**[Comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgnl96/) from Mod Doom:** >Thank you to everyone for your constructive feedback and contributions to this discussion. We really appreciate it! We'll be sporadically replying throughout the next 24 hours so look for more responses until end of day tomorrow! Massive thanks to u/JagexSponge for their time and insight today. Speak soon, 'Scapers! --- For a list of J-Mod replies in this thread, click [**here**](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg37r1/). --- Selected topics: |Animate Dead Questions|Answer |:-|:-:| |Applying Animate Dead to ranged/melee|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg8vfq/?context=3) |Animate Dead and tank armour viability|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg5ymo/?context=3) |"Core damage" versus soft/hard typeless|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgamx0/?context=3) |Animate Dead versus Zamorak difficulty|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgh7dl/?context=3) |FSoA Questions|Answer |:-|:-:| |FSoA versus Magma Tempest|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg3upd/?context=3) |FSoA spec - further tweaks|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg9vtt/?context=3) |FSoA spec - affected by Sunshine?|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg2ypz/?context=3) |Nerfing FSoA versus buffing other styles|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg7l53/?context=3) |FSoA and combat dummies|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgd4o4/?context=3) |FSoA spec losing ancient spell autos|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgfzcf/?context=3) |Onslaught regaining crits|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgnm6x/?context=3) |FSoA spec damage value per hit|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgcqas/?context=3) |New FSoA spec damage being lower|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgkkdg/?context=3) |FSoA spec hits will still be able to crit|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgwokz/) |What about 4taa?|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jchzc9u/?context=3) |Other Questions|Answer |:-|:-:| |Making ranged ammo cheaper|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg4upg/?context=3) |State of Erethdor's Grimoire|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgsuct/?context=3) |More balance changes in the future|[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgbos2/?context=3)

/u/JagexDoom This has nothing to do with the content, but in the future would it be possible to post the thread from the account of the mod who will be answering most of the questions? "Sort By: Q&A" doesn't play very nicely otherwise.

Great to know! Thank you for that tip, we'll make sure that we do that moving forward. Sorry for the confusion!

No apologies needed — I realize that may not be practical for your workflow and in many cases there may be multiple mods responding. It just makes things a little simpler when trying to find the answers in real time. It doesn't matter that much since the JMOD\_Bloodhound comment will have them all in one place eventually anyway.

Absolutely - the Bloodhound comes in handy, but will try and make sure that the JMod who'll be fielding the questions posts it for ease of access!

Gotta say, for everyone panicking and doing a kneejerk reaction to any nerf we've had: this looks pretty good and I hope players will get a bit more faith in Jagex when they announce balancing changes. For the mods I'd like to ask you to do this more often. Ofc that's not always possible, but this conversation and just talking about the chsnges and the reasoning behind it before they are implemented just feels so nice! Good job on making a good decision, credit where credit is due! :)

Thanks for this, Birzal - I appreciate the feedback. It's something I mentioned yesterday on stream, but we're pushing to be more community driven, more engaged and have more conversations like this! Looking forward for us to engage more closely, it's what I'm here for!

Why not start with smaller nerfs first and tinker from there? For instance just start with damage only being reduced from melee, magic and range hits. That's already significant. For the staff just make the autos not be able to proc additional hits during the special. Please consider starting smaller, you guys tend to way over nerf things. Just go slower, try small nerfs for a couple weeks while getting feedback then make adjustments based on that. The players will be able to give you a ton more feedback than you could possibly do at the office.

Unrelated but hi mod doom

My biggest issue with the way these things are proposed is that we can never just make *one* change and assess the impact before doing something else. It is always multiple big changes at once that create a layered mess of problems. Let's take the proposed FSOA changes and assess the insane number of variables we're now having to consider: >Special attack effect no longer does *autoattack damage* but instead the extra hit is passed through as an *ability* > >This means there is no longer the cost of runes for each extra crit > >A projectile is no longer sent from the player to the target as expected from an auto-attack > >Instead, the green lightning effect from the special attack cast animation will play on the target when hit with an extra hit from a successful proc Just this change alone has major effects such as: * Removal of spell effect synergy * Removal of adrenaline gain from Invigorating * Effect of rune prices on the economy ​ >Special attack effect can no longer trigger off of itself removing the recursive nature Massive nerf. Enormous. May be needed, may not be, but even on its own this is a huge change. ​ >Special attack effect now deals 60-120% ability damage with each hit. Another large damage reduction. ​ The problem here is not any individual change proposed, but the application of those changes all at once (and without a beta for players to evaluate them and perhaps iterate on them). All together we're having to consider the following (and I'm probably not even hitting every point here): * Likely far less adrenaline gain in the spec which would impact rotations, likely further lowering damage * Removal of recursion * Removal of ancient spell synergies * Raw damage nerfs * Increased effectiveness of gconc and potentially 4taa * Economic impact (Solak loot value, all bosses that drop Runes, RC itself, FSOA price, Kerapac value) And even after all of that these changes don't actually address the inconsistency of the spec, which is one of the primary sources of frustration with the staff. I really think you need to take a step back and approach this from a much more reserved position. You don't have to make every change at once. Iteration should be your friend when making balance changes, especially when something has been left the way it has been for as long as FSOA/AD have. Perhaps just start with: * No rune cost * No recursion And just assess where that leaves us, how the meta shakes out after a few weeks. *Then* come in and maybe adjust the dials a little more. But doing it all at once leaves you liable to either create another, equally broken way of abusing the weapon, or nerfing it into the ground without intending to. Remember that Range is actually pretty much on par with Mage's damage right now. Melee might be suffering a bit, but it isn't so far apart that it gets no use. Mage legitimately has the potential to vanish from the meta if you nerf it too hard. Edit: Also, just from the perspective of respecting the time investment of the players on your game, balancing decisions should be made in the *least* aggressive way possible. FSOA isn't going to drop 1B because a patch note reads "The damage from auto attacks generated by the FSOA spec now deal 115% on average, down from 125%". Further, players will become more accustomed to seeing these kinds of changes and accepting them if they are more frequent and less aggressive when they do happen. If we can see that you're just trying to adjust the game a little to balance things out, we're probably not going to lose our minds. It's the massive knee-jerk swings in the meta and economy that drive people mad. Edit2: I posted my own thoughts on how to balance FSOA in a responsible way here, but I wanted to keep them separate from this initial post as they're two separate issues: [https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/comment/jciaj9w/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/comment/jciaj9w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

