Good afternoon folks!
Today, we’re launching another beta build to showcase upcoming Combat Modernisation changes and gather your feedback, helping us continue to refine and polish the update.
This beta branch will be available from today until Monday, February 16th, and we plan to follow it up with a blog later that week, sharing player feedback, key insights and what we’ve learned as part of a dedicated “What We Learned” post.
So grab your weapons, set up the dummies and get a feel for these new ways to approach combat in RuneScape!
The Vision
Melee, Magic, and Ranged are long-standing combat styles built upon years of mismatched design patterns, legacy systems, and bloated ability kits, leaving much to be desired in terms of gameplay identity, early to mid-game power, accessibility, overall structure, and visual fidelity.
Resolving combat issues is a journey, of which we're focused on the early game with this update. In our eyes, once the early game is solid, we can continue to improve and expand upon the mid and endgame experience, such as ammo and Essence of Finality's.
As a result, we are looking to modernise and improve the game’s three original combat styles in the following ways to provide a clean foundation for future combat updates to explore.
- All combat styles should follow the same foundational structure
- Removal of 'threshold' ability type → move to 'abilities' like necromancy.
- Styles increased to 120 max level.
- Create/embrace clear style identities in the combat styles.
- Reduce the number of abilities by removing redundant or rarely used options.
- Strip away filler abilities; focus on a concise, meaningful ability set.
- Reduce “keybind bloat” and new player complexity.
- Start players with a simple 1 or 2 button ability rotation and slowly introduce them to combat in a way that doesn't result in cognitive overload.
- Bring animation and combat flow up to the quality bar Necromancy set.
- Improve visual clarity & reduce screen bloat.
- Improve the progression of abilities to feel more natural
- Improve the floor of abilities with unlockable upgrades - it's fine for upgraded abilities to be powerful, but moving from a regular to a greater ability should never drastically alter, or 'unlock' the style.
New Changes
Ranged - Style Identity
Ranged maintains its on-hit identity, extending it via the use of two new self-buffs:
- Imbue: Gales - an ability which provides bonus damage on-hit for a duration.
- Imbue: Shadows - an ability which provides adrenaline on-hit for a duration.
Ability Removal
- Unload
- Rout
- Salt the Wound
- Dazing Shot
- Tight Bindings
- Demoralise
- Needle Strike
Abilities Reinstated
- Shadow Tendrils
Ability Modification
Ricochet
Following the feedback from the last beta; Ricochet has been reverted to its AoE first, single target second behaviour. However, to maintain that Greater abilities are still a worthwhile upgrade over their regular basics, without being style warping - their hit count will now be modified by the Greater ability codex upgrade; rather than caroming.
Caroming will be disabled for Ricochet while we discuss how to best action this - if you have ideas and feedback for what you want to see from Caroming, please let us know.
Incendiary Shot (now known as Imbue: Shadows)
To fully play into Ranged's on-hit effects, we've replaced Incendiary Shot with a self-buff which generates additional adrenaline on-hit.
This serves to cement on-hit within Ranged's core ability kit, while reducing Ranged's reliance on crit, so that additional complexity via ammo and weapon passives (Bow of the Last Guardian) can build upon that core framework, and allow for more interesting reward design.
Bombardment
Bombardment has had its overall adrenaline cost and damage reduced, with a short cooldown added. This allows it to maintain its primary purpose as an AoE ability.
New Abilities
Imbue: Gales
Similarly to Imbue: Shadows, this serves as a way to introduce on-hit effects much earlier and within the core ability kit of Ranged.
This provides a small amount of bonus damage on-hit, to better incentivise using it before high hitcount abilities - Rapid Fire and Deadshot in particular.
Melee - Style Identity
While Ranged and Magic focus on ammo, Melee derives all of its nuance through the use of weapons. Maintaining its dual-wield and two-handed weapon ability variants, it provides flexibility within your rotation, depending on your specific needs.
We're leaning into On kill and On Next Attack effects to hammer home Melee's burst damage.
Ability Removal
Several Melee abilities have been removed. While some of them had an interesting dynamic (e.g., Destroy), overall, they offered less value to Melee than other abilities that were kept.
- Decimate
- Havoc
- Smash
- Slaughter
- Destroy
- Massacre
- Balanced Strike
- Blood Tendrils
- Forceful Backhand
- Kick
- Cleave
- Quake
- Frenzy
- Stomp
Ability Modification
- Bleeds are a niche sub-build within Melee, supported by various pieces of equipment. To better support these, Dismember has been converted into a three cast ability, incorporating existing bleeds into its identity.
