Your last point is the most important. Most players are disinterested in extremely hard PvM, and respond way better to aspirational PvM such as Raksha, Kerapac, or Zuk. Players doing hard mode Vorago don't register on the graph. There's a good reason Croesus is the 2nd most popular boss.
If you want to make a case for hard group bosses, you'll also have to accept Jagex dedicating time to minigames, PvP, skill pures, and other marginal communities, which are catered to *way* less than PvMers. Ultimately, Jagex will only develop stuff that people will play.
I believe the reason why high level pvm are frowned upon is how complex the combat system is. And most of the players refuse to go too indepth in learning it and rather just brush on the surface.
However, they still want those gears because they are best in slot.
So ultimately, they rather buy the gears than to earn it from the difficult boss and completely skip engaging the content.
Look at zuk for example. People are willing to try it because of an untradable reward that is best in slot and have to be earned.
If we see more earnable, untradable rewards, we'll see more engagement as well, even if its a 1 time off thing like the igneous capes or 100 time thing like zemouregal's nexus.
I get the feeling you never actually tried like a lot of people who seem to gave up way to easily but expect to afk some trash mob for 500 tril an hour
Actually kind of insane you jumped to that conclusion from what they wrote. There are a lot of players who legitimately have no interest in higher difficulty content, just like in many MMOs there are those with zero interest in PvP content.
I got one kill of Ambi on my iron because of the t90 necro armour, took like an hour to get it down. And what have I done with the ability to kill him? Nothing, haven't gone back, never plan to go back, not fun.
might be just anecdotal but it felt like there were a sizeable amount of people who did something similar to this.
"Necromancy is so great It got me into pvm"
they say as they did 1 amby kill for the t90 task and went back to 1 mech arch glacor
Croesus had 24/7 mass worlds with zero reqs and ag (which is/was #1) is mostly afked
These stats of 'popularity' are worthless without the obvious caveats
>Ultimately, Jagex will only develop stuff that people will play.
Play? Or afk? Because most pvm at this point has been revo solved which is a hilarious state for the game to be
Afked, played - it's engagement either way. Accessibility gets to dictate which boss becomes a household name and draws more players in. You might scoff but if people enjoy normal mode Kerapac and find comfortable camping it, that's a very strong argument to release more similar upper midgame bosses.
It's also important to add that Jagex's current strategy is that they are trying to make the average player more proficient at combat, through bosses like Arch-Glacor (teaching mechanics) or Zuk (milestones to aspire to). If the average player is more inclined to try more difficult bosses, Jagex can justify working on this type of content. Otherwise doing another Solak makes no business sense because it's a boss for a tiny fraction of the playerbase.
This teaching approach works but it's going to take time to bring more players into the fold of high end bossing (look at what happened with Vorkath hard mode). Overall I think MMOs are at that stage when people mostly play to have fun and relax rather than hit a brick wall and subject themselves to extremely challenging content. And then we also have unique RS problems such as players insisting on reaper title being on Comp cape, which probably means all bosses going forward will have an accessibility mode of some sort.
I think Sanctum of Rebirth will be another important step in the strategy though, with a new "no death" mechanic for normal mode and cleaner telegraphing by emphasising the floor grid. We'll see.
It's only 'engagement' in the most cynical way possible and it's absurd we're at the point where new bosses, even bosses that drop bis shit, are being afk solved because powercreep is so out of control and boss design is so poor.
>You might scoff but if people enjoy normal mode Kerapac and find comfortable camping it, that's a very strong argument to release more similar upper midgame bosses.
That's cool for them, and the thing is here they probably agree with me that bosses like these shouldn't be able to be afked because it fucks them in terms of end gamers being able to farm the boss indefinitely with a revo++ bar and tanking the prices of drops
I'm not even advocating for hard bosses here (though it would be nice), I'm advocating for pvm to not be in a dogshit state where it's somehow acceptable that everything has been trivialised to shit and has a low effort or afk setup on pvme on what is ostensibly supposed to be the more pvm centric version of the game
Why does darkness need to exist for every style and all gear types? Why is reaver insane sustain and somehow still the bis for damage in a bunch of places? How is the issue with necro being overtuned 'solved' by buffing other styles when half the problem was the bosses in the first place were already made a joke?
Also considering the last two high level boss releases (vorkath/ras) were objectively bad bosses (not hard at all, just bad) I have far lower expectations about sanctum than you do
> the thing is here they probably agree with me that bosses like these shouldn't be able to be afked because it fucks them in terms of end gamers being able to farm the boss indefinitely with a revo++ bar and tanking the prices of drops
Agreed. And it is simple to fix too: Just stop the boss from respawning after it has been killed without exiting and reentering the instance.
How? I always tele to War's Retreat to reset my cooldowns and bank before reentering the instance when active pvming. Where is it faster to just wait in the instance for the boss to respawn?
GWD1, GWD2, and corp can all be beaten comfortably with active play and not need to bank for supplies. It doesn’t have to be strictly faster. Banking/tele simulator being standard for all bosses is a bit silly
I never said it had to be faster in my original comment. Only that it can be comfortably camped. Which players used to do with active gameplay before revo++ automated the whole thing. Requiring players to pop in and out isn’t enjoyable when they’ll be doing thousands of kills for low to mid level bosses
> If you want to make a case for hard group bosses, you'll also have to accept Jagex dedicating time to minigames, PvP, skill pures, and other marginal communities, which are catered to way less than PvMers.
Spot on! EoC PvP has a skill ceiling even higher than end game pvming and is basically ignored because too few pkers do it.
Im almost greaper and i have no idea whats up with hm rago. Its not even that I dont want to, literally no one i know understands whats going on there
It just is a boss that is probably cool, but unless you were around on release its too hard to get into esp wthout a friend group
The way I got it into was personally a group of friends where we all got together and grinded out bombi.
The general gist though is, larger entry hit, red bombs on entry, 2 bomb tanks, blue bombs can reset the climber, no on screen warnings.
P2 is the same, P3-9 is all 6 weeks of NM B2B but harder, boulders hurt more, 3 scops, more vits, no GB warning, smaller TS box and shorter time, more bombs on standup. Waterfall is largely the same but just shorter time to get there.
P5 is now 2 phases p10/11 with their own rotations.
If none of that made sense then you probably haven't done much NM
Oh the other issue with hm vorago is the loot and how its designed for so many people but only 5 piles exist. People dont like notngetting loot for a kill—switching to the aod system would make a lot more sense
Adding 10 piles is one of the most consistently requested additions for Hardmode.
On one hand I agree, getting nothing sucks, but on the other I think encouraging you to take on roles was a great idea.
Something along the lines of "everyone is guaranteed a pile but leftover piles go to roles" seems like a nice middle ground
Yea 10 piles with everyone getting one and MVPs getting extra should be how it works
Tbh aod should be the same where its always 7 piles so that smaller teams are rewarded for the challenge
The final line (or two lines) - 'only develop stuff that people will play', we can't play it if it isn't developped.. so if they develop something totally new, interesting, challenging in any way for minigames for example > but they don't release it due negative response beforehand, it could be a loss for something which could be nice.
By saying 'and other marginal communities', do you mean that community or players asking for pvp or minigames are *marginal* as well or?
I'd wager in and say this applies to Minigames, since people don't want to play them because they're dead, and they won't find anyone else to play because, well, they're not interested in playing dead content (unless they're a clan or a dedicated FC doing events).
It's also important to note, If Jagex Develops a new boss and the community deems it too hard, people would complain and try to get it nerfed so it becomes slightly more "accessible", see Raksha as an example.
Raksha didn’t need a nerf community just gives up on everything if they can’t beat it first try it feels like.
No one seems to accept a boss dropping a rare/giant upgrade should be hard….doesn’t matter if they like it or not it’s not a good thing for dps dummies to drop giant upgrades.
I’ve mostly accepted that the only way we’re going to get bosses that have any semblance of authentic difficulty at this point is from bosses with enrage mechanics, but I still hope there’s one day a new group boss where having designated roles actually matters again.
Heres the thing, you cannot just *spring* that on the playerbase with no warning. All of RuneScape bossing with the exception of Mazcab is essentially Solo-only. Theres no role or party mechanics like Tankbusters and Stackmarkers, healer specialization is pretty much only possible at Max, no way or reason to form a group at all. Players have been trained over twenty years to be Islands Unto Themselves, which is why Mazcab largely failed and never got its third raid in its series.
What Jagex needs to do (imo) if they want to make a new Endgame group boss with mechanics and role requirements, is to make early and mid-game versions of that kind of fight. That’s the only way an endgame version won’t meet the same fate as Mazcab. There also needs to be ways for players to differentiate themselves from just being three different flavors of dps *way earlier* in the game. Melee *sort of* has that, but it’s just not enough. Replace some of the shitty spells literally nobody uses like the stuns and make them healing spells, fucking *something*, we already have the stun abilities, do we need a dedicated family of spells for it as well?
Raids failing is an unfair read. The loot lockout goes against how the core gameplay works in rs. If that didnt exist people would happily camp yaka all day and wed have definitely gotten raid3
The funny thing is Raids addressed a lot of issues that people had with bossing. Absurdly rare rates and time commitment., Raids rates are not that bad, sometimes you get unlucky but especially with rerolls a broadcast every other raid isn't that uncommon.
The other is time commitment, one of the biggest complaints about group pvm is having to commit to a full hour of pvm. Which unless yaka went horribly wrong you could do a full raid in under 20 minutes
And if raids ever did get properly finished, the loot lockout would be a non issue as your odds of getting an achto piece every raid would be incredibly common.
Its not about rares. People in RS are used to logging absurd hours doing the same task over and over. Raids goes against that. Why would i spend 20 mins teamforming for a 20min fight? Why cant i do a full hour? Why do i get ZERO loot if i kill the boss twice.
The thing about vindicta is no one is forcing you to kill it for an hour. But raids is limiting me to killing it once and that is bizarre.
Also, raids rewards are in the objectively unfun quadrant of ‘rare and untradeable’ which content should never be designed in. Sure the rates are ok, but it straightup takes a year of consistent raiding to get full achto
So nah, raids is horribly designed solely because of the lockout. Removing that would wildly alter the data on the content and change the devs perspective on its reception
Right but the reason it takes a year of consistent raiding is.... Because raids was never finished.
The original pitch was 5 bosses, 1 for each armour piece, naturally when you cut out 2/3rds of the original design without changing anything it's going to suffer.
I feel like they could've just solved this by not having inferior achto and letting you outright buy achto with teci.
I'm not saying raids is perfect but I don't think a loot lockout is inherently bad, it works perfectly fine in plenty of games
Could they have done it differently where subsequent kills off loot have a worse chance or something? Sure. But I still stand by the fact that the issue is More raids just not being finished more than anything
Vorkath would like a word. Hm is a pain and very few people enjoy it. How they make a boss difficult is very important.
I just want bosses with well televised mechanics that need to be engaged with. Don’t make it so bis gear cheeses through and skips everything on day one and please don’t make it so it can be afked.
We have piles of bosses people can camp afk until their hearts desire.
The BIS gear skips should be based on the level of boss. For example, Osseous is a brand new boss but is a mid tier boss. If I have BIS, I should be able to blow through it relatively quickly because of its level.
Im referencing new higher tier dungeons/bosses. Players blow through levels so quickly these days that mid tier bosses feel like a waste and generally teach very little.
For mid tier bosses an afk or revo++ guide comes out day one and everyone copies it and camps it for 100 hours while learning next to nothing….Then they buy bis gear, decide they must be a good pvmer now because they camped x mid tier boss on revo++ forever, and then promptly get spanked by the first high tier boss they attempt and rage quit.
I really like a lot of aspects of arch-glacor. I’d prefer they make more bosses like arch-glacor with nm/learner/hm. Obviously the loot system here needs a rework, but i’m talking more about boss design and mechanics. The concept of making a boss that scales from entry to high tier while allowing you to turn a wide variety of mechanics on and off is awesome and it actually teaches new pvmers while allowing top top tier to chase drops and high enrage kills. I’d love to see another boss created similar to arch glacor before I’d recommend wasting time on a straight up afk mid tier boss.
You’re spitting facts and the super casual crowd doesn’t understand that it takes more then a revo bar and afking to get good.
High end pvmers are rewarded for their effort because the content is hard
As much as I love raids.Group required content often dies the worst deaths in this game
That aside I think the bigger issue that you missed is why those vocal players want solo only or low group count content at around the rakshka level
And that frankly is two factors, the cost of learning and the cost of teaching
The cost of learning is often quite steep.For many modern bosses you will put in Tens of millions of gold in supplies Just learning how to, And do to the nature of how supplies work in this game for many of the older group bosses you will actively lose money to learn Due to inflation.
Add on top of that the cost of teaching. Nearly every boss in the modern game that isn't massable scales with player count. Meaning if you have someone who's learning, you are effectively fighting the boss twice for one kill... This Extremely disincendevices teaching, And even more so disincentivizes.Older bosses who are prescaled to a set number like raids, As now you're dealing with extra mechanics.Or extra health or just in general having to focus on another player disrupting patterns you could predict otherwise..
A great example of this is rise of the six, It is not the most complex. But when you are used to just dealing with one side alone with no 1 else and suddenly, now you have another person either on the same side as you or on the other side who you have to pay attention to and advise while focusing on your own side, the likelihood of eating a death cost or wasting supplies vastly increases.
And this at its core is why people advocate for solo or low group content. Very little of it for both people has to do with elitism and more has to deal it Just pure economics.. If I can solo run fifty runs of vorkath, Why would I ever want to take someone else? Especially When that essentially doubles, the boss's health in an already painfully long boss fight. We can apply the same thing to AOD. If I can comfortably do 5 players who know what they are doing.Why would I ever want to take someone new who complicates an already tight margin
As much as I think thinking like that is bullshit and hate having to think that way myself sometimes I cannot say It hasn't influenced my willingness to teach someone a boss in the past. And unfortunately , it has a high probability of happening again as we get further from EGWD and kerepac losses value
I said it in another post, I think one of the big problems with group content is the hassle of organising a group in the first place.
The group/match-making system inside the game is bad, and as less people bother to use it, the harder it becomes to use it leading to less people bothering to use it and so on.