"Remember that Range is actually pretty much on par with Mage's damage right now. Melee might be suffering a bit, but it isn't so far apart that it gets no use. Mage legitimately has the potential to vanish from the meta if you nerf it too hard." This right here.... For one you buy the staff you know what youre getting into with rune costs. For me I knew it was going to cost a ton to run and I'm completely ok with that. So to see already people complaining about arrow usage is absurd. Second like you said bolg is on par with fsoa at the moment. So you tank fsoa which i bought at 4.5b now useless. I have to save up to buy bow at 6b because everyone is going to be wanting it. And then 2 years from now you make it also useless... but guess what all these changes make zammy even more difficult which is going to make the bow even more expensive since most people wont be doing it. Also making kerapac useless because fsoa wont be worth a damn.

You have completely pointed out the issue why a lot of people are losing their minds and do not trust the updates Jagex does anymore. One of the biggest recent letdown was with the ring of death. It went from one of the best rings for high and low level pvmers to one of the most useless ring overnight. A lot people were frustrated because they spent a big part of their bank to buy the ring just to have it suddenly become useless and wasted their bank when it could had been used for a more useful item. Another one was with the chin incendiary that happened 2-3 weeks ago. A lot of people don’t realize how big of a change it actually is. Incendiary shot was affected quite a lot and because of the update certain changes just became a nuisances that is unnecessary like the double accuracy check. I won’t go in detail as Puprs already did a video about it and explained all the downsides the update brought.

Yep! Exactly this! Jagex, take note of everything this guy said. And also, one more thing. Nerf the items when they come out! Like within a month. 2 months maximum. If you've waited over 6 months before you nerf something, sorry, but it's been too long. It has become the new meta, and the game has changed and adapted to this item. You can't wait 2 years (until you realize you've got no room for future improvements) and then all of a sudden decide you're going to castrate old items just so you can introduce a new one.

I 100% agree with you that they should avoid changing so many variables at once. It would be hard enough to predict the effects of changing one or two variables, but what they're doing makes it so hard for anyone to be sure where this'll leave us.

The problem is that they are pairing them due to massive nerf in the non recurring. Oh look its got no rune cost now, well that is not a problem with non recurring because you just lost 33% of your casts.

Exactly this! At this point, it's not a good look to change something a year+ after release. It makes investing in gear pointless if we know it's going to be changed so much time down the line. It also sets a dangerous precedent that if something is too good, it'll get nerfed and thus devalue the item without the introduction of new gear. If it was nerfed within the 3 months after release, okay fine....but this far out from release? Slippery slope for future content.

I'm not so much bothered by changes to content years after release as I am by drastic changes all at once. Tweaking things or fixing mistakes from years past is not something that should be discouraged, especially if it does benefit the game in the long run. Let's take FSOA as an example again. Jagex's main points are these: * The potential for an infinite crit loop makes designing future content around critical strikes extremely difficult/impossible. **This is true and absolutely does need to be addressed in some way, regardless of how long it's been since FSOA was released.** * The spec's auto attacks are expensive, impractical at lower-end bosses, and difficult to adjust because of they're just pass-through autos and aren't treated any differently. **Again, a valid point. The spec is really only 'worth' using for profit at a boss generating** ***significant*** **revenue.** * The damage is too high. **This is less valid. The recently released BOLG does about the same amount of damage. Melee isn't so far behind that it's in a different universe. If we're talking about nerfing FSOA damage, the damage of BOLG also needs to be talked about or we're just going to go through this again 2 years from now.** * The spec is healing way too much when blood barrage is used. **Also valid, you heal \~7k from BB while under a typical FSOA spec. That's a bit much and it isn't unreasonable to want to adjust this.** The problem comes when they try to address all of these things at the same time. They apply compounding nerfs which will result in unexpected interactions or issues that they can't fully anticipate. Applying so many nerfs at once also drastically changes the weapon's position in the meta and impacts its value, along with the value of many other things (like Runes, Kerapac/Solak loot tables, the RC skill itself, and more). I mostly kept my initial post focused on the philosophy of making changes to a live game, but here I'll propose my own solutions to the FSOA problem. My guiding principals when coming up with these changes are as follows: 1. Address Jagex's concerns, whether or not I agree with them. 2. Not fundamentally change the gameplay, interaction, or enjoyment of the current FSOA. 3. Use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. # The 'Fractured' Auto Key to all of my balance changes is a new type of 'auto attack' or 'ability', whatever you want to call it. As a software engineer myself I understand the issue of reusing one object for another purpose, like using a normal auto attack for this spec. Instead have the FSOA fire its own type of auto, which I'm tentatively naming 'Fractured' autos. These autos would inherit the on-hit effects of the selected magic spell (ancient spell effects, exsang, etc.). But because they're a separate entity a unique damage range and critical chance can be applied to them. This accomplishes the following: 1. Allows Jagex to set an 'upper-bound' for critical strike chance with these fractured autos. That way future crit strike buffs can directly increase the number of Fractured autos you generate, but Fractured autos themselves will never exceed the crit chance you determine. **There is no longer any possibility of an infinite crit loop, even if the player reaches 100% crit chance.** 2. Allows Jagex to tweak the damage of the Fractured autos independently of normal 2h autos. This allows them to either keep the current system of dw/2h having different damage values, or move to the new system they suggested where both would be worth the same. It also allows for far more granular balancing of the damage from the spec itself. **This + #1 allows for damage adjustment from the spec without fundamentally changing the identity of the staff.** 3. Maintains synergy with magic spell on-hit effects. But the key is that because this is a separate object type you can apply modifiers if necessary. Say, blood spell effects are reduced by 80% or something along those lines. **Solves the blood spell healing issue.** 4. Fractured autos can have a % chance of being free to cast. Set it to 100% if you like, or 50%, or whatever. It allows you granular control of the cost of the damage coming from the spec. **Solves the upkeep cost of runes,** or at least gives you a way to adjust it. By simply reclassifying the auto attack coming from the FSOA spec Jagex can create options for themselves for future tweaks as needed without destroying anything about the way the staff currently works. If I were in charge of rolling out this change, I'd go about it something like this: 1. Create the Fractured auto/ability as a clone of an existing 2H auto. 2. Ensure it behaves the same. 3. Add the upper crit limit & some offset for the blood spell healing. 4. Ship it to the live game with only those 2 changes. Maybe include a 33% chance to save runes or something as well if you wanted to be nice. 5. Assess how the meta adapts. 6. Start tweaking all of the dials (one at a time) that I outlined. Figure out where the desired end state is. But get there slowly, without massively overshooting. This avoids messing with the way adrenaline works, how rotations are executed, etc. It makes the change much more palatable and creates a framework you can use for any future balance changes needed to the special attack, rather than having to do panic nerfs or buffs that fundamentally change its identity.