- First cast: Dismember - Low amount of damage per hit every 1.2s
- Second cast: Slaughter (now Dismember recast 1) - Low amount of damage per hit every 1.2s, increased if your target moves.
- Third cast: Massacre (now Dismember recast 2) - Deal a medium initial hit, then low damage over time.
The first cast is unlocked at Level 50, with each recast being added at level 60 and 75 respectively to introduce bleeds at a more gentle pace.
Punish
We really like the identity of Punish as a niche ability that becomes more useful at the end of the fight. To better accentuate this, we've given Punish the ability to lower its cooldown based on whether it delivers the killing blow.
This hones in on its identity as a fight ender, and gives it additional purpose during high enemy count situations, such as Slayer.
Sever
Sever has been converted to Adaptive Strike. In removing abilities, we found we lost some variation between dual wield and two handed.
Dual-wield had reduced damage, but made up for it via multiple hits, and two-handed weapons honed in on area of effect (AoE) damage. We like this behaviour for Melee, whereby its flexibility lays in weapons, rather than ammo, but don't believe it needs to be two separate abilities.
As such, Adaptive Strike takes the benefits from both Decimate and Cleave, and bundles them up into one package, with an additional effect of offering increased adrenaline gain over other basics, to let you build up to your harder hitting abilities faster.
Flurry
Flurry was always a bit of an odd ability - it only really became useful when turned into a greater; and while we like the use of Flurry to reduce Berserk's adrenaline cooldown, it wasn't something we wanted to bring into the base version, as it would sit in an awkward place.
Either the ability it affects does not become unlocked until much later, maintaining it as a 'noob trap' early on, or you'd unlock it far too late to have it meaningfully impact your player journey.
As well as this, Melee suffers somewhat from early game sustain, whereby you don't have any good ways to mitigate damage (e.g., standing behind a fence that you can range over), and always needing to move around to hit your target. Flurry now heals a flat amount per hit, plus a percentage of the damage dealt to make it more impactful in the early game during multi-creature fights, but tapers off as you unlock more sources of healing in the end game.
Berserk
Fury is a core part of your Berserk rotation, whereby you want to use it to ensure your strong hitting abilities critically strike more often. Combined with the decreased ability count, this meant you could be using Fury in a suboptimal way, due to having fewer basic abilities to play around with. Really leaning into the 'Go berserk' element of Berserk, we're giving you the ability to be as furious as you want (within reason).
Meteor Strike
Similarly to Incendiary Shot (Imbue: Shadows), Meteor Strike has been reworked to be less crit-reliant, giving your Berserk a bit more consistency.
Pulverise
Pulverise has been detached from the Ek-ZekKil as a passive effect, with its effect now made baseline, to make it more useful before endgame weaponry.
Hurricane
Leaning into its AoE nature, Hurricane now has the ability to reset its cooldown when used against a large number of targets - allowing it to really shine during Slayer.
Ability Book - Notice anything different?
We've removed the strength book in its entirety. Melee abilities are now grouped up into one book, simplifying the UI and getting another ability book off your screen.
All melee attacks have been converted to require Attack levels instead of Strength. Strength now serves to unlock specific weapons (Ek-ZekKil, for example) and offers increased damage through its levelling benefits, namely increased damage per level and increased Critical Strike Damage at level thresholds.
Magic - Style Identity
Magic maintains its two core playstyles: Critical Strikes and Burn/Bleeds. Several abilities have been modified to better fit within these playstyles and to allow the identity to come through before the inclusion of endgame weaponry.
Ability Removal
- Deep Impact
- Metamorphosis
- Horror
- Shock
- Wrack
Ability Modification
Concentrated Blast
Both Greater Concentrated Blast and Concentrated Blast have had their damage reduced slightly, and their Critical Strike Chance increased. This leans further into their identities as crit-buffs, adding consistency within the early game, especially when combined with Runic Charge (we'll get into that later).
Concentrated Blast was in an odd place - due to its hit timing, it was almost always more beneficial to cancel it after a full global cooldown. To mitigate this odd behaviour, we've increased its hit frequency to 0.6s to match Greater Concentrated Blast.
Sonic Wave
Flow stacks have been removed; and instead Sonic Wave offers Flow and Greater flow as next-ability buffs, decreasing the amount of adrenaline they cost. This allows for some dynamic gameplay, whereby you might not have enough adrenaline to squeeze in a Tsunami, or a final Wild Magic - unless you reduce the cooldown.
