The combat team have been hard at work, reviewing player feedback and today we are making some adjustments based on your player feedback to the recent beta branch.
The recent beta patch is being pitched as a release candidate so we are going to continue these adjustments till they are just right and this is where you come in, If you're a pvm god and smash your way through bosses, or just wanting to get your daily combat challenge done, try out your usual combat scenarios on the beta and let us hear from you on how they play and feel with these changes under your belt!
How to access the beta
Ready to give the Beta a try? Here’s how:
- 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.
To Revert back to Live, from Beta:
- Jagex Launcher Users:
- Close the clients you're using.
- Right-click the Jagex Launcher icon on your taskbar
- Click "Exit"
- Wait a few seconds.
- Load the Jagex Launcher from your start menu normally.
- For Non-Jagex Launcher Users:
- Close the clients you're using.
- Reload the client as per normal.
How do I give feedback?
With the aim of this patch being refinement before launch we are asking people to focus their feedback on how the systems feel compared to currently on live, there will be plenty of time in future for bigger picture ideas but right now we want to set a solid foundation for the other styles like Necromancy currently has. Are your slayer tasks taking longer then normal? Are bosses flowing differently? How do you feel about the visual information you are getting from your tooltips and buffs etc
Once you have played around with the changes for a bit and have some feedback you want to share please do so via the following:
- The #Combat-Beta channel in the Official Discord.
- This Beta Thread on the subreddit.
If you are talking about the changes in other places like streams, twitter etc we will endeavour to hear from you all but using the above channels will be the easiest place to have your voice heard!
What is changing/patch notes
Since the last beta, we're generally pretty happy with how systems changes are performing, and feedback has reinforced this.
However, a large amount of player feedback is from our most devoted combat players, with concerns that the beta is introducing too much power.
We're using this beta iteration to tone down the amount of power being introduced; pulling multiple levers at once to better manage the distribution of damage and more closely line up with the live game.
As always please let us know if you have any feedback.
Damage Potential
"With the first iteration of Damage Potential with Necromancy's released we set a minimum hit chance required to deal damage to 25%. Since moving all styles to this system we've noticed that this can cause a number of issues for older content so have reduced this drastically."
Changes
- Reduced the hit chance required to hit an NPC
- 25% → 1%
Critical Strike Damage
"Critical strike was overperforming, combined with the hit cap changes it meant that players were doing too much damage compared to the live game."
We're bringing the critical strike damage formula down, to better match the live game, and bring power down across the board.
Changes
- Lowered critical strike damage formula across all styles
- Level 90: 60% → 35%
- Level 120: 75% → 50%
- Increased the damage of guaranteed critical strike abilities such as Shadow Tendrils and Smoke Tendrils as they were affected by these changes
Critical Strike Adrenaline Buff
"With the new base critical strike chance and hit cap increase, the additional adrenaline gained from critical strike effects such as Tsunami allowed our top-end players to deal an unintended level of burst damage. We've reduced the adrenaline gain from these abilities to ensure this doesn't happen consistently, while still allowing you to 'pop off' during critical moments."
Changes
- Reduced the adrenaline gain from the critical strike buff from Meteor Strike, Incendiary Shot, and Tsunami
- 10% → 6%
Fractured Staff of Armadyl
"FSOA was noticeably lacking in our test worlds after the reduction of critical strike damage & critical strike adrenaline. We're giving it a passive in the beta to see if this helps remove some of the lost damage, and reduce the damage falloff when out of sunshine."
Changes
- NEW* Passive: Shattered Siphon
- Now generates echos of time when critically striking
- At 5 stacks launch a time strike (values matching special attack)
- Disabled whilst instability is active.
Greater Fury
"Greater fury having guaranteed crit was comboing too well with critical strike adrenaline buffs and critical strike damage; meaning melee when played correctly was performing too well, we're moving away from guaranteed crit all the time, but still ensuring greater fury is better than the live game."
Changes
- Increased base damage to correctly act as a Greater variant of Fury
- AVG damage: 105% → 120%
- Replaced the guaranteed critical strike effect
- 25% chance for your next melee attack to critically strike
- 100% chance for your next melee attack to critically strike if Greater Fury critically strikes
Ruby Bolts - Blood Forfeit
"Ruby bolts didn't quite hit the mark with our last beta update, so we've given them some additional power in line with their original identity."
Changes
- Increased Ruby bolt (e) damage scaling
- Now scales between an additional 25% and 125% ability damage based on your target's current life points.
Anticipation
"Whilst we like the changes we made to anticipation, it's clear that players were using it in its previous form too much to justify us changing it to off-GCD right now. We're considering doing these changes again in the future, once we're able to give players an ability that replaces how the functionality they're using anticipate for in the live game."