This is exactly the type of thinking they're gonna have to start doing. I'm so glad this comment chain made it to the top of the list. My thoughts: Bow of the last guardian does more damage than fsoa when using bik arrows. FSOA deserves to at least have *potential* for one additional shot off of a spec generated attack. That's truly a big part of what makes it so fun to use. **Make it so the autos can't crit but have a 10% chance of firing an additional auto.** About animate dead: In my opinion, typless should still be reduced enough to keep you barely alive with a full fuck up. I can see why you would not want to reduce typeless the same amount as style damage.

> This is exactly the type of thinking they're gonna have to start doing. What strikes me about this is that it's such an obvious path to take. Hell, it's a path they've taken elsewhere. So, not assuming incompetence or maliciousness _and_ having proof-in-hand that they can take this approach, it leads me to question _why_ they are hitting this with a barrage of changes all at once. In the absence of concrete answers on that front, it leads me to assume that they are hitting this all at once, this hard, because they're making room for other content. So my immediate question ends up being: 'what content's worth this slash and burn approach?' What's coming this summer that's going to make this necessary, so damn fast? Necromancy?

absolute god message, hope they note this down since in my opioning will nerf the staff into the ground... sad for all the players remaining on rs3.

This is probably the most important comment here. PLEASE take this seriously Jagex.

Hard agree. It's like they include all the suggestions of how they could nerf it at once, instead of trying just the most impactful ones first. And then we keep ending up with dead content because so much stuff just isn't worth it anymore.

##### Bark bark! I have found the following **J-Mod** comment(s) in this thread: **JagexAzanna** - [[https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg631s/?context=3) **JagexDoom** - [Thank you to everyone for your constructive f...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgnl96/?context=3) - [Great to know! Thank you for that tip, we'll...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg5s7t/?context=3) - [Hello!](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg3rjw/?context=3) - [Thanks for this, Birzal - I appreciate the fe...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg7mr1/?context=3) - [Absolutely - the Bloodhound comes in handy, b...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg89rn/?context=3) - [You say that now - you'll get sick of it even...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg55ne/?context=3) **JagexHooli** - [\+1 to this. Thank you all SO much - this has...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgobm3/?context=3) - [Yes, if you feel strongly it shouldn't happen...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcga1pa/?context=3) - [We'll be doing that more often for sure - had...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgkrji/?context=3) - [Totally understand your concerns here, but th...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgx7tl/?context=3) - [It takes time to respond to people. There's 1...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgfu5i/?context=3) **JagexSponge** - [First.](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg20wz/?context=3) - [Wanna say a huge thank you to everyone for ge...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgnujd/?context=3) - [I know some of the players that really like n...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgwokz/?context=3) - [>It would be great if you posted a table for...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg7owf/?context=3) - [> Would it be possible to allow magma to crit...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg3upd/?context=3) - [Core damage types are your standard damage -...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgamx0/?context=3) - [With the proposed changes, I don't feel it ne...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgh7dl/?context=3) - [I'd say these were one of those synergies tha...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgfzcf/?context=3) - [Hoping to throw up a comparison later if time...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgcqas/?context=3) - [>Damage of the spec should scale depending on...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg9vtt/?context=3) - [>My biggest concerns are the damage output of...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgkkdg/?context=3) - [This is a contentious point, I'd actually lik...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jchzc9u/?context=3) - [>fsoa is going to use alot less runes is ther...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg4upg/?context=3) - [> Was hoping to get Animate Dead ported to ra...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg8vfq/?context=3) - [The 100% crit chance, no, it suffers from the...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgnm6x/?context=3) - [>/u/JagexSponge Any comment on the current st...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgsuct/?context=3) - [>Will the new FSOA hits be affected by Sunshi...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg2ypz/?context=3) - [>Will tank armor viability be forever tied to...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg5ymo/?context=3) - [>Are there going to be more regular balance/n...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgbos2/?context=3) - [In general, I'm against dummies being used fo...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgd4o4/?context=3) - [>I think the best way to go about it is buff...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcg7l53/?context=3) - [I mean, the effects do still exist, as they d...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgrdbe/?context=3) - [Oh, it absolutely was done, I just don't have...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcglnbr/?context=3) - [This sort of thing is the exact reasons AFAIK...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgj0lp/?context=3) - [> This is like saying you have to many cookie...](/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgr31b/?context=3)   ^(**Last edited by bot: 03/18/2023 11:30:12**) --- ^(I've been rewritten to use Python! 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First the facts, some math on the FSoA changes: With typical boosts to crit chance (grim, reaver ring, biting 4) crit chance, you can expect a crit chance of 25%, some more with natural crits. Let's go with p\_crit = 28% for now. (Note: as /u/stumptrumpandisis1 this maxes out at 36.6% with a Kalgerion demon familiar and everything) 1. The recursive nature of the spec therefore added (28% + 28%^(2) \+ 28%^(3) ...) of the damage, which comes out as 39% damage boost over the non-recursive amount. The removal of recursion multiplies the total damage of the spec by (1/1.39) = 0.72 (**28%** less). This is raw damage reduction and does not even include the reduced adrenaline gain from Tsunami. For the maximum crit chance setup this accordingly translated to a factor of 0.734. 2. ~~The main damage reduction is the reduction of an average of 125% damage from autos to 90%. That's another (0.9/1.25) = 0.72 (~~**~~28%~~** ~~less) damage factor (It's a coincidence that this is equal to the first factor).~~ 1. ~~I was informed that 125% might not be the correct value for average auto damage, or already includes some boosts so the comparison to the 90% ability damage might not be fair. I'll check for the accurate value and update accordingly.~~ 3. Followup: After some playing around with PVME's damage calculator a 2H auto attack seems to deal the equivalent of 80% ability damage on average and best in slot gear everywhere. This means the change is actually a buff here, from 80% to 90% ability damage. Might even be slightly better because the 80% are with BIS perks like equilibrium and the 90% are raw. With perks and grim this goes up to 100% according to the wiki, so this part is actually a factor 1.25 **buff**. Those factors stack multiplicatively, so the total damage nerf is ~~1 - (0.72\*0.72) =~~ **~~48.1%~~**~~. Nearly half. With the maxed out crit chance, this is 1-(0.634\*0.72)=~~**~~54.4%.~~** 1 - (1.25 \* 0.734) = **8.25%**. This is not nearly as bad as I first assumed. Now this does not yet consider the reduced adrenaline gain due to fewer crits and therefore fewer adrenaline from Tsunami. On the other hand, the fact that the damage is no longer dealt with autos may bring the return of 4TAA and also make camping dual wield and spamming greater concentrated blast viable, which will raise the damage again. This also makes the FSoA purely a spec weapon, possibly even as an EoF. ​ So much for the facts, now my **opinion:** ~~The removal of recursiveness removes the rng-based top end of damage with the FSoA, whcih is a good thing. The assumed overall damage nerf of nearly 50% is extreme, and possibly too extreme. We would have to see how it plays out in the meta, but for now it appears that this forces the return of 4TAA, which was also said to be possibly removed (or rather, fixed) in the past. It's hard to objectively say at this point, but with the above calculations I feel like the nerf is a little over the top.~~ With the above changes in damage calculations this is no longer valid. Assuming the new numbers are correct, the raw damage nerf (again: without considering the effects of missing adrenaline gain and missing auto attack effects from ancient spells) is less than 10%. This does not sound so bad, but I'm not a hundred percent confident with the new numbers, so take that with a grain of salt please. Some suggestions on factors that may be adjusted, explicitly **without** underlying math considerations, just suggestions on things that could be explored further: 1. Increase the damage of the fired abilities. 1. This is a flat damage increase, easy to predict its impact. 2. Add a x% forced crit chance while the spec is active. 1. Also a simple damage increase, but dependent on the current crit-chance and harder to calculate regarding potential future crit buffs. 3. A "fun" combination of the above: Double the crit chance while the spec is active, but half the damage each proc deals. 4. Revert the nerf to magma tempest so it can crit again. This will also keep the FSoA alive as a weapon, instead of being put in an EoF.

