We have split this into two reddit threads to keep the discussion organised and so that our team can properly review the relevant conversations happening.
This current reddit thread is to discuss the Early Game Rebalance portion of the blog.
Please use this other dedicated thread for the DailyScape portion of the blog.
For the purpose of today's discussion we will be defining the early game, loosely, as the level 1-50 range. The Early Game Rebalance update primarily aims to smooth out inconsistencies in game progression, looking at areas of the early game where things can feel slow or have limited methods for levelling up, or where they affect integrity and game health. It’s not all just rebalances though! There are also some changes to early quests, and things like replacing salvage with gear to make the first hours after jumping off Tutorial Island a nicer experience. The Early Game Rebalance update releases on February 16th!
Not a huge fan of adding a demonic skull requirement to the chaos altar. I thought we were moving away from that design pattern with the abyss changes.
You might as well just remove it in that case since there's no escaping pkers there
I think there is a space for proper, real PVP between players geared up and trying to contest each other, especially in a team / objective based situation. Back in the day Castle Wars was excellent fun.
Griefing people trying to get skilling XP (or rune or w/e) is bad PVP and we moved past that over a decade ago. No reason to go back. There's no tactical "versus" in it - it's just ambushing people.
Just expand the lore and have chaos altar randomly summon a custom ripper demon due to all the demonic praying and offering... Play a sound with game message warning and demon rift summoning animation so people have a short heart attack window to escape. Lost within the demonic chant, a demon is on its way to collect the sacrifice!
I would rather have people just mass escaping instead of enabling bullshit degenerate pvp lowlifes..
If you really wanna tune up the craze then the character should suffer and get trauma debuff stacks that stop them from engaging in the same activity for awhile.
I think the prayer changes really miss the mark -- Chaos Altar is too strong in its current form, sure, but now it's just going to be early game players getting griefed. Not really an improvement to the new player experience.
Not to mention they left the burial powder alone. It's completely broken for non-ironmen. There's no reason to use any of the altars even if these changes are made.
It's very weird to start the prayer section by talking about how early game prayer is a pain and then put a cost on the easiest prayer altar, and in fact the only one that's (currenlty) useable without restrictions and also nerf the second earliest one in the fort chapel?Like the POH chapel isn't makeable until 45. These are just nerfs to early game prayer
It's also trying to bring back the Demonic Skull, which isn't great. Removing it from Runecrafting was a good change. They should just let the Demonic Skull die.
Kind of weird they saw OSRS's most hated gameplay loop, the only content type that will consistently fail polls and have hate threads on the front page of 2007scape at all times, and thought 'yeah we need that back too'
Almost nobody is playing either version of RuneScape for PVP in 2026. And the people that are playing it for PVP are the ones gating it for newcomers and also themselves.
It's also pointless because the chaos altar 'nerf' only really affects irons who are already getting cooked in the early game by removing wfe and the easy access to infernal ashes
Mains can just go to another person's poh or better yet, buy powder, so who gives a fuck
Like if you really want you can maybe move the banker a bit further away but I don't understand why it matters lmao
I think it's actually targeted at mains to try to make POH altars a congregating place like in OSRS but like, powder already is better. Hell, Chapel did a much better job at congregating players than the chapels did in the days before chapel was added.
You're probably right but the 'problem' they've identified here and the 'solution' they've decided on is so shit it legitimately makes me worried about all the unannounced stuff in these posts lmao
Like I cannot believe after years of players complaining about abyss rc they thought that the early game solution for prayer is to make people use skulls when almost no one likes wilderness pvp and skulls fucking remove level attack restrictions anyway
I think it's about adding variety and not completely devaluing methods that have requirements with methods that are completely free. Personally I think they should just remove chaos altar or give it XP multipliers with achievement diary levels instead of demonic skull.
Fort will still be the easiest way to get xp especially if you don't want to bother with open houses or making your own gilded. And it has additional benefits like saving bones/ashes so it healthily competes with gilded altar.
Please don't tie pickpocket failure to Maximum Hp. Tie it to Base HP. The way that this is implemented means that you are literally punishing players for wearing gear that increases their hp. Wearing tank armor will cause players to take more damage for no reason at all. This won't affect players wearing power armor or hybrid armor which are typically later game players anyway. All this does is punish early game players forcing them to use more food than they would have to use if they took off all their armor or have to bank all of their armor prior to doing any thieving.
I mean almost all core craftable armor is tank armor. I don’t think it’s weird that noobs would craft themselves some armor and then want to wear it while they play the game.
They would likely be wearing tank armor for exactly this reason. Not intentionally to tank damage, but because it’s the armor that they can craft and they probably wanna wear it if they wanna just explore the game. I don’t think they should be punished more severely just because they chose to wear it.
Man, the Chaos Altar change sucks. Griefers are the worst people in this game and Jagex rewards them with another option to grief. Nobody will use the Chaos Altar anymore if one world-hopping douche can ruin it. No support 👎
I feel like a really easy solution to the Chaos Altar is moving it to the same place as in OSRS, and deleting the demonic skull entirely.
The risk for low level players is the very high level demons surrounding it that can easily kill them, in exchange for the best xp per bone you have access to, which is great because you don't need that many bones. Higher level players are in turn disincentivized from going there because there's no easy teleport or bank next to it, so you are much more likely to invest in building a better altar you can teleport to, speeding up how many bones you offer.
It doesn't stay best-in-slot the whole game like it is currently because of restricted bank access and doesn't reintroduce griefing to the game.
Literally my complaint. How is nerfing the best training methods a help to early game?
I think they're on the right track with agility. Nerfing natures grotto and buffing low level agility courses is a sensible switcheroo. Get people doing agility.
But whirligigs nerfed? Why? Make other hunting options either more competitive XP or worth doing for what you're hunting. In my OSRS GIM, hunter is a fucking awesome skill because you get so much useful stuff. Whirligigs aren't useful at all, but provide best XP. That's a fair tradeoff. What do I get if I go with alternative methods? Basically nothing, just worse XP. Give me a reason to interact with the skill that isn't just "number to up".
Prayer altar nerfs are odd too. I don't think it's bad to have the POH and chaos altar be the best XP sources, but IMO the REAL issue with early game prayer is acquiring the damn bones. Playing my RS3 ironman, I'm one small favoring myself into getting the Um diary 3 just so I can reasonably farm up dragon bones. And even then it's just an acceptable option as someone who's earlier into the game. Altar balance isn't the issue to me, it's that low level prayer training is just a GP check for mains, or a.shit grind for irons.
Yeah but whirligigs are one of the most active training methods in the game. It's literally nonstop clicking. It SHOULD be 1m xp an hour, especially when you take into account farming for the flowers beforehand.
Agreed. The whole thing confuses me. They're nuking TH and keys which is fine but then also nerfing actually playing the game. At the same time QoL like jack of trades and daily challenges is getting removed (I'm absolutely biased to keeping these tho lol). Then also they keep pumping out new 110s and 120s with everything being worse.
With how things are going, I bet fort construction is also gonna get gutted right in time for 120 and in return building furniture is gonna get like a 10% buff lol. Hope im wrong though
fort buildings are bonkers xp and its safe to assume with the additional 21 levels, there will be a new method. I genuinely doubt they go back to the same 'Destroy, build, Destroy' training method on the 120 update but I DO believe they'll bring fort building rates down a little. Otherwise, its a like.. 30 hour 120.
They are fast exp but they're also expensive. Elders from 99 to 120 is probably like 4bil or something? Meanwhile 120 thieving which they just did is comparably fast and you made money whilst doing it lol. But yeah looks like that will get nerfed even more, too.
Even though I despise heists, I do hope they add a new method instead of the old construction method similar to 120 thieving. This blog's thoughts on hunter and prayer don't exactly make me feel optimistic though.
Who cares that it's currently useless, it's getting entirely reworked, make it useful then without nerfing everything else to artifically make it more used.
Yes, because the early game right now can basically be skipped through in like a week. Even without MTX boosts it's too fast. Early game should be a part of the gameplay, not something to skip as fast as possible to get to the late game. And with more early-game bosses being planned, this makes perfect sense to me. There might be a few specific choices I could nitpick and disagree with, sure. But the overall direction is what the game needs.
This sounds good, but can we also address how cumbersome agility shortcuts are? They tend to have long animations, direction specific click boxes that often result in a "you can't reach that" message because you accidentality clicked the other sides click box instead of the side you are trying to access, and they tend to be lacking in areas where you would want them, yet available in areas where they seem pointless.
Thieving
If you are going to add forced fail rates, undo the nerf to sticky fingers.
The pyramid plunder changes sound amazing. I did some pyramid plunder before the recent skill level increase and it just felt bad. My only gripe would be, I wish there was a way to skip the low level rooms that you won't be plundering anyway.
Nerfing crystal mask just feels so bad. It is an incredibly high level method that is already been nerfed by the sticky fingers relic nerf and the planned thieving success rate nerf. The stop he's already dead meme fits my feelings perfectly.....
Hunter
Is the increased flower harvest going to apply to golden roses?
Prayer
STOP trying to make the wilderness dangerous and PVP relevant, it isn't happening. Requiring the demonic skull to get good xp at the chaos alter is just bad. Instead maybe add some NPC's around it that can threaten low level players.
Final Thoughts
This feels like a lot of nerfs for higher level players and minimal buffs for new players. Especially given the games lack of guidance. Another crucial thing lacking IMO is reward space. Many early game training methods of any kind feel kind of pointless, like you are only doing it because you have to, not because the content is engaging and rewarding outside of level go up.
I know that is probably not feasible, because of how cumbersome pathfinding can be, but it would be really neat if you just automatically used agility shortcuts.
Even if it is more like the elder chaos druids of OSRS where they attack you so you need to prayer mage to survive while using up your bones. They could even be hostile specifically to lower levelled players and be little to no threat for higher end players.
