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As you saw in our latest This Week In RuneScape, we are looking to make adjustments to both the Fractured Staff of Armadyl (FSOA) and Animate Dead – but before we do, we want to hear from YOU about your thoughts on our proposal.
This Is About Feedback
We’re opening this discussion today, weeks before any potential release, in order to hear your thoughts on our proposed changes and get your feedback.
Nothing of what you are about to read is set in stone. This is an important change for us to make, but it’s equally important we make these changes in the right time and in the right way.
Constructive, detailed comments will help us understand all perspectives as best as possible to help inform where we go from here. While balancing changes will always have an element of necessity, we want have your perspective in mind when we make them. With that said, let's get to the changes.
Animate Dead
In it's current state, Animate Dead is unfortunately just performing too well with very little downside. In particular, it's overly synergistic with other sources of damage reduction and creates a scenario where lots of low-damage hits can no longer threaten players. That being said, we do like that Animated Dead has increased the viability of tank armor and allowed more players to get into PvM.
With that in mind, our goal is to make a conservative change to Animate Dead - we want to balance it out while preserving that tanky experience many of you love. Here's what we're looking to do:
- Cannot reduce damage by more than 60% (was 75%)
- Damage reduction now uses 25% of defence level (was 33%)
- Now only works vs core damage types (melee, magic, ranged)
- E.g. Will not work vs typeless damage, reflect etc
The biggest of these changes we see is the move towards core damage types.
Commonly, PvM mechanics where we want players to show some level of skill to proceed in a fight will use non-core damage types and as such aren't affected by damage reducing prayers, requiring players to get the mechanic right or suffer some form of punishment. Animate Dead previously excelled in letting players just ignore mechanics, such as Zamorak's Rune of Destruction attack. As such, Animate Dead was creating a large amount of design debt that was having to be considered when creating new encounters, limiting our ability to create exciting mechanics or combat for you as players that Animate Dead could disregard entirely.
Despite this shift, the resulting damage mitigation changes to Animate Dead are fairly small. Here’s a table for comparison to outline the impact to a similar geared and levelled player:
| LIVE | POST CHANGES |
|---|---|
| Player has Seasinger Hood, Legs, Top, 99 Defence. Animate Dead value: 240 | Player has Seasinger Hood, Legs, Top, 99 Defence. Animate Dead value: 213 |
| 1000 Damage vs above player with NO animate dead850 damage dealt to player | 1000 Damage vs above player with NO animate dead850 damage dealt to player |
| 1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead.610 damage dealt to player | 1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead.637 damage dealt to player |
| 1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer185 damage dealt to player | 1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer255 damage dealt to player |
| 500 Damage vs above player with NO animate dead425 damage dealt to player | 500 Damage vs above player with NO animate dead425 damage dealt to player |
| 500 Damage vs above player with animate dead.185 damage dealt to player | 500 Damage vs above player with animate dead.255 damage dealt to player |
| 500 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer53 damage dealt to player | 500 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer127 damage dealt to player |
Fractured Staff of Armadyl (FSOA)
Since the release of FSOA, the weapon has been bringing death and destruction to anything that gets in its path (both monsters and runes!) assuming you hit the RNG rolls enough. When it comes to the FSOA we've identified a number of problems:
- The auto attack problem:
- Being auto based means the weapon has an excessively high upkeep cost, it feels bad to use the special, particularly against lower-end bosses.
- The damage value is of individual shots from the spec is hard to adjust due to the combat system just passing auto-attack through for the staff.
- The weapon is putting a big design restriction on critical strike as the recursive nature of the special attack means that any future unlocks that affect critical strike push the special close to going 'infinite'.
- The damage output of the staff is hitting the limits of what we're comfortable with, and far beyond what we've previously introduced, meaning we're less able to create new rewarding upgrades for magic players.
The changes we have in mind are focused on the FSOA's Special Attack:
- Special attack effect no longer does autoattack damage but instead the extra hit is passed through as an ability
- This means there is no longer the cost of runes for each extra crit
- A projectile is no longer sent from the player to the target as expected from an auto-attack
- Instead, the green lightning effect from the special attack cast animation will play on the target when hit with an extra hit from a successful proc
- Special attack effect can no longer trigger off of itself removing the recursive nature
- Special attack effect now deals 60-120% ability damage with each hit.
- AVG 90% ability damage per fire.
What this means is the effective damage of the FSOA will be moved to a balanced place where it performs as a weapon of that level should (as a result of losing it’s recursive nature) while also becoming less of a Rune-eating fiend!
While this does reduce the power of the FSOA from where it is today, this makes the ability much easier for us to control and balance - and ultimately means we'll be able to introduce more upgrades that synergise with magic, critical strike and the staff that we couldn’t do without addressing this first. Bringing other weapons up to this level is unfortunately not an option as it would introduce the same design problems for other styles, and ultimately, create less exciting options for future content in those areas too.
Now We Want To Hear From You!
Now it’s back to you – the whole purpose of this post is about gathering feedback and getting your input on how you feel about where we’re going with these changes.
While balancing over-performant weapons and spells is important – as we’ve mentioned, it’s even restricting design choices on doing even cooler things for future encounters or other Magic upgrades – this comes with an impact and we want to understand your perspectives on it too.
I’m here with u/JagexSponge today to chat to you all for the next few hours, and we’ll also be sporadically responding on Friday to continue the conversation.
Please keep it constructive to help us get the best insight into your thoughts and – with that in mind - fire away ‘Scapers!
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