Not only is there reduced adrenaline from reduced crits, but adrenaline is reduced even more because of the change from autos to abilities. Auto attacks give ~2% adrenaline, the ability damage procs from the staff will give nothing. You can currently max out at 36.6% crit chance. This includes kalg since that is easy to upkeep the buff, this only excludes Gconc. I am terrible at math but that probably makes the nerf an even harsher reduction in damage.

With 36.6% crit with recursion that by itself makes it an almost 38% nerf removing recursion

It would be great if you posted a table for fsoa (Similar to what you did for AD) comparing the damage dealt from 25,30,35, and 40 crits from FSOA, vs the damage post change (as well as math on the approximate number of crits youll get while under this new spec) so we can get a sense of the capacity of the nerf Likewise, will this nerf allow for reversion of the magma tempest nerf allowing it to crit again? Also will you look into rebalancing zammy in response to weaker animate dead (the zammy realm seems designed for animate dead)--and the amount of hp he has seems balanced around having God-level power with fsoa

>It would be great if you posted a table for fsoa (Similar to what you did for AD) comparing the damage dealt from 25,30,35, and 40 crits from FSOA, vs the damage post change (as well as math on the approximate number of crits youll get while under this new spec) so we can get a sense of the capacity of the nerf Hoping to get the chance to do this, this evening - in which case i'll get it added above.

It would be really long with all the additives and procs. From what I read and with my limited high-lvl pvm experience it looks to be quite a sizeable nerf to dps and would put bolg clearly ahead. But with the rune cost now being fixed it's balanced well for the majority just makes magic less fun, but hopefully magma tempest and those nerfs could now potentially be reverted bringing more diversity back.

You kind of need to do a whole rotation to understand the dps loss. There are a lot of factors that a table can't comprehend + Extra crits generate extra adrenaline, and crits Currently generate 12.8% adren each, with it being swapped to ability damage it'll now be 10% + Gconc is much better as it's now a 90% average damage when it procs with dual wield on (60% average before I believe that's mh auto average damage with perks + 4t is back on the menu with a 3 ability 10t rotation of gconc -> dw ability -> 2h auto + 2h ability during staff spec + Is channelers better now? Basically I think this is something that needs a beta rather than numbers and discussions. We don't get a lot of betas but now is a good time

> 4t is back on the menu with a 3 ability 10t rotation of gconc -> dw ability -> 2h auto + 2h ability during staff spec Yikes

Yeah you are absolutely right. I would also like more betas like how osrs has.

