Quyneax

Ah true. Well, I tend to save Bombard for when it can hit 2+ targets anyway. But yes, strangely it's single-target is better than Snap Shot >.>.

Even then, those three seem to genuinely believe that their way will benefit mortals as well, if that isn't at least part of their motive (Zamorak as a way of strengthening them, Zaros and Saradomin as a way to establish order and/or stability, though the latter wants to rule openly and the former wants to be fate). If that's the case, all of them see power as a means to an end. I think it's pretty much a given that power is a means to an end. It's about whether it is only that, or also a goal in itself. Plus that, in the case of the three most power-hungry gods, I'm not sure what was there first: lust for power or lust for helping mortals.

Growth also means you become more powerful. Look at Moia. Being a guiding hand = power play. Zaros may be subtle, but if he can achieve what he wants, he still has power. Obviously yes, we have no first-hand experience in-game with most of the gods, but we don't have enough experience with any NPC to really get a judge of character. Instead, we rely on typical characters to provide a sort of blueprint, and we extrapolate from the information we have, and we cross-reference second and third-hand sources, like Moia's account of Zamorak. I still think that list is a pretty accurate one, and that Saradomin/Zaros/Zamorak are definitely after (political/magical) power, with the other gods viewing it more as a means to an end.

Done for today at 63 Divination. Hopefully will get 70 tomorrow but I doubt it.

Zamorak is definitely after power, it's explicitly part of his philosophy to go for greater personal power. Zaros had a great deal of power ruling his empire pre-God Wars, and as god of Control he will likely want to have control, which is a form of power. I don't see him settling for less power, only for less visible power. Anyone after the Stone of Jas is also after power, although it's possible that some gods only want it to prevent it from being used. Bandos/Sliske seem to like playing games, from the way Bandos sets up tribes against one another, and the way Sliske collects wights. Seren and Armadyl are not after power, I think, but they might need to become more powerful to attain their goals, like Guthix had to gain great power to shield Gielinor from the other gods (they wouldn't have listened to Tumeken, right?). The Godless probably will require some power source in order to banish the gods, unless they can convince the gods to leave, but I doubt that's going to happen.

Well in general, avoid ultimate abilities (except Berserk, Metamorphosis) and use tresholds when you can (Assault, Destroy, Slaughter, Hurricane*, Wild Magic, Asphyxiate, Snap Shot, Rapid Fire, Bombard*). Marked with an *, only use if you can hit 2+ targets.

As per This thread has been returned to the Archive of Wisdom. Welcome back :). p.s. it's been two years!

Level 56! Edit: 60.

After that AMA, I feel they intentionally released a skeleton skill and they are intending to flesh it out later. If they keep up a good pace of updates, and if the second skill is very good, then I can see it working somewhat. They don't update that often (apart from SoF/SGS). I'd rather have them add a full skill, which allows for more exploration - releasing content piece-by-piece means you can already see the border when you start exploring. It's also so that I don't have to lose my comp cape to a bare-bones update like this, but okay. The locations for wisps are known, and linear. There is no reason to go back to earlier wisps so far. You do exactly the same at each place - there is nothing to learn. A thought experiment: Imagine that you could get xp in one skill only, X. All other skills would exist, but they would simply level up proportional to X - if X is 99, all your skills are 99, except dungeoneering which is 120. If X is dungeoneering, other skills are at 81 when dungeoneering is at 99. For what X is the game still fun? Hitpoints, defence - Combat-based game, still very playable. Slayer - More annoying, but still playable. Other combats - Messes up the triangle, but doable. Dungeoneering - Very playable, probably quite fun. Prayer, fletching, herblore, firemaking, cooking - Skills would be irrelevant, everyone maxed. Divination, agility, runecrafting, mining, fishing, woodcutting - Nobody would start playing. This indicates of course that hp/slay/def/dg are much more widely applicable than other skills. I think it's also test of skill strength - how well a skill can carry a game, or make up a game in its own right. For skills which combine with others, like mining + smithing + magic, it's relevant to look at training methods instead. If you do that for skills like agility, runespanning and divination, the skill is a training method - they are essentially self-contained. That weakens them, I think. Not that each skill should make up a game by itself, but each skill complex should: combat with slayer is the biggest complex we have, and dungeoneering with all skills is a sort of super-complex. "Skilling" has much smaller complexes. The aforementioned mining/smithing/magic is one, you have fletching with a bunch of skills, you have divination/hunter and woodcutting/firemaking, you have a bunch of skills with magic, but no big complexes, as training goes (SC is not efficient training, sorry). That's a gap in the content here.