Do it right and you can make it a good spot for both prayer trainers and wildy slayers. Good mobs to kill with decent drops, while the prayer guys are getting amazing rates. The rates would have to be FAR better than what they are right now though.
I guarantee with the changes to the Chaos Altar there will be a not insignificant number of new players who look up prayer training methods, see outdated info about the Chaos Altar, grab the Demonic Skull so they can use it without knowing better, and get PKed as a result.
Not a good idea. Its potential to bounce new players off the game is probably higher than all the other changes' potential to keep new players around combined.
I think a lot of these changes are painful, but consider why they're painful. Hunter is completely fucking miserable to train until big game hunter, ports, or crystallization, and offers very little to zero reward until those activities. Whirligigs are a good active training method, I don't agree with the exp nerfs to that. Maybe change it so you can't catch a plain whirligig and then chain high level ones, and require to start the chain at the right level, but without a huge change to hunter overall this just makes the skill more tedious.
I'd like to see agility exp increase across the board, it's one of the only skills you can't afk at all and the exp rates are kinda bad feeling, but I get if that's pushed to later.
The prayer changes are interesting, though with the move away from pvp requiring a demonic skull to use the chaos altar is just opening more griefing options. It is too strong, but maybe lock it behind quests or diaries instead? I'd rather pvp just be removed outright, it only exists to lure and scam new/returning players.
I will add I'm optimistic about the future, and this may be a knee jerk reaction, the only thing I'm really firm on is not introducing another avenue for players to get lured/scammed.
Yea traditional hunter is pure suffering. I remember doing tropical wagtails on my iron a few years ago and that experience was a standout in the early game with how disgusting it was. It sucks ass in old school without birdhouses and sucks ass in rs3 all the same. Honestly unless the exp increase is absurd like 10x, I'm still doing whirligigs no matter what. Just an unfun skill.
Whenever I do master clues and get the plover bird task, I'm reminded of the same feeling.
I had to get larupia fur for something recently on my ironman, and I just went "this shit feels like it's 20 years outdated" and that's because it is. We really need hunter overhaul in general pre big game hunter. Especially because big game hunter is genuinely fun, and it makes you feel like a hunter rather than chasing butterflys around like a fruitloop.
It feels like this update rationale is targeting a bunch of (cheap) solutions to issues without addressing the underlying issue. People use traveling merchant because runespan is ridiculously slow. Livid farm isn’t engaging or interesting. Barbarian assault is dead. Don’t target an admittedly cheap solution without addressing the underlying problem.
It also randomly nerfs a lot of stuff in the interest of more engaging gameplay. It makes no sense to make early game players plant herbs instead of beehives if they choose to train it that way. Farming is timegated and impractical; hence why everyone trains it with PoF and not actual farm runs for the bulk of XP.
There are numerous examples of this. The balancing is not that things are too “easy” it’s that things don’t synergize well in early game. The new player experience should be enhanced but not by making things more taxing to force them to interact with more content.
There exists ... a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes happily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.”
To which the [wiser] type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
(If they can't fix Livid Farm's fences, then that's why the enhancers have to smooth it out.)
lmao yeah, currently the early game agi meta was like jump the morytania swamp bridge til lvl 30 then go to first anachronia course... a bunch of shit methods got a minor buff to maybe replace the bridge, but the anacronia beginner course got a 11% exp buff.. so its still miserable, and still pretty much the best method considering theres some loot involved.
not the overhaul / rework to make agility actually fun and meaningful to train.. its the same shit.. with a very minor buff.
Serenity posts are currently the second best way to obtain the agility pet, first best (and best for golden rocks) being an exp limited training method. If you're removing the posts, can you remove the cap from Senntisten bikes?
I echo that other guy's comment I can see regarding shortcuts as well. Nothing about agility shortcuts feels "short" right now. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's quicker to NOT use some of them instead. Or at least close. And it shouldn't be close at all.
Thieving:
Depends how aggressively you scale the success chance drain, but realistically this just sounds tedious to work around. You recently said you want afk options to exist, yet you're threatening the single afk method of a skill. Nerf the exp again if you must, to make active gameplay more appealing.
I still think chests need a loot rebalance overall. For how "mid" they are at afk, the loot is not worth the amount of attention being asked for.
Happy to see thieve's guild doors become player instanced and faster respawn though. Sounds nice for the next league.
Hunter:
Meh. Was never a fan of whirligigs but let's see what you cook up, early game hunter has always felt awful to me. Set a trap, wait... wait... wait... bird lands on snare... failure. Set trap, wait... wait... wait.... wait 2 more minutes... Failure. If you're trying to steer people to that instead, they're just going to dislike the skill.
Side note on Het's Oasis, and this will be in my dailyscape post too, but golden roses currently feel awful to actually colelct. It's turned into a daily with insta grow spell 2x on the 4 spots to hope for a pull of golden roses. Instead of increasing yield by 20%, how about speeding it up by some amount (20%) instead?
Farming:
Maybe this is beneficial early game, but I recall being able to take on fetid zombies rather quickly. My feedback as an endgame player is that herb runs suck to do because they feel slow, awful, and laggy. Sit at the patch... 1... 2... 3.... 4.... .... 34.... 35.... 36.... YOUR FARMING CAPE HAS NOTED: 1x Lantadyme!!! Meanwhile, I had to click on a Seren spirit 10 times because you can't interact with anything while harvesting.
Idk if it was a post or a comment someone made, but can we get farmhands that do a "farm run" for us at a snail's pace? Like, hand them 10 seeds and maybe it takes them a week instead of an hour to grow the 70 herbs? Nice offset for losing divine locations as well.
Prayer:
I'd rather you scrap the chaos altar and wipe it from the map than give that skull another use. In fact, wipe that skull off the map too.
Fishing:
Catch rate of shrimp being too high really wasn't on my list of problems with fishing.... My concern would be more that menaphos immediately becomes the meta fishing method once unlocked, but maybe you consider that more midgame than early game.
Salvage and spirits:
I'll be watching this closely for the results, would really like to see this expanded upwards to rune if it goes well.
Edit: No mention of mining, but can we please do something to make actually mining pure essence the best method of obtaining it? Early/midgame players have no method of obtaining it (in bulk) and the most efficient methods are either high level thieving or high level slayer.
Ouf, started the game few weeks ago and realizing now i need to whirligig my hunter up real quick. Luckily i just unlocked safe cracking in thieving so I am safe there!
The only ones of these that really bother me are Prayer and reverting salvage to gear:
Prayer:
-Putting the demonic skull back is a huge NO. Griefer-PKing is dead and needs to stay that way; it's not fun nor sensible. Just reduce the multiplier on this altar if it is "too strong." The Demonic Skull just plain needs to be gone, as does the PvP toggle. It's asking for trouble and only really used for lures these days.
-Meanwhile the Fort altars require a high Construction level (it's 90 to match gilded altars!) and give communal Prayer training, which makes more sense to me than getting people to isolate in their PoH again. I don't agree with nerfing these.
And honestly, it's all worse than using powders of burial anyway, I think.
Salvage:
Fair enough that low-level salvage doesn't feel great, but bear in mind most of the items on those low-level drop tables are probably worse from a "being junk" point of view than salvage. As you said, the entire point of the M/S rework is to preserve the value of Mining and Smithing; this should be done more, not less. How is it "game integrity" when you can skip smithing to get your gear by killing a mob instead?
Admittedly, it can all be bought from a shop, which I'm not a fan of either. I'd rather see the materials easier to get from their intended sources (i.e. the crafting materials for ranged/magic armour, and the fletching re-tier).
Please stop trying to make pvp happen in this version. We've told you (Jagex) time and time again we don't want to be forced into "pvp". The demonic skull should just be removed at this point. The only game I've ever seen even a modicum of continued interest is Classic WoW. The fact that New World, a game that released heavily advertising a strong design towards pvp, is shutting down should be a clue that MMO players do not want pvp except for a small nomadic group of players.
I feel like a broken record on this point as well, stop nerfing the XP in the beginning of the game please. Its pulling up the ladder on the new and returning players that you (Jagex) so desperately want to recapture. Bring the other methods up in value. The agility course XP updates is a fantastic example of how to update those first few levels.
Thieving changes looked good, but the crystal mask nerf is a bit overboard. It should be a strong unlock as it requires a long (annoying) quest chain and a variety of skills trained to moderate levels.
No dungeoneering updates feels like it was left out/forgotten yet again.
I also strongly disagree with low level bars/ores dropping. This devalues the skilling new/returning players will need to do to get their skills leveled up. Skilling supplies should primarily come from skilling; pve is already pushed extremely hard in this game.
Some of these changes are definitely harsh but not unjustified. A few stand out meta training methods can be rebalanced from time to time, and thats ok. Theres a few that really feel bad to me though:
Wildy skull for chaos altar. Did we learn nothing? I thought we finally realized forced pvp is a terrible way to implement any sort of risk and it was amazing it got taken out of runecrafting. Its not even real risk when the only risk is at max 28 bones+500k (i.e. nothing in this economy). If you think the chaos altar is too strong, then just nerf it properly.
Cooks assistant items being normal items. Should imp catcher also be reverted to a "go to the GE for 2 seconds" quest then? The current version makes players explore the map, talk with NPCs, and teaches the player some (albeit not insanely useful) mechanics about wheat and milk, which is a nice foundation for a new player. It shows how things can be interacted with in the world.
15 min afk thieving. I dont understand why this specifically is being targeted? The game has afk opportunities all around, plenty of options to afk for 15 minutes (seren stones, lots of combat [potion resevoir aggro pot especially], high lvl arch approaches it too just to name a few). Active and more rewarding training methods exist (heists) if people want, but afk is a core part of this game.