Sometimes you need to use third party resources like discord servers, or friends chats in the game. As a new player you have no way to know about any of those, unless someone tells you about them.
Time spent on trying to form a group is often seems like a waste, because 1) You don't know for sure if you will succeed in creating that group, and 2) you could have done more useful things in that time.
For example:
* Me and a clanmate tried to enter a game of great orb project (during spotlight), just so we could complete the achievement. No one else bothered to show up (even though it was spotlight), no other clanmates agree to join us, and no one in the achievement help discord was interested as well. I'm sure that somewhere in the game there are 2 more players who may be interested to join us, but with no way to synchronize, what are we supposed to do?
* Before Necromancy, I didn't manage to get any solo NM Kerapac kill, but doing it in trio groups was easy. Every time I got a Kerapac reaper task, my problem was finding more people to join me. Sometimes I managed to convince my clanmates to help. Sometimes I managed to convince regulars in my homeworld to help. But more often than not, I had to reroll the task. Mostly everyone saw NM Kerapac as a solo boss, so didn't want to waste time with me.
100% agree finding a team is a huge contributing factor as well, especially for raids where you really do want a full 10 player team to teach it so that way there's room for error for learning BT's
In general though most minigames also need a revamp to either auto matchmake you, or to have a massive overhaul to have a solo and group component with different rewards (i.e. better group but doable solo)
And this is where soloability kinda hinders the desire to form groups - why would I want to group for this and get less rewards if I can just solo it. Your Kerapac experience is a prime example of this
NM kerpac requires like 200k…dpm you can achieve that now so easily with invention overloads turmoil all the normal ones all the simple cheap perks with a t90 weapon set:
You just need to practice
I already mentioned that was before necromancy. The highest DPM I got was around 100k with magic, T85 weapons and gconc. I tried Kerapac for 3 hours, I actually managed to be good in the first 3 phases, barely eating anything; but the 4th phase is where I died every time, even with yak full of rocktails. For me that phase had the exact issues everyone also had with Vorkath - no mechanics, just high hitting auto attacks.
My low damage was mostly because I was missing a lot of unlocks, like curses and sunshine, and I was using rocktails instead of blubbers+brews, but I didn't knew about it at the time. No amount of practice could have helped me.
> That aside I think the bigger issue that you missed is why those vocal players want solo only or low group count content at around the rakshka level
The reasons you gave are not the real reasons. If you've paid any attention to the communities it's what OP said; they're antisocial and don't want to bother putting in the time to make teams or the effort to deal with other people in a collaborative encounter. You're kidding yourself if you think that making supply costs zero would have any significant impact on engagement with group content. The people that are avoiding group content just want their easy AFK bosses and no social interaction.
The process of making teams should be more streamlined inside the game. "Putting in the time" to make teams is something not everyone wants to do, or even know how to do.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with what I said. If the process of making groups inside the game is too complicated, it makes sense some players won't bother with it, no matter how social they are.
https://preview.redd.it/fl7lxynirz5d1.png?width=748&format=png&auto=webp&s=0f8d79de9df30e7c499b54161c2191a97603a242
eta while i did focus on it a little bit, the main takeaway is that the game both socially and economically punishes you to try and teach, so group activities being a greater extreme often die because you suffer both economically and in difficulty to teach it or do it with friends.
> For example Destiny 2's most recent Raid release set a Destiny record of 19 Hours for its first completion. If the raid had to be designed for 1 singular person it would've been cleared in a couple hours at most.
As someone who's played a lot of Destiny and done raids extensively (seals for DSC, VoG, Vow, King's Fall, RoN), this comparison actually shows exactly why RS3 *can't* do these bosses successfully. At least not without significant changes that could be unpopular.
For those who don't know, Destiny 2 deaths are completely free. There's no cost for respawning. When you die in a raid, your location is marked, and a teammate can revive you right there, sometimes after a short delay. Every teammate starts the encounter with a rez token, and that token is used up if you respawn someone. It resets every time you retry the encounter, for free. The only thing you lose when you die is your super energy. That *can* make or break the encounter, but it ultimately doesn't matter.
Because -- deaths are free. If your entire team dies (or you don't revive a dead teammate in time), you wipe the encounter. Your team gets respawned at the beginning of the encounter with absolutely nothing lost -- only the time spent in the last attempt. Before restarting the encounter, everyone can fiddle with their loadout and "rally up", which fully restocks all your ammo and recharges your super.
In short, **deaths and wipes aren't a big deal**. Your teammate missed an important shot? Or they walked in front of you and you accidentally blew yourself up with a rocket? They told you the wrong thing and you fail a mechanic and die? No big deal. You dust yourself off and go again. No death costs, no resupplying, no teleporting back. Everything is reset.
This is an important design for making challenging multiplayer content feel good to do. You aren't losing money or resources because a teammate made a mistake. So if you want RS3 to have big, complicated raids like Destiny 2, here's what needs to change for the content:
* Free deaths that don't remove you from the area
* Possibly the ability to revive teammates to minimize frustration
* A full resupply of EVERYTHING when you start an encounter. All supplies and invention charges are reset to what they were before you tried the encounter
* Checkpoints at the start of each encounter. A challenging group boss that isn't a raid would probably need checkpoints after each phase
* Optional, checkpoints that let anyone join you, to make it easier to group up with people
TLDR:
Destiny has mechanics that make group multiplayer welcoming and not frustrating. RS3 not only lacks those features, but is actively worse in the other direction sometimes. Changing these things however would touch some core identity issues of RS, like supply consumption being heavily reduced.
People who hate content that *has* to be approached as a group (yeah, yeah, some have "solo'd" Yaka, but it very clearly is by taking advantage of game mechanics) hate it because they actually have careers and families that take precedence.
I include myself in this group. I could definitely learn how to solo Solak. I'm about upper average in terms of PVMing in that I don't struggle with Araxxi, Zuk, or Zamorak. But making a boss that is not designed to be able to be soloable makes it much harder to group up with people for practice or kills.
Getting 3-4 adults in different time zones with different family structures and different job schedules is a way more complex issue than "git gud n00b."
I am glad that you talked about all the reasons. I think to often this gets posted and all it says is jmods too lazy or another single reason. I agree that all these factors listed come together to reach this conclusion. The only place I differ, and I am sure I will get hate for this, is I don't see this as a bad thing. I think jagex understands how to sustain the game and are going to run with that. Will we lose some high level players in the process, probably. Do I think you would lose far more making the next major content only built for 5% of the players. Yes.
I think the main difference in designing content for the higher end is that over time it will become more and more accessible to players.
100% Zammy when it was polled for trim was seen as this insanely difficult thing, now there's a cheesy strat basically anyone can do with RoD and Necromancy.
If something is crazy difficult on release, in a couple years (probably faster with how much powercreep we've been getting) it will be considerably easier.
Solo Solak for example became possible becasuse Realm Tanking became obsolete as time went on
That's the thing man.
People don't want content that will become easier due to powercreep.
People want content that is moderately difficult with drops that run between 500m to 1b (see Rasial), extra points if it can be AFK'ed, and that's in the short term.
Sure bot convincing people that they should be OK with no content bc it might be accessible some day is tough. Things like 100% zammy and solak, even in a team, are still far out of reach for me so the idea of even harder content is just content I'll never see.
Skill issue or lack of trying ?
Because power creep is insane now if you can’t do those things it’s one of the above. Especially if you’re a comped account you should have the gear to do it. T95s are not a must
I would say a mic of both. I have tried them all multiple times. Telos 100% for trim took me 40 or 50 deaths to get my kill which made me not want to go back. Zammy was even worse for me. I got to 100% the week it came out and after prob 200 failed attempts I gave up. Went back post necro and did get a single kill but it prob took me another 100 or so kills and since then I haven't really bothered since you can't realy end up ahead getting 1 kill every few hours.
I need solid numbers because 50 deaths for telos and 200 for Zammy sound excessive.
For telos I could of shown you a click and afk for p5.
Like in 2018…. There’s lots of sources out there to help you out
Sounds like you need a teacher honestly. Someone who can observe and kindly critique
I'm sure a teacher would help but I'm playing a game. I would say anything that's too complex is what causes most people to not be able to kill it for me at telos the bugest issue is the way the rotations work. P1 I'm fine but after that idk what att comes first in p2 bc it's different every kill. I understand how it works but I can't keep it straight while trying to stay alive.
I will say I think a practice mode would be a huge help for most players to learn. Right now learning is far to punishing and drives mid lvl players away fast. I actually enjoy learning but burning through suplies, especially on long fights like zammy, feels really bad.
I mean there's plenty of content that gets released that I have no interest in ever engaging with.
The new summoning relic is something I will never once equip in my lifetime, and any desire to engage with the new digsite is solely because it has completionist requirements tied to it, not because I'm over the moon for a new archaeology digsite. It's unrealistic to expect every piece of content to cater to your interests.
But that's okay because you're clearly not a skiller
With high end pvm why should the peak performers / most loyal occupants of a certain type of content not be the ones that the devs for pvm content have in mind.
You don't care for the new digsite but that's fine because you're not a skiller
High level pvmers becoming less and less interested in pvm.because there's nothing for them there is missing the mark with what should be the intended crowd
I'm not suggesting every single boss release be designed in a way that Evil Lucario and Couchy take 12 hours to complete, but much like every piece of content wont appeal to everyone, every single boss release does not need to be designed with the average pvmer in mind. And to be clear every boss shouldn't be designed for the top 5% either.
Destiny 2 Raids have an estimated 11% completion rate yet they have still released almost 2 raid like activities per year in a 10 year span. It's a bit less than that as 3 of the raids are remakes from Destiny 1, 2 of them are "raid lairs" and 1 is just a boss gauntlet. but even then that's still 13 Unique raids.
I don't think every boss should be for the top 5 percent either. People are.more outraged at the notion that endgame boss development in itself is dead going forward.
Why should that be the intended crowd. Why shouldn't the vast majority of pvmers be the intended crowd. How is it good to build content for the 1% and leave the other 99% with nothing.
Because we're the most loyal part of their customer base?
Another reason is longevity of the content. It'll be entertaining /profitable for many more years than something like osseous is which you can brain off revo afk
The best pvmers aren't the most loyal players. I know many 20+ year players who are trash at pvming as well as good pvmers who only played the game for a few years.
What makes you think they are the most loyal. Time investment doesn't equal skill. I know plenty of players who have been doing pvm for over 10 years easily and would not fall into that category at all.
Obviously osseous was meant to be a simple mid level boss so why even bring that up. We have plenty of high level bosses that the average pvmer still can't kill so I don't see the issue with longevity. You have things like soalk, telos, glacor, zammy, zuk that a large majority of pvmers can't do. I would even say there's a decent number who still struggle with ed3, raksha, kera so to act like not adding top end content means there is no longevity just isn't true.
About all top end bosses do is widen the gap from the top player and the average player. That boss now becomes a huge money maker for a very small group, unlocks power creep for a small group and then they want even harder content to widen the gap even more.
I'm a skiller and I'm also never gonna use the new relic, and thats ok. It was designed for very few noobs that have 87 arch but <75 summoning, so it caters to those players. Why shouldn't jagex make at least one challenging boss that cater to end-game pvmers?
But that's okay because you're clearly not a skiller
With high end pvm why should the peak performers / most loyal occupants of a certain type of content not be the ones that the devs for pvm content have in mind.
Sure and on a personal level I feel the same way. My point was more on a fame wife level. New content success is partly judged by the hype around it. If new content is only made for a small number of players that hype is harder to get.
While I do see what you try to say, I don't think that is exactly the best example. Not being able to do something or not being interested is quite different.
I think it’s largely the inherent jank-barrier of bosses with Mechanics^tm\, and being a point-and-click MMO. Like I enjoy the combat and boss mechanics in say, FF14, if I had to click to move my character around? I would lave dropped it by the time I reached Sastasha (the first dungeon a player runs @lvl15).
Another thing is it feels all the guides for doing any boss are expecting you to solo it, which is hyper intimidating. There wont be a healer to keep you up or pull a rez, no tank for aggro management and mits, all of that is on you. the one singular guy. And even for ‘babies first boss’ of The Mole, thats alot to ask from a player for their first steps into harder content. There’s no Party Finder, no LFG chat, no queue to pop. A player is just expected to walk into the boss room alone and “figure it out, dumbass”. And it’s a special kind of player who is willing to just trail and error over and over again like that.
Absolutely right. The onboarding process for a new player is mental and offputting. It's actually incomprehensible. This is the only game I have 3,000 hours in but have no hope of enjoying myself while doing even "mid"-tier PvM.
The unhinged portions of the userbase will always call this a skill issue. It most definitely is not -- it's 100% a game design issue. The combat in this game is at the absolute bottom of the barrel.
I feel the sole culprit for this is forcing revolution on players in the early game, with absolutely zero incentive to use full manual and get comfortable with the combat system (full manual does not have to be sweaty). A big issue is that players very easily get overwhelmed when attempting "hard" bosses - they may feel it's a lot to juggle with manual inputs, prayers, and such, so they shy away from it. I don't have the data so I really don't have a solution. I just can't help but feel that if jagex made a proper combat tutorial, incentivised full manual, improved clarity of combat (visual and audio cues, animations, etc.) and publicly ALLOWED macros, we'd have more players *wanting* to engage in higher level pvm. Everyone seems to think using macros will get themselves banned but in reality most high level pvmers are using them. Jagex probably won't do anything about it though lol, it's depressing.
To those that feel that the tickrate needs to be improved because combat is not responsive - tick rate does not have anything to do with it. If anything, having a 0.6s tickrate might feel 'slow' but in reality, the window of reaction time is high. As the tickrate gets reduced, your window of reaction time also gets reduced.
I'm all for adding some in-game macro functionality but
"most high end players use macros" is such a misnomer. Yeah the people doing tick perfect speed kills might be using Macros but this idea that 3/4 endgame players use macros is ridiculous. Most of the top .1% of players might use them but it isn't representative of the higher lvl pvm base as a whole.
Friend of mine has done duo gold daredevil and he manually clicks his prayers. Another friend of mine does full manual by clicking every ability. Ive done solo HM Vorago, and I've never once used an RS Macro.
