Necromagus

Actually, I'm in the top left of the pic, returning from doing a green dragon slayer task. I guess it doesn't count as a GE pic because I'm outside the walls :P

Yeah, I think I've posted my ultimate combination of perks here before, but basically, Commando, Finesse, Sniper, Concentrated Fire, Action Girl and Grim Reaper's Sprint, combined with a hockey mask that gives another 25 AP, maxed Small Guns and Energy Weapons skills and the unique laser rifle mean that pretty much anything that has a head and isn't a behemoth gets killed from half a mile away. VATS can be incredibly cheap, especially late in the game. The only problem is when there's some sort of object between you and the enemy that VATS doesn't catch and you end up wasting your action points and ammo pumping rounds into a wall.

Actually, the Digsite quest, which introduced archaeologists, was introduced near the end of RSC. They've been around for years :-w

At level 67 combat (ranged based) and 42 slayer I really have to push myself to do slayer. The only task I get that makes any significant money is ogres, when I get ranarr seed drops. I get two or three of those each task. I never really spend much money anyway, so I'm not that bothered about breaking even. What I am bothered about is having to spend two hours camping outside of Yanille ranging ogres when I could make so much more money and basically get the same ranged XP per hour killing green dragons. So far I've had one pyrefiend task (annoying because of the lack of safespots), two lesser demon tasks (alright, mostly because of rune meds, Crandor is usually empty on members worlds), a whole bunch of earth warrior tasks (urgh) and about the same amount of ogre tasks (prayer XP, I guess, and some good seed drops).

Yeah, it's always great to see some surprise entrants. Snuka and Piper last year was brilliant.

I think you should add starting Fairy Tale II to the P2P quest list. Unlike newer quests it doesn't check your skills before you can start it, and about two minutes in you get access to fairy rings.

[hide=It seems that the Royal Rumble winner has been 'leaked'...]The band Rev Theory, who made Randy Orton's current theme song, posted a message on their website saying that they will be playing at RAW next week. Obviously, bands are only brought in to play when something big happens, like a PPV. I don't believe that they'd bring in a band just to promote one of their theme song CDs.[/hide]

Locked. This obviously has very little, if at all, to do with Runescape. -Necromagus, Tip.It Mod.

Locked. This obviously has very little, if at all, to do with Runescape. -Necromagus, Tip.It Mod.

My personal preferred method is ranging them: Rune crossbow, steel bolts, anti-dragonfire shield, black d'hides, coif, glory ammy, accumulator. My favourite location is level 35 wilderness, just north of the teleportation platform. It has safespots for three different dragon spawns and is almost always empty.