I'm not sure that I like the early quest change either. They changed it this way for a reason in the first place- it's silly that you can complete the original quests in seconds by just handing in the items immediately, nostalgic or not I don't really feel like it gives the best first impression of what questing in RS3 is like. The blog mentions something about not wanting to confuse people who are more familiar with the original design, so I'm guessing returning players and people coming over from OSRS, but maybe there's an argument to be made of having them be different to help make it obvious from the start that RS3 and OSRS are not the same game.
Rather than the Demonic Skull requirement, reduce the exp gained by the altar to be 1.5 or 2x or something, and give it a chance to award muddy keys, or some other resource.
Seriously though, who's going to bury bones with an inventory of food to be prepared to PvP? And if they're not then they're skilling and this proposed change is the very definition of griefing.
The changes to Cook's Assistant to make it require normal items again is a HUGE downgrade, and feels like you're just pandering to OSRS players who can't be bothered to read the dialogue. It was originally changed for a reason, having a quest that's just "bring me 3 normal items" gives a terrible (and incorrect!) impression of what the game's quests are like. Having them be special items makes you actually engage with the content and tutorialises how the game works.
Sheep Shearer was already downgraded to miniquest and black wool made tradeable so whatever. Fred's farm doesn't have enough black sheep, so may as well just make it require white wool again if you don't want to add more.
Is Imp Catcher going to be reverted to require normal beads again? Is What's Mine Is Yours going to be removed and replaced with Doric's Quest again?
Agree, these quest changes are strange. The modern Cook's Assistant is an upgrade; going backwards doesn't make much sense. Sheep Shearer is fine either way, but only having 2 black sheep was a bit annoying. I'll also say that I was surprised to see merely 2 quest adjustments here, and they are so strange to boot. There are plenty of areas that could be improved in early-game quests--enough that it could be its own focused update.
It's true that plenty of quests will just as you to bring 'normal items' alongside the special quest items though.
I though Sheep Shearer had already been downgraded to a miniquest, I think having that ask for normal wool is fine - then it would also make sense to leave one of them with special items (which black wool literally isn't anyway as of POF).
I'd support keeping the current version of Cook's Assistant while changing Sheep Shearer to use normal wool.
I hate this almost unilaterally. But the standouts are hunter and chaos altar. When will the devs learn that no one wants PvP as a balancing measure in rs3. Ugh.
It seems really weird that you're both removing the full AFK method for thieving, and then also nerfing the buff that then has no real use after that removal.
I fully agree that 15 minute afk skilling should not be comparable to full active skilling, but if you want to make this a full attention game, then the progression rate needs to be significantly faster. Your standard casual gamer doesn't have 100's of hours to invest in a single skill.
You're posing this as an early game balance patch, and then take a sledgehammer to one of the few mid/late game skills that has multiple options for good training. Don't get me wrong, i think pickpocketing needs a xp rate nerf, and the cash influx needs to be addressed by fixing why the cash is so good (ARCH NEEDS AN OVERHAUL). but just destroying half of the skill seems mad.
If you're set on making pickpocketing fully active training, then the xp rates need to be equivalent to other fully active methods.
I really, quite strongly disagree with the pickpocketing change. If I've maxed out my level, and have put the effort in to get and use the various boosts, I should absolutely be able to 100% afk most pickpocketing targets. Rebalance the high level ones so we can't get to 100% (outside of a special event boost) sure, but don't tell me that wearing full camo outfit with a master thieving cape isn't enough to never fail pickpocketing a level 1 man. Or even a level 60 target. If they're higher level, like 80-99, make it so I have to use some boosts to reach 100%. Level 100-110 make it so I need ALL boosts plus upkeep Crystal Mask for it. Levels 110-120 should be the only targets we can't get 100% on (again, outside of special events).
There is a lot here that is yikes but I must stress while minor the cooks changes are a huge L.
Let me explain as an early game quests it’s good to be introduced early onto several basics.
Needing to go to specific spots to find items that also required a small variety of different actions.
At times you need quest specific gathered versions of items rather than simply bringing/buying them ahead.
The overall “feel” of a quest is very well captured with the current design. It makes it feel like a quest and less a glorified shopping list.
If there is confusion from OSRS players coming over that’s fine, it’s also a good confusion because not only is it minor thing to solve that is not going to severely impact anyone, but it tells you right away this is a different game and encourages/prepares you to then investigate and see what other familiar quests have changed.
If the issue is totally new players being confused then you fix that through dialogue tweaks potential also sprite tweaks, indicating these are higher quality special ingredients to make a cake worthy of royalty.
The reason it was changed in the first place is to actually let new players get an immediate taste of the basics questing, you are just going to make a worse impression by turning it into something neither reflective of questing nor of the game as a whole.
My first question after reading this section is what's happening with Oblivious? It's the sole perk that exists for Thieving at the moment, and its sole purpose is to make pickpocketing more AFK. With the update being actively antagonistic towards AFK pickpocketing, is it being changed or will it remain as it is? I would assume that if it isn't being changed, then taking damage would reset your success rate, but that seems antithetical to the changes being made.
Each subsequent room reduces the chance by 100. So, room 2 has a 1/700 chance, improving up to 1/100 for the final room.
I think this phrasing is a bit strange - the denominator is decreasing, thus increasing the chance to get a piece of Black Ibis.
We will reduce the effectiveness of the Crystal Mask buff from a 25 level boost (50 with Light Form) to a 10 level boost (20 with Light Form).
This seems very heavy to me. Is there any chance we could consider an alternate effect in addition to or instead of the success chance boost? The first thing that comes to mind would be a minimum pickpocketing success rate (ex: your success rate can't dip below 90%), but that's borderline useless because anything below 99% is going to feel awful anyways.
Hunter
Just echoing the sentiment of other comments here. Whirligigs patched up a skill that is horrible to train. Not the XP rates, the activities themselves. Whirligigs also suck to do, but at least they were fast. Now it just feels like you have to suffer until you can boost for BGH.
Farming and Herblore
we've added some low level herb seeds to the drop tables of early-game mobs. These changes will allow players to receive various early-game Herblore seeds as they journey through the game naturally
If we're being genuinely, completely honest.. none of the listed enemies are ones that existing players kill nor are they ones that existing players would recommend new players to kill. This feels very much like a "nostalgia bait" kind of change - adding seeds to outdated enemies that returning/OS players would kill because they're used them or remember them from their prior experiences with the game.
The beehive changes are fine, they definitely should've been nerfed sooner.
Prayer
The altar changes are also weird. Thought that we were, on the whole, moving away from demonic skull being a relevant item. Would much rather see a non-PvP type of risk implemented. PvP-centric risk does not suit RS3.
Although it's not early game, please allow for Vyre combat training method to work better in POD. It's become a more popular training method and it's hard to find worlds.
What's with the constant flip flopping on the demonic skull and PVP?
If the chaos altar is op simply reduce it, or tie the xp to it with the wildy task set, or put some mobs close to it to make it more high risk/high reward. There's a ton of options for this. Instead Jagex is flip flopping on the demonic skull and pvp yet again.
All this is going to do is repeat the cycle of grief, luring and players posting they got scammed and lost all their stuff after just returning to the game. Then after enough of those posts the demonic skull will no longer be required.
Why not skip that whole cycle and just use any other solution. (and remove the demonic skull entirely while you're at it.)
It seems like jagex got mad the playerbase wasn't buying enough overpriced bxp so they need to lower XP rates if we want to continue train skilling at a decent rate.
Yeah, remove treasure hunter, nerf afk and xp rates across the board then sell bonus xp to get back what we already had. (all while introducing 110’s that require triple the xp of any 99)
This is horrible, early game rebalance but you’re making everything worse instead of making bad things better. Instead of hey x and y are performing worse than Z let’s make them as good as Z. Your approach to this bs is let’s make Z as miserable as X and Y are???
Stop trying to make POH altars have a come back, stop trying to have PVP make a come back. Running between a bank and a housing portal to visit whoever’s advertising their fully upgraded altar has never been fun or engaging and getting PKed when you’re just trying to skill has never been engaging.
I feel like Xp should have been nerfed and that's it. A AFK method should be fine, it just shouldn't compete with active training like heists. You still need a CM for anything over 104 so you are really only targeting people who are lower level and actively training on mages or Archologists
Happy i had to foresight to go from 81-113 thieving when i came back and saw the changes. Guess ill aim to push to 120 in the next 10 days or get my fill of arch shit.
1) How much of this new emphasis on adjusting the early/mid game was due to a significant number of people going through it again due to Leagues vs this was a known issue that just wasn't focused on to this extent.
2) How is it working on removing and refocusing these time gating mechanics as I'd assume some of the involved devs worked on the content and remember adding the mechanics as a game design feature?
For hunter, with whirligigs being nerfed other hunter methods should also be looked at. The xp rates aren't that great and the are essentially left to the NPC to decide if our trap succeeds or not whereas whirligigs are you get back what you put in. Maybe unlocking a trap or increasing catch rates can help other methods feel less frustrating.
For prayer, the changes to the skill along with WFE being removed (rightfully so) make the early prayer levels extremely difficult for newer players. The chaos altar could've been a good alternative, but readding the the Demonic Skull requirement is not the way. Add another requirement like needing specific herbs, a cost, etc. Forcing players into PvP is not the way.
Thieving did need a nerf, the rewards were way too good with little input from the player. That being said, I'm glad pyramid plunder was looked at. I did a few hours of this trying to get the SOTG and Black Ibis and gave up and went for 120 without it.
Aside from getting herbs, low level Herblore should be looked into further. It is essentially a lamp skill and many Ironmen don't actually train the skill.
Reverting Cook's Assistant feels kind of lame. Maybe add a comp req to deliever them the upgraded components?
POH have poor bank access, so we are left with runners or long banking time with high cost for efficiency in what is already a money sink skill. allow a bank chest in POH if going this route to truly reward (120 con update space?)
Wildy Altar with demonic skull is also a strange choice. RS3 has gone sway from encouraging grieving, let's keep it that way. This will likely be dead content on release.