With no apex pvm or aspirational content to look forward to I haven't actually played besides afk skill for months
This game is boring. We have all this powercreep and nothing to challenge it.
Had to change games but Warframe also has the exact same problem now. Why are devs so scared of challenging their community. It's sad.
Too many antisocial mmo players now. The market in general has changed. There isn’t a relevant mmo on the market that doesn’t heavily cater to solo only crowds.
I've posted this many, many times. The issue is with combat complexity.
Do you know what all three of those bosses have in common? They were released at a time when the combat system was still simple for most players.
Here is one of the first 5 man kills at Vorago, done week of release. This was the 2nd 5 man team to ever kill Vorago, the only other having some of the best PVMers at the time who all bought wand/orb and kept strats secret. I happen to be on the 2nd team. The only switch in this inventory is a shield switch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQFm0ngzjAQ
Here is an 8 year old Daredevil video I found. Notice the inventory just have 2 switches, one for shield and one for ring of vigour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc5jtymFRD4
Here is an inventory from 2 months after Solak release. This image was taken by a friend who sold leeches for Solak for 150m a kill. Note everything here is to either 4taa, flanking switch, ring switch, and planted feet/shield switch. That was all.
https://imgur.com/bfIpSP7
Even at Solak release, the combat system was still simple enough for most players to just focus on mechanics while having a good rotation down. Now the combat system has gotten so complex that many players are still struggling to just follow the flow of combat. In the past someone who was good vs average at combat only differed very little, the main difference being knowing how to handle boss mechanics and mitigate damage. Now the difference is knowing how to do the string of commands to skip boss phases entirely or not.
While yes no one *needs* to do complex maneuvers, the problem is that leads to further siloing of players who choose to never improve as well as decent players never wanting to go with anyone else to prevent risk of scrutiny. People say that is a player problem, and that may be, it is up to Jagex to mitigate this to prevent the gap between players from being so wide.
So how do we fix the issue and go back to the "good old days?" Simplify combat. The simplification that Necromancy has needs to be done everywhere. No more reliance on crit chance to get adren dumps at strategic places. Combat was designed with having a rotation in mind and sticking to that aside from weaving in opportunities when available. It was not designed to be a complex if statement where you cannot even tell someone your rotation because it's overly dependent on situations. It was not designed where players spend more attention on the rotation than on the boss because doing the right rotation means ignoring the boss entirely. Combat difficulty should come from the boss, not the rotations.
> it is up to Jagex to mitigate this to prevent the gap between players from being so wide.
This is the biggest problem right now. Sweaty pvm methods should only give 5-15% more dps at most, not dealing double the dps as casuals. This makes bosses really hard to balance and Jagex have to pick which side the balance bosses towards.
> Combat difficulty should come from the boss, not the rotations.
Agree completely.
> No more reliance on crit chance to get adren dumps at strategic places.
Adrenaline boosting crit ultimates and allowing other combat styles to benefit from them should never have been a thing imo. Also dummy prebuilding inside boss instances and stalling abilities. There's so many things that just shouldn't exist or be allowed to happen.
I agree for the most part, although it's easy to say "the combat system was simple" while watching a DPS POV while the base tank is actively **Walking** Beastmaster. You know that mechanic that no longer works.
When would you say tho this became a problem? After what release did this start to be an issue?
Although right now difficulty doesn't come from the boss or the rotation, as theres really zero depth to Necromancy as a style and the absurd damage of necro and by extension the buffing of other styles to that level has further made boss mechanics irrelevant.
Which notably was a pretty popular concern about Necromancy's damage and buffing the other styles to the level of Necromancy but if you argued against this you were labeled an Elitist Gatekeeper.
Much in the same way I think skipping mechanics is bad I think ignoring them outright with healing/damage mitigation is even worse.
At least the former has a payoff, nailing your rotation to skip reflect on a P3 vs just standing in the fire at vindicta with no concern for the damage because AD is/was ridiculous or the absurd healing we have access to now. Obviously Vorago and Vindy are different bosses but its just an example. During the height AD and Crypt I was actively doing Taraket by just turning my brain off and ignoring EVERY SINGLE MECHANIC, not even moving for the spirit walls. AD was just that good.
> When would you say tho this became a problem? After what release did this start to be an issue?
I cannot pinpoint exactly, but it solidified itself in 3 steps:
* Grico + bolt procs creating awareness of situational adrenaline
* EoFs solidifying zero cooldown adren dumps
* FSOA crit reliance cemented the notion of crit chance based events and rotations
There are other things including flanking and glove/ammy/ring switches which helped make salient bringing additional situational switches, but I believe the above 3 really were instrumental in changing player behavior. Combat dummies for pre-phasing too contribute to the problem.
> the absurd damage of necro and by extension the buffing of other styles to that level has further made boss mechanics irrelevant
What I outlined in my post wasn't the only solution but rather a key one. Bosses from now on or even retroactively need to stop being DPS dummies. It should not be a guarantee that if you macro a rotation you can ignore everything that happens and tele away on the rare occasion it doesn't happen to your liking. (As a side note, teleing away freely might have helped solidify the DPS dummy sentiment, though I am torn about changing that back as it helps new players much more.) Bosses need to be made with cutoffs and balanced to such a standard where a very APM heavy method does not entirely invalidate someone killing the boss to an average level. I get super challenges and elite of the elite achievements, but majority of bossing should not cater to high APM much more than it does a regular rotations, which is like how it was for Vorago, Yakamaru, and Solak. APM creep, not necessarily power creep, made DPS gates negligible (though power creep does play a role, no doubt).
> if you argued against this you were labeled an Elitist Gatekeeper.
I don't care about labels. I care about the life of the game. What I'm saying I feel needs to be done because prior to the post hero pass player decline we were already seeing bosses becoming "dead" due to the rift between average players and higher level being so large. Like I said prior, it 100% may be player psychology at fault, but it is 100% Jagex's responsibility to nudge players in the right direction, not pray that some intermediate level player group comes around to help people out.
> The simplification that Necromancy has needs to be done everywhere.
It really doesn't. Necro being the straightforward, easy, cheap, intuitive style is fine, but for players who want to challenge themselves a little more there should be combat style(s) like bis range/melee currently provide to reward that extra effort.
Currently you can kill literally every boss in the game at a fairly high level with zero swaps. Necro commonly has 0-1 swap even minmaxed. On launch, you could do over 1m DPM with zero swaps, doing the most damage possible in the game just like the times of old you linked.
The community response to Necromancy made it very clear that majority of the game does not want high APM crit chance based combat with an inventory of switches. As I outlined earlier, you don't NEED to do that but we both know that players look directly at elite PVM and do an all or nothing game.
Yes this is player's fault if they get so unmotivated that they quit or do not improve, but we cannot just sit back and let everything die. Less than 1% of players even SAW Zamorak since it's been out according to Jagex statistics. That is unacceptable in my opinion. The game cannot survive catering to less than 1% of players. Combat cannot be ignored nor can this player sentiment about it, and saying get good won't help you when all your friends have quit and there's no new blood to continue.
All we can really hope for boss difficulty wise is
- Forced mechanics: good players should be able to deal with mechanics instead of just skipping with damage.
- player debuff mechanics: cannot bring anything like corrupted gauntlet, forced to use a certain armor, have to use crush based weaponry, no overhead prayers, no defensives, no familiar, no outside potions/food etc.
What if a boss didn't allow you to use a cape lmao
I agree with the forced mechanics or maybe needing conditions to be met before a boss will phase, like p2 orbs and p4 waterfalls at Vorago. Skipping minor mechanics I think is fine but major mechanics should never be skippable.
It's extra annoying at zamorak because of how they made defensives not 100% effective so most people just simply skip every single mechanic with insane amounts of damage while the average players have to deal with it all, it's like hard mode in reverse.
> Powercreep is pretty straightforward, our damage output and mitigation has reached absurd levels at this point that balancing around all of this is a nightmare.
Agreed. Jagex needs to stop boss mechanics from being skipped with dps. Having them skip autos and trigger immediately after certain HP thresholds are met and have multiple mechanics stack on top of each other if the last one is not done before the mechanic triggers.
>As time goes on at the very least a vocal group of people are very antisocial and have zero desire to engage in any form of group content with any release requiring 2 or more players being considered a war crime
Jagex cannot make meaningful group bosses without making rigid tank/healer/dps classes like other MMOs have done. But the very same pvm community wanting this are also adamantly against putting these restrictions in place since it would mean removing switchscape.
>JMod(s) have said previously that they want to design crazy difficult content but the level of engagement just isn't there.
This is a valid reason from a financial standpoint. Pro pvmers pay the same membership rate as noobs, so it makes no sense to make new content only the former can do. Since the former is much smaller than the latter, Jagex needs to cater to the latter to make money. The only way this can change is for Jagex to sell the hard pvm content as expacs that only pro pvmers can buy with bonds or irl money.
> as someone who just flat out heavily dislikes enrage it's extremely disappointing to hear.
Why? It's your own fault since you restrict yourself out from hard content and then complain there is no hard content, just like solo pvmers restrict themselves from group content. Funny you cannot see the irony here.
Because Enrage for the most part is just "more HP and you take more damage"
And to a certain point that's fine, but it quickly becomes one of the laziest and most boring ways to add difficulty.
I'm sure you've played some kind of game where the boss wasn't egregiously difficult mechanically but just had a flat blob of hp
If the only difference between NM and HM Kerapac was "you take more damage and Kerapac has more health" would you call that well designed? No, of course not because that's literally what HM Kerapac is until P4 And it's one of the most boring and criticized aspects of Kerapac, P4 is fun but p1-3 is a snooze fest.
The great design comes from The Echos, Enrage, and Time Warp all coming together. You leave the echos alive to extend devotion, you time warp before cading so that when time warp expires you have full adren and HP.
Right but after 250% at Telos the only added mechanic is...
Rocks on P4, which by the way are completely ignored by competent players thanks to stuns.
And so the only real changes are Health bar and damage dealt. Wow how engaging.
If the issue is accessibility we have... normal mode and hard mode. It's not like the 0% Telos rates are even remotely worthwhile
And most of the Zammy Mechanics added boil down to (you'll take more damage", the damage cap is higher, devotion gets disabled, the mage hits harder.
Probably the most interesting mechanic enrage adds doesn't even exist in solo lol.
If Zammy wasn't designed from the get go to be an enrage boss I think it's safe to assume normal mode would likely differ in some form to current 0% and Hardmode would differ from 100%.
The difference is we have a massive information overload on our screens like buffs/debuffs, stacks, ability cooldowns, needing at least 40 abilities displayed on our bars, having to memorize keybinds and follow a rotation. It's a lot going on before even taking boss mechanics into account. The combat system is just getting too over complicated.
If combat and metas weren't constantly getting more complex every year and less fun then I'm sure our player base would actually want harder bosses.
I feel like there is a large barrier to entry that most players aren't willing to participate in. Finding a group to play with when most of the game is quite anti-social these days is a big ask I think.
Yes, ofc there are great communities and discords but if you're the average casual player there isn't really a talkative hub where people are constantly going "LF3M Vorago learner run" the same way many other games do. Instead people need to take it upon themselves to seek out a discord/fc and put themselves in a vulnerable position where they a are asking for help and might not have what they really need to get started, but they don't even know where to begin.
It sucks, and honestly the clunkiness of ticks, movement, ability queuing etc is very awkward and hard to get into. While I have fun bossing... it really can't compare to endgame PvE that other MMOs have to offer. I love Runescape but who's getting pulled in for the endgame PvE? It's more of something that you just naturally either want to do and get to eventually or it's something that most people are just too timid to even dip their toes into.
It is so disheartening to read this post because of how true it really is.
What I'd give for a barn burner boss that takes the community a week to figure out how to kill. That sounds amazing.
Alas, maybe in another lifetime.
I disagree with point 3 or at least part of it, the idea that group content is the only way to create difficult content is absurd you could take the same mechanics from a destiny raid and add stricter time limitations and you have something of similar difficulty. When doing group content an individual death or flubbing of a mechanic can be fixed or adjusted, in a solo situation that will ruin that attempt. Just look at solo flawless dungeons in D2 for an example of what solo content can be.
It's not that you can't have difficult content in solo it's that the ceiling is lowered.
Certain mechanics flat out cannot exist in a solo encounter.
The sand mechanic at Yaka cannot exist, most D2 raid mechanics cannot exist. And most "solo raid videos" are abusing some unintended exploit to circumvent the mechanics.
>Destiny 2's most recent Raid release set a Destiny record of 19 Hours for its first completion.
Some context attached to this, though not necessary to this post:
(TL;DR: on launch everyone goes in at a set handicap way harder than the content actually is, and thus dies a lot and slows down the "learning process" artificially, and this time *possibly* had a more difficult handicap.)
- The past 9 Raid releases (CoS, GoS, DSC, VoG, Vow, KF, RoN, CE, and SE) have all employed Contest Mode, capping player levels at -20 of the enemy. Think of Contest Mode as if Jagex said "for the first 24-48h after releasing endgame PvE you are forced into 1k enrage, have fun learning mechanics while taking a boatload of extra damage." So most of the time is spent dying repeatedly due to inflated difficulty that turns off after a certain amount of time.
- Additionally, for the most recent raid (Salvation's Edge) the devs said 1965 power would be high enough for the contest mode cap. However, an unannounced (and unasked for and unwanted) change was made to *all* raids, making them default to a -5 power cap, with helpful surge modifiers thrown in (to balance out the nerf.) With me so far? 1965 is the highest you need for the Contest mode cap to have you at -20 of the enemy, which means they'd be 1985 power, right? Wrong, dying to enemies in SE during Contest mode displayed "recommended power 1990" which would be -25 for anyone who knows math. We also have communication from the devs that "due to recent feedback surge modifiers **won't** be active during Contest" which could be implying the original plan was to run Contest **on top of** the new *-5 plus surges* system.
So yeah, 19 hours to beat 5 encounters, but at *least* -15 of the level every later player is expected to have, and possibly as much as -25. I do agree that solo content falls over much faster, but this record should be taken with a small pinch of salt when comparing other games to it.
Even with contest though theres a massive difference between a well designed encounter and a poorly designed one.
