So people who said they missed consistently with Ice Barrage / Blitz were lying or assuming "0"'s are misses? I swear I saw people saying they still splashed but that post makes it clear as day it was a bug making 100% accuracy spells.
Either way glad they went back on it, Mage is so weak compared to the other two Relics.
It was impossible for the spell to splash previously, but people may have thought a 0 hit was a splash. You can still successfully cast a spell and it hit 0, with Ice Barrage it would freeze the target in that instance.
DO we know when we'll find out how many points the various rewards are going to cost?
It'll be before the League ends so you have time to view everything in advance, but no exact date to be given just yet!
If theres any mod lurking in this thread, I just wanna say that not all Zeah steps were removed. Today I got hosidius mess hall from a hard clue.
We're aware some clues were missed out, we're investigating that currently and hope to have those steps removed but it might be with next week's game update now
I love how they're rolling with the punches, trying to keep things fair and reasonable, but most of all, not shying away from strong/busted effects in order to promote fun. Removing the KC on gwd and this are undoubtedly the best ways to keep things going and making sure no one is stuck on a relic choice they regret.
The mod's mindset seems to be absolutely on point, kudos
It's a tough balance to manage but ultimately yeah, we want to make sure players are still having fun even if things are a little broken. That's kind of the charm of Leagues, you can do stuff you'd never normally be able to do in the main game!
I wouldn't say "absolutely" on point considering the lack of communication in regard to the stealth nerf. I am happy with the results we are getting once the community gets engaged though.
In hindsight we should have sent out comms to make everyone aware, but it was a little tricky given it was changed at around 10pm GMT when not as many staff are avaiable. It would have been better to not make the silent hotfix at all and went with today's approach instead, something we've noted for future instances :)
does this make all spells hit all the time if you are above those thresholds or is it only bind spells against players? it isn't really clear to me from the newspost, but I was using double cast against vorkath a few days ago and it felt really, really bad, like it probably had no effect so i'm hoping it's all spells against everything
It's only for Bind spells and the Ice spells from the Ancient spellbook.
Does this apply to all spells or just barrages?
Only the ice spells from the Ancient spellbook and Bind/Snare/Entangle spells in the normal spell book are impacted by this change.
True but the big points are in the pvm and I’m already at that stage. Glad they changed it back but just cost me a day...
Sorry it cost you so much time, I personally would have just done something else for a while but it was on us for not communicating this earlier! Hope you manage to climb back up again now!
I wasn't happy about the how sneakily the original nerf was done. It should have been discussed with the community or at the very least announced to have happened before it was implemented into the game.
The current implementation is great, it means people can't wear full tank gear and always hit, but if they wear proper magic equipment they can do what they were meant to.
Even though we rather quickly got a good solution, we shouldn't have had to deal with the suspense of an unexpected and unannounced nerf for one of the less popular relics.
I wrote this in another comment and think it applies here too:
In hindsight we should have sent out comms to make everyone aware, but it was a little tricky given it was changed at around 10pm GMT when not as many staff are avaiable. It would have been better to not make the silent hotfix at all and went with today's approach instead, something we've noted for future instances
Does this version of things allow the +60 to mean Entangle (and other "normal" spellbook bind spells) will always bind? Or just Ice spells?
Thanks :)
All standard spellbook binds are also included in this yeah, so they'll always freeze their target if you have the required accuracy
This seems really unfair for those of us who didn't pick the desert for ancients. I decided I could afford to not pick up ancients because I could use the swamp trident for my main damaging spell and the exploding attacks relic to mimic the aoe of barrage spells.
If I had known that ice spells were going to be given 100% perfect accuracy, I likely would have chosen desert instead of tirannwn. I want to try to do ToB with magic but now it looks like a swamp trident build is completely inferior in every way to an ancient magic build.
Is there any way this change could be applied to other high level spells? Mainly surge spells and powered staves, just to make it fair for those mages who chose different paths. Even with that change, magic would still be underpowered compared to range and melee. But I chose magic because I wanted to be a little different from everyone else and I've always preferred using magic combat in video games.