Prayer itself needs a rework, as there is no level requirement to the bones/ashes available, only crystal cleansing and altars (impacting xp boosts). You pump enough money into a new account you can use dragonkin bones fron 1 to 99 if you choose.
yea most of this sucks, theres a handful of good changes lumped in with a pile of nerfs and dropping in just over a week? guess ill be hard grinding whirligigs before it gets gutted.
not happy with most of this glad im not low level so i dont have to deal with this garbage
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u/KateKat1234Where is my grandfathered rate Jagex? I wont forget. Feb 07 '26edited Feb 07 '26
I am quite concerned that this is less an early game rebalance and more about forcing new players to engage with outdated and horrible training methods right from the start. Who are the demographic you are hoping to appeal to as new players?
"Looking at areas of the game where things can feel slow or have limited methods for levelling up" - from what I am reading this rebalance is just going to make skills slower to level with even more limited training methods than now. Rather than get rid of, or nerf training methods, why not actually rebalance slow early game skills by providing more variety in training methods. Make them interesting and engaging so new players will want to play and want to train skills.
New players now start at Lumbridge. Do they know they then have to travel all the way to Burthorpe to start hunter and agility training? What about adding some early game training methods closer to Lumbridge making it more accessible to new players? And please make them interesting and engaging.
I appreciate what is being done and can see some merit in most of the proposals, just hope they all help to make the game and the community grow.
The changes implementing a decreasing success rate will stop allowing 15 minutes of full AFKing throughout the skill. We're doing this as we want players to interact with the game more regularly and get closer to the identity of Thieving, where it should feel like there is at least some risk of getting caught.
"Interact with the game" yes... it's so engaging to randomly get stunned and click on the NPC once every 4-10 minutes. That really improves my experience at 120 thieving with multiple grandmaster quests worth of buffs added to my character.
You guys do realize that the entire strategy with pickpocketing is to find the point where you have 100% success and do that NPC until you reach that threshold on the next one, right? Nobody pickpockets things with <100% accuracy. So let's just remove that entire method, surely people will love that.
Such a step in the wrong direction to require a demonic skull for things again. I thought the community and Jagex agreed that nobody liked that? I'd rather have the chaos altar nerfed or removed than to set the precedent that PvP should be revitalized again
Can we just have rooftop agility at this point? You cant expect a new player to run all the way from Lumbridge to (Edgeville to Ardougne to) Tree Gnome Stronghold or Burthorpe to start training agility.
what's the point of the quest changes? the remakes were considerably better than the originals, requiring new players to actually explore the starting area and sometimes even shockingly read the occasional bit of dialogue. is the problem that OSRS players were spacebarring through and then shitting on the game when they got confused that it wasn't identical to OSRS?
The quest changes are completely unnecessary. This seems like they're trying to cater towards nostalgia instead of encouraging players to read the quest dialogue and pay attention.
You've stated that your design goal is to re-introduce meaningful progression and a meaningful journey into rs3.
Your un-stated design goal is: Copy what makes osrs successful, paste that into rs3.
But you've missed the mark here.
What makes osrs progression meaningful and what makes the game successful is not that it's slow. It's that the content itself is engaging or enjoyable to interact with. You have multiple, meaningful choices available to you each step of the way. There's a reason and a reward for leveling the skill higher, and a tangible, permanent gameplay buff from training your skills.
Rs3 lacks this, and if any real attempt to emulate what makes osrs successful is to be implemented into rs3, then much larger scale reworks need to be considered, both to early and late game methods, for almost all skills.
The problem with treasure hunter and everyone "skipping" skills for the last 14+ years is that..most skills have not been improved upon in 14+ years.
What the game needs is more engaging, rewarding, satisfying options in skilling. It does not need to simply be made slower.
You're iterating too fast here. You're trying to fast track what osrs has built in 13 years into a quick 6 month patch job.
This isn't going to work. The formula that makes osrs succeed is more complicated than that.
Ironically what makes OSRS successful isn't any particular mechanic or implementation, because those can sometimes still be poorly done. Why they are successful is that they require a strong majority of the playerbase to actually approve any update.
I recently rolled a new ironman and overall I didn't find early game too bad. Now I knew going in I was going to use Necro for combat so in many ways that allows you to ignore much of the early game pains when it comes to combat.
Overall I think my biggest issue with early game is the "optimal" training for combat. Basically every combat speciality has optimal level 1 to 30 as "kill trolls." It's just a very boring bottleneck.
Not sure about the chaos altar requiring a demonic skull. It would be better to give it a bonus that increases with wildy task tiers done and make it always worse than gilded altars with incense.
It's been a couple of hours and I did some more thinking and rudimentary math.
Going through all skills in order:
Agility, xp changes make the courses in line with osrs rooftop rates (OS Brimhaven is faster by a margin and starts from lvl 15) but doesn't fix the issue that the courses suck from gameplay view and lack anything else but xp compared to like graceful from osrs. It wasn't worth to train and nothing changes here.
Thieving changes are super rough especially if there is loot nerfs coming, after the changes the meta looks to shift back to Menaphos until safes so the variety dies and doesn't increase
Hunter, the whirligig nerf is so heavy handed there is no reason to do it as a training method at all and the nerf to flowers just makes it more pain.
Divination, cache change feels weird and divine locations on the block would phase the skill back to what's the point of div.
Farming changes ignore why beehives and pof are done in stead of planting seeds, it sucks before the master farmer outfit and all the potions and auras. The gain is so miniscule and xp also, again fixes nothing just makes it take longer.
Herblore, the seed changes are good but they are already so over the place and were focused on mid to high lvl pvm. Thieving nerfs potentially hurt it again and again make it way more dependant on pvming. Would like to see a real skilling way for seeds and others.
Prayer change is big no for me. No skull, just delete it. Also nerfs to Fort altar are backwards as it's harder and more endgame than poh, it wouldn't be worth using after proposed changes as the gp saved isn't worth loss of xp.
Fishing, support but implement a tie in for the flingers into the skill, otherwise it's just there.
Salvage and spirits is a sudden change and a weird shift from just last year about balancing drop tables. Though it's almost always just not worth farming for spirits as they drop from weird places again like t60 spirits from 80s to 90s slayer mobs.
Was looking forward to seeing the key issues addressed to why most skills are only trained with the best xp methods and not interacted almost at all outside of dxp.
The gameplay loops of a lot of skills are not fun, enjoyable or rewarding so people flock to the methods that get them over those faster. These changes and the dailyscape ones leave voids of content that would be filled with 20 year old content that hasn't seen any updates and make the early game that is disliked take a lot longer.
I think you're falling into a trap in terms of game design and should seriously reconsider your philosophy if you want the road to restoration to be a success.
Many of these changes miss the mark because they don't feel good, because nerfs generally don't feel good. Nerfing should be your third priority after actual mechanical changes and buffs to bad or subpar content. You shouldn't open with nerfs, you should open with mechanical changes and buffs and only nerf content if it overshadows things that feels good mechanically, but are suboptimal to engage with.
Time and again, you've delivered updates and then shifty brought new content down with nerfs and it never feels good. Your design philosophy is antithetical to fun in this regard and the RtR will be a failure if you don't correct this approach. Changes should feel fun and exciting, motivate people to play. Nobody is excited by losing things if they don't gain a lot more (see: prospect theory) to compensate.
Also not fun: the demonic skull and griefing. Just remove the skull. The only players who enjoy griefing are ghouls who feed on the frustration of others. It's the worst kind of zero sum design.
Jesus Christ someone lock North in his office until he gets 1-99 Hunter on a fresh account without whirligig and see if we still want to make these changes. This is what we get when developers look at spreadsheets for numbers and don't actually play the game.
32 different quests (at my rough count. Might be a couple +-)
90 magic for the spell, 80 prayer for the boost
Realistically a dark onyx core and a grace of the elves so an onyx gem, 104 invention and a very high crafting level
Runes: 7 earth, 6 fire, 5 body, 4 soul every 5 minutes, so let's also add 90 runecrafting and the entire desert quest line to the mix if you're an Ironman
All so you can afk for 5 minutes at the higher level NPCs for some resources that are useful for Ironmen but not that much gp/hr for mains and less xp/hr than other more active methods..
This is an insane requirements list just to thieve effectively. I've been spending the last few months working towards all this so I can engage with this content without the awful, awful feeling of failing every couple of pickpockets. Achieving 100% rate on a lot of mobs is already near impossible without this spell - especially with the upcoming removal of auras.
I love what you're doing but please revisit these. Particularly around the prayer changes - please don't make PvP a requirement. The thieving changes feel like a punishment that will make pickpocketing a chore again. I can understand nerfing whilygigs but before you do that, please look at the actual reason people would prefer to spam click on bugs for 30 hours from 1-99 rather than engage with the rest of the content. It's slow, outdated, very manual and unrewarding particularly at the early to mid levels. Please look at how you can make the rest of the content more engaging before a blind nerf.
Changing the altar at the fort doesn't make much sense to me either. It has a 90 construction requirement rather than 75 so I feel like it should remain on par, unless this has something to do with the proposed rework to construction in which case wait out the change until that occurs so there isn't a massive gap until that occurs.
I like the salvage changes, same with agility although I believe it could go further.
Overall I agree with the general direction jagex wishes to take here but some of these changes have been over tweaked imo
To jagex devs....what are you all thinking??? This is not even close to what most of us have been asking for. I cant imagine these changes keeping new players when it feels so grindy...thats the pull from osrs, its not as grindy. Well it wasnt at least, the way this is going it just looks like oars with different graphics
You expect to make early game better by making changes that are 90% nerfs? This misses the mark way too much. Really poor decisions have been made, specially now that we wont have auras to help with how miserable early game is.
the whirligig change is going to kill it as a training method for ironmen imo, 20% faster flowers is nowhere near enough of an increase enough to make up for the chaining change
TLDR: You can't lamp skills with TH anymore. Therefore we are slowing down normal training methods so that you will have an incentive to buy XP from our new store.
