Troacctid

So we had an update today, and it's a new thingy for summoning. That's great, because I always need more charms. Is it strange, though, that what made me want to log in for this update was this little bullet in the patch notes? "What? They changed the Dramatic Point emote? I have to see that!" As it turns out, it looks the same as it used to look, and so does the Freeze & Melt emote. But it had me excited there for a moment; I'm not a big fan of that flying snow thing they have going on. Anyway, then what had me intrigued is this one: And I couldn't stop wondering what they added as food or if you can just feed the guy anything. So I went over to Paterdomus and started a trek with some food items I found in my bank (they haven't changed what you can give them to hold before you start). Naturally, the first event I run into is this piece of crap: God, this event is annoying. I wanted to do a real trek, so I teleported away and started over. On the next one, I fixed a bridge with some logs, and then... Well that's torn it. I'm done with this minigame for today. At this point I lost interest in completing a trek, but at least I got to test out some foodstuffs on the Adventurer. Here's what he accepted out of my test pool: In case you missed it, he turned down the Saradomin Brew, the prayer mix, and the beer and wine, but he was willing to accept a whole watermelon, a whole pizza, and for some reason, deadly nightshade. Nightshade? Really? This is supposed to be an improvement? Geez. Me: Here, take this deadly poison in case we get attacked and you need to heal. Adventurer: Thanks, I'll save this for later. What a sap. He took the caviar, though, so at least he must have some taste. Wait, but then why didn't he take the wine? He must just be weird. Anyway, I'll probably try out this "familiarizing" thing later. In the meantime, I hope you all had a happy Valentine's Day!

1. Trout and salmon are weak for training fishing 2. Trout and salmon are weak for training cooking 3. Trout and salmon are not affected by cooking gauntlets Anyway, if you do go for fishing, rocktails are probably going to be your best bet. If you do woodcutting (which isn't very profitable btw), ivy is the most popular method, but I'm told the sawmill training is actually faster. Chinchompas are still the biggest method with hunter, although grenwalls have gained viability in the past few months with the herblore update making their spikes valuable.

Yeah zaaps's guide is pretty good, I'd check that out. You can also do more quests to raise your level quickly. Fairy Tale Part 1 is a good place to start--it gives you a nice chunk of xp and you need to do it for magic secateurs anyway.

The ring of wealth affects a very specific list of drops that are considered rare. Those drops are all shared among every monster that is affected by the ring of wealth. That means gems, half keys, and dragon spears/left halves.

Interestingly enough, I got two rune full helm drops from my abby specs task the other day...ALL WITHOUT RING OF WEALTH! I also got an oak chest in War of Legends...WITHOUT RING OF WEALTH! And I beat Zelda Spirit Tracks...ALSO WITHOUT RING OF WEALTH! In fact, I've been doing a lot of things WITHOUT RING OF WEALTH! I just didn't realize it had become common practice to announce all of them. [hide]Ring of Wealth doesn't affect any of the drops you listed. Jagex just confirmed that it doesn't. That's kind of the point of the thread. And even if it did, why would you ever have gotten the idea that it's somehow impossible to get the drops without a RoW? That's just stupid, sorry. :wall: [/hide]

Exceeds the profit of yews, actually. They're both faster and more profitable. So yews are pretty much not worth cutting. Maples even less so, as the experience is weak and the logs themselves are barely worth any gp at all, so you get bad xp and bad profit--not worth swinging a hatchet at, ever.

From what I've always been told, their defense is low enough that the crush weakness isn't particularly relevant, and it's better just to use a whip/defender.

Seers' Village is best accessed via Camelot Teleport, but Ardougne is quite a long ways off and is better reached by an Ardougne Teleport or, failing that, a Skills Necklace teleport to the Fishing Guild. There's almost always a better way to get around than by walking. The longest distance I ever have to travel is typically through Mort Myre to get to Burgh de Rott, or other such areas in very secluded portions of the map.

It was always like that. Anyway, whether a macaw or a BoB is better depends on the location. The faster it is to bank, the better the macaw is. So for example, if you have slayer rings, it makes sense to use a macaw at Abby Specs because banking is quick enough that extra inventory space isn't as important. But if you can't use slayer rings or the spiked chain shortcut and you're killing them in the slayer tower, you might benefit more from a terrorbird. (War tortoises' extra 6 spaces aren't likely to balance out the additional cost per pouch, though.)

You could employ them to collect items that are hard to get on the Grand Exchange, such as pawya meat, or to scout for dragon implings and such.

Depends on the monster.

What's wrong with "another" slayer monster with a 1m drop? It would still be incredibly profitable to kill thanks to its other drops, which are quite valuable on their own, and it would still avoid overcrowding thanks to the 93 slayer requirement (which is really high, although admittedly pie-able without the task-only thing) and the spawns that Kuradal would presumably want to add to her dungeon.

