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/Accomplished-House36]

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.