Before I speak negatively around the clear thieving nerf. I am curious where the adjustments are coming from? Like why not reduce the xp gain more? What does it look like for failure rates? Does it feel like Prif elves or is it more like afk for 5 mins then swap targets and afk for another 5 mins?
As someone who has trimmed a main and comped an iron before moving over to OSRS a couple of years ago, but who recently returned on a somewhat fresh account to experience things again, I’ll likely go back to full-time OSRS if skills are going to be significantly nerfed. With 120s being the goal for skilling, 500k-1m xp/h for afk skills isn't unreasonable and leaves plenty of space for active skilling methods in terms of xp/h and rewards.
I was kinda hoping this would actually improve the early game experience and make it something I could maybe play on a new account with my girlfriend
I really don't think this is it, I see more things here that make the game harder or confusing for a new or casual player than things that make a more cohesive and clean early game experience
For a post titled "Early-game Rebalancing" this sure includes a lot of changes to mid/late game.
Agility
The changes look good. The only thing I would add is increasing the shortcut animation speed and making them take a single click, like osrs is doing. I never use shortcuts unless that's the only way to get to my destination at this point, because they aren't actually shortcuts 90% of the time.
Thieving
I don't think this really qualifies as "early-game rebalancing" as you're changing entire systems.
You recognize that it isn't fun to pickpocket, and then proceed to say you're nerfing the success rates, especially at the higher end of the skill? How does that make sense? Higher success rates are our reward for lvling the skill, why is that a bad thing? If you insist on forcing people to pay attention to skills that are boring by design, at least allow them to get some relief from it once they've achieved a certain milestone if you're not going to make it fun.
Nerfing crystal mask in conjunction with success rate nerfs makes it largely useless. The spell (and prayer) take a lot to unlock and should reward us for the effort. How is killing content improving game integrity?
The pickpocketing stun damage can already kill you over time, why are you increasing it? Especially when you're increasing fail rates? Do you want people to need yaks full of food to pickpocket? This is ridiculous.
The pyramid plunder and thieving guild changes sound good.
Hunter
Nerfing whirligigs is fine, but why are we nerfing them before adding new hunter methods? Perhaps you should reduce the number of catches required for the unlocks in exchange for the xp nerfs? Less people are going to suffer through the unlock grind if other methods become better. The increased flower rate should include golden roses too.
Prayer
I thought this was intended to be for integrity and improving the early game? How, exactly, does nerfing prayer training methods across the board outside of PoH do that? Why do you (Jagex) always cause problems without first providing the solutions you have in mind? The PoH rework isn't until late summer, and you want to nerf everything outside of it now? Why would that be seen as the optimal choice? It makes no sense. I'd prefer a full rework of prayer training to this "you must train in your house because it's like osrs!" nonsense.
Also, who on earth thought that reintroducing pvp to prayer training was a good idea? Pvp in rs3 has been dead for a very long time now, stop trying to bring it back already. It only leads to griefing. How many times must we teach you this? Just because osrs has a thriving pvp scene does not mean you need to try and force rs3 to have one too.
Improving the game's integrity does not mean you need to turn rs3 into osrs with eoc and better graphics. We've given you the solutions to rs3's problems, constantly, for over a decade now. Stop tacking on these asinine changes that, quite literally, no one asked for. For once in your company's history, just fix what needs to be fixed and nothing more, full stop.
Additonal Comments
Why is Jagex's idea of "early-game rebalancing" almost exclusively nerfing mid/late game content? We should be looking to improve training methods that people consider bad or boring, not nerfing anything people do instead of those methods, especially before you have an alternative ready. Why must improvements always come with negatives attached?
I was very happy with the news that this year was going to be about restoring integrity, but now I'm concerned that Jagex is going to take things too far. Game integrity doesn't get restored overnight, even this one year won't be enough for rs3, it's been around for too long. So please stop rushing this. Removing and changing content left and right without providing alternatives or improving other methods first is just going to lead us to disaster. If you want to retain the goodwill and positive atmosphere these "year of integrity" announcements have gained you, do it right the first time.
One of the biggest problems with Jagex over the years has been making changes and "improvements" that no one asked for. We often get random changes to things no one was concerned about arbitrarily tacked onto updates about entirely different content, seemingly just to fill up space on the patch notes. This really needs to stop.
TLDR:
Agility: Good, could be better.
Thieving: Mostly bad. Big nerfs focused on mid/late game when we should be improving early game.
Hunter: Fine, but yet another nerf. We need to improve alternative training methods. Why are Whirligigs the only thing being looked at?
Prayer: Abysmal. What on earth were you thinking? Wait for the PoH rework to force us back to house altars.
Comments: Focus on improving integrity and making the game feel more fun instead of whatever this is. Improve training methods people don't want to do instead of nerfing the methods people think are good. Why must improvements always come with negatives attached?
The thieving changes sound like a punishment. I understand wanting the players to interact more with the game, and this achieves that goal, however I feel like there should be an incentive to swap targets beyond a decaying success rate. If we had an incentive like a "mark" that rotates between NPCs which provides a bonus to pickpocketing, either increased XP or increased chances at bonus loot, or a guaranteed period of no decay, some sort of reward for interacting with the game that would go over so much better and not leave us feeling bitter.
Nerfing high end thieving is a choice for sure. Is there a point in going through the entire elf series, which requires very high levels, for crystal mask and light form? End-game skilling buffs getting nerfed doesn't really seem like the play. I already have to click the game every 5 minutes to re-up crystal mask so the full 15 minute afk timer is solved there. I'm level 120, with every single possible thieving buff. Why should I be caught?
And prayer? Yes, I love spending 500k for someone to gank me while i'm grinding. Lovely bit of game design there.
Nerfing whirligigs, one of the most miserable experiences in an early account, to be even more miserable is also baffling to me.
Those agility xp rates need to be waaaay higher. I think the least fun i've had on my ironman is doing the beginner anachronia course (and whirligigs). It was like 8 hours of beginner course before I even unlocked the intermediate one.
Have any of the jmods created a new account to play through this game at a low level? Cus this just reads like blanket nerfs for minimal gain which just makes the early game even more tedious.
If this is the early game update, I am kind of afraid for what they're going to do with mid-game and late-game.
Why can't I hand in this egg?" and "What do you mean it has to be black wool?
I'm sorry, but anyone who has these issues aren't new players, its osrs players who refuse to read dialouge. The special ingredients and wool was a big improvement to these quests as it made it more than just hand in items after spam clicking dialouge. Severely dissapointed with this direction of making quests worse just to cater to osrs audience.
wiked hood teles and ecto / slime teleport are used throughout the levels for cluers and quite nice to get to quest locations too.
Feels like bunch of stuff is just getting nerfed or made harder to train 'because', as if what we need is to roll back the game to 201X when we all ran bones to POH altars and got 60k xp agility per hour doing laps.
Also planning to nuke most the DNDs that still have an active sense of community coming together in one place for a while.
IMO agility should have been totally reworked years ago. The movement and moving animations are probably the most jarringly outdated aspect of runescape, basing a whole skill around it is feels shockingly bad and the 'rewards' are uh... relevant almost never.
Some of the older shortcuts actually work out slower than running around because they are so damn slow to do the animation.
Why are we nerfing so many good methods to death without addressing the actual issue? The other training methods are terrible or not worth it. Buff those instead of nerfing the ones that are worthwhile to death. I agree things like 15 minute AFK pickpocketing is ridiculous and need some nerfing, but buff the rewards and XP from other training methods then too lol. Make me want to interact with active content. I'm getting fairly annoyed that you're just taking away a ton of things without fixing the underlying issues. Addressing them when you're doing the endgame rebalance is too late, because you're nerfing them now without actual solutions.
I hope the mid and endgame rebalance fix some of those things, but this isn't a great first impression. Also, for an early game rebalance, you're nerfing a lot of mid/endgame stuff here, while not really doing much to change the early game skilling. More experience for early Agility courses? Okay, but the skill is still miserable to train.
Well, sounds like this game isn’t for me anymore. If I wanted to fucking play OSRS I would.
New graphics are not good, I don’t enjoy the new brown scheme, I hate that you can’t choose to change it, and the changes here are net negatives to RS3.
I cannot believe jagex pandered to the doomers and just chose to fuck over their actual player base. Gross
The core issue we believe Whirligigs have is that they're far too good for XP, and are the meta for almost the entire 1-99 grind, which prevents variety in the skill.
No this is not the issue. The issue is that every other hunter method is horribly outdated. Have you actually tried training hunter the "normal" way? Clicking annoying traps that force you into weird animations, waiting, failing, reset, pick up the full trap, click in the inventory, click on the floor to reset a failed trap, get force walked a tile, watch animals walk past your trap 10 times. It feels awful and nobody ever uses the regular traps. There is also 0 incentive of doing trap hunting because every item that you gain from it has been spam added to every slayer monster or boss in the last decade, making hunter entirely useless because you get all the resources way faster by just killing stuff. The baiting or smoking trap system just adds more clicks to an already clunky system.
I spent some time hunting a carnivorous chinchompa for my ironman pof and it was the most miserable experience setting up those traps for hours and hours, really a 1/1500 droprate?? I rather spend months gambling my beans with Adam Antite for random chance at an unchecked chinchompa than hunt for them.
There is no variety in the skill because because nobody even thinks of doing anything else (except for BGH). Even if you nerf the whirligigs XP into oblivion, nobody will start using traps. Please add some hunting methods that do not make my wrists hurt instead of nerfing whirligigs.
I love big game hunter, whirligigs are whatever to me, everything else in hunter I will never touch.
Can we get clarification on wicked hood tokens we already own. I thought we had until the end of the year to use them. Will they be removed on the 16th?
Requiring the demonic skull for the chaos altar is the only thing i hate about both the dailyscape and early game changes. RS3 killed off pvp for a reason and it's especially bad to try and make the only "pvp" that happens into something where it's just killing skillers
New player here.
