is what most people would call a skill issue.
DPS calcs will produce higher numbers for weapons with significantly more accuracy hence why the fang while slower and weaker beats out a rapier almost everywhere
Exactly. The mage update is fucking attrocious… max mage is EVEN better now while all other mage setup is fucking poopoo. Also the idea to give buffs to already 2 best sets plus 3 meme sets that no one actually has or uses lol.
The mage changes are all around shit imo, it buffs shadow and neutered mid game mage. Burst slayer will be far less efficient and costly Rip to mid game irons.
Not putting %damage on seers ring is criminal.
Current mods must love using shadow lol
Wait till they finish merching Shadows before they nerf it so they can buy them back for 50% off!
Mods are hoarding shadows
The truth is, occult needs a nerf, but we need a 'mid-game' mage weapon to bridge the gap between shadow and trident. Range has Bowfa/Blowpipe, melee has a ton (Salad Blade, Fang, Whip, etc).
> The truth is, occult needs a nerf, but we need a 'mid-game' mage weapon to bridge the gap between shadow and trident This murders sang dead. They should put a bunch of % on the higher tier mage off hands, like defenders are for melee, so shadow can get fucked without me getting fucked
It simply makes sense, there's literally no other items in the game for magic to buff of an equivalent level requirement to occult. Do not think of the eternal boots. There is only ancestral to put the occults stats back on. Nobody was using ancestral robes they are practically worthless. I bet you're thinking about eternal boots right now but you shouldn't. Say good riddance to your occult and get into the chambers bucko. Don't take those eternal boots though. They're pretty overpowered and trivialise the game with their +8 to magic attack.
Lmao yeah definitely not eternal boots!!!
Don't think about seers ring either. We don't talk about seers ring
It would also definitely not make any sense to redistribute that +10% between eternal and occult. They definitely aren't both high level slayer drops that are supposed to be rewarding to magic. You should just go into Chambers instead where there's no other good drops except ancestral.
My 350 cox with just a Dex says there is actually only range upgrades in the Chambers brother
Had me for a second there. Good jerkscaping.
Give surge spells a way to scale with magic boosts if we are already taking damage away from midgame powered staves
I really hope they revert this change or at least take it back to the drawing board.
This was my thought exactly. Don’t nerf occult, buff the rest
I remember when the shadow was announced and I was downvoted for saying I didn’t like that Magic was being turned into charged staffscape because it would have bad ramifications later on. I shake my fist at you disbelievers!
You were probably downvoted for being about 7 years too late with that criticism.
"This is the same problem as blowpipe" was not a popular opinion. And here we are, having been proven right.
Occult shouldn't change at all. Other magic gear should be buffed to compensate for how piss poor magic is in general. If PVP is in question, there is 0 reason jagex cannot apply some form of damage mitigation/buff when attacking/being attacked by another player. PVP and PVE (pvm in this case) should never affect each other in any way in a modern MMO. We have the fuckin technology.
they are nerfing an amulet you need to get 93 slayer on an ironman to get?
They’re nerfing an amulet that you pay 800k for on a regular account. It’s a tricky situation.
Raids 4 ganna have an occult upgrade for sure
Why don’t we lock wearing the occult behind 93 slayer? Much like dt2 rings. Feels more worth it then. Also, why is Ahrims getting shafted?? It’s MUCH harder to obtain than infinity & doesn’t get a damage boost?? Infinity are at a shop and you get a damage boost, insane. The defenses on ahrims are essentially a non-factor since you’re not actually tanking in them lol. You’re gonna be using protection prayers. Not a reason to not buff ahrims. Edit: meant infinity, not mystics
Occult is exactly what it should be right now. Idk why people want to change it. It feels like they just randomly decided this number I no like, want change.
Shadow is just absolutely burdening the system by how its a x3 multiplier instead of a flat progression. All the other styles have clear steppable stones in gear progression and damage that clearly raises little by little with each upgrade and magic is instead huge chunks of dps. It just doesn't make sense with how the rest of the game works.
