Jagex proposes buffing 1-75 agility by more than 2 hours, and yet people see a slight adjustment to seers and think it's the biggest nerf possible.

Hey, I'm going to try and explain the methodology for the process of reaching the numbers we did for the agility rework just for full transparency so that the full context is out there to be reviewed as to whether or not it is "good" or "bad". From this, I'd hope that the full context can aid in the discussion and help us get relevant feedback to review.

First up, the design goals were not to directly buff agility or nerf agility, we instead were looking at how content was positioned throughout the skill and to see if we could reach a healthier meta for agility as a whole and several things stood out to us.

1. Rooftops dominate the meta for the entire skill for most players, this is largely due to marks of grace.
2. Getting to your first course is very unintuitive.
3. The level 60 rooftop course (Seers) occupies a large place in the meta, basically taking most players from 60 to 90 unless they wish to do more pro-active methods of training. This is entirely because of how this diary warped the meta and causes the agility skill to feel very stale with few meaningful changes in gameplay.

For the purpose of this comment, I'm going to be talking about the third point.

So, to start things off, let's look at how the rooftop courses were initially setup without taking into account the diary reward from Kandarin. For the purpose of this I'm going to ignore how the rest of the agility proposals in the blog sit in the meta. XP-rates are taken from the osrs wiki.

• Level 60 - Seers: 45.6k
• Level 70 - Pollnivneach: 52.3k
• Level 80 - Rellekka: 55k
• Level 90 - Ardougne: 62.3k

As a design, this accomplishes the simple desire when training a skill of unlocking a new milestone reward every 10 levels to change which course you go to.

Now, let's look at it with the addition of release of the Kandarin Hard diary reward.

• Level 60 - Seers: 58.9k
• Level 70 - Pollnivneach: 52.3k
• Level 80 - Rellekka: 55k
• Level 90 - Ardougne: 62.3k

Now we can see that Seers really does become the best rooftop method until you reach Ardougne rooftops.

Naturally, we can't really just remove the diary reward and fix this issue. It's long been established in the meta and we don't think it's inherently bad gameplay to get access to a nice teleport to enhance an existing skilling method by jumping through some additional hoops, so we decided instead that perhaps we should look to add the same reward to Pollnivneach and Rellekka through their respective diarys. This resulted in the following rough proposal:

• Level 60 - Seers: 58.9k
• Level 70 - Pollnivneach: 52.3k -> 60k
• Level 80 - Rellekka: 55k -> 65k
• Level 90 - Ardougne: 62.3k

Ok, so now when looking at it, you're getting an XP increase by going to the next course but very clearly Ardougne is now not worth doing and we can't really add a closer teleport to speed this up because of where the course ends, so instead we're left with the option of increasing it's XP rates.

We also noted that Pollnivneach still might not be worth doing, why go to the bother of unlocking an entire other diary reward just for a 1.1k XP/hr increase? Also, increasing Pollnivneach even more would have a knock-on effect to the other two courses, so instead we felt it fair to just touch it down a little bit to make the next unlock more pronounced by reducing the lap completion XP, by reducing it to around 55k we've reduced it to about 93% of what it used to be and since we had no plans to move the teleport location this would also have a knock-on effect of slightly reducing Seers without the diary too. This would result in the following which we've included as the proposal in the blog:

• Level 60 - Seers: 58.9k -> 55k
• Level 70 - Pollnivneach: 52.3k -> 60k
• Level 80 - Rellekka: 55k -> 65k
• Level 90 - Ardougne: 62.3k -> 70k

Just a note, we've gone for rough increases of 5k xp/hr per course just as a rough guideline but naturally through balancing the numbers could vary slightly but I wouldn't imagine by a significant amount.

So, as a result of all these changes Agility gets a slight nerf from 60-70 if you are doing Seers (but we'd expect the other proposals in the blog such as Brimhaven to cover this if you want more leaned in gameplay) and the rest of the skill get's a slight buff.

We didn't go into this with the intention of buffing content but it feels like with the Seers diary reward as it is and without nerfing it completely, this felt like the more natural solution to go for and the hope was that it wouldn't have too much of an impact on efficient rates because rooftops are not the efficient meta.

Now, I've seen some general talk and sentiment about Agility being a slow and boring skill and some outcry to just make it faster, while I don't want to bloat this entire thread out with a skill philosophy discussion, I thought I'd just leave any thinking this to ponder the following:

• Are slow skills the problem? Or are boring skills the problem?
• Is Construction a good skill because it's fast?
• Is Slayer a bad skill because it's slow?
• Does making a boring skill fast actually fix the underlying issues?

Anyway, just my two cents on the issue, I'm aware that this is a very sensitive topic, but it's a discussion I'm acutely interested in, skilling has an important place to all kinds of players so it's important that these discussions are had when we're considering any changes!

Yeah, the slow and boring part is where Agility definitely sits. I still wouldn't want the change to just be "Make it fast and boring"

My hope is that the introduction of new content can resolve this issue. Sepulchre is only really meta from level 72 onwards (at the very least, it's not as fun to run floors 52 and 62 repeatedly) and I also don't think Sepulchre should be the be-all and end-all from 52-99 either, that was a very intentional design choice.

The proposal mentions a Brimhaven agility rework which I hope can scratch the itch of being fun while also providing more XP/hr at the relevant levels for those who want to pay more attention.

Hopefully my response to another player above provides my thoughts to some of what you raised.

I think the reward aspect of agility is still something we should address and is completely separate from the xp rates of the skill. It simultaneously feels mandatory and underwhelming at the same time and shortcuts don't do enough.

The discussion about whether or not Agility should be a fast or slow skill was not really something we were planning to address with this project. We just wanted to create a more healthy meta and to make receiving unlocks while training it feel more exciting and meaningful.

I don't dislike the idea of looking at the marks of grace a course gives as another balancing metric as a potential solution. I'd need to think on it some more and actually dig out some numbers before coming to any real conclusions though.

The addition of a diary locked teleport similar to seers would inevitably make these locations easier to get to. Or were you specifically talking about getting to these courses before the proposed diary reward is unlocked?

I don't think it's unreasonable that we could touch up the layout/interactions of some of the courses as part of this project.

The course just feeling bad to do (from a gameplay perspective) is very different to it feeling bad to do because of the xp rates.

I did see the comment!

Your thought process is generally consistent with mine and it's why I posed those questions at the bottom of my ramble.

I think that looking at a skill's xp rates in a vacuum without considering other metrics is not a good way to evaluate whether or not a skill is good.

My response to another player:

"I don't think it's unreasonable that we could touch up the layout/interactions of some of the courses as part of this project.

The course just feeling bad to do (from a gameplay perspective) is very different to it feeling bad to do because of the xp rates."