Future of Runescape Combat

[Grimy_Bunyip]

I did my best copying the session into text form.

So don't beat me up if I took some shortcuts in rewriting the dialogue.

 

 

There are 2 Jmods are the info session.

One is Mod chris L, and another IDK the name of.

But the second Jmod does most of the speaking in the session.

He sounds like a really smart guy. I actually like him now, wish I knew his name.

 

Things that will be kept in the future runescape combat system:

You will be able to click on a target then AFK, but it will come at the cost of DPS.

The combat triangle will stay in some shape or form

Must be easy to learn.

Free to switch between the 3 classes whenever you want.

 

Mod Chris L on future updates ideas (Not guaranteed):

New abilities unlocked at, for example, higher strength/attack/defense level.

You would put these abilities on a hotbar.

Jagex is not sure how weapon special abilities will translate to the new hotbar.

But they want to preserve the mechanic that unlocking new weapons will unlock new special abilities.

Mod Chris L does not want magic spells to deal fixed damage (IE fire surge -> 280 damage)

 

Things Jagex cant do:

Jagex delete skills.

Range and Mage must use ammo

fletching and runecrafting must still be useful.

 

Suggestions & Answers:

Suggestion:

Can Jagex make armor weight affect your weapon speed?

Response:

Technically possible to implement, it seems like an added penalty for armor, that I don't like that very much.

What we will do however, is balance it so that all 3 sides of the combat triangle have the same DPS.

 

Suggestion:

Couldn't hear, something about a new skill

Response:

We can't make a new skill for just range and magic.

If we release a new combat skill, it has to be one that can be used by all 3 classes. Melee, Magic, and Ranged.

We can't tell our players. You're a ranger, you need to train another skill to be a max ranged combat level.

That's not fair on them.

 

Melee and magic and ranged will still use the same skills they do today

All 3 classes will need to train their defense. We're not going to force you to train your defense. We're going to heavily encourage you to train your defense. Okay?

So what we do.

You got your action bar, your new spells, your new abilities.

You unlock new abilities by training your defense.

Lets say you train your defense level to 90.

You get this new ability, you put it on your action bar, you press it, it reduces all damage you take by 100% for 10 seconds or so or something like that.

So if you don't train your defense, you will be at a huge disadvantage.

 

Suggestion/Question:

Could you split magic into the skilling and combat magic skill?

Response:

We can't suddenly say, you trained your magic level to 99, but you log in and you can't use your new skilling magic.

We can't change this anymore.

 

Question:

Why can't we have more armor like split bark, with lower magic accuracy, but higher melee defense?

Response:

Lets say the new items, or your rune plate, or your dragonhide, will be restated.

We're going to move away from putting offensive stats on armor.

We're going to put a greater emphasis on your weapon slot and on your offhand slot.

Magic armor is going to be strong against melee, because that's how the combat triangle is designed.

We're just going to say something like, it's magic armor, it has magic runes on it, it's got forcefields or whatever, they're going to make you really good at defending against melee.

 

Question:

F2p is underpowered, can you give us free stuff?

Answer:

I'm sure andrew would just say subscribe, that's how you get free stuff.

The culture between free to play and members is getting a bit blurred.

Something in the pipeline, but we won't talk about today.

But the idea is, free to play is like, i hesitate to call it an intro.

Sometimes it's been called an intro. Sometimes it's been called an entirely other game.

I hesitate to call it either.

We can do f2p updates, but unfortunately, but the crux of the matter, updates are funded by money.

And generating an update for f2p doesn't generate as money as p2p.

So while we can give you stuff from f2p, the higher ups generally want us to not give stuff to f2p.

So we can do it but it's probably unlikely

 

Question

What about giving f2p snares, which is 10 second hold

Answer

Spells like the snare, we'd convert them into abilities.

So as you level your magic, you'd unlock new spells, as well as abilities.

And one of these abilities would be a snare.

We want a snare, we want a snare early on.

We don't like the idea of safespotting.

We don't want to prevent you from safespotting, but it's not really great gameplay.

So we want mages to get a snare early on.

 

Question:

Will you still have negative offensive bonuses? so ranger's wont wear melee armor?

