Original Post — Direct link

Counting ticks and attacks is becoming more and more important. When facing end-game bosses it's pretty much mandatory to count boss attacks or count game ticks when doing complex rotations. It's also important for activities such as Hall of Memories or when doing Mining.

Unfortunately some of us have slight impairment called Beat Deafness. Long story short, we can't keep rhythm. I could listen/watch something rhythmic for hours and I'd desync few seconds of not having auditory/visual aid. This makes high end pvm and pretty much any complex combat that relies on ticks very difficult for people like me.

I suggest implementing 2 relatively simple things:

Boss Auto-Attack indicator

Basically few lights that would light up - they would represent boss' attacks. Once all such lights are active the boss would do his thing and they would turn off.

Raksha's interface modified to include auto-attack counter. Notice the bars below health - in this instance it would indicate that Raksha did 1 out of 4 attacks before next ability.

In-Game metronome

A simple widget that would have 2 squares that would alternate every tick. Optionally it could have audio cue and you could set frequence from 1 to 5 game ticks.

Movable just like the Slayer Counter Widget. The green and red rectangles would alternate with frequency selected by player.

Q&A

Question: Doesn't it dumb down the game and make the bosses/combat easier?

Answer: It doesn't give the player any information he doesn't already have and thus it doesn't change difficulty for standard players. On the other hand such change would greatly help Rhythm Deaf players.

Question: Can't you just use metronome or something? There's plenty of metronomes online

Answer: These metronomes are difficult to sync with the game precisely and even then they tend to desync after a while as Runescape's ticks aren't always 0.6s long.

Question: Why do you need it? We all learned the stuff by counting ticks and attacks

Answer: Most people can "learn" a rhythm after a while, Rhythm Deaf people can't. This means that even after over a thousand of Raksha kills and hundreds of hours of manual combat I have to consciously count attacks and ticks which is mentally exhaustive and distracting, not to mention incredibly inaccurate if I'm not using some aid.

Question: Is this really necessary? I don't like it

Answer: It's purely interface feature that should be non-intrusive as possible. Optionally, there could be some way to hide it if you don't like having it on screen.

External link →
over 2 years ago - /u/JagexOrion - Direct link

I've actually considered creating a server tick metronome exactly like this. What a fantastic post, thank you.