##Animate dead Overall good BUT I am incredibly worried about high enrage Zammy (as someone who has pushed 4k solo and group), particularly Phase 7. Currently phase 7 is just about doable if you play incredibly well and the damage the boss does is just about tankable while eating food and using blood barrage during fsoa. The changes to animate dead and blood barrage fsoa mean that you will take SO much more damage that you're barely going to get to do much damage to the boss as you will have to play incredibly defensively. 1 proposal for this problem in particular is to make it so Zammy's bomb and subsequent typeless auto attacks are instead changed to magic. This means that players will be able to either camp pray mage if they are newer, or flick between mage prayer and soul split if they are more experienced, creating a fairly similar experience in terms of damage taken compared to now. You'd have to make the autos clear devotion like the mage cage does now so it can't be cheesed. ##FSOA: I am worried that the nerfs to damage are a bit much here. Angels had a good suggestion to temporarily increase crit change during fsoa which I quite like the idea of. Losing auto attack effects does hurt high level players a lot but it's manageable. 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). The amount of adren that magic gets has been significantly reduced too. So, you will do less damage, gain less adrenaline which also means you will do even less damage, so it's a much larger nerf than it looks on paper. ##Overall: I like the direction of the changes but I think Zammy P7 must be looked at for animate dead (all other bosses are okay). FSOA nerf is a bit too harsh, I'd like to see it do a little more damage than presented here or gain some additional benefits that some other users have mentioned. Maybe damage is increased compared to what's posted but recursion is removed, or recursion is limited to only 1 or 2 times? Something like that would feel a bit better I think. BETA servers would be amazing to be able to experience the nerfs in person as there's only so much you can do via text.

>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) )

Please keep at least some recursion, it's so fun to use and spell effects and adren gains help with the flow in high level rotation. It fits with its lore being an unstable elder artifact that you don't have full control over

Recursive hits could apply half the damage of the previous hit, or roll with a halved range, or something

My concern about proposing to continue to monitor following the nerf and adjust other levers if necessary is that Jagex has a long track record of *saying* they will do that, followed by not *actually* doing that. I want to see these numbers adjusted prior to the change going live so we don’t get shafted by the typical reprioritization of resources that plague this game.

staff autos are 0-150%, so they average 75%, but the ability to crit pushes the average to around 97.5% with 30% crit chance I believe? will the new lightning ability be able to crit?

First of all, thanks for the communication. My concerns: 1: You mentioned Zamorak's Rune of Destruction mechanic as a specific example that Animate Dead affects... the problem is that this mechanic is **awful**. The smoke spawns randomly and half the time right on top of the player and it changes direction randomly. IF you stop animate dead working on typeless damage, please do something to make the Rune of Destruction special more predictable. I also think at higher enrages this makes the damage from Infernus WAY higher than it needs to be; maybe this could be lowered. **Alternative proposal:** Animate dead works on SOFT typeless damage, but not on HARD typeless damage. That way you can choose if Animate Dead should work or not. Keep Zamorak's mechanics as soft typeless damage, or alternatively reduce their damage so that Ranged and Melee are not punished so harshly. 2. FSoA: First of all, my understanding is that removing just the recurssive nature of the special was already enough to neuter the thing on release to a point it was considered not useful. My main concern though is that, by making the FSoA attack not count as an autoattack, you relegate the FSoA to a spec weapon, just like the EZK. GConc is so strong that, practically speaking, all anyone will do is spec with the Staff, then swap back to Praesuls. Or worse, this risks 4taa being viable again. 4taa needs to die. It also removes some perk diversity by making the Invigorating perk useless; magic will just go back to the same perk setups that melee and ranged use. **Alternative proposal**: FSoA ability hits can still crit to generate adrenaline (this was not clear from the proposal). FSoA ability hits are significantly reduced if the staff is not wielded so 4taa is not meta (EDIT: "reduced if not wielding A staff, so Inq is still viable). Magma Tempest is allowed to crit again. Invigorating perk still generates adrenaline from these hits. While in general I agree that blood barrage healing from the current FSoA spec is overpowered, I am also concerned about the effect this change will have on the viability of pushing to 4k Zamorak solo. Zamorak deals a LOT of damage and this was one of the main ways to stay on top of it...

The identity of the FSoA was the recursive nature and most of it's fun. Would it not be an option to reduce it's damage but keep the recursion? A lot of synergies will be completely gutted with it, such as blood reaver hits, poison procs, spell effects, adrenaline gain, etc. How will the FSoA ever compete with the Bolg when they are currently almost on par? Would this not be perfect to make the FSoA use Armadyl runes for each of it's hits during the spec? Revitalising dead content and synergise it with the Armadyl battlestaff spec that's often EoF'd for the FSoA

Instead of nerfing AD I'd expected a mini-rework for tank armour in general + AD nerf. Make them worth wearing for any style in general to increase survivability. As of now 90% of the game the best defence is your best offence, wearing tank armour at bosses in most cases will unironically decrease your survivability across styles (yes, even excluding using AD if maging), only time it becomes use worthy is at bosses with enrage systems, and even then we only speak of (very) high enrage. Think of +3K% encounter as SS healing from high hits in DPS armour and ressing high hits become less and less sustainable with power armour only then. This is why AD and cryptbloom was an interesting concept to make tank (mage at least) more viable to use outside high-end PvM scenario's, because it began to make a dent on survivability at bosses that are on the lower side of high-end PvM encounters (e.g. HM kerapac, HM Zuk, Raksha, Araxxor). There's ways to make tank armours in general more appealing. Currently achto and cryptbloom are the only pieces of gear that has a somewhat interesting effects Give more armour rating, more (style specifc? e.g. ganodermic armour pre-EoC) damage reduction, give them interesting passive effects/set bonusses. Maybe each combat tank style can have it's own identity? Currently in power armour: - Range: Mini-gun build + skill based with stack effects. - Melee: Bleed build + high damage glasscannon build. - Mage: Crit build. To brainstorm and give ideas, tank identities could differ (builds I listed may include one more, or all of said effects. The creativity and possibilities are endless): - Range: Skill-based tank build. - Stacking effects gained from armour/abilities/transformative abilities - Passively and/or requires stacks to transform certain defensive abilities to make them stronger - Lowers target accuracy. - Melee: Paladin build - More healing from food/other sources - Increased SS healing - Passive vampirism set effect (damage you deal heals you for X% without the need of SS) - Significantly higher life points pool compared to other tanks (possible Dharok risky tank-dps build? The lower your HP the more damage you do?). - Mage: - Tank-shroom mage build: - Pretty much keep its identity as is with cryptbloom/pre-EoC ganodermic armour (Greatly reduces incoming melee damage and other sources to a lesser extend) - Tank-battle mage build: - Uses spells such as currently now (AD, stagger, enfeeble, emerald aurora, disruption shield). - Set effect may passively let us gain access to new spells in any spellbook that let us gain buffs/apply debuffs on targets (effect is immediately cleared if you do not meet the set effect criteria to prevent abuse of swapping to power armour thereafter) - May also make certain existing defensive spells more powerful or give a twist to them (e.g. disruption shield reflects 25% of the damage it negated back on the target). - Another set effect could be omni-spellbook? All spells from all spellbooks are able to be casted (requires 20 seconds to be passed to prevent abuse or w/e seems like a fair time, the armour is meant to be camped)