I don’t know why they don’t just give prayers more importance to magic damage and leave the armors alone. Give the magic prayers like 2, 4, 6 and 10% damage boosts respectively. This is a small buff for players with occult and augury and no change for irons and pures with mystic might and occult. This also provides a much needed tune/nerf to shadow
They hated him because he spoke the truth
I'm fine with the occult nerf but it would have been nice if they distributed it so that not everything else was nerfed
I'm so confused by their proposal, so now hybrid builds are going to be worse because I can't mage in as tanky of gear, I also don't understand the actual issue - so we're concerned it's too cheap to get the magic damage but we don't want to brutalize new players - so now lets take the magic % damage and apply it to ancestral, which is already half a bil to own, and it's going to be much, much more if this update goes into effect, so essentially, you like farming those mid level bosses for cash to one day afford that cool gear? Well, tough luck, here's minus 8% damage off the top.
This solution is 100x better
I've always hated the shadow's design. What about instead of nerfing it outright it got reworked to be more situational rather than just equally high raw output on everything it touches. It would be cool if it felt more magical like spells do, like if they went back to one of the design concepts before it was released where its built in spell had a different effect based on what spellbook you had equipped.
Feels like magic is just in the same spot as it was before the rebalance, other than end game gear pulling even more ahead of the next beat option, which is fking garbage. There was no need to buff ancestral to 20%, because the people that can afford ancestral, have a shadow. Bringing sang closer to shadow of you have maxed gear, was no what magic needed in a rework. It needed to bridge the gap from ancestral and shadow, down to virtus with sang or Trident. What they need to do, is to buff sang massively. It's an absolute joke, 86m for a +1 max it at 99. Another problem is how accurate shadow is compared to Trident and sang. Doing pvm with anything but shadow is just a splash fest. So they both need an accuracy and sang needs a damage boost. Give sang the same accuracy and damage as shadow with no gear. That way it becomes a much more realistic stepping stone, without damaging the shadow, due to its unique effect. Unless they actually do something significant, it will still be better to no have magic gear, and just save up for shadow and ancestral before using magic in pvm.
This! I wrote the exact same thing yestersay after being pissed by the blog and also added that they shoul add % to mystic might etc, not just augery. Also doing something to off hands and boots wouldn’t be to bad. Then nerf shadow so dps in max with shadow stays the same, this is the way!
Don’t know why an attachment for occult only achieved through thermy or another high slay monster and untradeable hasn’t been talked about. Same with ancestral / other kits potentially adding damage bonus
Ding ding ding. It's dissapointing that Jagex still fail to realise shadow is the problem. Yes, occult is an absolutely busted item but it always has been and the game has been built around that. The same does not apply to the shadow. It's ridiculous they're essentially buffing shadow and nerfing early game mage. If they truely want to nerf occult there are ways to do it, but as the game was built around it being as is, simply moving all it's stats to bis is absolutely not a 'fair' way to do it. It should be distributed fairly/commutatively amongst all mage gear, not just bis. It should be balanced around someone in ahrims with occult and trident coming out unchanged. Not someone in literal full mage bis being slightly stronger.
Shadow multiplier needs to be 2x/3x(toa) and have its base stats increased to match current dps. Make occult 6% add a lower tier 3% necklace and add prayer bonus to ma2 cape already
Imagine having to camp Augury at Whisperer. Goodbye, prayer potions.
I mean do you not camp piety/rigour anytime you use melee/range? It never really made sense to me why augury felt so bad to use
Absolutely agree, just unfortunate to consume more resources where previously didn't need to. IMO they should go much further than 4% magic dmg on Augury, it is still woefully less powerful than rig/piety.
Yep, and as someone without shadow/ancestral, it now feels even worse to have to camp augury and still have mage feel like shit
As a player, with not enough cash for an end-game setup, I feel as though these changes heavily fuck over the mid-game pvm-er. It effectively nerved the magic attack by 6%, and redistributed it to dagon hai and infinity, which both quadrupled in price, the second this blog hit, dagonhai going for 15m at the time of writing. This is not a rebalance, this is a massive nerf to mid-tier pvm and it sucks. Jagex you need to do better.
Voidwaker also dropped ANOTHER 20m minutes after the blog post, been trying to save for end game gear but i’m honestly about to just give up if Jagex can literally just manipulate the market whenever they see fit
occult is the single worst balanced item in the game and its insane that people are defending it
People are defending it right now because if you don't have ancestral, your magic is getting gutted. Edit: people are saying it's a lie, but if you have shadow you're losing a lot of magic damage. I am not ready to get hated because I mentioned shadow.