Meteorite iron beads?

But in-game lore wise, this skill has only recently been discovered, and as far as I can tell, you have, as the adventurer RS revolves around, just volunteered to become the leading expert in it, doubly so by being the world guardian... And no it's not like Runecrafting, because there you merely discovered the means to teleport to the Rune Essence and a shortcut to the altars... If I'm at the forefront of a new discipline, I'm damn well going to be using my expertise in other areas and apply the things I discovered there to the new-found things. That means I will try to capture the memories in rune essence, I will try to convert memories into familiars... as far as I know, none of that is possible right now, is it? I don't think you read very carefully. Yes, it's slow, at such levels that it is unexpected. After all, we were promised an 'oldschool gathering skill', which means the xp/h goes up very fast in the beginning (compare: every other gathering skill). But the problem is that this skill is basically self-contained. It's so bad that you actually gather stuff, only to throw them away for extra experience! It's like mining concentrated gold where you only get xp for depositing ores. A bad skill idea can be partially saved by high xp rates and good rewards (e.g. prayer is pretty lame, and firemaking, but those are fast). This skill makes no sense, has no fun mechanics, it doesn't look great, there is nothing interesting about training it, it has low xp/h and the rewards are basically auto-food for afkers. The game doesn't need more afk, it needs more Dungeoneering.

^Exactly. Further suggestions for Divination as magical science skill that studies energy deposits & their uses: 1) Ability to unlock our Guthixian post-TWW powers to cast spells without elemental runes - magical equivalent of genetic manipulation. 2) The ability to construct a soul altar. 3) The ability to create recipes would be ideal - essentially hundreds of different possible recipes - also point 1 on my previous list ofc. 4) Unlocking new abilities based on the same principle as 1. @Fishing comparison: Quite true, but since all those things are released now, they could be tied in to Divination on Divination's release, right? There is no tie-in with past content at all. For relatively old skills, like runecrafting, that's not a big problem, but we're years past that and those years need to tie in somehow.

As opposed to RC, Cons, Agility, Herblore, Thieving, Crafting, Fletching, Hunter, Mining, Smithing, Fishing, FM, and WC without the use of minigames or bonus xp? Well, yes. We were promised a lore-heavy skill. It's not. In fact, the skill makes very little sense. Runecrafting is based on imbuing energy into things - runestones, staves, robes. Divination is based on gathering energy and making things - portents and such. So why aren't we using runecrafting for this? Why is Divination required? "It's a different type of energy" - why? How? Why don't my 99s in runecrafting, magic, summoning, prayer (Guthix!) and dungeoneering (portals! strange energies!) help my Divination at all? But my hunter suddenly helps?

I think what would be good is: 1) Research in libraries is required to get recipes (you also get xp). 2) You take damage from actually siphoning wisps. 3) Wisps are spread out more, like implings, and are less visible, like stryewyrms. 4) Magic, prayer and summoning will be helpful here - magic for tracking wisps, prayer for protecting against damage and summoning for healing, for example. 5) Obtained energy/memories is analyzed in laboratories (Wizards Tower, Magic Guild, places like that - PoH, too). This gives you xp, too. 6) Energy is refined at laboratories, too.