Answer:

Like I said, We're moving away from offensive stats. Positive offensive stats.

But we would have negative offensive stats on armor.

So there will still be hybrid, because we know people like to hybrid. So there will still be opportunities to hybrid.

But our main items. Our rune platebodies, are going to have much much higher negative penalties for non melee attack.

 

Question:

If you have inventory slots taken up by runes, and melee is wearing their weapons, is there anything in that area for mages to carry their runes?

Answer:

Something released for dungeoneering, unfortunately mod trick isn't with us anymore. He made the spell boxes. Which kinda suck really.

Mages still have to carry runes, but we might give you an off hand, which cancels a certain kind of rune.

As well you got your main hand, which cancel out another type of rune.

New abilities as you level up. Say, at level 10, you get a new ability. You press it, and you next spell cost no runes.

 

Question:

Waterfiends, you gotta wear dhide or karils, if you don't wanna get hit hard. But they're only weak to crush weapons.

How are you going to balance that?

Answer:

Monsters will get rebalanced.

When you click a monster now, it will tell you what a monster is strong against, and when it is weak against.

We want to encourage you to do it. To use the stronger attack style.

For now you can lean on slash, and forget about it.

We want this for all creatures now.

All creatures will be rebalanced, They will have strengths, they will have weaknesses.

You will have to play to those strengths and weaknesses to win.

 

Waterfiends are just horrible from my point of view, because whoever made them didn't know what they were doing.

They give far too many charms.

Their combat system is completely messed up.

.... Charms are fun.

[awkward silence]

 

Question:

Now that you have absorption, how about negative absorption

Answer:

Okay um, I don;t know much myself. but i don't like absorption at all.

It's just uh, too complicated. And when it does work, it doesn't do it enough.

personally, I'd like to just see it gone.

What we do see in pvp, is that people do too much damage.

You whip out your dragon claws or your armadyl godsword, you bust out your special, bam bam you're dead.

We can't have things like that.

We're probably gonna get rid of damage absorption as it exists right now, because it sucks.

We're going to release life point boosting for armor across the board.

Right now, only a few armors boost life points. We're going to put it on everything.

We want players at max level to have, 2 to 3, maybe 4,000 life points. We want to increase that ceiling so we can have more interesting combat.

 

Question:

we have 4 elements for magic. Wind, fire,air water, can you make them do slightly different things?

like fire -> damage over time

water makes u run slower

Answer:

Absolutely.

Problem with magic is that it's been around since classic.

And runescript in classic was horrible.

So unfortuantely that's why mage is what it is.

So what we'd like to do is make everything more interesting.

We'd like to give fire a damage over time ability.

or you do a wind, wind could slow down a person's run speed.

all sorts of interesting things.

 

Question:

[audio break out] Higher end bow, like higher range strength

Answer:

Like I said, the combat triangle isnt balanced

In this new system, hopefully everything is balanced.

Lets say a manic guy is running around with an abyssal whip.

Your ranger is using a magic shortbow, off the top of my head.

We want to boost the power of range and magic so it matches the power of melee.

The damage chart we showed earlier... [fumbles with powerpoint]

there's gotta be a better way to do this [fumbles more with powerpoint]

there we are, so, as we see, we got melee sitting at the top. [blah blah pointless stuff he said already]

 

Question:

Are you able to change run speeds?

Answer:

What we can't do, because of a technical limitation. We can't change run speed.

Run speed doesn't exist, it's a cheat. It's you going 2 squares at once, and you skip over the tile in between.

We can't make you go 3 tiles at once.

We can make weight a greater impact on your run energy, but i don't like run energy

 

[video cuts out in the middle of Q&A session]

[Bows]

Cool, combat needs a bit of a make-over. It gets stale quickly.

[Jeff Delu]

This sounds awsome. :D

[Sir_Squab]

I want to see this NAO! Lol. If this works out as well as promised, it will be very very good =D

 

4k lp at maxed levels tho. Lol. Well, bosses will need to be rebalanced as well as the rest of monsters.

 

Also, they need to do something so that low levels don't get screwd out of bosses because of higher level competition, preferably by simply making better, high level bosses.