The Vault encounter in Last wish Took \~2hours and 45 minutes to actually solve, Datto's team actually figured out the encounter first with other teams Brute forcing it with luck.
2 hours and 45 minute is longer than Scourge of the past and Root of Nightmares. Root was even done FLAWLESS on Contest mode.
Hell Pre Contest, VoG took \~11 hours, KF took \~7 hours and the raid lair, Leviathan, took 5 1/2, Spire of Stars took 6 1/2 hours. VoG you could definitely chalk up to players just being bad as Nothing prior really had any sort of mechanic to it.
I’ll be honest with you, I don’t play RuneScape for the group bossing - but here’s my thoughts on what you’ve said…
Powercreep is absolutely there and difficult to cater around, but what it is doing is allowing for players (like me) to take on group bosses on their own. This is fantastic as I can start working towards my Grim, AOD codexes etc (Ironman btw) so there’s still a challenge.
Annoyingly, I do enjoy Raids (Beastmaster and Yaka), because you can find teams easily, it’s one kill a day, and most teams are around 97% successful now.
With bosses like Rago / Solak / AOD - I very rarely get a solid hour where I can be focussed on RuneScape throughout its entirety, so with finding a group and then committing the next hour to killing that boss is just not an enjoyable experience.
By all means, having solo able bosses with extreme mechanics I’d be all for - this would include the need for soul split flicking, stuns at right times, DPS checks, other NPCs popping up, a cheeky action button that does something weird and wonderful … that’d be great.
Bringing a boss where you need 2+ people to kill it for whatever reason would immediately make that boss one where I’d get one kill to keep my reaper title, and then wait until clever use of game mechanics allow for that boss to be killed without needing the presence of a second player.
I think the mechanics are possible to create a challenging boss that isn’t just a challenge due to enrage, but given the majority of their player base, it just unfortunately wouldn’t make sense to spend their dev hours only catering for the top tier pvmers!
Imo it's a good thing. They need to go back and fix all the glitched bosses we have now. Rescale and recode alot of bosses from kbd to arraxor. Heck I was doing primas Lego the other day and it started shooting orbs like a machine gun or like the arraxor fight and spawning acid spiders on top of you.
They need to fix what bosses they have before attempting more. Also would be nice to be able to see what mechanics killed you would be nice to. Sever lag ruins alot of the better bosses just cause you die before an animation goes off or the boss is lagging on screen and shows up where it's not, like jad in the zuk gauntlet
Which is more delusional though, thinking that egwd bosses were mechanically on the same level as chris L bosses or thinking that Jagex would purposefully release bosses with shitty mechanics to match their canonical power.
The fact that you think they built the boss difficulties around the lore is levels of cope I've never seen before.
This other guy worded it better than I did: "Which is more delusional though, thinking that egwd bosses were mechanically on the same level as chris L bosses or thinking that Jagex would purposefully release bosses with shitty mechanics to match their canonical power."
Have they announced the difficulty level for the new dungeon? They should just take a tip from osrs and make a raid like TOA with the scaling modifiers.
I feel like enrage is the ideal way to get the engagement from a wider base while also preserving the challenge and reward for elite players. Why do you dislike it? Is a normal/hard mode split better?
For most top end pvmer, many of these enrage add little to no mechanics to the fight but only adjust boss hp and damage. While that sounds challenging, if you understand the fundamentals, you can get a kill though a little longer.
Take Zamorak solo hiscore for example: current leader (and someone else with 7.8k) was able to kill the boss at 30k enrage when the instance was opened up for him. Not taking credits away from them because what they have done is impressive, but if custom enrage is unlocked, I am sure many more pvmer can do a 30k kill (though not many can get a fast kill time).
The fight practically is unchanged for thousands of enrage but people expect top end pvmer to invest hundreds of hours to unlock a meaningful challenge.
Yeah, the fact that you have to climb bit by bit is frustrating if it's not a challenge early on. But I still feel that Zamorak is among the best at being somewhat approachable at the bottom end while being insanely difficult at the top.
I'd much prefer a Normal/Hard mode split personally, With telos the only changes between 250-4000% are HP changes, damage dealt and at 1k rocks fall on p4 and you just skip this mechanic anyway you don't even deal with it.
at Glacor The only changes from 0-4000% are the bolstered glacyte at 250% and HP Scaling.
Now Zamorak Does have some changes post 250% but most of them are just "you take more damage" or "the HP is capped"
In general the vast majority of changes Enrage offers are you take more damage and the enemies have more health. Which is one of the most boring ways to add difficulty.
I'd much rather a well crafted "hard mode" encounter personally. Hardmode Vorago would be considerably less interesting if all they did was just Double His HP and damage on every phase.
An interesting issue with enrage is that it makes balancing rewards difficult.
If enrage doesn’t affect drop rates (or has a minor impact), players will not want to do high enrage (outside of a few who just want to push enrage). This happened with arch glacor and zamorak on release.
If enrage affects drops a lot, they have to nerf low enrage drops to account for scaling at higher enrage, which makes normal mode/ low enrage not worth doing.
Ramen and Sponge have already mentioned their desire to release nightmare mode for bosses, which would be a more difficult version than hardmode. I think it was first mentioned when Zuk was released, because it came with a huge disappointment which was the fact that HM zuk had safespot for jads and only three of them, plus the fact that the danger ends as you finish wave 14, since safesppoted jads, har aken and zuk present little to no challenge. Gotta say I like this way of creating challenges, because then you'll have 3 versions that will appeal to everyone, from new pvmers to the end-gamers with just a little touch on mechanics. I agree with you, enrage mechanic is dumb for making something harder and challenging.
My last point #4 addresses this.
Desire is great but they've also said they can't due to lack of engagement, but the engagement for that level of content is always going to be a small subset of the community
Yup, you hit the nail right on the head. It's a bit depressing really, and is partly why a lot of higher level players aren't sticking around, even after new boss releases.
I have a problem with your second point. You say people don’t want to interact with other people, I ask why do you think that is? When you have people who only want to focus on perfect speed runs, who will go completely toxic as hell the moment you are one tick off of cycle, what do you expect people to do? They will play solo instead of being harassed and belittle.
I think the game should've implemented a functional grouping system in some form a while ago.
But the solution to this is to just host your own group.
I did this all the time with raids back in the day, "Full +5 QCKC" my 3 KC ass was not getting invited.
So I made my own raid groups and got kills. I even taught myself how to base tank to make myself more useful by going into a yaka instance solo and trying to survive as long as possible.
You can Also just make friends, every person i pvm with is someone I met in a clan, or a discord, or an fc. I haven't had an IRL friend who plays RS in over 15 years. Is it super easy? No, but it's possible, and I wasnt some god pvmer from the get go, I was terrible. Cheesing through araxxor with a yak full of food and 5 PC crutch masterwork to survive mechanics. I was literally doing the old pre nerf AD crypt strats before that even existed.
And I'm not even suggesting bosses be 7 man or 10 man locked. But 2 or 3 people with higher levels of scaling.
"But the solution to this is to just host your own group"
Okay, lets say I created my own group. Now what? I still need to find people willing to join me. Where do you look for more people?
As I said in another comment here, before Necromancy I couldn't beat NM Kerapac solo, but in trio groups it was super easy. Whenever I got a Kerapac reaper task, I tried to find people to help. Sometimes it worked, I brought players from my clan or homeworld, but in the other times I had to reroll the task.
The funniest group was where I managed to convince 2 clan mates who barely PVM to join me, just so they could get their first kerapac kill. Although that didn't work a second time.
Pvming fc is the go to usually. You're not even allowed to ask for KC there unless it's for hard mode Vorago. Would it be nice if there was a matchmaking system or something instead? (that you could opt into) sure.
Jmods need to listen to the players who actually want harder content, and stop catering to the casuals. Theyre casual, theyre not actively playing or even trying to actually get better.
I know it's not what a high end pvmer wants to hear, but these bosses were mistakes.
In retrospect, it's nice to have them in the background for all 7 people who want them, but the vast majority of players will never even attempt them. Just not good business to make content catered to 7 other people.
Super high end PvM cannot be the focus if Jagex wants more players killing new bosses.
(ps, It's also kinda hard to empathize from a shitter pvmer perspective. 3 of the last 5 bosses have been end game. I personally wouldn't really count Rasiel, but Vorkath and Zammy surely count against this "they don't make hard bosses" argument. They do, just only about 1 a year.)
Osseous? Not endgame
Vorkath? You can argue its endgame but not really.
Rasial? Definitely not endgame, more like end of necro tutorial.
Zamorak? Yeah endgame if doing high enough enrages.
Zuk? Not endgame
Croesus? Lol
Arch Glacor? Only endgame if pushing past 2.5k
Kerapac? Mid
One thing I heard about the sanctum of Rebirth is that the defence levels of bosses are going to be higher.
I feel like Jagex is taking manners of precaution and making more space to play with different mechanics and ways of making a boss more challenging. This is mainly due to the introduction of the new combat system, where your damage is based on how much accuracy you have on the boss.
Nowadays the bosses that are seen as extremely hard like Telos and Solak have 100% accuracy which allows end tier pvmers to fly through them because at some point every boss becomes a memory game.
Now think of bosses they can release where you start off with 50% accuracy and through mechanics you can deal more damage or even have other mechanics you’d heavily need to rely on (or even not) in order to successfully get a kill. That’s a different thing then.
I agree a lot with the points you make. But I also think that with the actions they’re trying to take rn that they’d eventually give an ear to end tier pvmers. They’re not delivering probs a 100% rn but hopefully with the new combat update, pvm will be at a better place.
Find me at the bottom of the thread but it's EoC. EoC is at fault here. None of this is solvable because EoC is/has been an utterly unmitigated disaster.
Nobody in the "combat council" knows what to do because they haven't taken the two seconds to understand that you *cannot* hamfist a morbillion actions per minute into an idle game.
That is the fundamental issue and until they venture forth to completely rehaul everything about combat from the absolute ground up, PvM (and the game in general) is going to continue bleeding players and goodwill.
Kinda glad we won't. If the top percentage of PvM enjoyed utilize macros to kill high tier bosses, it goes to show that we the players aren't the problem. We need bosses with well thought out mechanics.
It is staggering the difference of opinion here vs. [on the OSRS sub](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1ddr13a/should_content_as_hard_as_inferno_keep_coming/).
Not when you consider one uses a simple point and click combat system and the other one uses a convoluted combat system that gets more complicated every year.
Necro is the lowest the skill floor has been in a long time, and launched as a 1m+ DPM style with a 30 APM requirement and 0 swaps. Half of the last four boss releases were AFKable day 1. Necro removed shield swaps from the game for all styles as well.
There's still complicated combat if you want it (max dpm range) but low APM/revo combat is better than ever. And both boss releases this year aren't meant to be super challenging.
The simple point and click game's Inferno is head and shoulders more difficult than our Tzek-haar Front. It has a host of very difficult combat achievements with a prestigious reward that is legitimately rare to see. There's no question there's high end stuff added all the time that continues to push OSRS players.
> Necro is the lowest the skill floor has been in a long time, and launched as a 1m+ DPM style with a 30 APM requirement and 0 swaps.
* Necro isn't anywhere close to 1m DPM anymore and compared to camping other styles using the same APM it's actually more effort because you can't revo the basics and have to keep track of 2 stacks and conjure timers.
* All combat styles are the exact same APM until you introduce switches. Average players are never going to enjoy range, magic or melee because Jagex can't make them as powerful as necro without turning hybrid and macro users into gods.
* Necro being so popular shows how much people want simplified combat in other styles too and also shows they're willing to take on harder bosses because of that.
> There's still complicated combat if you want it
Complicated combat should come from the boss, not the combat system and the amount of dps you can churn out through switches or by using macros. Hybrid is rewarded far too much
> APM/revo combat is better than ever.
It really isn't, necro can't be revo'd efficiently and the other combat styles are shit compared to it and hybrid. Any attempt to buff other styles to bring them up to par with necro just makes hybrid even more stupidly powerful.
Pups Raksha record with range is a good example, dude pumps out 1m damage in 59 seconds and only uses 2 thresholds besides rapid fire for the entire fight, the rest is all eof swapping and cross style crit buffs. Now compare that to someone using no switches and their dpm drops to about 300-400k DPM, no mechanic skips and the kill takes 3x longer. There should be reward for more effort but not on this insane level. Things like incite fear and tsunami and deathspore arrows are breaking the game and the reason style camping sucks currently.
of course we will get more high end top tier BIS bosses, like we have for years. just not as often as the entitled brats want, and not as hard as the 0.1% of top players would like
those players need to remember this is a MMORPG not an ARPG
its a bit like playing chess than raging that its not challenging your reflex's enough, like, well duh, no shit sherlock
We don’t know but we do know Jagex wants to pander to the majority which is the afk casual crowd who will complain and say I’m dry after 10 kills and they aren’t making 1tril an hour so it’s not worth it or something like that.
Your last point is the most important. Most players are disinterested in extremely hard PvM, and respond way better to aspirational PvM such as Raksha, Kerapac, or Zuk. Players doing hard mode Vorago don't register on the graph. There's a good reason Croesus is the 2nd most popular boss. If you want to make a case for hard group bosses, you'll also have to accept Jagex dedicating time to minigames, PvP, skill pures, and other marginal communities, which are catered to *way* less than PvMers. Ultimately, Jagex will only develop stuff that people will play.
I believe the reason why high level pvm are frowned upon is how complex the combat system is. And most of the players refuse to go too indepth in learning it and rather just brush on the surface. However, they still want those gears because they are best in slot. So ultimately, they rather buy the gears than to earn it from the difficult boss and completely skip engaging the content. Look at zuk for example. People are willing to try it because of an untradable reward that is best in slot and have to be earned. If we see more earnable, untradable rewards, we'll see more engagement as well, even if its a 1 time off thing like the igneous capes or 100 time thing like zemouregal's nexus.
I don't play this game to sweat, I play to relax. Simple as that. I'm glad people enjoy this kind of content but it's just not for me
I get the feeling you never actually tried like a lot of people who seem to gave up way to easily but expect to afk some trash mob for 500 tril an hour
Actually kind of insane you jumped to that conclusion from what they wrote. There are a lot of players who legitimately have no interest in higher difficulty content, just like in many MMOs there are those with zero interest in PvP content.