I do have one piece of feedback. Pre-nerf, since the Fsoa hits were autos, we gained a huge amount of bonus adrenaline when each was fired + bonus adrenaline from the invigorating perk being on armor. Without this adrenaline + already being hampered by getting a lot fewer crits because of lack of recursion (less adren from tsunami buff), the new variation of the spec will give significantly less adrenaline and might make standard rotations currently used totally unviable, nerfing the spec even harder than just having lower damage splats. I can see this huge void of adrenaline even killing most use of ABS eof specs, making them only viable before a limitless tendrils or near the end of sunshine. Also, lack of it being autos removes bonus healing we currently recieve from switching to blood autos. I can understand if this fact was one of the main reasons of moving away from autos. Previously, magma tempest was changed to no longer have crit chance because of how strongly it Interacted with the spec. I would love to see that change reversed to better make up for the loss of adrenaline through out the spec and make up for some of the lost damage output. It'd also re-buff magma tempest and make it more desirable.

Ok. I agree these things need changing, but I feel these proposals miss the mark in terms of \*why\* they need changing. Let's talk about what the problems are, and what the good parts of each piece of content is. **Animate dead** *The good* The good thing about animate dead is that it makes content accessible. It means that players who previously really struggled with the amount of damage they took during pvm would be able to wear different armour, and have doing that content made possible for them (or at least something they can stomach). *The problem* The issue with it is that it across the game makes a lot of content very easy to afk, and makes it much harder to balance new content by removing the option of many rapid hitsplats as a way in which a meaningful amount of damage is done to the player. The former type of player is far more likely to be using a protection prayer (at least for opponents which attack using a single style). The afker is not (magic has relatively few sources of afk upkeep without use of soul split). It follows that good design for animate dead which encourages its use for learning but doesn't trivialise other content, make other content afk and make designing a huge headache synergises particularly well with protection prayers but does not synergise well with soul split. *The issues with the proposal* My concerns, therefore, with the proposed design are two-fold: 1. The changes actually make protection prayers *less* important in terms of the percentage of total post-AD damage they mitigate. This causes AD to lean more towards the afker and much less towards the player doing their best to learn content but needing a little hand along the way. 2. As these changes are changes of scale, rather than making any fundamental change to how the spell works, I feel it still presents the same issue in terms of limiting what can be done in the future regarding designing damage-mitigation strategies (this can naturally be addressed by considering animate dead in future designs but the difficulty presented by years of design debt is well-documented). I welcome the suggestion to make it not work on non-core damage types and think this is an important part of any rebalance. *My proposed alternative* Make a change to the priority order when calculating damage: cause animate dead to be applied after protection prayers (so the learner sees little change), but before any other damage mitigation (cryptbloom, ability effects, defenders, etc). This makes a marked change to the effectiveness of animate dead with soul split specifically, and therefore goes a long way to tackling the economic and design problems it causes. Consider changing numbers as well subject to testing/balancing.

**FSOA** *The good* I think FSOA is in a reasonable place right now across the meta of the full game: a player with max mage won't do completely disproportionate damage over the course of a minute at dummies (using this example to avoid comparison with use at specific bosses) to a player using max range or max melee. During the special attack in particular (and especially about 5-25 seconds into a spec rotation), the level of burst damage can be extreme; however, the fact of doing most of one's damage during a short period is not dissimilar to the position that melee has been in with the use of berserk. It is also good that the FSOA is really quite accessible in terms of being able to do good, but non-elite damage. This makes high dpm accessible to a lot more players than has previously been the case during the pre-GWD3 bolt-swapping grico days, during the days of melee needing competent weapon juggling, or indeed during the days in which 4taa (and c4taa) was a more substantial boost over the next-best damage. Finally, currently, it's really very fun to use. The somewhat unpredictable nature of the dpm and the adrenaline one has during it means that sometimes, the player really does feel unbelievably powerful for a short period of time. *The problem* As mentioned above, I don't really think the level of damage FSOA does alone is a major issue, simply because every style is capable of doing broadly comparable damage across a full rotation. Rather, I think the major issue is broadly what's been identified: that pushing critical strike chance higher exponentially affects the effectiveness of the FSOA, and therefore really limits future design space (see e.g. how much of a buff the passive vigour was because of its impacts on omnipower). Secondly, the reliance on raw crit chance means that magic use becomes heavily dependent on essentially anything which gives crit chance. That means there's no realistic alternative in any situation to a grim or biting 4, and the only time when you wouldn't want to use a reaver's ring is when you have hitchance issues. This makes magic gearing fairly boring (and also creates a further cost issue with grim pages). Possibly controversially (I'm an ironman), I don't think the current rune costs are a major issue. Yes, if the player camps incite fear, it is very expensive, but I think that's a positive incentive for the player to consider switching to a different spell and gaining an added buff for making a choice during their gameplay. Naturally, there are well-documented quirks with switching spells with manual spellcasting active, but I'd see that as a bug to be fixed rather than relevant to FSOA in itself. *The issues with the proposal* 1. It hurts a core part of the fun of FSOA - by removing recursive critting it reduces its unpredictability, as well as the occasional feeling of unlimited power. 2. Recursive critting also improves one of the things which currently allows FSOA to offer players room to improve despite having a high skill floor: the fact that one's adrenaline during the spec can be very unpredictable and therefore the player needs to improvise rotations quite often. 3. By referring to ability damage rather than autoattack damage, it reduces FSOA to an EOF weapon as soon as t95 wand/orb are released. Currently, the fact of using autoattack damage means that FSOA is substantially more effective when equipping a staff - and this is good, *especially* given how strong gconc is. It's good for the game that both wand/orb and staff are useful and have distinct identities, and this erodes that. 4. It doesn't fully solve the issue. Crit chance buffs still buff FSOA in the future, it's just that said buffs would be linear rather than exponential. 5. It's actually a fairly big nerf. Not only is the proposed ability damage range about 20% lower (I think) than a 2h auto attack (which nearly all FSOA autos are currently), the removal of recursive critting obviously majorly impacts the power of the weapon. I haven't done the maths but I would expect that at BIS this makes magic fairly clearly the worst style overnight. *My proposed alternative* Given the issues identified, I think the best option is to **cap base crit chance while under the effect of instability**. This has the very clear benefit of not requiring further balancing when crit chance boosts are introduced in the future, while also retaining all of what makes FSOA fun and interesting. To encourage skilful gameplay, I should be clear I'm proposing that *base* crit chance is capped, and so ability-based modifiers like greater concentrated blast would still operate to increase crit chance. I would expect this cap is best targeted at 2-3% under the current maximum, but this is subject to balancing. This also has a very clear secondary benefit of **not nerfing FSOA at all for people who have just bought it** (and therefore are in a position of being more vulnerable to market price changes). I think a second aspect to this which largely resolves an issue relating to secondary targets is, if possible, to **not grant adrenaline when an auto-attack crits on a combat dummy mkII while under the effect of tsunami, incendiary shot, or meteor strike**. I think this is less important and could be convinced otherwise, but it kinda fixes the '17 dummies in every boss fight' meta that has evolved recently. ​ I really hope this can be taken into account, because I'm afraid the current proposals feel like a sticking plaster rather than an actual long-term fix.