This allows for some dynamic gameplay, where you can squeeze out an extra wild magic, special attack or get an earlier ultimate when you wouldn't normally have enough adrenaline.
Dragon Breath
Dragon breath has had a slight modification to lean into the burn build; it now deals increased damage against combusted targets, maintaining its AoE behaviour as a Magic basic.
Combust
Combust is no longer a basic ability; in place of generating adrenaline, it lasts for much longer, making sure that choosing to burn your target is an intentional choice, rather than just a strong basic.
Chain
Similarly to Ricochet, Greater Chain's effect has been brought backwards into Chain to maintain a consistent behaviour between base and greater abilities. Greater Chain reduces the secondary target damage debuff, and takes on Caroming's additional targets.
Caroming will be disabled for Chain while we discuss how to best action this - if you have ideas and feedback, please let us know.
New Abilities
Runic Charge
Wrack has been replaced by Runic Charge, which deals no damage, but greatly empowers one of your next Magic abilities. This provides variation in your gameplay - need to reduce the adrenaline cost of your next attack? Empower sonic wave. Fishing for critical strikes for your Fractured Staff of Armadyl? Perhaps you empower Concentrated Blast.
General
Stalling
We understand that there are core mechanics that make RuneScape combat exciting and unique, and stalling is one of these. That being said, we've made some changes to how stalling works.
Previously, a stalled ability could only 'really' be released on a different target if the player did so by releasing it with a spell, such as Smoke Cloud. With changes to how these spells work, it meant this was no longer possible.
To mitigate this, stalled abilities will immediately release on click or target-cycle, no matter what the initial target was, replacing the old Smoke Cloud release.
Basic Attacks
To preserve the meaning of weapon speeds, we've unified attack speed across the game, whereby fastest and fast weapons utilise a 2 second global cooldown (GCD) for their basic attack only. This provides some interesting nuance, whereby attacking more rapidly may be more beneficial for spell or ammo effects - such as ice barraging targets to keep them away, without making two-handed weapons feel slower.
Note: We have some work in progress (WIP) ability icons present instead of the Necromancy auto attack icon. These are not final, but are used to better visualise what the basic attack may look like.
Stuns
Some of you eagle-eyed players will have looked at the above lists and say, 'Hey, this means that I have a reduced number of stuns - what about X piece of content?' - while we like that you had multiple stuns to play with, we don't feel they have to exist as a basic and threshold combo. As such, after unlocking your basic stun at level 54 (the same for all four styles), at level 70, you'll unlock an additional stun charge.
Note: Necromancy is excluded from this, as its stun resource is derived from souls.
Default Action Bars
The default action bars for the core three styles have been adjusted to include only the core abilities for each style. These have not been generated with Revolution or any specific scenario in mind (e.g. Single target versus AoE).
Modified ability unlock order
All three styles have had their unlock order for abilities modified to better support the player journey. As an example, when you first set foot on Gielinor, and you're killing a Goblin for some armour, you'll begin by basic attacking repeatedly, building up adrenaline that you don't yet have a way to use. Next, we unlock your basic 'spender' ability - here, we introduce you to a very basic rotation. Build enough adrenaline to use your spender ability, then use it to increase your damage output. This is layered on throughout your journey, introducing complexity where appropriate.
The full level unlock orders are as follows:
Melee
| Ability | Level | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Attack | 1 | |
| Adaptive Strike | 6 | |
| Assault | 7 | |
| Overpower | 15 | |
| Fury | 21 | |
| Hurricane | 37 | |
| Flurry | 45 | |
| Dismember | 50 | Recasts at 60 & 75 |
| Backhand | 54 | Second Charge at 70 |
| Punish | 60 | |
| Barge | 65 | |
| Pulverise | 71 | |
| Berserk | 76 | |
| Meteor Strike | 90 | |
| Chaos Roar | 92 | Requires Codex |
Magic
| Ability | Level | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Attack | 1 | |
| Wild Magic | 3 | |
| Sonic Wave | 6 | |
| Dragon Breath | 14 | |
| Omnipower | 20 | |
| Runic Charge | 38 | |
| Combust | 44 | |
| Chain | 51 | |
| Impact | 54 | Second Charge at 70 |
| Asphyxiate | 59 | |
| Smoke Tendrils | 65 | Requires Quest |
| Concentrated Blast | 66 | |
| Detonate | 71 | |
| Corruption Blast | 75 | Requires Codex |
| Sunshine | 76 | Requires Quest |
| Magma Tempest | 85 | Requires Codex (Level incorrect in beta) |
| Tsunami | 90 |
Ranged
| Ability | Level | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Attack | 1 | |
| Snapshot | 2 | |
| Snipe | 7 | |
| Piercing shot | 13 | |
| Deadshot | 21 | |
| Bombardment | 36 | |
| Binding Shot | 54 | Second Charge at 70 |
| Imbue: Gales | 58 | |
| Rapid Fire | 62 | |
| Shadow Tendrils | 65 | Requires Quest |
| Ricochet | 67 | |
| Corruption Shot | 75 | Requires Codex |
| Deaths Swiftness | 76 | Requires Quest |
| Imbue: Shadows | 90 |
UI tutorials, and the removal of 'automatically placing abilities on your ability bar'
In the live game, while levelling up, abilities are automatically placed on your action bar. This is behaviour we're not a fan of - it muddies up your freshly made combat bar, and doesn't introduce the abilities to you.