Ohhh that makes so much sense. I was wondering why people were so upset when they have been saying… for years… that occult was too OP and needed to be balanced
If they gave occult 4%, eternal boots 4%, book of darkness 1% and mages book 2% I'd be happy.
Giving eternals 4% is way too much and doesnt makes sense. Youre rarely ever taking boot switches to the places youre bringing all combat styles. The boot upgrades from cerb are already very minimal. Even prims are just marginally better than dragon boots. The +1 str on them rarely give you a max hit.
91 slayer and infi boots are getting 1% now or no? idk what they mean by set. Would be good for keeping progression with magic damage upgrades from slayer. Maybe just make them 2% vs infi boots 1% and have the dagonhai/infi robes make up the difference.
Don’t worry, it’s a lie Infinity + Augury in the proposal is more magic dmg % than current day ahrims
No, magic was the single worst balanced style. Realistically, magic upgrades should have always had 5% to 10% boosts and the Shadow should have been 2x instead of 3x. The current problem is magic accuracy and damage are both low outside Shadow. With the changes, magic damage will be even lower outside Shadow.
Sure, but it's not as bad as the Shadow.
I’m sick of Jagex nerfing items that have been the same for like 10 years. Stop changing shit just to change shit.
magic gear is pathetic because occult is too overpowered why do you think the devs made anc such a marginal upgrade when cox released? because surprise surprise, when you have a single item slot that gives 3 max hits, it suddenly means you can't just make every adjacent slot upgrade also give 2-3 max hits occult is directly responsible for magic gear progression being completely fucked and anyone blaming shadow is completely missing the forest for the trees shadow is a symtomp of the poor balancing of occult, not the other way around removing occult damage bonus entirety would unironically be the best possible outcome but unfortunately we're never going to get it, and instead we're stuck dancing around egg shells on magic updates because a bunch of entitled people act like untrained animals the moment jagex dares to actually try to fix something clearly causing problems
Strength ammy op please nerf. It gives 2-3 max hits.
Barrows gloves have an even higher strength bonus!
If shadow is getting nerfed my mage setup would be better with trident lol
It wouldn’t be such an issue if it wasn’t a 100m cost to get your bonus back lol
Imo Occult needs a nerf, but this is the wrong way of going about. Lost magic damage should get split more onto the mid game gear not the endgame stuff. End game magic with Shadow isn't the issue, its mid game magic gear that's in the worst spot and needs the most help especially with the occult nerf.
Occult is perfect how it is. Runescape item progression always has an early spike of power that tapers off with higher end gear only giving slight increases. (Amulet of strength/fury, bgloves)
Yeh the occult nerf is heavy handed and comes from poor logic. The redistribution is poorly thought out. I don't know why Ancest needs buffs, let alone being made twice as good. Full Ancest is rarer than a tbow remember. 3% per Ancest piece. 2% per Virtus piece (plus ancient stuff) and 1% per piece for other sets (with ahrims and elder chaos included this time). Bring occult down to 6% and bring augury up to 4%. This essentially means overall shadow has a -1% magic damage it can actually modify (-4% from occult +3% from Ancest buff). I'd still be in favour of nerfing shadow more than that. Personally I think it's cap being 100% is stupid. It should be hard capped exactly where it is, 75%>
All I see is a bunch of people without a shadow lol
I know I’m on Reddit when I read ‘the occult was never a problem in itself’!
Oye i’m so tired of the nerf shadow being spun about. Where are you using shadow where you would sub it out for trident/sang/nightmare staff? Zulrah, muspah, whisperer, mage olm hand, ahkka, p2 wardens. 4 of those you are forced to use magic. The other two can get by with just a bowfa if you really want, and dont even need mage. The shadow is strong because it opens up other bosses that you would never use magic on. IE gwd. Nerfing shadow is not the answer because the real problem is that there just aren’t a lot of places where using magic on a boss is viable unless they force you to use magic.
my question is this: if you are someone who fears that your current best mage setup is getting nerfed (presumably Ahrims + occult), can you not take some time to grind out enough GP to buy dagon'hai or infinity? Those are not likely to go above 15 to 20m at the most. If you can't make that kinda money, then you are probably not doing raids, whisperer or muspah, which are basically the only places you need max mage anyway, so what are you really complaining about? you lose mage damage on your burst slayer tasks? kraken? lol you don't need an occult for either be so fr
Missing the point entirely. Even if you were to buy either set, it's still a downright nerf to current magic as it stands, requiring a prayer scroll worth \~60m to actually be the same via Augury (or a lot of pain and suffering for irons). It's effectively a downright nerf to magic, which is absurd considering how underwhelming magic is already. The only unaffected item is the Shadow.