The best single target mage dps against a lot of things is still going to be Toxic Trident/Sang with imbued heart (which stays perm boosted with botanist). It has a max hit of around 44 which is much stronger than ice barrage and also outperforms Crystal Bow/Crystal armour by a reasonable amount. (Especially because Powered Staves benefit from T6 relic effects such as Draining Strikes/Exploding attacks and ice barrage does not)
Ice barrage will be better now against bosses where magic is not typically good at such as Nightmare, Bloat etc.
I would like to reply directly to you for this.
After seeing the nerf I came out f**king HOT on reddit this morning. After further clarification and explanation from this post, it is much more reasonable.
Thank you and the people who interact with the community everyday. As anyone who has ever worked in CS knows, customers are the literal worst. As a customer, having this clear and concise communication about an issue and resolution from the company in a matter of hours of it popping up is amazing.
E: When you are in full mage gear and landing constant barrages with no splashes, you don't think anything of it, as that dps output is "normal". When you are in full mage gear and notice more splashes occurring than "normal" it is a bit triggering.
If our players are happy then we're happy! That's all that really matters at the end of it all.
We could have approached this better in regards to the silent hotfix and avoided the overnight confusion and frustration players experienced, but we'll learn from that for the future!
Thank you for replying so positively <3
Again I'm nothing but impressed with the handling of the league! A perfect middle ground achieved and well communicated to boot.
The only thing that makes me sad is the slightly misleading production master description and no red dragon tasks allowed, that seems a bit funky but small issues. Oh and welcome back Ayiza!
Thank you! It feels so good to be back <3
Also am sad about Production Master, I want my instant glass smelting!!
Hello, I've checked your recent comments but didn't find anything regarding reasons behind glassmaking nerf. It's incredibly frustrating to see prod master relic description changed instead of its effect fixed to match description players used to make relic choice.
Could you please reconsider actually fixing prod master relic effect for glassmaking or at least provide some explanation why it's impossible?
We're working on that at the moment and hope to have more information to share next week
Wasn't it reversed like 12h or so after the nerf? That's really fast
They "fixed" what they deemed to be a bug, probably planning to mention it on the next post, and then noticed it had unintended consequences that affected the fun/viability of the relic. So they make a post exclusively for it with a nice middle-ground.
About as good as I could hope for, tbh
This is pretty much exactly it, there was no point in us putting comms out until we had another meeting to review if we wanted to make anymore changes and since we did decide to make changes we waited until we'd actually made them.
face me u/JagexAyiza
I don't think we'll be changing that one back unfortunately as it could be abused in too many areas, I'm sorry (︶︹︶)
well if you ad an amulet to it and maybe some higher level mage equipment then I guess you could also add a tank piece without going below 60
I was just about to add that with some small tweaks you could drop other pieces of gear quite easily. Even an Amulet of magic would give an extra +10 Magic accuracy for example
Is that +60 for perfect accuracy on everything or are we basically stuck with just ice being viable? I don't need a buff that huge, I would just like to see the spells all be balanced and the relic effect decent.
It's only for Bind spells and the Ice spells from the Ancient spellbook.
Have you guys taken into account what effect the rapid xp and drop rates on Trailblazer will have when these players gets back to the normal game? Are the worries about the potential lost interest exaggerated or warranted?
I think it's going to be interesting to see how players adjust going back to the main game that's for sure. I did an internal playtest yesterday and couldn't get over how slow melee felt in comparison!
Just wondering if you can share the techincal reason why? Seems so strange to me.
Also have you seen the AS bug on fossil island swamp critters?
Husky wrote this on Twitter so I'll just copy paste his reply
We are essentially going with "We'll keep the bug but with extra steps" to prevent things like Justiciar being the best Mage Armour, theoretically.
The bug was only present in "binding spells" because they have a separate acc check for those and that was the only one affected.