Changes
- Reverted off-GCD Anticipation changes
Magma Tempest
"Some of our more combat-savvy players who were threading an auto-attack in with magma tempest were noticing a big loss in damage after its removal. We're adding a bit more damage back to magma to help recover some of that.
We're weary of adding too much power here as a large portion of players that were using the normal magma cast are essentially gaining free damage with this change."
Changes
- AVG damage: 200% → 220%
Special Attack Damage
"Changes to hitcap, critical strike damage, and the increased critical strike chance given meant that our topmost players were destroying bosses too fast for us to be comfortable with. We're pulling down some numbers to make up for the power introduced by the beta."
Changes
- Reduced the damage on a number of special attacks
- Dragon Claws - Slice and Dice
- AVG damage: 400% → 360%
- Dark Bow - Descent of Darkness
- AVG damage: 240% → 210%
- Bow of the Last Guardian - Balance by Force
- AVG damage: 275% → 200%
- Bow of the Last Guardian - Perfect Equilibrium
- AVG damage: 10% + 35% of previous → 12% + 30% of previous
Seren God Bow
"Seren godbow is a headache complex weapon, critical strikes in the new system added more damage variation to the ability, so we're reducing the variation at its core, this'll mean it's easier to understand and will do decent damage more consistently, but keeps its niche of being better at big bosses."
Changes
- AVG damage: 140% (per shot)
- Initial shot always targets the centre of the NPC
- Subsequent shots target tiles within a 5x5 area around the centre
- Note: This means that 5x5 enemies will always be hit 5 times
Bow of the Last Guardian
"We got a lot of feedback regarding the bow of the last guardian's tooltip, so we've cleaned up and reverted some of the changes we previously made to reduce visual noise."
Changes
- Perfect equilibrium buff no longer turns red when it's primed.
- Perfect equilibrium buf is now hidden when leaving combat, instead of on weapon swap.
- Balance by force buff now uses the same priorities as Perfect equilibrium, (they'll appear next to each other on the buff bar)
PvP Damage Effectiveness
"Burst damage can be quite an issue in PvP and as most abilities are designed around PvN combat this can cause a number of issues. We've implemented a 'PvP Damage Effectiveness' feature that can be applied to abilities going forward to make simple changes where needed."
Changes
- Volley of Souls
- 55%
- Death Grasp
- 40%
- Overpower (Igenous cape)
- 60%
- Omnipower (Igneous cape)
- 65%
Melee Hit Timings
"A number of ability hit timings have changed with the melee rewrite and we've tweaked a few of them further based on feedback."
Changes
- Tuska's Wrath
- Hit splat is 1 cycle faster
- Quake
- Hit splat is 1 cycle slower
- Overpower
- Hit splat is 1 cycle slower
Vinewhip
"Several players expressed that they liked the old vine whip special attack, we've reinstated it after cleaning up a number of the bugs it had. We'll keep the poison-based special for a future special attack if the theming fits."
Changes
- Removed the poison-based special attack
- Reinstated the area of effect special attack.
Lengswords
"The lengs were intended to add some variation to melee that players could play around, but the proc chance was too consistent and damage benefits were too low, alongside this, the adrenaline benefits combined with more recent rewards such as vestments of havoc & jaws of the abyss, meant that melee players were getting too much adrenaline for free."
Changes
Mainhand:
- T95: 7% chance to apply a Primordial ice stack
- T85: 5% chance to apply a Primordial ice stack
- Both: No longer generate adrenaline when gaining a stack
- T85 now has access to the icy tempest special attack
Offhand:
- T95: 3% chance to apply a Primordial ice stack
- T85: 1% chance to apply a primordial ice stack
- Frostblades damage 12% AD → 24% AD
Special attack:
- Icy tempest main hit: AVG damage 100%→ 110%
- Icy tempest area of effect hits: AVG damage 155% → 165%
- Icy tempest now applies its bonus damage to the primary target on both hits.
Action bar text
Changes
- Reverted the font for key bind text to match the live game
- Reverted position of ability cooldown information back to the top-right to match the live game
Other
Changes
- Combat dummies
- Updated 'Max hit' mode to guarantee critical strikes
- Updated how the player who modifies the mode is stored so that the dummy remembered who they are if they logout
- Reduced the maximum damage of Dominion mines
- 30,000 → 10,000
- Reinstated the Eldritch Crossbow's auto-attack
- Fixed an issue that could occur when using Bladed Dive while having Laceration Boots equipped
- Fixed an issue where the Split Soul icon would not correctly swap back to Soul Split
- Fixed an issue where Greater Ricochet was not correctly applying on-hit effects
- Fixed an issue where channeled abilities were being incorrectly cancelled when moving north-west of the target
- Ek-zek-kil's Bleed AVG damage increased 65%→67.5%
- Vestments of havoc's increased adrenaline no longer works with non-melee styles.