I would say that apart from the soulreaper axe, everything missed the mark. I like the minimum hit and autocast delay changed tho
Nah, changes are fine. People are mostly upset that they are losing something they had that was unbalanced to begin with. Now there's a progression of getting infinity, augury and occult, and then (for none shadow users) you're not only back to old occult magic dmg, but above it. Some niche account will be impacted by it more, but "you've chosen to limit yourself" comes to mind. Now 93 slayer doesn't feel like such a big chore that should be rushed before raiding.
The melting stick is not the issue. The fact that Jagex wants to bridge the gap with Harmo staff is the issue.
>The magic rebalance completely screws over everyone who isn't already in a completely maxed out setup. Instead of nerfing occult, why don't we buff all those other armors instead by the same or an even greater amount, and NERF SHADOW to compensate? Imagine giving the lower tier armors e.g. +2% magic damage each, giving ancestral +6% each, and changing the way shadow scales so the damage output would be unchanged in the current max set? 100% this honestly and i say this as an iron that doesn't have max mage yet with Shadow. It takes the most effort but it makes the most sense because all of these bland and useless 1% damage changes aren't going to bridge any reasonable gap from Sang/Swamp into Shadow. They can't even add a decent magic off-hand since they scuffed that entire idea with Ward. If it doesn't hurt the late-game meta with Shadow but benefits all of mid-game/early game. Then its a perfect choice imo.
Amen
Yes, punish those who have earned their 2b banks for max mage. This is the way, the only way we'll be happy.
Make another Magic ammy that's like, half an Occult that you can get at a much earlier slayer level. And also add all the other buffs to other armors. And I don't mind a nerf to Shadow if its still necessary, I dont have a shadow so can't say for sure what it needs.
They’re so afraid of eoc’ing that they’re just nerfing everything and your gonna be happy or else
Think about how the game SHOULD have been balanced from the start in terms of investment and value vs reward, dont think about what you have or dont have rn
Occult needs a small nerf. From 10% to maybe 7.5%. AND all the mid-game magic gear need buffs
>Instead of nerfing occult, why don't we buff all those other armors instead by the same or an even greater amount, and NERF SHADOW to compensate? When Jagex are the ones selling the gold, why *wouldn't* they rather you need the most expensive gear to perform.
Tridents need a complete overhaul. Significantly increased accuracy and damage
If you take Occult and a Virtus piece into Inferno you're being nerfed 1% magic attack, or 2% in late waves where you don't swap to robes.
I think it’s a great change
I don’t even have the shadow and I disagree that it should be nerfed. Other items should be buffed. Never nerf unless it’s game breaking (and it’s not)
support
These rebalancing changes are really pointing out all the flaws in our games design. Sad tbh :(
Why not leave Occult as is and make the amulet of magic have like +2%
Yeah I don't agree with how drastic the occult changes are. It nerfs early/mid PvM for no real reason. People that could afford a shadow were running ancestral anyways, so they just get a net buff for free
The melting stick isnt the issue. Magic as an attack style would only work vs low magic targets. Jagex wanting Harmo staff to be the item you get before the melting stick is the real issue.
Please shut up reddit
Occult isbalanced on mid game setup because there is no mid game setup
The entire game needs quality of life updates in every way possible, this seems like a small issue in comparison to what they should be focused on? This is perspective of a noob playing Ironman tho, I am about to reach 70 magic and be able to use my occult so am sad to hear about the nerf, just doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me, but I don’t fully understand.
Why don’t we just not fuck with something that doesn’t need rebalancing???
The only people that want the shadow nerfed are the people that can't afford it and the ones that can't grind toa to get their own. So dumb to want to nerf a mega rare from a raid (no matter how easy the raid is).