But now you need to take into account that "rich" in f2p is a far lower threshold, as you only need a couple mil to be able to afford anything you could possibly want. And it still doesn't change anything fundamental about the argument--the ability to play longer per day still doesn't affect the income earned per hour.

I think the slayer ring fills that role quite nicely, actually. You could make an argument for broad-tipped bolts as well.

I fail to see what's wrong with that scenario; in fact, I would prefer it to the situation we have now. Giving efficient magic xp to high-level slayers doesn't seem like a problem considering the restrictions, and why is it bad if the staff crashes? I think it would be good to have the staff widely available, as it's really the only staff in the game that's actually powerful. What if whips were as rare as godswords? They're pretty much essential if you want to train melee, so the result would be to make efficient melee training unaffordable for the vast majority of scapers.

Why should low-level quests be held to a lower standard than high-level quests? I expect all quests to be well-designed and fun.

If you can't already afford both, you certainly can't afford to buy enough cannonballs for the cannon to be worthwhile. Should be a no-brainer. :thumbsup:

Just a short blog entry today. I thought I'd share my feelings on the most recent slayer update, strykewyrms. If you're out of the loop, strykewyrms are new slayer monsters with high level requirements that can only be fought if randomly assigned as a task; they drop new ranged and magic analogues to melee's black mask and a new staff with powerful special abilities. Anyway, I get the feeling that these strykewyrms are more of a "training" update disguised as a "reward" update. It only affects the people who are still leveling up. This includes the addition of the hexthing and focusthing. If you think of it in those terms, it's not really so bad. And the monster design is pretty cool just looking at still pictures and reading about their attacks--I have yet to check out the area in-game, but I'm intrigued. The idea of extra damage with magic attacks in particular is intriguing. The staff's rarity irks me, though; I don't think the "task-only" thing works for it at all. I suppose it may be excusable for the lower-level ones (although I would much prefer to have the hexthing and focusthing more widely available, given their importance), but when you're at this high a level, you really don't need an update to your training--you need an incentive. I can easily see a lot of frustration for high-levels who have to work their way through dagannoth and blue dragon tasks repeatedly just to get a shot at icewyrms, making what was once enjoyable on its own into an exasperating wall of monsters preventing you from doing what you really want to do. At least with the jungle and desert wyrms, you're training up for the higher-level monsters anyway, right? But with ice wyrms, they are the higher-level monsters, and you aren't interested in training anymore. My impression is that it's a poorer execution of the decent concept that we first saw in Kuradal's dungeon. Task-exclusive monsters aren't bad in and of themselves, but it's not good to have monsters that can't be fought at all without a task, especially when slayer tasks are chosen at random. In fact, I happen to have a link on the subject that you may find interesting. It talks about the advantages and disadvantages of having randomness in games, and I think it's very relevant to this update. Give it a skim at the very least. As far as the fire cape requirement thing that people have complained about, the general idea of requiring a fire cape for something doesn't bother me in itself; however, I don't appreciate that it further adds to the exclusivity of the staff, which is already prohibitively difficult to obtain. That damn staff is going to have an unreasonably high price tag, which will make more slayers want to try and get it, which will force them to go through the frustration of not getting ice wyrm tasks, and then force them through the frustration of finally getting one, completing it, and not getting a staff. The whole system with the ice wyrms incentivizes players to go through gameplay that they don't enjoy. So yeah, that's what I'm thinking with these wyrms. Good concept, not the best execution.

Or, you can introduce localized game mechanics/equipment that only work in the boss area, as they hinted at for their next high-level dungeon.

