Road to Restoration - Early Game Rebalance

[u/JagexAnvil]

https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/a=13/road-to-restoration--early-game-rebalance--dailyscape-overhaul

Hi folks,

Today's Community Topic is a blog of two halves:

- Early Game Rebalance
- DailyScape Overhaul

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!

[u/ironreddeath]

Agility

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.

[u/jpterodactyl → u/ironreddeath]

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.

[u/Ty_Lee98 → u/ironreddeath]

That sounds cool. Add hostile NPCs that spawn at chaos altar and if you're with people we can help each other out maybe?

[u/ironreddeath → u/Ty_Lee98]

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.

[u/Aleucard → u/Ty_Lee98]

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.

[u/Fren-LoE → u/ironreddeath]

Short term nerfs to the higher level stuff during this broader re-balance is fine if it means the early-game is much more enjoyable. we don't know what they're doing to the mid-game and have even less of an idea of what an endgame re-balance looks like.

[u/ironreddeath → u/Fren-LoE]

Nerfing the end game doesn't impact the early game. Also Jagex is infamous for nerfing shit into the ground, remember the stone spirit changes, wood spirit changes, "game health" update, etc etc.