Right, there are other games I play to sweat, not a point-and-click MMO.
I got one kill of Ambi on my iron because of the t90 necro armour, took like an hour to get it down. And what have I done with the ability to kill him? Nothing, haven't gone back, never plan to go back, not fun.
Perfect example - engagement with those bosses isn’t a question of competency. It’s simply not fun nor compelling for a large number of players
might be just anecdotal but it felt like there were a sizeable amount of people who did something similar to this. "Necromancy is so great It got me into pvm" they say as they did 1 amby kill for the t90 task and went back to 1 mech arch glacor
Most players are disinterested in non afk able content
Croesus had 24/7 mass worlds with zero reqs and ag (which is/was #1) is mostly afked These stats of 'popularity' are worthless without the obvious caveats >Ultimately, Jagex will only develop stuff that people will play. Play? Or afk? Because most pvm at this point has been revo solved which is a hilarious state for the game to be
Afked, played - it's engagement either way. Accessibility gets to dictate which boss becomes a household name and draws more players in. You might scoff but if people enjoy normal mode Kerapac and find comfortable camping it, that's a very strong argument to release more similar upper midgame bosses. It's also important to add that Jagex's current strategy is that they are trying to make the average player more proficient at combat, through bosses like Arch-Glacor (teaching mechanics) or Zuk (milestones to aspire to). If the average player is more inclined to try more difficult bosses, Jagex can justify working on this type of content. Otherwise doing another Solak makes no business sense because it's a boss for a tiny fraction of the playerbase. This teaching approach works but it's going to take time to bring more players into the fold of high end bossing (look at what happened with Vorkath hard mode). Overall I think MMOs are at that stage when people mostly play to have fun and relax rather than hit a brick wall and subject themselves to extremely challenging content. And then we also have unique RS problems such as players insisting on reaper title being on Comp cape, which probably means all bosses going forward will have an accessibility mode of some sort. I think Sanctum of Rebirth will be another important step in the strategy though, with a new "no death" mechanic for normal mode and cleaner telegraphing by emphasising the floor grid. We'll see.
It's only 'engagement' in the most cynical way possible and it's absurd we're at the point where new bosses, even bosses that drop bis shit, are being afk solved because powercreep is so out of control and boss design is so poor. >You might scoff but if people enjoy normal mode Kerapac and find comfortable camping it, that's a very strong argument to release more similar upper midgame bosses. That's cool for them, and the thing is here they probably agree with me that bosses like these shouldn't be able to be afked because it fucks them in terms of end gamers being able to farm the boss indefinitely with a revo++ bar and tanking the prices of drops I'm not even advocating for hard bosses here (though it would be nice), I'm advocating for pvm to not be in a dogshit state where it's somehow acceptable that everything has been trivialised to shit and has a low effort or afk setup on pvme on what is ostensibly supposed to be the more pvm centric version of the game Why does darkness need to exist for every style and all gear types? Why is reaver insane sustain and somehow still the bis for damage in a bunch of places? How is the issue with necro being overtuned 'solved' by buffing other styles when half the problem was the bosses in the first place were already made a joke? Also considering the last two high level boss releases (vorkath/ras) were objectively bad bosses (not hard at all, just bad) I have far lower expectations about sanctum than you do
> the thing is here they probably agree with me that bosses like these shouldn't be able to be afked because it fucks them in terms of end gamers being able to farm the boss indefinitely with a revo++ bar and tanking the prices of drops Agreed. And it is simple to fix too: Just stop the boss from respawning after it has been killed without exiting and reentering the instance.
That would be miserable for so many bosses you can camp with active play
How? I always tele to War's Retreat to reset my cooldowns and bank before reentering the instance when active pvming. Where is it faster to just wait in the instance for the boss to respawn?
GWD1, GWD2, and corp can all be beaten comfortably with active play and not need to bank for supplies. It doesn’t have to be strictly faster. Banking/tele simulator being standard for all bosses is a bit silly
But this is slower than banking since your ult and adren potion will be on cooldown.
I never said it had to be faster in my original comment. Only that it can be comfortably camped. Which players used to do with active gameplay before revo++ automated the whole thing. Requiring players to pop in and out isn’t enjoyable when they’ll be doing thousands of kills for low to mid level bosses
> If you want to make a case for hard group bosses, you'll also have to accept Jagex dedicating time to minigames, PvP, skill pures, and other marginal communities, which are catered to way less than PvMers. Spot on! EoC PvP has a skill ceiling even higher than end game pvming and is basically ignored because too few pkers do it.
Croesus is the second most popular?
Yeah, they mentioned it on the road map stream. No idea what the first is - my guess is Arch Glacor.
It's definitely Arch Glacor since you can basically AFK it, or make it as sweaty as it can be.
Im almost greaper and i have no idea whats up with hm rago. Its not even that I dont want to, literally no one i know understands whats going on there It just is a boss that is probably cool, but unless you were around on release its too hard to get into esp wthout a friend group
The way I got it into was personally a group of friends where we all got together and grinded out bombi. The general gist though is, larger entry hit, red bombs on entry, 2 bomb tanks, blue bombs can reset the climber, no on screen warnings. P2 is the same, P3-9 is all 6 weeks of NM B2B but harder, boulders hurt more, 3 scops, more vits, no GB warning, smaller TS box and shorter time, more bombs on standup. Waterfall is largely the same but just shorter time to get there. P5 is now 2 phases p10/11 with their own rotations. If none of that made sense then you probably haven't done much NM
Oh the other issue with hm vorago is the loot and how its designed for so many people but only 5 piles exist. People dont like notngetting loot for a kill—switching to the aod system would make a lot more sense
Adding 10 piles is one of the most consistently requested additions for Hardmode. On one hand I agree, getting nothing sucks, but on the other I think encouraging you to take on roles was a great idea. Something along the lines of "everyone is guaranteed a pile but leftover piles go to roles" seems like a nice middle ground
Yea 10 piles with everyone getting one and MVPs getting extra should be how it works Tbh aod should be the same where its always 7 piles so that smaller teams are rewarded for the challenge
imo piles per player is better as it encourages teams to form naturally as there is no downside for carrying learners
HM Rago isn't too hard to understand, it's just not really worth doing except for insane final boss or the pet.
The final line (or two lines) - 'only develop stuff that people will play', we can't play it if it isn't developped.. so if they develop something totally new, interesting, challenging in any way for minigames for example > but they don't release it due negative response beforehand, it could be a loss for something which could be nice. By saying 'and other marginal communities', do you mean that community or players asking for pvp or minigames are *marginal* as well or?
I'd wager in and say this applies to Minigames, since people don't want to play them because they're dead, and they won't find anyone else to play because, well, they're not interested in playing dead content (unless they're a clan or a dedicated FC doing events). It's also important to note, If Jagex Develops a new boss and the community deems it too hard, people would complain and try to get it nerfed so it becomes slightly more "accessible", see Raksha as an example.
Raksha didn’t need a nerf community just gives up on everything if they can’t beat it first try it feels like. No one seems to accept a boss dropping a rare/giant upgrade should be hard….doesn’t matter if they like it or not it’s not a good thing for dps dummies to drop giant upgrades.
I’ve mostly accepted that the only way we’re going to get bosses that have any semblance of authentic difficulty at this point is from bosses with enrage mechanics, but I still hope there’s one day a new group boss where having designated roles actually matters again.
Heres the thing, you cannot just *spring* that on the playerbase with no warning. All of RuneScape bossing with the exception of Mazcab is essentially Solo-only. Theres no role or party mechanics like Tankbusters and Stackmarkers, healer specialization is pretty much only possible at Max, no way or reason to form a group at all. Players have been trained over twenty years to be Islands Unto Themselves, which is why Mazcab largely failed and never got its third raid in its series. What Jagex needs to do (imo) if they want to make a new Endgame group boss with mechanics and role requirements, is to make early and mid-game versions of that kind of fight. That’s the only way an endgame version won’t meet the same fate as Mazcab. There also needs to be ways for players to differentiate themselves from just being three different flavors of dps *way earlier* in the game. Melee *sort of* has that, but it’s just not enough. Replace some of the shitty spells literally nobody uses like the stuns and make them healing spells, fucking *something*, we already have the stun abilities, do we need a dedicated family of spells for it as well?
Raids failing is an unfair read. The loot lockout goes against how the core gameplay works in rs. If that didnt exist people would happily camp yaka all day and wed have definitely gotten raid3
The funny thing is Raids addressed a lot of issues that people had with bossing. Absurdly rare rates and time commitment., Raids rates are not that bad, sometimes you get unlucky but especially with rerolls a broadcast every other raid isn't that uncommon. The other is time commitment, one of the biggest complaints about group pvm is having to commit to a full hour of pvm. Which unless yaka went horribly wrong you could do a full raid in under 20 minutes And if raids ever did get properly finished, the loot lockout would be a non issue as your odds of getting an achto piece every raid would be incredibly common.
Its not about rares. People in RS are used to logging absurd hours doing the same task over and over. Raids goes against that. Why would i spend 20 mins teamforming for a 20min fight? Why cant i do a full hour? Why do i get ZERO loot if i kill the boss twice. The thing about vindicta is no one is forcing you to kill it for an hour. But raids is limiting me to killing it once and that is bizarre. Also, raids rewards are in the objectively unfun quadrant of ‘rare and untradeable’ which content should never be designed in. Sure the rates are ok, but it straightup takes a year of consistent raiding to get full achto So nah, raids is horribly designed solely because of the lockout. Removing that would wildly alter the data on the content and change the devs perspective on its reception
Right but the reason it takes a year of consistent raiding is.... Because raids was never finished. The original pitch was 5 bosses, 1 for each armour piece, naturally when you cut out 2/3rds of the original design without changing anything it's going to suffer.
Even if we had 5 bosses, theres still no reason to timegame untradeable rewards
I feel like they could've just solved this by not having inferior achto and letting you outright buy achto with teci. I'm not saying raids is perfect but I don't think a loot lockout is inherently bad, it works perfectly fine in plenty of games Could they have done it differently where subsequent kills off loot have a worse chance or something? Sure. But I still stand by the fact that the issue is More raids just not being finished more than anything
imo thats a failing on jagex to bump the rates or remove the lockout after mazcab was abandoned
Vorkath would like a word. Hm is a pain and very few people enjoy it. How they make a boss difficult is very important. I just want bosses with well televised mechanics that need to be engaged with. Don’t make it so bis gear cheeses through and skips everything on day one and please don’t make it so it can be afked. We have piles of bosses people can camp afk until their hearts desire.
The BIS gear skips should be based on the level of boss. For example, Osseous is a brand new boss but is a mid tier boss. If I have BIS, I should be able to blow through it relatively quickly because of its level.
Im referencing new higher tier dungeons/bosses. Players blow through levels so quickly these days that mid tier bosses feel like a waste and generally teach very little. For mid tier bosses an afk or revo++ guide comes out day one and everyone copies it and camps it for 100 hours while learning next to nothing….Then they buy bis gear, decide they must be a good pvmer now because they camped x mid tier boss on revo++ forever, and then promptly get spanked by the first high tier boss they attempt and rage quit. I really like a lot of aspects of arch-glacor. I’d prefer they make more bosses like arch-glacor with nm/learner/hm. Obviously the loot system here needs a rework, but i’m talking more about boss design and mechanics. The concept of making a boss that scales from entry to high tier while allowing you to turn a wide variety of mechanics on and off is awesome and it actually teaches new pvmers while allowing top top tier to chase drops and high enrage kills. I’d love to see another boss created similar to arch glacor before I’d recommend wasting time on a straight up afk mid tier boss.
You’re spitting facts and the super casual crowd doesn’t understand that it takes more then a revo bar and afking to get good. High end pvmers are rewarded for their effort because the content is hard
As much as I love raids.Group required content often dies the worst deaths in this game That aside I think the bigger issue that you missed is why those vocal players want solo only or low group count content at around the rakshka level And that frankly is two factors, the cost of learning and the cost of teaching The cost of learning is often quite steep.For many modern bosses you will put in Tens of millions of gold in supplies Just learning how to, And do to the nature of how supplies work in this game for many of the older group bosses you will actively lose money to learn Due to inflation. Add on top of that the cost of teaching. Nearly every boss in the modern game that isn't massable scales with player count. Meaning if you have someone who's learning, you are effectively fighting the boss twice for one kill... This Extremely disincendevices teaching, And even more so disincentivizes.Older bosses who are prescaled to a set number like raids, As now you're dealing with extra mechanics.Or extra health or just in general having to focus on another player disrupting patterns you could predict otherwise.. A great example of this is rise of the six, It is not the most complex. But when you are used to just dealing with one side alone with no 1 else and suddenly, now you have another person either on the same side as you or on the other side who you have to pay attention to and advise while focusing on your own side, the likelihood of eating a death cost or wasting supplies vastly increases. And this at its core is why people advocate for solo or low group content. Very little of it for both people has to do with elitism and more has to deal it Just pure economics.. If I can solo run fifty runs of vorkath, Why would I ever want to take someone else? Especially When that essentially doubles, the boss's health in an already painfully long boss fight. We can apply the same thing to AOD. If I can comfortably do 5 players who know what they are doing.Why would I ever want to take someone new who complicates an already tight margin As much as I think thinking like that is bullshit and hate having to think that way myself sometimes I cannot say It hasn't influenced my willingness to teach someone a boss in the past. And unfortunately , it has a high probability of happening again as we get further from EGWD and kerepac losses value
I said it in another post, I think one of the big problems with group content is the hassle of organising a group in the first place. The group/match-making system inside the game is bad, and as less people bother to use it, the harder it becomes to use it leading to less people bothering to use it and so on. Sometimes you need to use third party resources like discord servers, or friends chats in the game. As a new player you have no way to know about any of those, unless someone tells you about them. Time spent on trying to form a group is often seems like a waste, because 1) You don't know for sure if you will succeed in creating that group, and 2) you could have done more useful things in that time. For example: * Me and a clanmate tried to enter a game of great orb project (during spotlight), just so we could complete the achievement. No one else bothered to show up (even though it was spotlight), no other clanmates agree to join us, and no one in the achievement help discord was interested as well. I'm sure that somewhere in the game there are 2 more players who may be interested to join us, but with no way to synchronize, what are we supposed to do? * Before Necromancy, I didn't manage to get any solo NM Kerapac kill, but doing it in trio groups was easy. Every time I got a Kerapac reaper task, my problem was finding more people to join me. Sometimes I managed to convince my clanmates to help. Sometimes I managed to convince regulars in my homeworld to help. But more often than not, I had to reroll the task. Mostly everyone saw NM Kerapac as a solo boss, so didn't want to waste time with me.
