JagexSponge

Hey we've got a bug in for this now, we're gonna see if we can get a solution in that is hotfixable

All good - I look forward to seeing your opening, best of luck!

Hey, I'm technically not supposed to be working right now, but figured I'd check out our bug-reporting channels at work and see if this had been highlighted (Pretty invested in seeing a 1k tetra opening).

One of the other devs has already investigated and pulled up your session ID, unfortunately, we can see that this is a case of misclicking. We can see in the data the incident occurred because you hit the OP-5 on the tetracompasses which is the destroy option, and then we can see 18 unpowereds get destroyed.

Sorry for your loss, but looks like misclicking and autopilot got you.

This is a contentious point, I'd actually like to discuss with the community.

In the current implementation prior to applying community changes, 4T would work with the staff but:

4TAA is something I'd (personally) like to remove from the game, I feel like it adds unintuitive complexity, that doesn't really need to exist. However, I fully understand that other players (especially those at the top of the skill ceiling) enjoy it as a form of skill expression.
Previously the combat council was shakey on removing it without giving some form of compensatory mechanic - my personal take would be to remove it without waiting for a replacement that may/may not be further down the line.

On the assumption that damage on the staff spec was increased to make up for the removal or prevention of 4TAA on it:
If given the option, what would you the players like to see happen with it?

1 4TAA Left on the staff.
2 Removal from staff effect only.
...

I know some of the players that really like numbers are going to plug this in and figure out exactly how it translates, and something I've seen in a few threads regarding recursive crits is the loss of adrenaline in part due to losing the recursion - It's worth me clarifying that the shots fired out by the FSOA post spec WOULD be able to still critically strike (triggering tsunami, and still scaling with your other crit effects, etc) it just wouldn't be able to retrigger itself.

/u/JagexSponge Any comment on the current state of Grimoire? Was it at all a consideration when FSoA rebalance was prepared?

So it's still not something that's been resolved yet.

However, I'd personally be a fan of getting the usage cost way down, or offering a similar pocket slot for crit users.

I do agree that some things in game should have high usage costs (my example would be a temporary buff you'd bring to e.g. get you over the edge to get you first zuk cape, at the cost of costing X amount and not being sustainable to continually use)
However, I don't personally think this suits the grimoire, as an item that has a decently high upfront cost and has become a pretty big component of both crit & melee builds. (I'd much rather grim have a higher ...

I mean, the effects do still exist, as they do with any standard ability - 10% proc chance iirc. (20 with dark form?) This would still apply to each of the fsoa shots post-changes, it's just not guaranteed huge pool of health that you essentially get for free.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...