We're thrilled to see so many of you try your hand at the new Combat Achievements! Really, Ghommal won't stop raving about it! If you haven't heard yet, Combat Achievements are a brand new task system designed to inject a little more spice and challenge into your PvM experience. It rewards those brave enough to complete some of Gielinor's toughest challenges!
We've been closely monitoring your response to Combat Achievements so far, and and these are our initial thoughts. This isn't an exhaustive list of everything that we've heard, but here's what we're currently looking at for next week.
First off, you've said that some of the tasks feel too difficult in comparison to the rewards on offer. It's absolutely true that the 'Easy' and 'Medium' tier rewards aren't the most noteworthy. Rewards at the higher tiers are better, but are also not considerably game-changing. When we originally pitched the idea of Combat Achievements, feedback suggested that we should focus on promoting players' sense of personal achievement, rather than offer something that players would feel obliged to complete. And while we think that's the right approach, we do however recognise that this design can feel somewhat demotivating to some.
The solution? We think there's scope to increase the rewards, but we'd like to consider this at a later date pending more feedback after the dust has settled. If you still feel we should introduce more rewards later down the line, we'll consider addressing this in a future Poll.
Next, let's talk about the range of difficulty for tasks. Why do some tasks within the same tier have wildly varying levels of difficulty? This is intentional. It's virtually impossible to create tasks that are all equal in difficulty whilst also providing variation for players AND spanning multiple areas of the game. The tier of task provides a ballpark estimate of difficulty for all of the tasks collectively rather than individually. Think of it like this: how do all of the tasks within the 'Easy' tier feel compared to all of the tasks in the 'Medium' tier as a whole? Is there a reasonable and appropriate jump in skill compared to the leap players needed from 'Medium' to 'Hard'? If there are individual tasks which are overly challenging for their tier, that's something we can address on a case by case basis.
Tasks should be challenging, but no task should feel impossible to complete or dependant solely on luck rather than skill. For this reason, we're going to reduce the RNG element of 'Squashing the Giant'. Currently, Obor's ranged and melee attacks do not provide full protection from protection prayers, which means that your success depends on his failure. We plan to change this so that the task will only fail if you aren't using protection prayers against his attacks.
We're also aware that Arclight is required for a couple of 'Easy' and 'Medium' tier tasks, specifically 'Not So Great After All' and 'Demonbane Weaponry'. That's despite our recommendation in the Combat Achievements Blog that players would only need base 60 or base 70 stats respectively to attempt these. So, we'll be changing the tasks to instead require any Demonbane Weapon rather than Arclight specifically, meaning you'll be able to choose between using Silverlight, Darklight, or Arclight to complete them.
We'll also be changing the 'Prepared for Battle' task in the 'Easy' tier so that accounts with low Defence levels can still complete it. We originally promised that these accounts would be able to complete up to and including the 'Hard' task tier, and we'd like to stay true to our word.
Last but not least, the tasks 'Fighting as Intended' and 'Fighting as Intended Il' will be tweaked so that they can be completed on World 45, as there is currently no F2P Permanent DMM World.
We can confirm that if you've already completed any of the tasks being changed, your hard earned completion will not be affected!
You can still expect some additional smaller tweaks and changes, which we'll let you know about in next week's game update newspost. For now, please continue to enjoy the release of Combat Achievements and share your progress with us! Thanks for your patience whilst we address any issues and congratulations to those of you who have been getting stuck in with the new challenges!
We'd love to hear your feedback so please let us know what you think via our official forums, on the 2007Scape Reddit, the Steam forums or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel.
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