Introducing: The Dragon Crossbow (ran January 18th, 2009) From the moment the material was first introduced, dragon items have been some of the most sought after pieces of equipment in the game. From the moment the first dragon weapons were introduced in Runescape Classic (shortly before the introduction of a rampant trading scam involving bronze weapons that was the original reason dragon items were given a look that distinguishes them from more common items), dragon items have been a staple of a high level player's armory. Even though many equipment slots now have more powerful or useful alternatives, dragon equipment often remains the standard to which other equipment is compared. Today only a handful of metal items haven't been released to the public. Of these items the most sorely missed is, in my opinion, the Dragon Crossbow. While the arsenal of rangers has vastly improved over the past few years, they still have only three weapons that can be considered truly exclusive: Seercull, the Dark Bow and the Crystal Bow. This is in mostly due to the fact that unlike dragon equipment, all other high-end ranged weapons are player made. This has made Rune Crossbows and Magic Shortbows incredibly cheap and easy to obtain. Therefor, I think the world is ready to recieve the Dragon Crossbow, a new breakthrough in pointy object delivery technology. This raises two important questions: How do we get our hands on this glorious new object? And just how good will it be? The first question should be answered by looking at how dragon items have traditionally been introduced into the Runescape world. This has in the past been done in three ways: Making the item available for purchase after the completion of a quest (most dragon weapons), making the item a rare drop from high level monsters (most dragon armour) or a crafting process that requires monster drops and high skills (dragon square shield, dragon plate). Obviously, each of these methods has its pros and cons. By offering the item as a reward for the completion of a quest, the item immediately becomes available to a relatively large section of the public. Of course, this doesn't mean it will be easy. When the Heroes' Quest came out, it had the highest stat requirements of any quest so far, along with a relatively long list of quests that needed to be completed before the player could even get started. How hard this quest would be depends entirely on how exclusive you would want the Dragon Crossbow would be. A good start would be to focus on stat requirements that are often used in conjunction with the ranged skill. The three skills generally most useful to a ranger are crafting (to make armour), defence (to avoid getting hit, to meet requirements for various types of equipment that give bonuses to ranged attack) and fletching (to make weapons, ammunition and projectiles). Of course three skill requirements is hardly fitting for an item as powerful as the Dragon Crossbow, so lesser requirements in other stats would be desirable. By using a quest and a store price of around 300,000 GP the Dragon Crossbow would immediately be available to a relatively large section of the public, although it wouldn't be nearly as exclusive as some of the other dragon items have been and still are. Still, this seems preferable to the huge economical shockwaves that have been caused by the introduction of various other dragon items in the past. Making the Dragon Crossbow a rare monster drop could be done in two ways: Adding it to the drop table of existing monsters (as for example has been done with the Dragon Med and the left shield half) or creating an entirely new monster for this purpose (as has been done with Dragon Claws and the Dragon Full Helm). Of course JAGeX could also do both (as has been done with the Dragon Twohander). This immediately gives the item an amount of exclusivity that making it purchasable after a quest simply won't do. While the former method is certainly tried and tested I would prefer the latter, mainly beause it would allow the game designers to not just make it exclusive, but making it exclusive to rangers. What I would like to see is a monster that can be killed (and reached) only by rangers. By making the entrance require a Mithril Grapple shot of particularly high difficulty, only the most skilled rangers would even catch a glimpse of this new monster. By making it immune to melee and magic and making it attack with all three attack styles for fairly high amounts of damage it can be made sufficiently challenging to anyone looking for their new toy. Of course introducing the item like this also means that its exclusivity isn't based on skill so much as wealth, as new dragon items have hit the market at a street price that sometimes went as high as tens of millions of GP. This hardly seems to be the kind of exclusivity we're looking for in this new weapon. The third and final method involves a combination of quests, rare monster drops and skills. Like the Dragon Plate, Runescape crossbows are crafted from three different pieces: the stock, the limb and the string. All three parts could be obtained through monster drops or certain parts could be sold in a shop after completing the required quest. A possible way to do it would be a special stock sold for a certain amount of GP, a crossbow limb that's dropped by certain monsters and a string that's crafted by, for example, spinning magic tree roots. These items could then be put together using the fletching skill. A crude extrapolation based on the levels required to craft various crossbows puts the required fletching level somewhere at 78. Again there's the risk of making this item easier to obtain through wealth than through skill, but adding a quest as one of the requirements certainly helps in there. Furthermore, by making one part available in a shop and the other a monster drop that's very rare but available to a large amount of different creatures, like the left shield half, the chance of the price reaching eight digit heights is severely reduced. For example, the dragon square shield price has long been stable at around two thirds of the price of the part that's purchased at the Legends Guild. So now that we've explored the various ways in which the Dragon Crossbow can be obtained, we should look at what this weapon actually does. First of all there's the level requirement. The difference in ranged level requirement from one crossbow to the next is, unfortunately, a bit erratic. However, if we start at steel and go up to rune, we can see that as we go one 'level' higher, the ranged level requirement increases by five, plus five for each step that we go up. Five from steel to mithril, ten from mithril to adamant, fifteen from adamant to rune. This would mean that the Dragon Crossbow would require twenty more ranged levels to wield than its rune counterpart. A ranged level of 81 would, in my opinion, be a very fair requirement. Luckily its only stat, the ranged attack bonus, is a lot easier to create. Going through the conventional metals from bronze to rune shows an increase of +12 every time we go up a step. Therefor the Dragon Crossbow would be a one-handed ranged weapon that would require level 81 ranged to wield and would have a ranged attack bonus of +102. Of course like all dragon weapons the Dragon Crossbow would need a special attack. At the moment there's eight ranged weapons that have a special attack: The Dorgeshuun Crossbow, which reduces the target's defense level, the Magic Shortbow, which fires two more powerful but less accurate shots at once, the Magic Composite Bow and Longbow which is more accurate and guarantees damage, Seercull, which reduces the target's magic level, the Dark Bow, which fires two shots with increased (and guaranteed minimum) damage and the Rune Throwing Axe, which damages multiple opponents in multi-combat areas. Most of these special attacks are useful but boring, but I think the Dragon Crossbow special attack should pack a little more punch than that. One thing that sets crossbows apart from other ranged weapons is the multitude of enchanted bolts that have a chance of triggering a special effect on impact. This is where I think the potential for a truly useful yet not too powerful special attack lies. My original idea of an attack that drains your special bar 100% and guarantees the next bolt's effect to be triggered looked good initially, one bolt threw a wrench in the plan: the damage dealt by ruby bolts is fixed at 20% of a monster's HP. This means that any monster in a multi-combat zone can be taken down pretty much instantly by a team of five rangers. Therefor I propose that in stead of a 100% chance to trigger the effect, the odds are merely doubled, at a reduced special bar drain rate. Since the Dark Bow has proven that the game code allows for two different special attacks on a single weapon, we could also create a special attack for metal bolts. A good example of a creative special attack using metal bolts would be an attack with a 100% drain rate that turns the next ten bolts you fire into a gem-tipped bolt that's made of the same metal (so bronze bolts would fire as pearl bolts, mithril bolts would fire as sapphire or emerald tipped bolts with each shot having an equal chance to become either) that have the same chance to trigger their special effect as a regular gem-tipped bolt. Of course the wacky world of special attacks offers plenty of fun and useful possibilities, and these are just two suggestions. So there you have it: the Dragon Crossbow. An item that's exclusive, but hopefully more attainable through skill than through wealth, and with stats and special attacks worthy of the name dragon.