 

Also, thanks for the text, because I'd actually much rather read it in text format then a video, lol.

[Troacctid]

Ooh, exciting.

[Robert_R]

Please do this... Seriously I'd be very content with them holding off with all other updates and working solely on this concept if they actually intend on doing it. Also, I love how blunt he about some things.

Waterfiends are just horrible from my point of view, because whoever made them didn't know what they were doing.

They give far too many charms.

Their combat system is completely messed up.

Awesome. :thumbup:

[Sir_Squab]

Please do this... Seriously I'd be very content with them holding off with all other updates and working solely on this concept if they actually intend on doing it. Also, I love how blunt he about some things.

Waterfiends are just horrible from my point of view, because whoever made them didn't know what they were doing.

They give far too many charms.

Their combat system is completely messed up.

.... Charms are fun.

[awkward silence]

Awesome. :thumbup:

 

Ftfy.

[tintin113]

Loved reading this, sounds amazing :)

[Robert_R]

Please do this... Seriously I'd be very content with them holding off with all other updates and working solely on this concept if they actually intend on doing it. Also, I love how blunt he about some things.

Waterfiends are just horrible from my point of view, because whoever made them didn't know what they were doing.

They give far too many charms.

Their combat system is completely messed up.

.... Charms are fun.

[awkward silence]

Awesome. :thumbup:

 

Ftfy.

Guess I'm the only one that would think that's great.

[Cheefoo]

World of Runescape. Where you can have fun adventures in the world of Azero- err.. Gelienor!

 

 

Edit: While this is blatant WoW game mechanics being added it is not a bad thing. I welcome the change

 

Elaborate?

 

Are you referring to "hotbars" "abilities" and such talk? That's not something original to WoW. Hotbars are just good game design; they allow you to quickly activate items, spells or any other kind of action. Hell, I'd like a customisable hotkey list even without this combat rebalance. Combat abilities are technically already in Runescape, they're just rather shallow. Magic spells, prayers, special attacks and so forth are pretty much just that.

 

Well, I'm pretty excited by the sound of this, a big combat change is what Runescape really needs, it's just not very interesting as it is now. Sure, PvP is exciting and can get rather complicated, but it could be so much better.

[Robert_R]

World of Runescape. Where you can have fun adventures in the world of Azero- err.. Gelienor!

 

 

Edit: While this is blatant WoW game mechanics being added it is not a bad thing. I welcome the change

 

Elaborate?

 

Are you referring to "hotbars" "abilities" and such talk? That's not something original to WoW. Hotbars are just good game design; they allow you to quickly activate items, spells or any other kind of action. Hell, I'd like a customisable hotkey list even without this combat rebalance. Combat abilities are technically already in Runescape, they're just rather shallow. Magic spells, prayers, special attacks and so forth are pretty much just that.

 

Well, I'm pretty excited by the sound of this, a big combat change is what Runescape really needs, it's just not very interesting as it is now. Sure, PvP is exciting and can get rather complicated, but it could be so much better.

To me his post just sounds like another "omg jagex is changing something in their game it's a WoW ripoff" posts. Very common. I just choose to ignore them at this point.

[Pete Party]

World of Runescape. Where you can have fun adventures in the world of Azero- err.. Gelienor!

 

 

Edit: While this is blatant WoW game mechanics being added it is not a bad thing. I welcome the change

 

Elaborate?

 

Are you referring to "hotbars" "abilities" and such talk? That's not something original to WoW. Hotbars are just good game design; they allow you to quickly activate items, spells or any other kind of action. Hell, I'd like a customisable hotkey list even without this combat rebalance. Combat abilities are technically already in Runescape, they're just rather shallow. Magic spells, prayers, special attacks and so forth are pretty much just that.

 

Well, I'm pretty excited by the sound of this, a big combat change is what Runescape really needs, it's just not very interesting as it is now. Sure, PvP is exciting and can get rather complicated, but it could be so much better.

To me his post just sounds like another "omg jagex is changing something in their game it's a WoW ripoff" posts. Very common. I just choose to ignore them at this point.

