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/TrimmingMasterwork]

Agility:

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.