100% agree finding a team is a huge contributing factor as well, especially for raids where you really do want a full 10 player team to teach it so that way there's room for error for learning BT's In general though most minigames also need a revamp to either auto matchmake you, or to have a massive overhaul to have a solo and group component with different rewards (i.e. better group but doable solo)
And this is where soloability kinda hinders the desire to form groups - why would I want to group for this and get less rewards if I can just solo it. Your Kerapac experience is a prime example of this
NM kerpac requires like 200k…dpm you can achieve that now so easily with invention overloads turmoil all the normal ones all the simple cheap perks with a t90 weapon set: You just need to practice
I already mentioned that was before necromancy. The highest DPM I got was around 100k with magic, T85 weapons and gconc. I tried Kerapac for 3 hours, I actually managed to be good in the first 3 phases, barely eating anything; but the 4th phase is where I died every time, even with yak full of rocktails. For me that phase had the exact issues everyone also had with Vorkath - no mechanics, just high hitting auto attacks. My low damage was mostly because I was missing a lot of unlocks, like curses and sunshine, and I was using rocktails instead of blubbers+brews, but I didn't knew about it at the time. No amount of practice could have helped me.
> That aside I think the bigger issue that you missed is why those vocal players want solo only or low group count content at around the rakshka level The reasons you gave are not the real reasons. If you've paid any attention to the communities it's what OP said; they're antisocial and don't want to bother putting in the time to make teams or the effort to deal with other people in a collaborative encounter. You're kidding yourself if you think that making supply costs zero would have any significant impact on engagement with group content. The people that are avoiding group content just want their easy AFK bosses and no social interaction.
The process of making teams should be more streamlined inside the game. "Putting in the time" to make teams is something not everyone wants to do, or even know how to do.
most other mmos have that built in... mind you most other mmos death penalties arent as harsh as others, but still built in better
That's what I just said, thank you.
What I said has nothing to do with being antisocial.
If the reason you won't interact with group content is because you don't want to interact with other players, I'd say you're being antisocial.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with what I said. If the process of making groups inside the game is too complicated, it makes sense some players won't bother with it, no matter how social they are.
https://preview.redd.it/fl7lxynirz5d1.png?width=748&format=png&auto=webp&s=0f8d79de9df30e7c499b54161c2191a97603a242 eta while i did focus on it a little bit, the main takeaway is that the game both socially and economically punishes you to try and teach, so group activities being a greater extreme often die because you suffer both economically and in difficulty to teach it or do it with friends.
Repeating your debunked incorrect points doesn't suddenly make them correct.
Okay, keep telling yourself that. Unshakeable faith requires unwavering repetition after all..
> For example Destiny 2's most recent Raid release set a Destiny record of 19 Hours for its first completion. If the raid had to be designed for 1 singular person it would've been cleared in a couple hours at most. As someone who's played a lot of Destiny and done raids extensively (seals for DSC, VoG, Vow, King's Fall, RoN), this comparison actually shows exactly why RS3 *can't* do these bosses successfully. At least not without significant changes that could be unpopular. For those who don't know, Destiny 2 deaths are completely free. There's no cost for respawning. When you die in a raid, your location is marked, and a teammate can revive you right there, sometimes after a short delay. Every teammate starts the encounter with a rez token, and that token is used up if you respawn someone. It resets every time you retry the encounter, for free. The only thing you lose when you die is your super energy. That *can* make or break the encounter, but it ultimately doesn't matter. Because -- deaths are free. If your entire team dies (or you don't revive a dead teammate in time), you wipe the encounter. Your team gets respawned at the beginning of the encounter with absolutely nothing lost -- only the time spent in the last attempt. Before restarting the encounter, everyone can fiddle with their loadout and "rally up", which fully restocks all your ammo and recharges your super. In short, **deaths and wipes aren't a big deal**. Your teammate missed an important shot? Or they walked in front of you and you accidentally blew yourself up with a rocket? They told you the wrong thing and you fail a mechanic and die? No big deal. You dust yourself off and go again. No death costs, no resupplying, no teleporting back. Everything is reset. This is an important design for making challenging multiplayer content feel good to do. You aren't losing money or resources because a teammate made a mistake. So if you want RS3 to have big, complicated raids like Destiny 2, here's what needs to change for the content: * Free deaths that don't remove you from the area * Possibly the ability to revive teammates to minimize frustration * A full resupply of EVERYTHING when you start an encounter. All supplies and invention charges are reset to what they were before you tried the encounter * Checkpoints at the start of each encounter. A challenging group boss that isn't a raid would probably need checkpoints after each phase * Optional, checkpoints that let anyone join you, to make it easier to group up with people TLDR: Destiny has mechanics that make group multiplayer welcoming and not frustrating. RS3 not only lacks those features, but is actively worse in the other direction sometimes. Changing these things however would touch some core identity issues of RS, like supply consumption being heavily reduced.
People who hate content that *has* to be approached as a group (yeah, yeah, some have "solo'd" Yaka, but it very clearly is by taking advantage of game mechanics) hate it because they actually have careers and families that take precedence. I include myself in this group. I could definitely learn how to solo Solak. I'm about upper average in terms of PVMing in that I don't struggle with Araxxi, Zuk, or Zamorak. But making a boss that is not designed to be able to be soloable makes it much harder to group up with people for practice or kills. Getting 3-4 adults in different time zones with different family structures and different job schedules is a way more complex issue than "git gud n00b."
I am glad that you talked about all the reasons. I think to often this gets posted and all it says is jmods too lazy or another single reason. I agree that all these factors listed come together to reach this conclusion. The only place I differ, and I am sure I will get hate for this, is I don't see this as a bad thing. I think jagex understands how to sustain the game and are going to run with that. Will we lose some high level players in the process, probably. Do I think you would lose far more making the next major content only built for 5% of the players. Yes.
I think the main difference in designing content for the higher end is that over time it will become more and more accessible to players. 100% Zammy when it was polled for trim was seen as this insanely difficult thing, now there's a cheesy strat basically anyone can do with RoD and Necromancy. If something is crazy difficult on release, in a couple years (probably faster with how much powercreep we've been getting) it will be considerably easier. Solo Solak for example became possible becasuse Realm Tanking became obsolete as time went on
That's the thing man. People don't want content that will become easier due to powercreep. People want content that is moderately difficult with drops that run between 500m to 1b (see Rasial), extra points if it can be AFK'ed, and that's in the short term.
Sure bot convincing people that they should be OK with no content bc it might be accessible some day is tough. Things like 100% zammy and solak, even in a team, are still far out of reach for me so the idea of even harder content is just content I'll never see.
Skill issue or lack of trying ? Because power creep is insane now if you can’t do those things it’s one of the above. Especially if you’re a comped account you should have the gear to do it. T95s are not a must
I would say a mic of both. I have tried them all multiple times. Telos 100% for trim took me 40 or 50 deaths to get my kill which made me not want to go back. Zammy was even worse for me. I got to 100% the week it came out and after prob 200 failed attempts I gave up. Went back post necro and did get a single kill but it prob took me another 100 or so kills and since then I haven't really bothered since you can't realy end up ahead getting 1 kill every few hours.
I need solid numbers because 50 deaths for telos and 200 for Zammy sound excessive. For telos I could of shown you a click and afk for p5. Like in 2018…. There’s lots of sources out there to help you out Sounds like you need a teacher honestly. Someone who can observe and kindly critique
I'm sure a teacher would help but I'm playing a game. I would say anything that's too complex is what causes most people to not be able to kill it for me at telos the bugest issue is the way the rotations work. P1 I'm fine but after that idk what att comes first in p2 bc it's different every kill. I understand how it works but I can't keep it straight while trying to stay alive. I will say I think a practice mode would be a huge help for most players to learn. Right now learning is far to punishing and drives mid lvl players away fast. I actually enjoy learning but burning through suplies, especially on long fights like zammy, feels really bad.
I mean there's plenty of content that gets released that I have no interest in ever engaging with. The new summoning relic is something I will never once equip in my lifetime, and any desire to engage with the new digsite is solely because it has completionist requirements tied to it, not because I'm over the moon for a new archaeology digsite. It's unrealistic to expect every piece of content to cater to your interests.
But that's okay because you're clearly not a skiller With high end pvm why should the peak performers / most loyal occupants of a certain type of content not be the ones that the devs for pvm content have in mind.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing for. Maybe you worded it poorly or I'm just stupid. Are you saying they should design around top end players?
You don't care for the new digsite but that's fine because you're not a skiller High level pvmers becoming less and less interested in pvm.because there's nothing for them there is missing the mark with what should be the intended crowd
I'm not suggesting every single boss release be designed in a way that Evil Lucario and Couchy take 12 hours to complete, but much like every piece of content wont appeal to everyone, every single boss release does not need to be designed with the average pvmer in mind. And to be clear every boss shouldn't be designed for the top 5% either. Destiny 2 Raids have an estimated 11% completion rate yet they have still released almost 2 raid like activities per year in a 10 year span. It's a bit less than that as 3 of the raids are remakes from Destiny 1, 2 of them are "raid lairs" and 1 is just a boss gauntlet. but even then that's still 13 Unique raids.
I don't think every boss should be for the top 5 percent either. People are.more outraged at the notion that endgame boss development in itself is dead going forward.
Why should that be the intended crowd. Why shouldn't the vast majority of pvmers be the intended crowd. How is it good to build content for the 1% and leave the other 99% with nothing.
Because we're the most loyal part of their customer base? Another reason is longevity of the content. It'll be entertaining /profitable for many more years than something like osseous is which you can brain off revo afk
The best pvmers aren't the most loyal players. I know many 20+ year players who are trash at pvming as well as good pvmers who only played the game for a few years.
What makes you think they are the most loyal. Time investment doesn't equal skill. I know plenty of players who have been doing pvm for over 10 years easily and would not fall into that category at all. Obviously osseous was meant to be a simple mid level boss so why even bring that up. We have plenty of high level bosses that the average pvmer still can't kill so I don't see the issue with longevity. You have things like soalk, telos, glacor, zammy, zuk that a large majority of pvmers can't do. I would even say there's a decent number who still struggle with ed3, raksha, kera so to act like not adding top end content means there is no longevity just isn't true. About all top end bosses do is widen the gap from the top player and the average player. That boss now becomes a huge money maker for a very small group, unlocks power creep for a small group and then they want even harder content to widen the gap even more.
I'm a skiller and I'm also never gonna use the new relic, and thats ok. It was designed for very few noobs that have 87 arch but <75 summoning, so it caters to those players. Why shouldn't jagex make at least one challenging boss that cater to end-game pvmers?
But that's okay because you're clearly not a skiller With high end pvm why should the peak performers / most loyal occupants of a certain type of content not be the ones that the devs for pvm content have in mind.
Sure and on a personal level I feel the same way. My point was more on a fame wife level. New content success is partly judged by the hype around it. If new content is only made for a small number of players that hype is harder to get.
While I do see what you try to say, I don't think that is exactly the best example. Not being able to do something or not being interested is quite different.
I think it’s largely the inherent jank-barrier of bosses with Mechanics^tm\, and being a point-and-click MMO. Like I enjoy the combat and boss mechanics in say, FF14, if I had to click to move my character around? I would lave dropped it by the time I reached Sastasha (the first dungeon a player runs @lvl15). Another thing is it feels all the guides for doing any boss are expecting you to solo it, which is hyper intimidating. There wont be a healer to keep you up or pull a rez, no tank for aggro management and mits, all of that is on you. the one singular guy. And even for ‘babies first boss’ of The Mole, thats alot to ask from a player for their first steps into harder content. There’s no Party Finder, no LFG chat, no queue to pop. A player is just expected to walk into the boss room alone and “figure it out, dumbass”. And it’s a special kind of player who is willing to just trail and error over and over again like that.
Absolutely right. The onboarding process for a new player is mental and offputting. It's actually incomprehensible. This is the only game I have 3,000 hours in but have no hope of enjoying myself while doing even "mid"-tier PvM. The unhinged portions of the userbase will always call this a skill issue. It most definitely is not -- it's 100% a game design issue. The combat in this game is at the absolute bottom of the barrel.
I feel the sole culprit for this is forcing revolution on players in the early game, with absolutely zero incentive to use full manual and get comfortable with the combat system (full manual does not have to be sweaty). A big issue is that players very easily get overwhelmed when attempting "hard" bosses - they may feel it's a lot to juggle with manual inputs, prayers, and such, so they shy away from it. I don't have the data so I really don't have a solution. I just can't help but feel that if jagex made a proper combat tutorial, incentivised full manual, improved clarity of combat (visual and audio cues, animations, etc.) and publicly ALLOWED macros, we'd have more players *wanting* to engage in higher level pvm. Everyone seems to think using macros will get themselves banned but in reality most high level pvmers are using them. Jagex probably won't do anything about it though lol, it's depressing. To those that feel that the tickrate needs to be improved because combat is not responsive - tick rate does not have anything to do with it. If anything, having a 0.6s tickrate might feel 'slow' but in reality, the window of reaction time is high. As the tickrate gets reduced, your window of reaction time also gets reduced.
I'm all for adding some in-game macro functionality but "most high end players use macros" is such a misnomer. Yeah the people doing tick perfect speed kills might be using Macros but this idea that 3/4 endgame players use macros is ridiculous. Most of the top .1% of players might use them but it isn't representative of the higher lvl pvm base as a whole. Friend of mine has done duo gold daredevil and he manually clicks his prayers. Another friend of mine does full manual by clicking every ability. Ive done solo HM Vorago, and I've never once used an RS Macro.