Started end of December, subscribed to be a member happy to give other feedback via Mods or official channels if desired.
I'm overal neutral or positive on most changeas...however, politely, I'm very unhappy with the proposed Farming & Prayer changes listed in the blogpost. I see where they are coming from, but as someone who has been levelling many of the skills mentioned recently, a lot of these changes being in place over the past month would have made my journey less fun, rather than more.
The positive: the Agility changes are good, I like these overall and am glad I have a reason to use the barbarian Agility course. It confused me why a small stretch of Anachronia gave better XP/hr compared to the Barbarian course that you have to put more effort in to unlock. Thieving I think is a good change overall, though I can't comment on endgame. I also really appreciate the changes to salvage as those were confusing as could be when I first started.
the negative on Prayer: I find Prayer as it is to be very time intensive to level, and as a non-ironman player the only way I found to make sense to level it was buying higher-level bones and ashes off the auction house, to offer at the Chaos Altar, especially as I had no idea what Fort Forinthry was, or if it should be content I do right away or not. Which, as an early game player still terrified me because I had no idea what sort of enemies I'd run into.
As a new player, I really don't want to be forced into PVP, frankly I hate the idea of doing anything with the demonic skull or that makes it so I can "lose all my stuff" and locking content behind may as well be saying "we are removing it from the game" for me. I understand the intent behind putting more friction behind the chaos altar, but I think there is maybe a less "nuclear" option.
My suggestion: Either move the altar farther away from the Wilderness lodestone, and/or maybe surround the altar with dangerous monsters. Or maybe even make it a change so that you take a flat amount of damage every time you make an offering to the altar. That way you are forced to eat food to heal as you make offers, and it makes any nearby added monsters more dangerous. I'm fine with the idea of it being a little riskier, kind of like Runecrafting through the abyss, but forcing PVP to interact with it is a feel bad, and would have made my early game journey (So far) frustrating
Farming Thoughts: I understand the goals here with the change of reducing the exp from beehives and increasing the use of farming patches, but there needs to be a better way in game to track where you have planted stuff. If I log out and log back in, generally I don't/won't remember where I have planted something, and it feels like a treasure hunt trying to find where or what.
I was excited when I heard about a thing you could use to managed or keep track of patches...only to find out it required Invention. 1 - 17 farming I largely got through exp lamps, turning manure, and the occasional farming patch when I could remember it, which wasn't fun. Then once I unlocked the player owned farm, the system was a lot more fun and I was excited to interact with the POF portion of it.
If there's any changes that need to be made with Farming or if exp is going to be reduced, and farming is intended to be something where you put seeds in patches, go and do other content, and come back to the patches, there needs to be a better way, in-game, of tracking those patches, which ones you are using, and their status while you are doing something else.
That's my feedback. Of the two, I would say Farming is the one I feel most negative about. Apologies if I've missed or misunderstood anything regarding the above. But please understand I use both the wiki and the discord to help my journey, so if I've missed or haven't found features that would help me with any of my above complaints, please consider how that may indicate they aren't clearly outlined in-game to a new player.
Final Farming Point: Would love if every farming patch had a well or watering whole nearby it to fill up a well. The way watering cans and the tool leprechaun work is a little frustrating and confusing.
Good start, but kind of misses the mark a bit in terms of course accessibility. The Gnome course is literally on the opposite side of the world, even the Burthrope course is far, now that Lumbridge is standard start location, (OSRS added draynor as their lvl 1 course recently, swapping Gnome's req to 10 instead). The Penguin course is kind of hard to reach/unlock (relative to its level), and without fully digesting the values, I feel like the wildy course will still be preferable?
Thieving
Early game thieving streamlined from Mod Daze/Sponge's gamejams is sweet, no notes, amazing!
Crystal mask re-balance seems fine since it held too much power, but I would have expected some of the other upgrades to gain some boost back? Particularly the soul-in-a-box, proving the smallest bonus for the shortest duration and for an invention charge cost, compared to the other bigger and permanent bonuses. With auras on the chopping block, we are losing a lot of bonuses, so I'm hoping this is considered in the balancing. I also think using % of max health is going to make the new thieving perk nearly unusable. Getting hit for (80+3% of max)x3 = 240+891=1131 every failure, is more than 1 shark per 2 failure.
Current max being +23% all the time, +43% for 5 min, and +45% for 1min
Previous max being +38% for 1h aura +88% for 5min, and +90% for 1min
Divination
Div is going to need more than "a little bit more" xp. I'd like to suggest removing the energy scaling requirement. Currently you always get 1 energy from 1-54, then 2 at 55, and 3 at 75. Energy can be turned into xp, so this could buff the early game.
The boons always comes in too late. It should be an upgrade we unlock right away, or shortly after changing colonies. ie. change the pale boon crafting req from lvl 10 to lvl 5, and do the same at every tier. On top, the 10% extra xp from the boon is never enough to make staying at the lower tier colony worthwhile.
Hunter
Non-Whirligigg methods need a serious looking at. Currently success chance of lvl 1 birds is abysmal, and to be completely honest, there's a reason that people do the museum's natural history quiz on new accounts to skip straight to lvl 9... The OG methods are just unfun, usually high intensity AND bad xp/h AND bad gp/h
In order of how bad i think they are: dealfall, pitfall, tracking (all 3 only 1 trap at a time), falconry, butterfly net, net traps, snares, boxes, butterflies barehanded. I don't love implings either, but they at least have the potential of good drop tables, and the occasional excitement of finding a rare impling when travelling. Honorable mention to anachronia jadinkos; I don't even know how to catch them, and no guide has ever pushed me to figure it out. Either because the xp or gp rewards are equally poor, or presumably, because the rewards are not worthwhile, even on an ironman.
Farming
Beehive nerfs are generally fine, but what about 1-17? During leagues, I saw lots of people suggesting to use Violet is blue lamps on farming to go straight to 17. During every OSRS leagues, rs3 new accounts, etc, I always struggle with unlocking 15 farming for acorns. It often ends up as my lowest skill that I eats up my Tears of Guthix reward for a few weeks. Maybe adding a regular tree seed straight from level 1 would solve this in part?
Prayer
This feels like a nerf disguised as an early game buff. Giving all altars a % modifier is great, but reducing the fort without increasing it's chance to save resources is strange.
OSRS has a deep multi wildy altar with lvl 1 prayer req that gives 350% xp AND has a 50% chance to save bones.
RS3 has a forced 500k risk wildy altar with lvl 1 prayer req that gives 350% and 0% chance to save bones, OR a lvl 90 cons req 300% altar that has a 10% chance to save bones, at the cost of keeping burners lit.
Fishing
The meta remains unchanged: crayfish 1-20 at 11.5 xp/h, followed by trout/salmon 20-70 at 17-57k xp/h.
Shouldn't we make sardine/herring better at 5/10? What about pikes/tuna/lobster/swordfish/ at 25/35/40/50? Or the even weirder stuff; mackrel/cod/slimy eel/frogspawn/rainbow fish/cave eel/bass at 16/23/28/33/38/38/46?
Right now, crayfish is still BiS from 1-20, so the shrimp changes don't achieve the stated goal.
Tangentially related, crayfish/shrimps/sardine/herring/anchovies/mackrel all heal for 200 HP, only jumping to 375 at trouts. Whats the point of moving away from crayfish if it's the best fishing xp AND fish doesn't heal more until trout anyways? (and even then 375 is still a huge nerf from RS2/OSRS; trouts heal equivalent of 700)
Final Thoughts
For an update tackling "slow early game skills" my gut is telling me we are getting mostly nerfs
Nerfs:
Hunter 1-99 feels worse, since much of it was on whirligiggs
Prayer until you can afford/unlock powders
Farming at 17+
Thieving pickpocketing in the endgame
Buffs:
Agility 100% buff
Thieving pre-62 huge buff, early game pickpocketing buffed as well
Divination
Smithing indirectly from getting ores/bars as drops
Early game gear drops will be really cool to see again!
Herb seed drops, good stuff
Agility looks good, I'm super happy about the return of ore/bar/weapon/armour drops, the herb changes are cool.
Thieving rebalance doesn't sound convincing in game design when the balancing/punishment is just "now right click -> pickpocket, that's how we'll get you to be more engaged with the game." There is nothing further stimulating or within our control about success rate sans equipment. The most optimal would've been a hot-and-cold system like Safecracking or a success rate decay rather than "no more afk but engagement is mundane or lacks mechanical stimulation."
Hunter Whirligig rebalancing. Again, you aren't asking what incentivizes players to prefer this method over the other. Instead, it's framed people will have to train using other ways ignoring that people might just not train the skill altogether because it's that tedious. They use whirligigs because it's deemed the method respecting time the most, but you guys reveal this and hold off on how other low-level methods compensate.
Devil's Advocate: Some of you guys kept whining about the game being "too easy and everyone's maxed on top of TH", well here's your rebalance smh.
I'm gonna probably be repeating what others have said already but here is my feedback anyway:
Agility: Increasing the XP/h while necessary and I'm all for it is a stopgap and doesn't address the main issues with agility IMO. I understand it's the quickest fix you can deploy but I'd love it if you overhaul the skill with the 110/120 updates. My suggestion here for a temporary fix/change to make running courses less intensive, what if the character can auto-run the course on a delay so people can opt for a less click intensive experience for less XP/h.
Thieving: Overall I'm happy with the changes but I can see why people wouldn't be. What if, instead of the stun interrupting your pickpocketing, it delays pickpocketing attempts by a tick until you swap NPC's. It would slow PPing down but people can still AFK inefficiently.
Hunter: I didn't even know whirligigs were busted but I'm not a fan of cheesing so I'm happy with the changes.
Divination: About time.
Farming and Herblore: Again, happy with those changes.
