May your frustrations melt away like Mandrith's Mallows melt on your tongue - we've hotfixed this now. Have a good day!

Good morning! We've hotfixed the date for these to actually expire when they said they would. (Candy doesn't go off anyway, right?) The date it shows is now correctly confirming when it expires: 23:59 Game Time, Wednesday 8th November, 2023.

So because of how grico previously scaled it actually gained less benefit from the stat boost than you'd expect. That being said I'd be fine giving it a couple % boost if it's generally felt necessary

Thanks for your feedback, everybody!

Sounds like Excalibur's options remain a divisive topic.

As many of you have suggested, adding an ability that triggers Excalibur's heal (pre-EoC it was a special attack anyway) looks to be a more palatable and less controversial alternative. Will next investigate the feasibility of that.

EDIT: The combat council are working to reduce the number of abilities players need to manage, so would prefer to not add eg an Excalibur ability. So I'll explore some other options.

The majority of feedback last time was regarding the dps loss on abilities, hence us trying it in the beta after applying various changes that raise player damage.

I think its a bit sensationalist to say it makes the game fun.

You do still get an accuracy boost as well as the base damage increase from being a higher level. We are/were considering having stat boosts affect critical strike in the same way you gain Crit damage at level thresholds

Honestly , I am just diving into an emerging topic and engaging the players on how they are feeling around it.

The intent of the change is to improve the visual clarity of the skill and see how that plays, ideally we would have bumped the visuals up but it wasn't viable to do in the beta as it would require art time.

I wanted to dive into the conversation that was emerging here around the size of the affect , I wanted to know more about the usage and situations where the extra size helps or if it didnt come up often.

The change isn't to test different sizes of ults, its to improve visual clarity. The question that is basically being asked is "Do skills like Death's Swiftness play better when you can better visually tell where you need to be placed"

I would imagine the takeaway is "Yes, its better if the visual matches the skill" & "The size of 7x7 is ideal" and if that's the outcome then that gives a very clear path to the resolution.

Now in an ideal world changing the visuals to match whatever size would be great but its wasn't possible for the beta so the best way to test this was reduce the size to match the visual as we could do that change more reasonably.

Its beta mate, to update the visuals would require dragging some of the artists off live projects to update the visual for something that isn't confirmed to go live.

Tomorrow the size could be 6x6 or 7x7 or even 10x10 cause its a beta, the point is to try things out and see how the are feeling.

This is one of the fun parts of a beta, trying out things to see how the fit and how people engage with them. The intent of this change is to have the visuals match the effect so that to the person playing they see the cause and effect of the situation.

Right now the feedback is "Don't make it 5x5 as 7x7 is better" , that's fine its a good starting point for feedback but how do we drill deeper into this conversation.

Do people want it to stay 7x7 just cause that's what it is and any reduction feels bad? That is one outcome, maybe then we focus on enlarging the visuals to match that size. My point being we want to know why you feel how you feel about a change.

Does the extra size help in common situations or is it niche? The more information you can give to explain your take on a change the more we can understand where it is coming from.

Hi, folks. Lately I've been tinkering with Excalibur (all variants) to respond to community hitlist feedback about its inconsistent options (eg Check for the augmented Excalibur on action bar instead of Activate, and having to open the minimenu to Activate Excalibur).

The primary use case, AFAIK, is that Excalibur has a very handy healing special, and being able to left-click Excalibur to activate that heal (wherever you have it - in backpack, equipped, or on your action bar) would be a Good Thing.

I've implemented that easily enough.

Where it gets thorny is that, at least in the past, weapon switching with Excalibur was a thing, so I've seen several historic requests to also be able to configure whether Excalibur's left-click is Wield/Remove. From what I can gather, the request goes beyond being able to configure whether Excaliburs in general flip Activate/equip, to setting that rule specifically on individual action bar slots.

That's proving to be ...

Something existing for a longtime doesn't justify its existence.

We're not trying to 'force it in' but it's a mechanic that's broken for various reasons, hence us trying it in the beta again.

If there's any legitimate DPS loss, we can easily adjust damage ranges now to compensate, albeit with the other changes in the beta I don't think there will be any loss.

Yeah changes are live for testing at the moment

What's New?

Today, we've released a significant update to the ongoing Combat Beta, and we want to hear from you again! Check out the blog post below for a full list of changes, as well as some insights into the respective abilities affected, and why.

The full list of changes can be found here: https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/combat-beta-updates

Catching up?

For further information on the previous iteration of the Combat Beta, please see: ...

I'm banning all of you.

Thank you, I plum forgot this was a thing.

This is oddly something I think the team is working on, might not show up in your banners right away, but personalizing content for the player so it could give them insight into stuff they may not have seen yet is being ideated on.