@OrTradeMe: "Conventional"? Are we going to get the old 'only noob methods count for balance purposes' thing again? The conventional method of training woodcutting is over 100k xp/h past level 90. The conventional method of training mining is >80k xp/h past level 80ish. The conventional method of training fishing: over 60k/h easily, more with Flingers. Over 100k/h with C2. The conventional method of training hunter: over 200k/h easily. The conventional method of training farming: over 100k xp/h just for torstol herb runs, tree runs are still a lot higher. That's not even counting effigies, D&Ds and bonus xp. So gathering skills are about 100k xp/h, on average, past level 80-85. The last ~10m xp takes ~100 hours. Are you saying the first ~3m xp should take ~150 hours? I think the xp/level balance should be changed before we get such a radical shift to low-levelled content.

The xp is low, the skill is boring, the skill is unimaginative... For me, the skill doesn't have any depth at all. Nothing says that I still have awesome things to discover after doing the first 37 levels. From here on, it's all going to be the same - actually, from level 10 on, it's all going to be the same. Also I don't have a clue what I'm actually doing. For the current non-real life skills I can sort of imagine how the training method is relevant to the skill: I can understand Slayer, Dungeoneering, even Runecrafting (though span kinda dented that). For Divination, I don't feel like my character is learning anything. I'm just moving to a different place each time and repeating what I did before. I'm not unlocking new training methods - to all the people who said Dungeoneering isn't a skill because you train it in one place - here's Divination. At least skills like fishing have different tools, different fish you can catch for different mixes of afk/gp/xp/apm. You can use SC harpoons, C2 fishing, FOG gloves, urns, familiars, Flingers, the fishing outfit - lots of things you can bother with (or not). Divination is always, at every level, 100% the same as the level before. I don't mind that in a skill like prayer, because it's fast, but for a skill like Divination, which is the slowest in the game, it's killing. Basically, the Divination release feels like they released a training method, rather than a skill. This should've been a way to train magic, runecrafting, summoning and your lowest skill (hi Guthix) all at once, but Jagex just really wanted a new skill - and they had no more material. It seems to me there is just very little content in this skill. Even if you allow for the fact that the previous release was far better than average, it should measure up to Dungeoneering better. P.S. At least up to level 40, the hunter xp/h is way higher than the Divination xp/h. Possibly at higher levels as well. This for the most efficient way to train the skill.

Is Momentum still broken for barraging?

#184 overall. Probably the highest I'll ever reach as I'm taking a break right now. 37 Divination. This skill is incredibly boring and unimaginative.

Wee. This skill is incredibly boring! For the most part you do quite little and the xp rate is low. There is also no variety up to now (just got level 35).

30 minute warning was two minutes ago. Disabled comp cape keepsake, unequipped, equipped teleport/weight reduction gear, runes + tabs in inventory. I CAN GO ANYWHERE. Now, the quest for max total before 500m xp begins. I have under 15m xp left to get 99 Divination in (14.895.908 until 500m round).

I could easily imagine that the Eastern Lands also noticed Guthix' death and have started practicing their own variety of Divination, and you could attract someone like that. The PoP adventurers are more like levels 80-90 in the relevant skills, I think - good, but not masters. Though the Occultist must have crazy quest points to be able to get immortal :o. Edit: Also what Gwyn said.

The lowest xp that could be holding rank 1 is the total xp required for level 2498 total (2496 + 1 from Diviniation + 1 to go higher). That requires 24 stats at 96 (including Divination) and two at 97. The total xp is then 254m, approximately. More realistically, at 2498 total you could have 2 Divination (with everyone else at 1) and old max total, giving you ~416m xp like Aiel said. Every level you can get ahead of the highest-Diviniation 2496 player will drop the minimum (theoretically possible) xp by a chunk of xp from Dungeoneering levels.

Hiya! Back for Divination? Forgot to post last night, but I got the goblin scroll and killed the champion :). Same rules as before, has 600 lp now. 8/13

Mace the fiends. Only top, legs and shield affect accuracy, which is otherwise based on weapon + level.

Jenever is gin, in English. "Gin" is (probably) a shortened form of "genever". Weee language :D.