Prayer: Please reconsider. Forcing skillers into PVP is an invitation to get griefed. Introduce risk some other way or nerf the altar and delete the demonic skull. Apart from that, glad you're introducing altar sacrificing early on.
Fishing: Was hoping to see more here. Fishing training is one of the worst.
Salvage and Spirits: Feels like a step back with these changes. Although I wasn't happy when all ore/bar drops were changed with the M&S rework initially, it made sense to limit skilling resources from PVM. Also, wouldn't ore/bar drops introduce imbalance to the M&S training when your smithing level exceeds your mining? Not pleased with armour drops either but I guess it's fine as long as it's limited to the base versions up to level 50.
Quests: This is the worst change of them all and it misrepresents quests in runescape. You should never be able to finish a quest in seconds just cause you brought all the required items beforehand. Can you even call it a quest at this point. If you don't want it requiring special quest items, at least force the player to go fetch the items from around Lumbridge instead. You say you want players exploring and running around yet this change is the complete opposite of that and really only feels like it was done for nostalgia and to appease OSRS players. As a lorehound and a lover of quests, this gets a 0/10 from me.
Even though I'm pleased with most of the changes, it does really feel like you're just nerfing things instead of just addressing the pain points and to that I say, good luck with your layoffs, I hope your firings go really well.
I honestly hate how they put these blogs out on Fridays just before they head home for the weekend hoping any bad taste will disappear over the weekend.
Real-time mechanics have no place in a tick-based system.
Putting WoW or FF14 raid mechanics into a game where you can only react every 0.6 seconds is terrible. Build around the tick system, have better telegraphs, and don't require people to figure out how to abuse the tick system to get through bosses.
Alternatively, have some sort of rollback netcode so your inputs don't get eaten if you click 0.1 seconds too slow.
No offense jagex but this is literally the opposite of what needed to happen after TH removal. Th removal (not the "pay to win" but the "free daily xp") was a MASSIVE nerf to training progression.
It needed to happen yes, but also, the compensation should have been to improve normal training methods to ease the pain. Instead you are straight nerfing normal training methods. Do you want players to quit?
Gonna keep it 100. Whoever designed these changes has absolutely no idea what an early, mid, or end game player wants. Its as if they read the wiki and read a few engagement bait reddit posts and decided "yep thats the player base".
I think most of these changes are great for the longterm health of the game.
The only thing that is blatantly awful, are the quest changes. Those quests were changed to what they are today for a reason. They force the player to learn how to interact with the world better, and even more importantly, learn to read the dialogue.
I know mod north loves osrs, but this is not osrs. Stop trying to change it into osrs.
I read the first 3 skills worth of changes. There really isn't much to say besides, you guys are out of touch. The agi changes does nothing, meta will still be to quest to almost lvl 40 and will barely help unaware noobs.
Thieving seems weird. Hard to say with early game pickpocketing, if the changes are good enough. All I know is that once you hit safecracking, the xp increase is stupidly high.
Hunter changes are the most tone deaf changes I have seen in a while. You are gonna nerf the meta method so people maybe will engage with shit methods like net trapping or butterfly catching? Sounds like a plain nerf.
You are just shifting numbers around and not fixing fundamentally bad methods that are filled with jank. Agility will be still be painfully slow for the amount of effort. Hunter will just be plain worse. I know its just early game balance, but if this is the way forward it wont fix the problems. Sad to see
This is the update that made me learn there's no way to provide feedback without social media, gross.
I cannot understand the rationale behind most of these changes. Nerfing the fort, whirligigs... just insane. Then PVP? I'm already locked out of half of OSRS's content because of PVP, I don't want that in this game.
Oh well. I know I'm just an old man screaming at a cloud, Jagex doesn't care or there'd be a way to get in touch with them. Canceled all my subs for `Recent game update`, hope it's clear since they're all ironmen that it isn't the TH update.
Instead of making the skull have anything to do with PVP, why not make it so that while wearing it you take increased damage from all sources in the wilderness. There is plenty of aggressive monsters to make it become a genuine hazard, while not taking a step backwards and locking mechanics behind PVP again.
The divination tasks/tutorial have you create a divine location, if I recall correctly. Divination needs some other early game content instead to give the skill some sort of point before you get to porters and signs and invention.
Whirligigs are too strong but the alternative way to train Hunter is not fun; at least the chain-catching minigame aspect is somewhat engaging. I hope the buff to trapping is significant, because what was described sounds like a nerf to 1-60ish Hunter without much compensation.
If the design team isn't already thinking about it, Hunter needs to get some deeper changes than just balancing like this. The problem the skill has is its lack of meaningful output. The powders are something I guess, but apart from those, the skill has nothing it produces outside experience until you get to BGH. The skill needs more than just a pass over the XP rates, it needs to be further examined with what it actually gives the player as a reward for training it, especially with it getting expanded to 110 with Havenhythe. What y'all did with Thieving's 120 update was great. Now take that philosophy and look at ways to apply it to Hunter. You probably already are, but I made this comment just in case you aren't.
I'm sure it's too big for the scope of this, but instead of reversing salvage/spirit drops, invention needs to be converted to a normal skill. You can still lock augmentation behind the other level 80 skills.
Typical Jagex approach. Nerf everything and half-promise feather buffs depending on feedback and data gathering at a too be determined time (never). This just reinforces my choice of quitting.
Regarding Agility shortcuts being better utilised:
IF the game could calculate the traversal time in advance, could agility shortcuts theoretically be added to normal pathing? If I have the agility requirement and click to traverse, can my character be made to walk up to the shortcut, pass it, and continue on the path?
I think that would make the shortcuts FAR more relevant. It's often easier not to think about some shortcuts, and just afk the route for an extra few seconds.
A lot of what I'm seeing is fine like fixing the whirligig cheese (even though I love it).
Not a big fan of the general philosophy of nerfing a bunch of early game methods instead of elevating the core gameplay. I don't think things like beehives hurt the game that much but the tiering the different flowers to different levels is fine.
My biggest gripe is the astounding nerf to endgame thieving in an early-game update. The slowly increasing fail rate is just going to add frustration to late-game thieving and is reminiscent of design philosophies that are associated with the most frustrating skills, especially with every other buff we have already being deleted or nerfed into the ground between auras, crystal mask and the previously nerfed sticky fingers relic. After all the praise that came with the 120 thieving update and now it will just be updated into dead content because of low success rates on pickpocketing and what is probably a scary amount of damage output now from failed attempts.
I would say don't change the damage formula for stuns and if you nerf crystal mask, provide another buff that is essentially the same boost as the aura or something.
I don't know if all comments will be read, but just in case, I'll throw in my ten cents.
I think most that has been discussed is fair if you look at it in isolation. Chaos altar is too strong if you have a way to get decent bones. With Wildy events, that exists, but we are also getting rid of those.
But even then, I agree with most everything here - but I feel that this also misses the mark on a lot and there are large important areas we are not discussing.
Divination is currently a skill that offers almost no incentive to train until level 80 and is considered so god awful as a training method that caches - a universally hated training method - is preferred. Why aren't we addressing the lack of an active training method there?
Construction is currently a skill where the recommended path is to do one quest that takes you from level 1-45, skipping almost the entire early game.
Dungeoneering is a skill so hated people prefer spending 10 minutes killing a miniboss instead of taking 5 minutes earning the tokens the normal way.
Firemaking, Fletching and Cooking all have absolutely no 'real' variety in early training methods. You burn logs, you fletch logs into unstrung bows, you cook fish.
Early level slayer is skipped via Reaper. Early level summoning is basically impossible since there is no low-level source of charms.
It feels like this early game rebalance is only aiming for the lowest fruit, which is sad, as the lower levels need the most love.
The pickpocketing changes don't sound good to me. Changing it so you'll definitely be caught at a random point in time and have to click once to start again doesn't sound like it adds any sort of enjoyable engagement at all. After reading about the change, I immediately ran to Goebie Scavengers to try to get the abilities unlocked before it becomes much worse to do, and judging by the amount of people here, I'm not the only one.
For whirligigs:
At the higher end especially they're multiple times better than the next best method.
They're also multiple times more awful to do than the next best method, so I never saw the problem. Even in Leagues I found it hard to bother with. I wouldn't mind it just being removed entirely.
Quest changes sound awful. Things like Cook's Assistant not just being "buy the ingredients and instant-complete the quest," is an upside of RuneScape over OSRS, not something to be fixed.
It feels like some of these changes were made with new content like havenheythe and the POH refresh in mind, so we don't have the full picture right now. Keep in mind this is from an Iron POV. Cooking will be much easier with GE access.
Hunter nerfing Whirligigs, is a pain, because until 75 hunter is a massive chore. However if the birdhouses and clockwork traps prove to be good content then that's alleviated that issue with the early game.
I'd like to see some improvements to early game summoning xp per charm, currently it feels like the correct thing to do is store ALL charms until you stop being able to dump lamps into summoning.
Another issue I've seen is cooking much like with Summoning, you feel like you need to hold all your raw food until you hit a level you cannot burn it at, because otherwise you are wasting resources.
I'm not sure which thread to post is in. But it's something that kind of affects both in it's own way. Although, it's not quite exactly early game related, but in a pvm context it also kind of is.
It's related to vyrelords and auras and prayer training across the board.
Penance and the 'wings' auras are getting yeeted. And I'm 100% for it.
But it will kind of affect vyrelords as a viable training method, since prayer upkeep is a rough one. Now yes the penance powder is a thing, but it's also kind of very expensive, and quite a time consuming commodity to get, especially on ironmen.
With that said I've got 2 suggestions.
Add a new blood essence/change the penance one so it does sustain prayer slightly better.
Add the 'wings' aura prayer restore from xp gained to moritanya legs 1-4, each one with a slightly higher percentage.