I'm going to do something different for this quest. I'm going to review it while I complete it. You'll be getting my impressions of the quest live (well, prerecorded) as I go. Then at the end, I'll sum up how I felt about the quest as a whole. I'm standing at the quest start right now, so let's jump in! SPOILERS if you care. 10:55 Starting the quest; just entered the basement. I assume we're going to be making rune guardians. That's interesting--continuing the "rediscovering runecrafting/magic" thing from Rune Mysteries. Not as exciting as I usually like from a new quest, but at least it isn't totally random and out of the blue like Perils of Ice Mountain. 10:58 Lol: 10:58 So I need to talk to the other wizards. 11:00 Wizard Dougal: paranoid much? But I'm going to forgive him for this line making fun of bad quests: 11:04 This is going fairly slow because as you can see, I'm stopping to take screenshots and type stuff like this. Anyway, just remembered to turn on the music in case there's any new tracks. 11:08 Well, I apparently need to solve a puzzle, but I lost connection...I have a pretty high ping. Oh well. 11:10 Starting the puzzle. 11:13 This is interesting. The portals make you move sort of like chess pieces. 11:24 Finished the puzzle in about 10 minutes. Got a tool for shaping rune guardians. 11:27 Wizard Shug is a rambler. I'm going to see how long he keeps telling his story. 11:28 That wasn't so long. I guess I need to enchant an emerald or two. I really hope this isn't a fetch quest. If there aren't any emeralds around here, I'm going to be very annoyed. 11:29 Wizard Shug is asleep, so he's not going to be giving me any emeralds. Let's check the basement. 11:30 Talking to Clerval. Apparently he got literally turned into a guinea pig for an experiment. Lol. 11:32 Goddammit, he doesn't have any emeralds or rune essence. GRAAH. And I already need to go craft a bunch of lame runes too. RAGE! 11:34 Oh, lovely. I lose connection again. At least I already have mind and body runes and emeralds banked. No such luck with steam runes. This is not an exciting quest so far. <_< 11:44 Finally I got everything. I'm going to talk to whatsisface again now. 11:47 Okay, another puzzle with some wires. About time something interesting happened. The last one was pretty tame; this better be better. 11:54 Solved the puzzle in 7 minutes. Now I need to carve the body. And it seems all I do is use them together. 11:55 Cutscene of a rune guardian coming to life, and...that's it, I guess. Quest complete. And I get a rune guardian pet. Analysis Okay, this was a boring quest. The first puzzle was okay, but not great. While the concept was okay and it wasn't incredibly easy to solve, it suffered from some visibility problems--you can't see the whole room, and you kind of need to. That hurt. The wire puzzle was poorly-executed. It might have had some potential as a sort of maze where you need to create a path to the other end, but that wasn't how it worked out. Instead, it was just matching the ends of each piece with the ends of another piece that fits. It might as well have been a nine-piece jigsaw puzzle. I was unimpressed. And despite poking fun at fetch quests (and rightly so), this is a fetch quest. Fetch quests are lame. If I hadn't had an emerald in my bank already, what would I have done? It could take a long time at the gem mine/Rogue's Den safe/Ardougne gem stall/a monster that drops gems before an emerald shows up. And you need two of them. That's potentially frustrating. The rewards are lame too. A very small handful of xp and a pet. Okay, it's a cute pet, but it's still a pet. It doesn't do anything. I stuck it in my Menagerie right after the quest and forgot about it. I've already forgotten about it. It's boring. And that's the problem with this whole quest. It's boring. Nothing really interesting happens, nothing interesting is offered as a reward, and none of the puzzles are interesting either. There's no real incentive to do this quest--it's not particularly fun and it essentially has no reward. I am thoroughly unimpressed. Initially I thought that it would at least advance the plot in some minor way. But it doesn't even do that. The knowledge of how to make rune guardians wasn't even lost. The apprentice was just an idiot. It's Perils of Ice Mountain all over again. I suppose it's a tutorial on how to craft combination runes, but who cares? Combination runes suck. The only practical way to craft them is with Lunar Magicks, and by the time you can use the Imbue spell, you really shouldn't need a tutorial, and you certainly don't care about 2k xp or whatever it was. So, to recap: Uninteresting plot. Unexciting puzzles. Lame rewards. Irrelevant to everybody--even the low-level players who don't know how to craft combo runes don't care because combo runes are mostly useless. Only redeeming feature is that the pet is kinda cute. My verdict: Disapprove. :thumbdown: What Jagex should have done was just release the pet without a quest. Cut out the research and just have one of the wizards tell you how to make it from the start. Then let us bring the supplies there and craft one if we want, or give us the option to buy one with our Mage Training Arena points. Boring quests like these give the good quests a bad name.

You do realize that it's obviously not useless at all, right? It's like wearing an amulet of glory while mining, only instead of just getting more gems, you also get more half keys. I'm certain that there are many situations where it's superior to any other ring you might wear, and knowing its effect makes it much more useful too. For example, if we didn't know exactly what it did, we wouldn't know to use it at Chaos Druids because they have no "rare" drops; however, knowing what we know now, we can say with some confidence that it's the best ring to wear there. We also know not to use it at boss monsters like Kree or the Corporeal Beast, since it's confirmed that it has no effect on unique drops.

Um...no duh if you have played for longer you're going to have more money and stuff. Of course if you play for longer you're going to have accumulated more money. Someone who started back in 2002 is obviously going to have more money than someone who started yesterday. The whole point is that by the time you get to the same playtime as the person who started 8 years ago, there's no reason why you couldn't be in exactly the same place they're at now. I'm not saying that you can just decide, "I want to be rich." and see a phat set miraculously appear in your bank. Functionally, there's very little difference between playing longer per day and having started playing sooner. You need to keep in mind that the relevant statistic here is not total wealth/accomplishment but the rate at which it increases.

Well actually, the ring does work at aviansies--it just gives you more gems. And maybe a dragon spear/half.

I can actually second this, on my abberant tasks, without the ROW i seem to get much higher herbs & seeds. I am honestly amazed that you would utter such ridiculous claims immediately after an official Jagex source disproves them. Really? *facepalm*

Bump?