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Based on feedback from the beta, we've made some changes and improvements to masterwork and especially trimmed masterwork armour.
Masterwork armour is T90 power and made entirely with smithing.
Trimmed masterwork armour is T92 power and made by combining masterwork with torva and malevolent armour.
You can read all the details in the Full Masterwork and Trimmed Masterwork Documentation
The most important thing we want to know is, is this armour good enough to justify how difficult it is to get?
The trimmed set effect is available on the beta right now to try out.
(You'll need to copy and paste the whole link as reddit doesn't like the formatting.)
rs-launch://www.runescape.com/k=5/l=0/jav_config_beta.ws
'Customisation' is not implemented yet and can't be tested right now.
TLDR on the changes:
Masterwork armour is significantly cheaper to make (the materials required have halved from 1200 of every bar to 600 of every bar)
Masterwork and trimmed masterwork armour have had the time taken to make rebalanced around a bit, but the total time to make is similar to what it was.
Trimmed masterwork armour has had a set effect added which turns 50% of damage received into a DOT you take over the next six seconds to spread the damage out and make it easier to deal with. You can test this set effect on the beta right now.
Trimmed masterwork armour has the option to "customise" it, which makes it permanently untradeable in return for 50% slower degrading and charge loss and no degrading or charge loss at all while on a slayer or reaper task. We're not entirely sure about this option - we think it might be too strong, but we wanted to put it out there so you can let us know what you think.
Full details of all these points is in the design document if you want to know more.
FAQ
Why did you put a tank set effect on power armour?
Right now the current balance situation is that we can't just add more killing power to the top end to increase kill speeds. I'm not happy about this either, but it's going to require some difficult decisions and some time to fix for the game as a whole, so for now we just need to not do it and use other beneficial effects instead.
EDIT: To expand on this point since it seems to be everyone's primary concern.
The current design of slayer and bosses in the game means that the economy is extremely sensitive to small increases in damage dealt at the top end. Both increasing the number of players who can efficiently farm high end bosses (especially higher enrages on Telos) and allowing the players who can already farm those bosses to farm them even faster will devastate the economy. Those bosses have drop tables which are so profitable and so generous that a 10% increase in kill speed will essentially crash everything on the drop table by 10% and cause gold to inflate by 10%, resulting in no net gain of money for bossers and punishing everyone else. (I'm oversimplifying but that would be the rough impact.)
There are ways to dig ourselves out of this hole, but they require a coordinated strategy across gear and combat content to fix. As a couple of examples, we could accept the increased drop quantities and resultant inflation, buff skilling to compensate, and put exponentially more expensive gold sinks into the game to deal with. Another would be that better weapons allow you to kill high tier bosses, but don't increase kill speed on low tier bosses (like the way hardness and penetration work in new mining) so good gear is mandatory for new content but balanced for old content.
The point here though is that fixing this problem is more complex than something I can just hack into the M&S rework right now. It'll take investigation, research, possibly polling, possibly making sweeping changes to old content. I agree that we shouldn't be in this situation, but we are, and in 2019 I want to look at dealing with it. First though, I need to get M&S finished.
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