In contrast, we're introducing Necromancy style UI tutorials upon level up, which give a brief introduction to your ability, prompting you to hover over it to understand your new ability.
While this won't benefit those of you with a strong knowledge of combat abilities, this tutorialisation gives newer players a firmer grasp on what abilities do, without holding their hand on how to use them.
These won't be introduced during this beta, but we have removed abilities from being automatically placed on your bar.
Lesser abilities
Lesser abilities aimed to bridge the gap between ability unlocks, to keep combat feeling fluid. In practice, the abilities ended up feeling lackluster, or in some cases, worse than using Slice, Piercing Shot and Wrack. Given our reduced ability set, introduction of the basic attack, and a more handcrafted ability unlock order; lesser abilities are defunct and have now been removed.
Removal of 'weapon locked' abilities
With the new ability set for Ranged and Magic, none of their ability set made sense as specifically dual-wield or two-handed abilities. As such, these restrictions have been removed. Feel free to be a magician using a wand and orb (or book), or a stave at your heart's content.
Conversely, Melee has a few weapon-specific abilities - while it makes sense for an archer to be able to fire multiple shots using whatever type of weapon they have, or a magician being able to channel magic regardless of their magical weapon, the impact of Melee weapons varies greatly depending on the weight and size of the weapon they wield. As such, where Ranged and Magic have their ammo and spells, Melee has its weapon variation.
Solid Food Improvements
In the early game, solid food can feel like a bit of a noob trap - whereby your lack of health regeneration and lifesteal effects means that you're eating more food, leading to adrenaline loss, and therefore being unable to use your high impact abilities. To address this, we've taken a dual approach:
- Removed the scaling factor from food based on your Constitution level. Previously, eating a shark for example at 20 Constitution would only heal you for 500 lifepoints - this drastically reduces the value of high level food in the early game. Food that previously scaled based on Constitution level, will now heal a flat amount.
- The adrenaline cost from food has been reduced from 10% to 3%. Now that basic abilities generate 9% adrenaline, 3% means that you're never going to be bogged down from eating food - even if you were to chomp on your sharks every tick you could, you would still be gaining some adrenaline.
Bug Fixes
- An issue where Ability IDs were shuffled around causing mischief on your action bars during the last beta has been resolved. You may need to reimport your save into the beta for this to take effect.
- Basic attacks will now generate Icy Chill stacks when using Wen arrows, and non-basic abilities will now convert Icy Chill into Icy Precision and benefit from them (I.E., Ranged adrenaline costing abilities will all benefit from them as expected).
Frequently Asked Questions
'My hit timings look weird'
For Ranged, a lot of the hit timings have been manually adjusted, however a few still remain to be addressed - notably, the blowpipe hit timings. As your hit timings are no longer based on weapon type, we suggest you remove your blowpipe and dart overrides for the beta!
How do I join?
Ready to give the Beta a try? Here’s how:
- Jagex Launcher
- Head to the taskbar and close any running instances of the Jagex launcher.
- Click this link.
- The link will load the Jagex launcher then start loading the Beta, logging you in automatically.
- Non Jagex Launcher
- Click this link, then log in as normal.
On first login, your live save is imported into the Beta. You can re-import your save into the Beta once per hour.
Once you’ve given the changes a try, share your feedback with our team through the following channels:
- Discord - The Combat beta thread in the Official Discord.
- Reddit - Combat Beta Thread.
Please note that this is a Beta, so not everything shown is guaranteed to make it into the live game. We’ll be working closely with players to refine these updates and bring them to the live game once they’re fully ready!