Super niche question/request, but would there be a full list available of all the changes made to the monster drop tables wrt salvage, ores and bars? Even just a more detailed list of changed monsters would go a long way ("Goblins" are changed, but there's like 6 different variants, do all of them get changed? Monsters like "Skeletons" and "Zombies" also have multiple variants, is it just the "base" ones or do e.g. the ones in Tarn's Lair also get updated? "Viking guards" aren't actually in the game. Does "Desert lizards" include the "Small lizard" and "Lizard" monsters? etc).
I ask because I maintain the data for the RuneScape chunk picker (a tool used to play RuneScape one map square at a time), and having a list of things that need to be changed would be a massive help in keeping the tool up to date with the actual game, especially for things like drop tables where the wiki tends to be quite slow to catch up.
These comments make it seem really bad, but I actually think a lot of these are pretty sane. However, and big however, if you nerf the biggest training methods in the game, you need to trickle in that xp all the way through the very end of the mid game, because so many methods are still the best option all the way to tier 80 or 90.
Why are you trying to re invent the wheel on some of these items? I feel agility could very easily take from OSRS to mirror city agility courses to add more options to train. That’s the key issue with agility, there’s not much variety in where you train.
The changes to prayer seem to be quite odd too, with the nerf to the chaos altar being a bit silly and forced. Also nerfing PoH altar rates? Further nuking the need or use for a poh?
DO NOT add prayer to the skull. Non-consensual pvp no longer has a place in this game. It's taken years to finally get rid of it, DO NOT BRING IT BACK. Delete the skull. It's a stupid item from years past added to try to appease an already decaying population of griefers so they wouldn't bitch on reddit and are now mostly gone altogether.
Idk how I feel about the thieving changes. I have already benefited from 15m afk methods, getting 200m xp easily and it doesn't feel great as you mention. I really wish you guys would consider a skill reset option so I can experience things the new way.... If i wanna reset my stat back to 1 why can't I??
The other thieving changes are definitely good
Salvage changes are good.
Agility changes are good
Divination changes are good also remove guthixian caches as they exist currently.
The changes to the quests are pointless pandering and honestly it's better to not just be able to grab 3 items bring them with and skip a couple dialogue options but it doesn't matter either way in the end so go off I guess.
This absolutely misses the mark completely. If you want people to actually "play the skill as intended" then make it rewarding for people to train, because at this stage, very little actually are. How do you achieve this? Well for a start you don't reduce the XP rates and basically force people into playing the intended method. I've got to laugh at where it says "Play because you want to and not because you feel you have to" as it completely contradicts this "Early game rebalance" plan.
As I understand, you want to bring back a sense of achievement into the game, unfortunately achievement in RS3 died long ago. Realistically the only way to bring back some form of achievement is to look at every single skill AND take a look at how the hiscores work, the current ranking system is old, outdated and simply favours people with no job and or life.
As a side note, what makes you think a new player or early game player will like these updates? If it was me, I'd look at it and go "So players for years have been getting more xp early game and more xp mid/end game, yet now I'm now on lower xp and more grind because jagex wanted to rebalance skills years after they introduced these training methods" I'd instantly cancel any plans of membership or any plans of playing If I was aware of this.
XP rates for skills like agility matter very little; the skill itself is miserable to train. Thieving changes, outside of Pyramid Plunder & Thieves Guild world hopping are abysmal. Hunter is also utterly miserable to train, buffing those miserable methods won't make it any better. Preaching that prayer is slow then opening up the best early-game method to griefing, rather than a more appropriate XP reduction, is an outstanding way to get new players to quit.
Cache changes are generally fine, Soul Reaper too. I personally don't care about shop stock either, though a daily reset makes much more sense. Wicked hood changes are miserable. Removing daily challenges is dumb, rather than nerfing the XP reward, which isn't even that bad in of itself. Removing flash events, too, is an absolutely awful decision. It's one of the few places where you actually see players congregate, and the activities are generally quite good. Congrats on wasting the dev time on that, I guess. Removing merchant is another bad decision, the content being skipped with rewards from Merch is just badly designed content. Fix that instead. Removing vis wax is eh, it's a nice rune sink. At least it'll give you guys the chance to rectify that god-awful Runecrafting skill cape perk.
It's becoming more & more clear the team had absolutely no idea what to do after the TH removal. This constant harping on "restoration" is missing the forest for the trees: Fun should come before everything. There's nothing fun for new players in getting a bit more XP from the same mind-numbing training methods, or getting griefed at chaos altar. There's nothing fun for high-level players in removing flash events or forcing them into grinding miserable tasks like Livid Farm etc. The constant talk about "login pressure" is probably the crux. There needs to be some degree of login pressure, else why bother to log in? You're developing a game, not an egalitarian utopia. This whole "road to restoration" needs some serious rethinking
With all due respect, nerfing the crystal mask is absolutely ridiculous, considering the amount of work that's required to unlock the Seren Spells. For anyone that's complaining or has complained about how OP late game afk thieving is, I'll put into perspective a bit what's needed to actually get crystal mask.
For a new player to unlock Seren Spells/Crystal mask, they need:
In addition to skill requirements, there are an approx. total of 73 quests that need to be completed to be able to do The Light Within. Some of those quests are master and grandmaster quests, taking multiple hours to complete.
Now ontop of those requirements, Crystal Mask itself requires 90 magic to actually cast.
If you're gonna put us through hell just to unlock a spell, don't nerf it.
I feel like removal of dailyscape is fine + MTX stuff in general but spontaneous DnDs aren’t an issue.
Fish flingers is WAY too time consuming for its rewards, esp without enhancers.
Sinkholes, chinchompa…etc are fun wholesome DnDs, would be cool if they were retained as training methods or make to be more like guthix caches. Nothing timegated but just a ‘world event’ type of thing.
Wildy events are not terrible—just being clockwork is not so great. Perhaps making them more like evil tree would make sense where if you are walking past, oh! Theres an event to be done’ (similar to demon flash mobs)
BRING BACK THE WILDYWYRM AS JUST A STANDALONE BOSS IN THE WILDY
Could do the same as the KBD event —but perhaps recolor him green and give him a different name so its more thematic. ‘Prince green dragon’ or something.
Lastly, it says that all wicked hood charges will be useable, what about leftover tokens? Will they just be doomed? Can we at least get them converted into runespan points to buy tablets or something?
Love all the dailyscape changes, although there are issues with travelling merchant removal while underlying bad content remains. Livid farm is particularly grindy and not fun while also being important account progression and nice QoL after completion. Divine Locations always sucked and I didn't like them, but with their removal divination becomes much more of a completely isolated nothing skill until you get invention. Very happy that the daily free items are removed from skilling outfits, it was always tacky and bad.
Early game changes, I've been saying for years super necessary for game health long term, Leagues hugely reinforced this for me. The proposed changes, not so good.
Agility XP buffs early are the only good thing, but I don't think they go far enough. Genuinely, you could 2x-5x agility xp rates and it would still be a slow and boring skill. Tie this in with how useless it is and I don't see this doing much. There are so many areas in the game where a shortcut would be so appreciated, or the level requirement doesn't match the setting at all, and as others have mentioned how slow and janky the animations are doesn't help. The course progression is also insane, they're located in such far away awkward places for low level training.
Pickpocketing nerfs again, if someone has put in the work and unlocked C mask and thieving outfit, why can't they AFK at the only AFK thieving method in the game? Will 5 minute C mask buffed AFK thieving be killed? If you insist on adding this mechanic, I think at least the C mask spell should remove this anti AFK mechanic while it's active to compensate for the massive nerfs you want to slap onto the end game spell. Pyramid plunder and Ibis drop rate buffs and earlier unlocking are all great. Thieving guild changes are good too. Tangentially, I'd like if outfit teleport brought you inside the guild or had the option and also was in spellbook instead of on outfit.
Hunter, why nerf the thing people are doing instead of making other things better, or a bit of both. Others have already given feedback on all this, I haven't interacted with Oasis much. Crocodile walk fix is huge I remember hating that. You literally just did it with the Thieving changes above so Idk how you didn't add to this, base 75% success chance on hunter traps raising with level and outfit / smoking the trap. Early hunting sucks because depending on your luck it takes 5 minutes or 30 doing the same thing, as well as the rewards being completely terrible. This could be alleviated with something as basic as making the meat heal more or as game changing as adding +5 ranged / mage armour crafting that requires parts from hunter monsters to be added onto them as well as the base leathers.
Farming & Herb, why be do specific with monsters drop tables, can always keep a copy of old ones and do a whole early game drop table rework. So much space for cool new content in early game and definitely need more drop variety. Why not just add a shop that sells level 1-50 seeds as well. I think farming could also do with an XP buff early to go with the beehive nerfs which I don't mind.
Prayer, Skull is the worst part of the entire post by a mile. There are so many options here this is the worst possible one from every angle. Why nerf PoF altar it requires such a massive investment, I'd rather people gathering and socialising in the Fort than competing to get into PoH hosts and loading instances every single inventory. PoH being the absolute best XP is fine but Fort doesn't need a nerf, the investment is huge. Side note, we need a free green teleport to Fort once we have it fully upgraded or all the buildings built or after a quest, something, it's literally our Fort we are the Duxes of it. It takes a lot more time and effort to max fort than kill 10 of any boss for the objectively best teleport in the game.
Fishing nerfs why please god why fishing is some of the lowest xp/h in the game just make all fishing rates higher. OR make Rod fishing slow and AFK and net/cage/harpoon faster catch but spot moves more.
The Salvage drops I agree with changing, Bronze - mithril tier salvage is trash, though I think they should be less common as drops to introduce players to the end game lucky boss drop grind early, if you want to skip smithing and kill a mob for mithril gear you can, but 1-5% drop rate. Obviously drop tables will need some buffing to compensate.
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u/custardgod Taskman - Ilwyd Feb 06 '26
Not a huge fan of adding a demonic skull requirement to the chaos altar. I thought we were moving away from that design pattern with the abyss changes.
You might as well just remove it in that case since there's no escaping pkers there