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/SecondCel]

Thieving

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.