Combat Styles Improvements - Ranged Beta.

16 December 2025 Your Feedback

Back in March 2024, we introduced a wide range of systemic updates to the core Combat skills to improve their flow, such as:

Combat made more fluid - improvements for the original three combat styles to modernise them closer to Necromancy.
Clearer tooltips, labels and descriptions to help you understand combat and make decisions in the moment.
Overhaul of accuracy, so it impacts damage rather than chance to hit, removing splashing from RuneScape. Never miss an Ultimate again!
Improvements to Critical Strike and the damage ranges of abilities so that you are more consistently in control and less at the mercy of RNG.

Prior to releasing those changes, we hosted beta worlds to showcase the changes to players, gather feedback and insight so we could polish and tweak the update.

As a special Christmas surprise, we will be launching another beta, aimed at shaping further modernisations for Combat in 2026. Instructions on how to join are at the bottom of the blog!

The Goals

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.

As a result, we are looking to modernize and improve the game�s three original combat styles in the following ways:

All combat styles should follow the same foundational structure

Removal of 'threshold' ability type → move to 'abilities' like necromancy.
Styles to increased to 120 max level

Create/embrace clear style identities in the combat styles.
Reduce ability count and remove 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 buttons 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 & screen bloat

What's in this Beta

We are exploring a revamp of the Ranged combat style and have developed a prototype that showcases how we believe Ranged could evolve. At the higher end of the live game, Ranged already emphasises multi-hit attacks and on-hit effects, such as enchanted bolts and Bow of the Last Guardian procs.

Our aim is to embrace this multi-hitting identity at the core of the style, introducing built-in payoffs that reinforce this gameplay, while also laying the groundwork for a potential sub-theme that can be expanded through future rewards.

Please note that balance at this stage is highly experimental. Our primary focus is on the overall feel of the style and whether it is engaging and enjoyable to play, rather than on precise tuning, so please focus your feedback on the feel of revamp more so then the overall damage numbers.

Changes:

Ranged core script has been rewritten

Realistically this shouldn't matter too much to you the player, but it means we can make ranged combat more consistent, and easier to maintain.

Ranged now uses fixed ability timings.

Impact timings are now fixed, like necromancy, meaning whichever weapon override you use, your ability will still hit on the same cycle (we won't miss you blowpipe)

Ranged basics now generate 9% adrenaline.

Ranged now uses ammo.

All ranged attacks now use ammo, with a 20% chance to break. Ammo which does not break is dropped on the ground.

Note: balancing for this isn't final. We aim to have players consume ammo at a steady pace that both doesn't feel overwhelming (like dinarrows), but also doesn't allow players to use 'no' arrows when training.

Core combat styles raised to 120.

The Berserker, Maniacal, Reckless and Mahjarrat auras have been disabled.

Abilities:

Ranged now has a 'basic attack'

This is your simplest ability and your default filler, we previously had this utilise weapon speed to allow basic attacks to work on 2/3/4 cycle GCD's scaling damage and adrenaline to equal out, however after internal playtests we felt that the different speeds felt weird or clunky, especially if they got slower than a standard GCD, as such we've normalised the speed across the board to 3 cycles like necromancy's basic attack

Snapshot

Snapshot has been rebalanced, as your simplest spender ability. No cooldown, good damage.

Snipe

Snipe now hits harder than a cold Wizard's mind bomb on a warm summer day.

Snipe is now an impactful but long cooldown ability. Whenever you press it, it should feel good.

We'd like to explore a sniper sub-identity in the future through reward spaces as a mirror to the multi-hit identity that ranged currently has.

Piercing Shot

Piercing is our first basic ability. It retains the familiar double hit, with each strike now also reducing Snipe�s cooldown.

Ricochet

Ricochet has lost its AoE effect; instead leaning in on what made greater ricochet 'great'.

Now always applies multiple hits to the target.
Simplified the damage reduction per-hit portion from the previous greater ricochet

We're still exploring what exactly we want caroming/greater ricochet to do (and whether we want to flip them)but in the meantime, caroming retains the hit count increase, and greater ricochet now increases the base damage of the ability.