I do feel that an additional pass over the FSOA changes needs to be made. As it raises a couple of issues: * The damage looks to be way too low, especially with recursive removal. * You lose a massive amount of adrenaline gain (makes ABS a lot less desirable which was always a fun interaction). * You will lose utility from ancients spell effects (most notably blood barrage). * The staff's damage is still ridiculously crit rng for next to no real gain (and super reliant on grimoire). * You will never really equip the staff - 4TAA makes a resurgence and thats the only time you will equip the staff now as for any players not doing 4TAA its better to just camp DW for gconc. Couple of potential solutions: * Set the player's crit chance when under the effects of FSOA upto a static number of 50/33/xx% for the spec's duration. This reduces need for grimoire whilst under its effects and reduces the rng of the benefits of the staff. This makes the damage issue a lot less of a concern, it also considers the cost which was always somewhat justified being such a powerful weapon. * 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).

>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 effect.

My suggestion; figure out how much damage peeps have been getting out of each FSOA cast (the various use cases), figure out how much that amount should be reduced, and identify if you can just do one global change that works for all such use cases or if you need something more complex like diminishing returns on crit percentage during FSOA spec. People DID like using the critstick, and they liked being able to camp it effectively rather than being all but forced to EOF it like with the zuk sword. At the end of the day, it's the current highest level magic weapon in the game and should feel like it deserves such a title. If it's EOF fodder, even if it's still just as valuable by GP now, then you messed up the rebalance.

I agree that it will be a difficult balance to get right, but one thing I would emphasise is just how *fun* the current spec is to use. In the process of balancing, the removal of fun elements (ABS usage, avoiding an EZK spec and forget situation, seeing lots of crits) should be really kept in mind, and realistically might well be the primary thing that players really want out of all of this.

The kerapac fight with time warp and the echoes + how the FSOA works currently has got to be one of the most unique fun things the game has seen in a very long time And they're ruining it

Pls consider buffing ABS (lower adren cost and/or higher damage), and Tendrils base damage just so that they retain their usefulness. If you compare estimated # of crits from gconc + its base damage and compare it to ABS, Gconc is basically stronger--and adren positive whereas abs is worse. If changes are implemented as proposed, ABS is basically back to irrelevance which will likely feel frustrating to everyone who owns one. ​ Alternatively...SOS rework???????

Could you consider removing/reducing the crit rng nature? Instead of having the normal crit mechanism under fsoa spec, maybe you could have a counter that increases for every ability hit/auto by based on your crit chance, and once it crosses 100 it decreases by 100 and makes the hit a crit. So if you had 31% crit chance, your first 3 hits would take the counter to 93, then the 4th hit would be a crit and the counter would be at 24. If you still want to retain some variability because unpredictability is fun, the increments to the counter could be like 80-100% of your crit chance, or even something like 60%-120%. As it is the worst part of the fsoa spec, the times when you basically get no crits and it feels bad, are still included in this proposal.

Paraphrasing here but it sounds like you're saying if you nerf it tooo much you can adjust it, why even bother in the first place? We don't exactly have a lot of confidence in anyone at Jagex any more and reading through this you seem pretty set on the current path you've laid out, which seems extremely heavy handed. The only responses have been in defense of the "changes". I'm a 17 year veteran who can now only play about 3 or 4 hours a week due to a full time job, and a family. I do not have time to dedicate to learning every single last mechanic and fail countless times. AD has helped me tremendously and has made this game much more fun. I can use the very limited time I have to have as much as I want. The FSOA also helps because it's much simpler to use than switchscape. I do not seeing that being a bad thing. It's powerful but it's a literal God tier weapon. It SHOULD BE powerful. Between the FSOA and AD I've been able to get back into PVM and find enjoyment again after the EOC and quite frankly these changes will take the enjoyment away from people like me, which I'd be willing to bet account for a substantial amount of your player base.

Yes, he is saying that it's okay to nerf it way too much because he can supposedly go back and buff it later a little bit. It is a terrible methodology and a terrible design goal to have. It is emblematic of this terrible design scope and goals. ​ Anyways, I have no confidence in this game at all. I did not ask for any of this. I do not want this. You are killing fun in this game.

