Runescape Dev Tracker

This is like saying you have to many cookies, so I'm going to take away one cookie from you so that I can give it back at a later time. Like, we won't be happy with future magic buffs if the overall power is the same or inferior to pre-nerfed fsoa

To use your same analogy, I'd say it's more like:

You've baked one cookie with all the chocolate chips in it. So now we can't make cookies ever again, or if we do, they're going to be very unenjoyable - And the person next to you that doesn't have the giant cookie is also going to suffer from it.

Now we can leave you with the giant messy cookie. Or we could pull some chips out of it, and know that we can continue to make satisfying cookies down the line.

Gosh, I dislike analogies.

+1 to this. Thank you all SO much - this has been full of well thought out, constructive perspectives for the development team.

Wanna say a huge thank you to everyone for getting involved here. I'm going to do some dinner now but will continue to reply as/when I can over the next day or two.

The 100% crit chance, no, it suffers from the same problem as current live FSOA, where it just synergises TOO hard with anything crit in the future, and it's likely we'd hit the same roadblock.

However, onslaught as a whole could get a rework/tweaks to give it back natural crit &/or get some adjustments in general. - Something I'm committed too is improving/adjusting our base set of abilities, a lot have seen very little love since release.

Oh, it absolutely was done, I just don't have the numbers stored or to hand, and even taking the collective opinions of everyone with some stake in combat on our side, players are going to suggest different things or have different considerations.
This is absolutely why we're proposing the changes to you guys, because we know fully that you're going to have different considerations and an even broader breadth of knowledge.

We'll be doing that more often for sure - had to get back to helping Sponge with this thread alongside Doom!

My biggest concerns are the damage output of this new staff is trivial compared to the current one. The lightning bolts it fires out are significantly weaker than auto attacks are right now (90% damage vs ~150% + recursion).

Trying to get through as many questions as possible so apologies for pulling just a chunk out of your post here to answer -

I'm fully aware that damage might be on the lower side and could be pushed up to compensate for recursion loss at least slightly - or via other levers with the fsoa effect. However - (I'll check later if I get time to do a full side by side comparison to throw in here, but I believe the avg of an auto is fairly far from 150%, & the old and new avgs per hit are much closer than you've implied (I absolutely could be mistaken and will take that into account alongside all the feedback from the community if so - hoping to do a small write up of comparative damage values if i get a chance tonight) )

This sort of thing is the exact reasons AFAIK as to why it hasn't just been removed.

We'd need to consider all these things prior to a removal e.g. moving the mobs closer together so a dummy isnt needed.

With the proposed changes, I don't feel it necessary to nerf Zammy's damage output as an offset, as the impact shouldn't be too bad.

That being said, Zammy P7 solo & P7 onboarding is something I am hoping we can address to let players better learn the encounter, which by itself could offset this, at least slightly.

I'd say these were one of those synergies that were just over tuned. Ancient effects were 100% on autos due to autos inherently being weaker than most abilities and so this translated over to the FSOA spec too.
The excessive healing from the barrage is not something that we'll be looking to add back as it was particularly egregious, and reduced what we could do with the staff.

It takes time to respond to people. There's 100s of comments - we're trying to take them in and Sponge will respond whenever he can. Either way, all of them are being read and captured for us to go away and consider.

As we said in the post, nothing has been decided as yet.

In general, I'm against dummies being used for cheesy mechanics like drawing extra crits out of the staff. I think there are bigger things to fix first, but yeah i'd like to remove that interactions with dummies in boss encounters.

Hoping to throw up a comparison later if time allows (currently a whole lot here to get through)

IIRC the damage value per hit is slightly above what you would've fired for a mainhand staff auto previously (so a buff under gconc, if you weren't staff switching after firing)
I'm very aware that the damage value could be pushed up slightly, however, if we go too far it again limits what we can do in the future with the play style (or we'd have to nerf again, something i'm categorically trying avoid)
Which is in part why we're fishing for feedback here, to see what the community wants from it.

Are there going to be more regular balance/numeric changes in the future? Some examples below:

I'm not going to promise this, as often things get in the way of intentions. But speaking to the combat council, it is fully the intention to hit numeric changes more frequently, especially with lighter changes so we don't give players whiplash.

Core damage types are your standard damage - magic: (fire,water,earth etc) Melee, Ranged etc.

Both soft typeless and hard typeless will no longer be reduced by AD. This is something we're aware of as being confusing(soft and hard typless being different things), we'd like to update their hitsplats when we're able so it becomes apparent which is which.

Yes, if you feel strongly it shouldn't happen, you absolutely can.

If you're up for it, what we do need with that though is any insight you can provide on why you feel that way. A "No" doesn't really help the team when they feel it's an important change to make, but detailed thoughts can be truly understood and considered a lot more when deciding what we do next. Hope that makes sense!

Damage of the spec should scale depending on wielding the staff or dual wield - as it currently does in game whilst also considering the damage bonuses from inquisitor staff if players choose to wield that. It also just feels boring to wield the staff for the spec then swap off it (or eof it lmao).

Appreciate the feedback.
We're aware that getting the damage per hit here is going to be the hard bit to get right (both for release and for the long-term health of the game), so we'll absolutely be taking feedback on this.

The reason we're suggesting these changes is because it essentially lets us do more with the staff - if we find the staff isn't performing well enough (or feedback suggests this) we COULD move the damage lever up now if needed, or increase the consistency of the effect (e.g, flat crit chance buff whilst it's active) something that wasn't possible with the previous effect due to it essentially having no cap on the effec...

Was hoping to get Animate Dead ported to ranged and melee tank armour as well with the toned down version.

This is one that I see fairly frequently. This is something I'm personally trying to avoid - in the past, the combat styles have been (imo) too similar to each other, with alot of abilities being carbon copies of each other, resulting in styles feeling 'samey'.
I think that's something that has been resolved (at least partially), in particular with range and mage moving playstyles towards multi-hit & crit. The hope is that this can be extended to the tank halves of each of these styles, where ranged/melee could get some nice buffs in a different form. Appreciate it's not entirely satisfying, but we're hoping to improve combat in the long term, not just make short-term feel good changes.

It would be great if you posted a table for fsoa (Similar to what you did for AD) comparing the damage dealt from 25,30,35, and 40 crits from FSOA, vs the damage post change (as well as math on the approximate number of crits youll get while under this new spec) so we can get a sense of the capacity of the nerf

Hoping to get the chance to do this, this evening - in which case i'll get it added above.

I think the best way to go about it is buff the other styles to be able to compete with the numbers that FSOA puts out.. (it's not restricting future content its actually giving you a good path to go down for other combat styles and a good ballpark number to have other weapons put out similar numbers and get the dopamine you get with a FSOA)

The issue isn't wholely with the damage fsoa was currently able to put out (whoever it was VERY) strong, but rather that any future upgrades pushed that number way higher, essentially roadblocking us on what we can do with mage.
Other things absolutely could do with buffs, however I don't think just flat-line buffing everything up to FSOA's level is the way forward and just leads to more issues further down the road.