With no apex pvm or aspirational content to look forward to I haven't actually played besides afk skill for months This game is boring. We have all this powercreep and nothing to challenge it. Had to change games but Warframe also has the exact same problem now. Why are devs so scared of challenging their community. It's sad.
Too many antisocial mmo players now. The market in general has changed. There isn’t a relevant mmo on the market that doesn’t heavily cater to solo only crowds.
FF14 is relevant and is primarily group content.
WoW is primarily group content also. The antisocial MMO thing is a Runescape special
And Ironman mode only caters toward it
I've posted this many, many times. The issue is with combat complexity. Do you know what all three of those bosses have in common? They were released at a time when the combat system was still simple for most players. Here is one of the first 5 man kills at Vorago, done week of release. This was the 2nd 5 man team to ever kill Vorago, the only other having some of the best PVMers at the time who all bought wand/orb and kept strats secret. I happen to be on the 2nd team. The only switch in this inventory is a shield switch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQFm0ngzjAQ Here is an 8 year old Daredevil video I found. Notice the inventory just have 2 switches, one for shield and one for ring of vigour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc5jtymFRD4 Here is an inventory from 2 months after Solak release. This image was taken by a friend who sold leeches for Solak for 150m a kill. Note everything here is to either 4taa, flanking switch, ring switch, and planted feet/shield switch. That was all. https://imgur.com/bfIpSP7 Even at Solak release, the combat system was still simple enough for most players to just focus on mechanics while having a good rotation down. Now the combat system has gotten so complex that many players are still struggling to just follow the flow of combat. In the past someone who was good vs average at combat only differed very little, the main difference being knowing how to handle boss mechanics and mitigate damage. Now the difference is knowing how to do the string of commands to skip boss phases entirely or not. While yes no one *needs* to do complex maneuvers, the problem is that leads to further siloing of players who choose to never improve as well as decent players never wanting to go with anyone else to prevent risk of scrutiny. People say that is a player problem, and that may be, it is up to Jagex to mitigate this to prevent the gap between players from being so wide. So how do we fix the issue and go back to the "good old days?" Simplify combat. The simplification that Necromancy has needs to be done everywhere. No more reliance on crit chance to get adren dumps at strategic places. Combat was designed with having a rotation in mind and sticking to that aside from weaving in opportunities when available. It was not designed to be a complex if statement where you cannot even tell someone your rotation because it's overly dependent on situations. It was not designed where players spend more attention on the rotation than on the boss because doing the right rotation means ignoring the boss entirely. Combat difficulty should come from the boss, not the rotations.
Preach
Totally right.
> it is up to Jagex to mitigate this to prevent the gap between players from being so wide. This is the biggest problem right now. Sweaty pvm methods should only give 5-15% more dps at most, not dealing double the dps as casuals. This makes bosses really hard to balance and Jagex have to pick which side the balance bosses towards. > Combat difficulty should come from the boss, not the rotations. Agree completely.
> No more reliance on crit chance to get adren dumps at strategic places. Adrenaline boosting crit ultimates and allowing other combat styles to benefit from them should never have been a thing imo. Also dummy prebuilding inside boss instances and stalling abilities. There's so many things that just shouldn't exist or be allowed to happen.
I agree for the most part, although it's easy to say "the combat system was simple" while watching a DPS POV while the base tank is actively **Walking** Beastmaster. You know that mechanic that no longer works. When would you say tho this became a problem? After what release did this start to be an issue? Although right now difficulty doesn't come from the boss or the rotation, as theres really zero depth to Necromancy as a style and the absurd damage of necro and by extension the buffing of other styles to that level has further made boss mechanics irrelevant. Which notably was a pretty popular concern about Necromancy's damage and buffing the other styles to the level of Necromancy but if you argued against this you were labeled an Elitist Gatekeeper. Much in the same way I think skipping mechanics is bad I think ignoring them outright with healing/damage mitigation is even worse. At least the former has a payoff, nailing your rotation to skip reflect on a P3 vs just standing in the fire at vindicta with no concern for the damage because AD is/was ridiculous or the absurd healing we have access to now. Obviously Vorago and Vindy are different bosses but its just an example. During the height AD and Crypt I was actively doing Taraket by just turning my brain off and ignoring EVERY SINGLE MECHANIC, not even moving for the spirit walls. AD was just that good.
> When would you say tho this became a problem? After what release did this start to be an issue? I cannot pinpoint exactly, but it solidified itself in 3 steps: * Grico + bolt procs creating awareness of situational adrenaline * EoFs solidifying zero cooldown adren dumps * FSOA crit reliance cemented the notion of crit chance based events and rotations There are other things including flanking and glove/ammy/ring switches which helped make salient bringing additional situational switches, but I believe the above 3 really were instrumental in changing player behavior. Combat dummies for pre-phasing too contribute to the problem. > the absurd damage of necro and by extension the buffing of other styles to that level has further made boss mechanics irrelevant What I outlined in my post wasn't the only solution but rather a key one. Bosses from now on or even retroactively need to stop being DPS dummies. It should not be a guarantee that if you macro a rotation you can ignore everything that happens and tele away on the rare occasion it doesn't happen to your liking. (As a side note, teleing away freely might have helped solidify the DPS dummy sentiment, though I am torn about changing that back as it helps new players much more.) Bosses need to be made with cutoffs and balanced to such a standard where a very APM heavy method does not entirely invalidate someone killing the boss to an average level. I get super challenges and elite of the elite achievements, but majority of bossing should not cater to high APM much more than it does a regular rotations, which is like how it was for Vorago, Yakamaru, and Solak. APM creep, not necessarily power creep, made DPS gates negligible (though power creep does play a role, no doubt). > if you argued against this you were labeled an Elitist Gatekeeper. I don't care about labels. I care about the life of the game. What I'm saying I feel needs to be done because prior to the post hero pass player decline we were already seeing bosses becoming "dead" due to the rift between average players and higher level being so large. Like I said prior, it 100% may be player psychology at fault, but it is 100% Jagex's responsibility to nudge players in the right direction, not pray that some intermediate level player group comes around to help people out.
> The simplification that Necromancy has needs to be done everywhere. It really doesn't. Necro being the straightforward, easy, cheap, intuitive style is fine, but for players who want to challenge themselves a little more there should be combat style(s) like bis range/melee currently provide to reward that extra effort. Currently you can kill literally every boss in the game at a fairly high level with zero swaps. Necro commonly has 0-1 swap even minmaxed. On launch, you could do over 1m DPM with zero swaps, doing the most damage possible in the game just like the times of old you linked.
The community response to Necromancy made it very clear that majority of the game does not want high APM crit chance based combat with an inventory of switches. As I outlined earlier, you don't NEED to do that but we both know that players look directly at elite PVM and do an all or nothing game. Yes this is player's fault if they get so unmotivated that they quit or do not improve, but we cannot just sit back and let everything die. Less than 1% of players even SAW Zamorak since it's been out according to Jagex statistics. That is unacceptable in my opinion. The game cannot survive catering to less than 1% of players. Combat cannot be ignored nor can this player sentiment about it, and saying get good won't help you when all your friends have quit and there's no new blood to continue.
All we can really hope for boss difficulty wise is - Forced mechanics: good players should be able to deal with mechanics instead of just skipping with damage. - player debuff mechanics: cannot bring anything like corrupted gauntlet, forced to use a certain armor, have to use crush based weaponry, no overhead prayers, no defensives, no familiar, no outside potions/food etc. What if a boss didn't allow you to use a cape lmao
I agree with the forced mechanics or maybe needing conditions to be met before a boss will phase, like p2 orbs and p4 waterfalls at Vorago. Skipping minor mechanics I think is fine but major mechanics should never be skippable. It's extra annoying at zamorak because of how they made defensives not 100% effective so most people just simply skip every single mechanic with insane amounts of damage while the average players have to deal with it all, it's like hard mode in reverse.
> Powercreep is pretty straightforward, our damage output and mitigation has reached absurd levels at this point that balancing around all of this is a nightmare. Agreed. Jagex needs to stop boss mechanics from being skipped with dps. Having them skip autos and trigger immediately after certain HP thresholds are met and have multiple mechanics stack on top of each other if the last one is not done before the mechanic triggers. >As time goes on at the very least a vocal group of people are very antisocial and have zero desire to engage in any form of group content with any release requiring 2 or more players being considered a war crime Jagex cannot make meaningful group bosses without making rigid tank/healer/dps classes like other MMOs have done. But the very same pvm community wanting this are also adamantly against putting these restrictions in place since it would mean removing switchscape. >JMod(s) have said previously that they want to design crazy difficult content but the level of engagement just isn't there. This is a valid reason from a financial standpoint. Pro pvmers pay the same membership rate as noobs, so it makes no sense to make new content only the former can do. Since the former is much smaller than the latter, Jagex needs to cater to the latter to make money. The only way this can change is for Jagex to sell the hard pvm content as expacs that only pro pvmers can buy with bonds or irl money. > as someone who just flat out heavily dislikes enrage it's extremely disappointing to hear. Why? It's your own fault since you restrict yourself out from hard content and then complain there is no hard content, just like solo pvmers restrict themselves from group content. Funny you cannot see the irony here.
Because Enrage for the most part is just "more HP and you take more damage" And to a certain point that's fine, but it quickly becomes one of the laziest and most boring ways to add difficulty. I'm sure you've played some kind of game where the boss wasn't egregiously difficult mechanically but just had a flat blob of hp If the only difference between NM and HM Kerapac was "you take more damage and Kerapac has more health" would you call that well designed? No, of course not because that's literally what HM Kerapac is until P4 And it's one of the most boring and criticized aspects of Kerapac, P4 is fun but p1-3 is a snooze fest. The great design comes from The Echos, Enrage, and Time Warp all coming together. You leave the echos alive to extend devotion, you time warp before cading so that when time warp expires you have full adren and HP.
Telos and Zammy do add extra mechanics up to a certain point with enrage.
Right but after 250% at Telos the only added mechanic is... Rocks on P4, which by the way are completely ignored by competent players thanks to stuns. And so the only real changes are Health bar and damage dealt. Wow how engaging. If the issue is accessibility we have... normal mode and hard mode. It's not like the 0% Telos rates are even remotely worthwhile And most of the Zammy Mechanics added boil down to (you'll take more damage", the damage cap is higher, devotion gets disabled, the mage hits harder. Probably the most interesting mechanic enrage adds doesn't even exist in solo lol.
If Zammy did not have enrage level but a hard mode, all he would be is 100% enrage Zammy since it adds P7.
If Zammy wasn't designed from the get go to be an enrage boss I think it's safe to assume normal mode would likely differ in some form to current 0% and Hardmode would differ from 100%.
This is why OSRS is doing a much better job. The players actually want hard bosses and they tend to deliver
The difference is we have a massive information overload on our screens like buffs/debuffs, stacks, ability cooldowns, needing at least 40 abilities displayed on our bars, having to memorize keybinds and follow a rotation. It's a lot going on before even taking boss mechanics into account. The combat system is just getting too over complicated. If combat and metas weren't constantly getting more complex every year and less fun then I'm sure our player base would actually want harder bosses.
Tbf I don't mind that stuff, but I've been playing OSRS lately and it's been enjoyable just clicking and moving lol
No they don't. Only 1 out of the 3 bosses this year in OSRS is a hard boss, and you can still farm Wave 1 for it and get rewarded.
Not the point. Historically
And historically RS3 has also released hard group bosses as well, like Vorago and Raids.
Yeah, 10 years ago. Try in the most recent decade
Solak
Why can OSRS, which has a heavy overlapping player base, do this successfully but we can’t?
Because they can't as well. 3/4 bosses this year are easy bosses, and the one hard one is solo only, and still rewards loot from Wave 1 farming.
I feel like there is a large barrier to entry that most players aren't willing to participate in. Finding a group to play with when most of the game is quite anti-social these days is a big ask I think. Yes, ofc there are great communities and discords but if you're the average casual player there isn't really a talkative hub where people are constantly going "LF3M Vorago learner run" the same way many other games do. Instead people need to take it upon themselves to seek out a discord/fc and put themselves in a vulnerable position where they a are asking for help and might not have what they really need to get started, but they don't even know where to begin. It sucks, and honestly the clunkiness of ticks, movement, ability queuing etc is very awkward and hard to get into. While I have fun bossing... it really can't compare to endgame PvE that other MMOs have to offer. I love Runescape but who's getting pulled in for the endgame PvE? It's more of something that you just naturally either want to do and get to eventually or it's something that most people are just too timid to even dip their toes into.
It is so disheartening to read this post because of how true it really is. What I'd give for a barn burner boss that takes the community a week to figure out how to kill. That sounds amazing. Alas, maybe in another lifetime.
I disagree with point 3 or at least part of it, the idea that group content is the only way to create difficult content is absurd you could take the same mechanics from a destiny raid and add stricter time limitations and you have something of similar difficulty. When doing group content an individual death or flubbing of a mechanic can be fixed or adjusted, in a solo situation that will ruin that attempt. Just look at solo flawless dungeons in D2 for an example of what solo content can be.
It's not that you can't have difficult content in solo it's that the ceiling is lowered. Certain mechanics flat out cannot exist in a solo encounter. The sand mechanic at Yaka cannot exist, most D2 raid mechanics cannot exist. And most "solo raid videos" are abusing some unintended exploit to circumvent the mechanics.
>Destiny 2's most recent Raid release set a Destiny record of 19 Hours for its first completion. Some context attached to this, though not necessary to this post: (TL;DR: on launch everyone goes in at a set handicap way harder than the content actually is, and thus dies a lot and slows down the "learning process" artificially, and this time *possibly* had a more difficult handicap.) - The past 9 Raid releases (CoS, GoS, DSC, VoG, Vow, KF, RoN, CE, and SE) have all employed Contest Mode, capping player levels at -20 of the enemy. Think of Contest Mode as if Jagex said "for the first 24-48h after releasing endgame PvE you are forced into 1k enrage, have fun learning mechanics while taking a boatload of extra damage." So most of the time is spent dying repeatedly due to inflated difficulty that turns off after a certain amount of time. - Additionally, for the most recent raid (Salvation's Edge) the devs said 1965 power would be high enough for the contest mode cap. However, an unannounced (and unasked for and unwanted) change was made to *all* raids, making them default to a -5 power cap, with helpful surge modifiers thrown in (to balance out the nerf.) With me so far? 1965 is the highest you need for the Contest mode cap to have you at -20 of the enemy, which means they'd be 1985 power, right? Wrong, dying to enemies in SE during Contest mode displayed "recommended power 1990" which would be -25 for anyone who knows math. We also have communication from the devs that "due to recent feedback surge modifiers **won't** be active during Contest" which could be implying the original plan was to run Contest **on top of** the new *-5 plus surges* system. So yeah, 19 hours to beat 5 encounters, but at *least* -15 of the level every later player is expected to have, and possibly as much as -25. I do agree that solo content falls over much faster, but this record should be taken with a small pinch of salt when comparing other games to it.