Splinter Shot (the name is not final)

Splinter shot is our new ability that acts as a built in pay-off for all the multi-hits ranged will be performing.

Applies flat bonus damage on-hit to all ranged attacks; meaning it'll favor your Ricochet's and Rapidfire's in particular.
At current it has a 100% uptime at a 40% adrenaline cost

You can currently dodge the adrenaline cost by casting it out of combat, but we will likely be removing this interaction.

Bombardment

Bombardment has been rebalanced to have better payoff in AoE scenarios, costing more adrenaline but dealing more damage.

Rapid fire

Rapid fire is pretty much the same currently. Dealing multiple hits with similar damage and similar adrenaline cost, but now having a much bigger pay-off in splinter shot.

Deadshot

Deadshot has been changed from a damage over time attack, to a multi-hit monster, think of it as greater, greater ricochet.

No longer applies damage over time.
Now it hits 5 times immediately.

Other Notes

Death's swiftness

Currently, Death's Swiftness remains unchanged. We will remove 'the World Wakes' as a requirement, allowing it to be level unlocked instead.

Incendiary Shot

Incendiary shot lives, but we're not keen on its design.

Positives:

We like players having access to big adrenaline swings.

Negatives:

We don't like each style's adrenaline swing being tied to critical strikes, which doesn't necessarily line up with its core identity.
We don't like each styles adrenaline swing being tied to an AoE ability

We'd like to suggest turning incendiary shot into a self-buff ability that feeds off of multi-hits (e.g. Granting flat adrenaline or adrenaline regeneration each time you hit a target), but ultimately we'd like to know what you'd like to see from the ability.

Corruption Shot

Currently, Corruption Shot remains unchanged. In the live game, Corruption Shots' core identity is as an additional form of AoE for ranged, however ends up as one of the more powerful single-target basic attacks that ranged has at its disposal.

We'd like to explore a different approach to this, whereby it can truly nail its identity as an AoE ability, while reducing its similarity to magic's Corruption Blast. Let us know what you think.

Lesser Abilities

Lesser abilities have served a purpose - bridging the gap between ability unlocks to allow early game players to maintain a rotation. With the introduction of the basic attack and an adjustment of when abilities unlock; lesser abilities are now defunct and will be removed.

Known issues:

This is a beta, so some obvious minor issues are to be expected. We�ve highlighted a few of these below to give you a heads up.

My action bars are messed up

This is a known side effect of us just hiding the abilities we'd like to remove (we've kept them all, they're just behind the scenes for now - in case there's any you guys really love and want us to keep)

Hit timings don't match when attacks hit

We're looking to adjust animations / hit timings to line up properly

General animation issues

There's a lot of animation tweaks/investigations happening behind the scenes, so expect things to look out of place.

PVP

PvP isn't our focus with this beta, and as such, we want to get the styles into a place you guys are happy with before we move the changes properly over to PvP too.

Other styles

Other styles are part-way through prototyping, so you may notice they are in places anywhere from a little-bit to a lotta-bit broken. We'll be looking to update the beta in the new year with melee and magic changes.

The balancing on X is whacky

The balancing in the prototypes is very finger in the air - e.g. we want Snipe to be impactful on press, so we've thrown in 'impactful' numbers without too much further thought. Still, let us know what you think is up/where you'd like to see numbers go.

What about X?!

Whilst there's a fair few changes here, we can't list everything we're planning to do with various items/effects that plug into changed/removed abilities (e.g. what about splintering arrows if you're removing dazing shot!), but feel free to point these out and/or make suggestions for what you'd want to see.

Final Note

Ultimately, we want combat to feel as good as it can, for as many players as possible. We'd love to hear your feedback and what you want to see from ranged as a combat style.

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.

What if I don't have any Ranged gear?

Speak with the "Ranged Trader" in War's Retreat, right by bank chest. They will offer to reset your stats if you want to try lower level skills and give out ranged equipment/ammo.

Once you�ve given the changes a try, share your feedback with our team through the following channels:

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!