Slash Bash's examine text says "A powerful looking Zogre". It drops Zogre bones and ancestral Ourg bones. The ancestral part makes it likely that they're just artifacts, like the Ogre Artifact he drops as part of the quest. It's just an oversized Zogre that happens to drag around a few odds and ends from the coffins spread around Jiggig.

I think that just because they're in a graveyard guarded by ogres doesn't mean that Ourgs automatically have to be a variety of ogres. Ogres were created by Bandos, goblins were brought into this realm by the same god. Since they fought side by side together it would make sense for them to be buried together. I don't think the actual age of the burial grounds has ever been confirmed, and there are plenty of remnants of the third age around. If you accept this it also makes sense that Ourg bones give massive XP, since apparently Ourgs were incredibly powerful commanders.

Compared to two or three years ago they really started to go all out with the stories behind the quest. I believe the Plague City series was the first group of quests that had an interconnecting story. Now we have the dwarves with their own line of quests, Dorgeshuun/goblins, Mort Myre quests, desert quests, Varrock quests, white knight quests, gnome quests, museum quests, troll quests... well you get the point. I like that Jagex has left things very open, often with each group having its own version of history.

The few Guthix items that are around (trimmed rune, blessed dragonhide, vestments) all have the same stats as the corresponding Saradomin and Zamorak items. The only reason that Guthix items are used less (that I can think of) is that Guthix items can't be used in the God Wars Dungeon. Still, when it comes to items there's a lot of gods that get screwed out a lot harder than Guthix. Mainly Bandos and Armadyl, they have almost no items for every day use and of course the desert gods don't have any items at all.

Yeah, but it's not how your champion is supposed to look. This is almost as bad as when Mysterio was world heavyweight champion and lost constantly. Hardy has beaten Kozlov and Big Show by countout and Edge after Big Show walked out on him in a tag match. Why not let Jeff Hardy beat Big Show clean in the middle of the ring? Now he really looks like a fluke and in the end nobody will take him seriously when it becomes time to actually defend his belt.

I'm really getting annoyed with how much Triple H is featured on SmackDown! at the moment. He's neither the champion nor the #1 contender, yet in one episode he seems to get more camera time than Jeff Hardy has gotten since winning the WWE championship. Meanwhile Jeff still has to get a clean, decisive win as a champion.

Indeed it isn't. Locked. -Necromagus, Tip.It Mod.

Even more releases... Mickey Henson has over 20 years of experience as a referee in both WCW and WWE. I know that they were going to cut their referee roster down with the new touring setup they have, but this one still comes as a surprise. I was even more surprised they released Matt Cappotelli. Cappotelli earned a WWE contract during the third season of Tough Enough (the season that John Morrison won) and was OVW champion (WWE's training federation at the time) when, in February 2006, he announced that he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had surgery on it in May 2007 and was hoping to make his return to wrestling after his recovery. WWE kept him under contract until now.

Well, when Edge won it for the second time they placed a Rated R spinner plate in it, and when he lost it for the last time they locked the W spinner in place. However, they have said in the past that they don't want the title to change too often. There are pictures out there of a custom WWF championship they designed for The Rock which was basically Austin's belt except that it had the Brahma Bull logo in stead of the flaming skull. Cena got a new belt because, like Austin, he was expected to carry the company for the next few years.

http://www.411mania.com/wrestling/news/ ... -(SPOILERS).htm As for the Jericho firing thing, it's an obvious storyline thing. Mr. McMahon will probably return next week, Jericho will tell him what a bad manager Stephanie is for firing someone who has made him so much money.

It does create some awkwardness though. Some people just won't accept that "Death to the Franks and their god Jehovah/Destroy their crosses, torch their churches" (translated from a Dutch song) has a valid historical context and isn't satanic at all.

Big spoiler for tonight's ECW show:[hide=]In the main event, Jack Swagger beats Matt Hardy for his ECW championship. While I'm sad that Matt Hardy lost his championship, he has had a decent run and, like using his United States championship, this should allow him to move on to bigger, better things. As for Jack Swagger, this is obviously huge for him. He has managed to establish his character well, both in the ring and outside it. Hopefully a run with the ECW title will be his first stop on a road to bigger, better things as an established member of the roster. It has certainly worked out well for John Morrison and CM Punk.[/hide]

Locked on author's request. -Necromagus, Tip.It Mod.

Locked. Please use the introduction sticky at the top of the forum. -Necromagus, Tip.It Mod.