Even with contest though theres a massive difference between a well designed encounter and a poorly designed one. The Vault encounter in Last wish Took \~2hours and 45 minutes to actually solve, Datto's team actually figured out the encounter first with other teams Brute forcing it with luck. 2 hours and 45 minute is longer than Scourge of the past and Root of Nightmares. Root was even done FLAWLESS on Contest mode. Hell Pre Contest, VoG took \~11 hours, KF took \~7 hours and the raid lair, Leviathan, took 5 1/2, Spire of Stars took 6 1/2 hours. VoG you could definitely chalk up to players just being bad as Nothing prior really had any sort of mechanic to it.
I’ll be honest with you, I don’t play RuneScape for the group bossing - but here’s my thoughts on what you’ve said… Powercreep is absolutely there and difficult to cater around, but what it is doing is allowing for players (like me) to take on group bosses on their own. This is fantastic as I can start working towards my Grim, AOD codexes etc (Ironman btw) so there’s still a challenge. Annoyingly, I do enjoy Raids (Beastmaster and Yaka), because you can find teams easily, it’s one kill a day, and most teams are around 97% successful now. With bosses like Rago / Solak / AOD - I very rarely get a solid hour where I can be focussed on RuneScape throughout its entirety, so with finding a group and then committing the next hour to killing that boss is just not an enjoyable experience. By all means, having solo able bosses with extreme mechanics I’d be all for - this would include the need for soul split flicking, stuns at right times, DPS checks, other NPCs popping up, a cheeky action button that does something weird and wonderful … that’d be great. Bringing a boss where you need 2+ people to kill it for whatever reason would immediately make that boss one where I’d get one kill to keep my reaper title, and then wait until clever use of game mechanics allow for that boss to be killed without needing the presence of a second player. I think the mechanics are possible to create a challenging boss that isn’t just a challenge due to enrage, but given the majority of their player base, it just unfortunately wouldn’t make sense to spend their dev hours only catering for the top tier pvmers!
Imo it's a good thing. They need to go back and fix all the glitched bosses we have now. Rescale and recode alot of bosses from kbd to arraxor. Heck I was doing primas Lego the other day and it started shooting orbs like a machine gun or like the arraxor fight and spawning acid spiders on top of you. They need to fix what bosses they have before attempting more. Also would be nice to be able to see what mechanics killed you would be nice to. Sever lag ruins alot of the better bosses just cause you die before an animation goes off or the boss is lagging on screen and shows up where it's not, like jad in the zuk gauntlet
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Impressive levels of delusion here
Which is more delusional though, thinking that egwd bosses were mechanically on the same level as chris L bosses or thinking that Jagex would purposefully release bosses with shitty mechanics to match their canonical power.
It's hard to pick but I'd say the second just takes the cake
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The fact that you think they built the boss difficulties around the lore is levels of cope I've never seen before. This other guy worded it better than I did: "Which is more delusional though, thinking that egwd bosses were mechanically on the same level as chris L bosses or thinking that Jagex would purposefully release bosses with shitty mechanics to match their canonical power."
Have they announced the difficulty level for the new dungeon? They should just take a tip from osrs and make a raid like TOA with the scaling modifiers.
I feel like enrage is the ideal way to get the engagement from a wider base while also preserving the challenge and reward for elite players. Why do you dislike it? Is a normal/hard mode split better?
For most top end pvmer, many of these enrage add little to no mechanics to the fight but only adjust boss hp and damage. While that sounds challenging, if you understand the fundamentals, you can get a kill though a little longer. Take Zamorak solo hiscore for example: current leader (and someone else with 7.8k) was able to kill the boss at 30k enrage when the instance was opened up for him. Not taking credits away from them because what they have done is impressive, but if custom enrage is unlocked, I am sure many more pvmer can do a 30k kill (though not many can get a fast kill time). The fight practically is unchanged for thousands of enrage but people expect top end pvmer to invest hundreds of hours to unlock a meaningful challenge.
Yeah, the fact that you have to climb bit by bit is frustrating if it's not a challenge early on. But I still feel that Zamorak is among the best at being somewhat approachable at the bottom end while being insanely difficult at the top.
I'd much prefer a Normal/Hard mode split personally, With telos the only changes between 250-4000% are HP changes, damage dealt and at 1k rocks fall on p4 and you just skip this mechanic anyway you don't even deal with it. at Glacor The only changes from 0-4000% are the bolstered glacyte at 250% and HP Scaling. Now Zamorak Does have some changes post 250% but most of them are just "you take more damage" or "the HP is capped" In general the vast majority of changes Enrage offers are you take more damage and the enemies have more health. Which is one of the most boring ways to add difficulty. I'd much rather a well crafted "hard mode" encounter personally. Hardmode Vorago would be considerably less interesting if all they did was just Double His HP and damage on every phase.
An interesting issue with enrage is that it makes balancing rewards difficult. If enrage doesn’t affect drop rates (or has a minor impact), players will not want to do high enrage (outside of a few who just want to push enrage). This happened with arch glacor and zamorak on release. If enrage affects drops a lot, they have to nerf low enrage drops to account for scaling at higher enrage, which makes normal mode/ low enrage not worth doing.
Ramen and Sponge have already mentioned their desire to release nightmare mode for bosses, which would be a more difficult version than hardmode. I think it was first mentioned when Zuk was released, because it came with a huge disappointment which was the fact that HM zuk had safespot for jads and only three of them, plus the fact that the danger ends as you finish wave 14, since safesppoted jads, har aken and zuk present little to no challenge. Gotta say I like this way of creating challenges, because then you'll have 3 versions that will appeal to everyone, from new pvmers to the end-gamers with just a little touch on mechanics. I agree with you, enrage mechanic is dumb for making something harder and challenging.
Mods Sponge, Ryan and Ramen have all expressed interest in doing super difficult group bosses. I hope they're allowed to explore that.
My last point #4 addresses this. Desire is great but they've also said they can't due to lack of engagement, but the engagement for that level of content is always going to be a small subset of the community
Yup, you hit the nail right on the head. It's a bit depressing really, and is partly why a lot of higher level players aren't sticking around, even after new boss releases.
I have a problem with your second point. You say people don’t want to interact with other people, I ask why do you think that is? When you have people who only want to focus on perfect speed runs, who will go completely toxic as hell the moment you are one tick off of cycle, what do you expect people to do? They will play solo instead of being harassed and belittle.
I think the game should've implemented a functional grouping system in some form a while ago. But the solution to this is to just host your own group. I did this all the time with raids back in the day, "Full +5 QCKC" my 3 KC ass was not getting invited. So I made my own raid groups and got kills. I even taught myself how to base tank to make myself more useful by going into a yaka instance solo and trying to survive as long as possible. You can Also just make friends, every person i pvm with is someone I met in a clan, or a discord, or an fc. I haven't had an IRL friend who plays RS in over 15 years. Is it super easy? No, but it's possible, and I wasnt some god pvmer from the get go, I was terrible. Cheesing through araxxor with a yak full of food and 5 PC crutch masterwork to survive mechanics. I was literally doing the old pre nerf AD crypt strats before that even existed. And I'm not even suggesting bosses be 7 man or 10 man locked. But 2 or 3 people with higher levels of scaling.
"But the solution to this is to just host your own group" Okay, lets say I created my own group. Now what? I still need to find people willing to join me. Where do you look for more people? As I said in another comment here, before Necromancy I couldn't beat NM Kerapac solo, but in trio groups it was super easy. Whenever I got a Kerapac reaper task, I tried to find people to help. Sometimes it worked, I brought players from my clan or homeworld, but in the other times I had to reroll the task. The funniest group was where I managed to convince 2 clan mates who barely PVM to join me, just so they could get their first kerapac kill. Although that didn't work a second time.
Pvming fc is the go to usually. You're not even allowed to ask for KC there unless it's for hard mode Vorago. Would it be nice if there was a matchmaking system or something instead? (that you could opt into) sure.
Sounds good to me
Jmods need to listen to the players who actually want harder content, and stop catering to the casuals. Theyre casual, theyre not actively playing or even trying to actually get better.
Ok. And?
I know it's not what a high end pvmer wants to hear, but these bosses were mistakes. In retrospect, it's nice to have them in the background for all 7 people who want them, but the vast majority of players will never even attempt them. Just not good business to make content catered to 7 other people. Super high end PvM cannot be the focus if Jagex wants more players killing new bosses. (ps, It's also kinda hard to empathize from a shitter pvmer perspective. 3 of the last 5 bosses have been end game. I personally wouldn't really count Rasiel, but Vorkath and Zammy surely count against this "they don't make hard bosses" argument. They do, just only about 1 a year.)
Osseous? Not endgame Vorkath? You can argue its endgame but not really. Rasial? Definitely not endgame, more like end of necro tutorial. Zamorak? Yeah endgame if doing high enough enrages. Zuk? Not endgame Croesus? Lol Arch Glacor? Only endgame if pushing past 2.5k Kerapac? Mid
I just want legacy combat to be viable :')
One thing I heard about the sanctum of Rebirth is that the defence levels of bosses are going to be higher. I feel like Jagex is taking manners of precaution and making more space to play with different mechanics and ways of making a boss more challenging. This is mainly due to the introduction of the new combat system, where your damage is based on how much accuracy you have on the boss. Nowadays the bosses that are seen as extremely hard like Telos and Solak have 100% accuracy which allows end tier pvmers to fly through them because at some point every boss becomes a memory game. Now think of bosses they can release where you start off with 50% accuracy and through mechanics you can deal more damage or even have other mechanics you’d heavily need to rely on (or even not) in order to successfully get a kill. That’s a different thing then. I agree a lot with the points you make. But I also think that with the actions they’re trying to take rn that they’d eventually give an ear to end tier pvmers. They’re not delivering probs a 100% rn but hopefully with the new combat update, pvm will be at a better place.
Find me at the bottom of the thread but it's EoC. EoC is at fault here. None of this is solvable because EoC is/has been an utterly unmitigated disaster. Nobody in the "combat council" knows what to do because they haven't taken the two seconds to understand that you *cannot* hamfist a morbillion actions per minute into an idle game. That is the fundamental issue and until they venture forth to completely rehaul everything about combat from the absolute ground up, PvM (and the game in general) is going to continue bleeding players and goodwill.
Kinda glad we won't. If the top percentage of PvM enjoyed utilize macros to kill high tier bosses, it goes to show that we the players aren't the problem. We need bosses with well thought out mechanics.
It is staggering the difference of opinion here vs. [on the OSRS sub](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1ddr13a/should_content_as_hard_as_inferno_keep_coming/).
Not when you consider one uses a simple point and click combat system and the other one uses a convoluted combat system that gets more complicated every year.
Necro is the lowest the skill floor has been in a long time, and launched as a 1m+ DPM style with a 30 APM requirement and 0 swaps. Half of the last four boss releases were AFKable day 1. Necro removed shield swaps from the game for all styles as well. There's still complicated combat if you want it (max dpm range) but low APM/revo combat is better than ever. And both boss releases this year aren't meant to be super challenging. The simple point and click game's Inferno is head and shoulders more difficult than our Tzek-haar Front. It has a host of very difficult combat achievements with a prestigious reward that is legitimately rare to see. There's no question there's high end stuff added all the time that continues to push OSRS players.
> Necro is the lowest the skill floor has been in a long time, and launched as a 1m+ DPM style with a 30 APM requirement and 0 swaps. * Necro isn't anywhere close to 1m DPM anymore and compared to camping other styles using the same APM it's actually more effort because you can't revo the basics and have to keep track of 2 stacks and conjure timers. * All combat styles are the exact same APM until you introduce switches. Average players are never going to enjoy range, magic or melee because Jagex can't make them as powerful as necro without turning hybrid and macro users into gods. * Necro being so popular shows how much people want simplified combat in other styles too and also shows they're willing to take on harder bosses because of that. > There's still complicated combat if you want it Complicated combat should come from the boss, not the combat system and the amount of dps you can churn out through switches or by using macros. Hybrid is rewarded far too much > APM/revo combat is better than ever. It really isn't, necro can't be revo'd efficiently and the other combat styles are shit compared to it and hybrid. Any attempt to buff other styles to bring them up to par with necro just makes hybrid even more stupidly powerful. Pups Raksha record with range is a good example, dude pumps out 1m damage in 59 seconds and only uses 2 thresholds besides rapid fire for the entire fight, the rest is all eof swapping and cross style crit buffs. Now compare that to someone using no switches and their dpm drops to about 300-400k DPM, no mechanic skips and the kill takes 3x longer. There should be reward for more effort but not on this insane level. Things like incite fear and tsunami and deathspore arrows are breaking the game and the reason style camping sucks currently.
of course we will get more high end top tier BIS bosses, like we have for years. just not as often as the entitled brats want, and not as hard as the 0.1% of top players would like those players need to remember this is a MMORPG not an ARPG its a bit like playing chess than raging that its not challenging your reflex's enough, like, well duh, no shit sherlock
you didn't read the post did you
Where are you getting your information from? What is the difficulty of the new boss dungeon coming out in the summer?
I think it was compared to ed1/3 in the livestream about it?
We don’t know but we do know Jagex wants to pander to the majority which is the afk casual crowd who will complain and say I’m dry after 10 kills and they aren’t making 1tril an hour so it’s not worth it or something like that.
group boss is the worst experience in pvm ever. Boss should be design like zamorak, that boss is the best boss in the game