 

Like no game ever before WOW had all that.... it's odder to not have it (runescape) that to have it (wow).

[Cow]

Are you not able to record this session?

[Grimy_Bunyip]

Are you not able to record this session?

it's recorded, but i put some of the details on my own forum, just as an incentive :P

[Cow]

Are you not able to record this session?

it's recorded, but i put some of the details on my own forum, just as an incentive :P

Ah, thanks, found it. So many runefest videos to watch over the next few days :thumbup:

[The Dark Lord]

This better not be where you use a maneuver and after you use the move there's a cooldown and then you have to find another move. And there's a list of like 50 moves you could do at various skill levels.

 

That would suck.

[Den]

Looking forward to seeing how this evolves. Very interesting.

[stevensda]

im looking forward to this, hopefully jagex can do this and not [bleep] up to much stuff

 

also more life boosting armors = great, hate how only nex shit had the life boost

[Kaida23]

But the idea is, free to play is like, i hesitate to call it an intro.

Sometimes it's been called an intro. Sometimes it's been called an entirely other game.

I hesitate to call it either.

So much for their long standing position that F2P is the game, and P2P is an expansion. <_<

 

Something in the pipeline, but we won't talk about today.

At least that sounds promising. I wonder what it could be.

[Beaumonde]

This sounds like a complete overhaul of the combat system, which could be good, but I'm also apprehensive that it will mess everything up and be a mess and we'll have to relearn the whole game.

[Nash]

Im so excited for this :) I just made a suggestions thread for a hotkey bar last week in the other section of these forums :D :D :D

 

 

Bring it OOOOOOOOOOOON. No more Afkable bosses = I like RS now.

 

 

And this isnt a copy of WoW, every MMORPG has these -.-

 

 

 

 

 

Do you guys think this will mean you'll be able to mage/range/melee all bosses now? For example, you can only range Arma now, but with the new combat mechanics do you think we'll see more "Class" types in MH teams? I would love to see mages, rangers and warriors all come to together to fight bosses (As opposed to having 6 ppl, all geared exactly the same, fighting the same way, fighting nex)

[FooK-A-Ji]

Im so excited for this :) I just made a suggestions thread for a hotkey bar last week in the other section of these forums :D :D :D

 

 

Bring it OOOOOOOOOOOON. No more Afkable bosses = I like RS now.

 

 

And this isnt a copy of WoW, every MMORPG has these -.-

 

 

 

 

 

Do you guys think this will mean you'll be able to mage/range/melee all bosses now? For example, you can only range Arma now, but with the new combat mechanics do you think we'll see more "Class" types in MH teams? I would love to see mages, rangers and warriors all come to together to fight bosses (As opposed to having 6 ppl, all geared exactly the same, fighting the same way, fighting nex)

 

No, I don't think so.

They want to even out the odds between the combat types within the combat triangle.

 

That doesn't mean that every "class", or combat style should have an even chance against all bosses.

Some bosses need to be tanked, some need to be spanked.

[Kimberly]

Edit: While this is blatant WoW game mechanics being added it is not a bad thing. I welcome the change

 

I see it as a good thing as well. Though, it's less like 'becoming wow-like' and more 'evolving into the average rpg in 2011'

 

It seems for the next decade, they're really set on making RuneScape almost unrecognizable from it's previous versions to grab another generation to milk.

[Amonitas]

Edit: While this is blatant WoW game mechanics being added it is not a bad thing. I welcome the change

 

I see it as a good thing as well. Though, it's less like 'becoming wow-like' and more 'evolving into the average rpg in 2011'

 

It seems for the next decade, they're really set on making RuneScape almost unrecognizable from it's previous versions to grab another generation to milk.

 

My thoughts exactly.

[@Dan3HitU]

This actually sounds like it will benefit the entire RuneScape community, I mean PvP and PvM, more specifically (my opinion) PvM, the whole weakness/strengths is brilliant.... I wonder if this would make getting a Fire Cape more of a challenge again.

 

As for the rebalancing the triangle, that's brilliant, I can't wait to see it, finally we'll actually see Mages beating Melee, Melee beating Range and Range beating Mage, fantastic!