We've seen the AS thing on Fossil Island and don't really see it being that big an issue so it'll stay as it is!
Hi Ayiza, I know you're getting a lot of comments but could you please comment on this and possibly even discuss it with the team depending on your response to this?
I would still claim that magic is the weakest of the 3 styles with this change reverted back... Even with magic reverted back (I'm actually happy with the accuracy bonus requirement for it to work). There is still the issue of 2 out of 3 of the tier six relics edging on entirely useless for magic. There is also being locked into ice magick.
In particular... It doesn't make sense to force the player to downrank a spell to benefit from something like draining strikes. Is there a limitation in the game that prevents draining strikes from working only on the specific target the player clicked and not on all the others hit by barrage? Perhaps a potential workaround is to give us 4 new ancient magick spells, single-target ones that have the same power as their barrage counterparts?
On top of that, it doesn't feel like it's in the spirit of what was intended to now force ancients users to use ice magick only. Is there any reason this "buff" could not be progressively applied to all types of spell damage now, if not to the exact same degree as ice spells?
I'm far from the only person that feels that tier 6 has little improvement for mages so I really hope you see and consider this!
I'm not sure on the balancing of the relics, though I do recall a few people saying that with the correct setup it's not actually as weak as you'd think, though this takes some good planning.
I personally feel like not every relic needs to be equally strong. I chose what I did because that's what I thought I would have the most fun with. I think we have a lot to learn for future leagues, and I would rather players not feel like they've made a mistake, but I don't think there will be any major changes to the relics in terms of balancing them out now we're already into the league.
Husky said this about the bind/ice spells, so I'll just copy paste it here. It's unlikely we'll make this change to any of the other spells because that check isn't currently present and it could lead to further issues:
We are essentially going with "We'll keep the bug but with extra steps" to prevent things like Justiciar being the best Mage Armour, theoretically.
The bug was only present in "binding spells" because they have a separate acc check for those and that was the only one affected.
Will you consider adding it for all spellbook spells? Essentially any spell that isn't cast by a powered staff, honestly, even those would be fine but, more on that later. This bug-turned-feature adds a lot of power to the desert for double cast users and region remorse for people who didn't select it, either because they weren't aware or assumed it would be fixed. In a lot of cases the powered staves will still be better than casting Fire Wave or Fire Surge but it would reduce situations where you have to hybrid/tribrid even though both of the other relics don't have to such as DKs, and situations that you're better off using a different attack style than the relic you picked like Vorkath.
In this post /u/jagexhusky cites ice barrage's inability to work with draining strikes as a reason empowered staves are better than ice barrage but didn't consider that somebody can just use ice blitz for only about ~4 lower max hit to get effect from draining strikes. So it's definitely easy with minimal damage loss to get guaranteed ice spell hits that restore hp & prayer, and for that reason I think even giving powered staves the guaranteed hits wouldn't be crazy, either. Whips are constantly 2 ticking 50+ hits
Like, are we supposed to ignore our t3 relic and use melee to get nightmare drops while getting 0 mvps to finally be able to use our magic relic at... kraken or rex because that's the only thing mage doesn't suck at? It's a little frustrating to see how strong melee is while we are practically useless on most things if we aren't using only ice barrage, which some mage users can't even get at this point because they were unaware of the bug.
I understand your frustration, and I'd rather have no players be unhappy with their relic choices, but it's unlikely we'll be making further changes regarding spell accuracy and such now.
In regards to your point about ignoring your T3 relic for certain pieces of content, I personally have to do the same with Zulrah being a melee user for example. It's just something I've accepted as part of my decision making with planning. Granted for me it's not as drastic as you've described, but I do think that's a big part of the league in general.
Does this apply to PvP in the wilderness region as well? It's very annoying if you took the melee relic and the mager has 100% freeze/accuracy rate when you're trying to escape.
It only applies to combat with NPC's, it should work with the normal accuracy buffs in PvP but still have a chance to splash.
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