Did you miss the livestream on April 8th? You can catch up on everything you missed right here, or alternatively head to the bottom of the post to watch the entire thing!
The huge new Archaeology skill recently came to RuneScape and many of you have already been getting your hands dirty in the soil of Gielinor. Once again, some of the developers behind this massive new update answered some of your burning questions in our weekly livestream.
How does excavation work?
Mod Ryan: When you are excavating, the blue bar represents the progress towards discovering an artefact. Precision is the value that helps progress that bar, while focus is essentially your success rate. A better mattock gives you better focus, which means you're more likely to be successful when excavating, meaning you're going to get materials. The focus bar increases based up on your mattock's precision and any other precision unlock you have. Your Archaeology level affects the success rate of finding a material, but it has nothing to do with the rate of finding an artefact.
Will you be revealing the dragon mattock drop rate?
Mod Timbo: In the past we said we'd release those figures a month after a new piece of content comes out, so that's about two weeks from now.
Is the exclamation point in Warforge! really canonical?
Mod Rowley: No. It's not wrong to include it, it was just a silly joke to help sell that dig site early on. It was just a bit of fun. You won't find it with an exclamation mark in game but there is also part of me that felt we'd only end up getting bug reports about it if it was used mid-sentence [Editor’s Note: Erm, excuse us Mod Rowley – our style guide for RuneScape.com very much insists on the exclam!]
Is there a reason that a level 94 artefact requires level 98 soapstone?
Mod Timbo: We are replacing the soapstone with the warforged bronze. It was an oversight in our testing and balancing.
What are the requirements to get an inquisitor’s staff piece at Kharid-et?
Mod Ryan: When the pylon is active, you have a chance of receiving an Inquisitor's Staff piece from everywhere inside the fortress, but not outside. You cannot increase your chance by using more batteries on the pylon, but of the luck rings do help increase the chance slightly. That's pretty much all you need. Your Archaeology level only plays a small role, but the higher level you are, the more successful you are and therefore the more chance you have of getting one.
At Runefest, you showed some other ancient invention suggestions. Can we still expect these to be released? An example of this are the boots that would generate divine charges?
Mod Timbo: We did some technical investigation and couldn't get them to work properly, so ended up scrapping them. I would love to go back and do them and add some more things to Ancient Invention. There will be more from relics, Ancient Invention, Ancient Summoning and so on as rewards in future RuneScape content.
Do you think there's a deficit of materials and a surplus of artefacts in Archaeology?
Mod Timbo: The skill is designed to have a deficit of materials. You cannot restore all the artefacts you get per hour with the materials you gather. That is not possible without material caches or anything else. You are encouraged to buy materials or excavate at material caches or stay a little longer for the projects you dug up.
The Ripper demon has been quite strong, are we still planning to change this?
Mod Iago: We're definitely going to make some changes, but it will still be the best familiar. We don't have the exact details just yet as we want to make sure we have the numbers right. We've had some feedback from players which has been helpful. There's a few options we want to check out to make sure it still feels really powerful, but that it isn't overpowered.
How does the Monolith gain power?
Mod Ryan: That would be a spoiler! As you progress through the skill you gain qualifications. At level 40 you get the ability to do research. The research you can unlock at qualification levels 40, 70 and 90 improves your power from the Monolith.
Could you tell us a bit about the bad luck mitigation mechanics?
Mod Rowley: We released a hot fix for the imcando mattock pieces. For every level you have above 76 when you first get into the Warforge!, we increase your chance of obtaining a mattock piece. There are also certain objects you can find while excavating which are used in mysteries. A lot of those have very fair RNG to begin with, but they also have a level at which they become guaranteed, typically at the level you need it. A good example is the Boots of Flight, which you can get from RNG from level 70 onwards. But if you look at the next highest excavation at Stormguard, which is 76, if you haven't got them by then, you’ll find them. We didn't want people to feel they were stuck on RNG. We also put mitigation on artefact discovery. We track the last few artefacts you discovered, and when you're excavating at a spot, every artefact has a weighting. Every time you discover something, we reduce the weighting so that you're much more likely to get something you didn't get last time.
How do relics work when they share the same effect as another item?
Mod Ryan: In the case when you have a luck relic, for example, if you also have the luck ring on, you don't have double luck. The relic is the priority.
The RuneScape Team