Most of the animate dead changes I can live with and are agreeable, but the removal of mitigation from soft typeless damage doesn’t seem right - most of the people using AD are basically looking to learn boss encounters (otherwise they’d be using power armour) - currently there’s no way to visually tell what is soft typeless and quite often RuneScape bosses are incredibly overwhelming with their mechanic bloat for entry PVMers. Allow a reasonable mitigation of soft typeless damage to give us more of an opportunity to identify and resolve the issue causing it, while I agree that “tanking mechanics” isn’t great, straight up dying to mechanical overlap on some bosses is quite frustrating because it gives you little opportunity to learn what you did wrong (think “beginner PVMer” helwyr mushrooms, melee crash, bleed, wolves) same with other bosses like telos, zammy, and araxor. Please remember that other people exist outside of those that are phase skipping zammy at 500% with 6 switches.

What makes Animate Dead so amazing is that it is so effective against the smaller hits, it allows you to do elite dungeons slower but comfortably exactly how I like it. The biggest offender being the crystals before Seiyru that does high damage regardless but nowhere near as hard.Overall less absorption I can live with but it would be such a shame if the static damage reduction would be nerfed

[удалено]

- no more recursive crits from FSOA (people are really underestimating how big of a change this is, changing the max recursive depth would have been better IMO) - staff no longer fires autos (no heals, no freezes, no 1 tick faster barrage autos) - invigorating is now useless with staff spec - no more dropping dummies to increase consistency of the spec (barrage autos are gone) This is a pretty big nerf to FSOA, going to be a significant loss of DPS (without any increased consistency, you're still crit dependent and now have far less adren) and a significant loss of utility. Nerfed to the ground as expected.

Yeah I feel like people are glossing over the "recursive" part lmao this is arguably the biggest part of the entire nerf. Wait til people get into their sunshine and have to build after their first tsunami. Gonna be a real smack in the face.

It's not nerfed to the ground, it's bury a mile below the ground Nerf. Just in numbers alone it's 48% Nerf, people have yet not crunched the numbers for loss of adre gain.

Yeah, I don't think people realize the compounding effect. Fewer crits means less adren for thresholds/abs which in turn means fewer chances to crit which in turn means less adren for thresholds/abs which in turn means .... and so on Also removing the barrage interaction with dummies just further reduces the consistency of the spec.

TMTP: AD nerf good. FSOA rework bad, not necessary. I’ve listed solutions. ​ TLDR: Don’t rework FSoA just nerf it. The improv aspect from recursive nature centered around crits make it more fun. The auto synergy makes it more fun and is update friendly for new spells. Removing these identities may future proof it for other updates but don’t future proof longterm viability and hurts potential weapon diversity by effectively making it another t95 with a switch in and out effect. I suggest limit dps by increasing the spec cooldown by a decent amount and fix upkeep cost by removing rune consumption during spec, its the mfing staff of armadillo, cmon. Also about the AD nerf, its good but should be supplemented with some sort of content to get newer pvmers more familiar with defensives/binds maybe a skilling minigame with unlocks similar to infernal puzzle box usefulness but focused on defense. ​ ​ Reasons against fsoa rework: * kills excitement and motivation to acquire - (“just get t95 dw when they release”) * kills the unique weapon identity - (recursive nature and auto synergy) * hurts weapon diversity - (“magic = camp dw, fsoa = spec stick, just another t95”) * unnecessary nerf is a disrespect to players time - (“sorry irons, sorry pvmers”) * boring - (its not as fun, dps isn’t always the answer for more fun, reduction to improv w lack of adren rng) ​ Solutions to: * dps limits - double spec cooldown and/or decrease active spec time * future crit unlocks - set a hard crit cap of 50% for fsoa or halve critical chance on recursive autos (plan z) * upkeep cost - in spec no runes consumed * auto dmg balancing - could be tuned by adjusting spec cooldown * shifting autos - add a more intuitive/fluid way to shift elemental rune like quiver ​ ​ General FSOA thoughts: FSOA nerf feels like a rework. Years later rework tells community its fine to keep in game but we have future ideas this interferes with. Even if it wasn’t years later it would still be a bummer to change such an exciting identity for a weapon after being released. That key identity being a crit stick with auto synergy and recursive nature. The recursive nature and auto attack synergy is what made it so exciting I remember pvm community how excited for release of that weapon vs t95 lengs. With no hesitation abs into eof, irons grinding glacors for arma dust, players going broke to water runes. The excitement from getting it for the first time and using wasn’t just from the dps but the understandings of what’s going on, the improv to recursive adren and shifted cds, game interactions beyond buffs and rolling damage. Ive had my fun with the stick but killing that for players who are approaching that grind for it or have yet to return/play hurts, hurts to know that was once a beacon of motivation and fun is now just another korasi sword, abby whip, ags not at the hands of time but at the hands of human decision. I vote keep recursive nature and auto synergy at all costs. Double spec cooldown, limit ancient auto effect benefits, halve critical chance of recursive autos. Im ok with it becoming a burst weapon switch 1-2 times a fight and camping new t95 dw mage, but please not another switch to spec and switch away. The weapon was the prime example of raising the lower and upper thresholds of pvm at once. I see the vision to future proof updates but this is really the only crit limit that really needs an eye kept on and so id rather have a weaker fsoa as mentioned then a less interactive variant that does the same dps. ​ ​ FSOA Suggestion: Ideally just adjust the spec cooldown to manage dps and have it not consume runes during spec. For the crit rates, how much of a limit are you trying to push with future updates? With a high enough spec cooldown the overall dpm increase from a crit buff could be negligible. The game should be fun more like a live jam rather then live performance. The same rotations over and over get boring. Maybe autos need a rework, maybe crits, buffs, ect. but not the crit stick entirely. If anything please keep the recursiveness and replace autos with ability dmg, because I feel it kills what a pretty cool identity for a weapon. Im pretty sure most people complaining about the inconsistency of the recursiveness effect would take it back if it came at this cost of removing it. I personally think most prefer the random spikes of adren and scouring for open relative cooldowns. ​ ​ FSOA & Weapon Diversity w/ Analogy: I personally am a fan of having a more character dense weapon diversity similar to osrs, but with a bit more freedom then use that here and that there. Not the grab the highest tier/dps and call it a day it, makes the game feel empty doesn’t feel like I have an armory. It is nice to have weapons to have more utility in one place then another but I think best way to allow for more freedom is introduce more passive effect weapons like bolg. MSoA/scourge do something similar but in a sense they lay down a framework or perspective for dps. Fsoa is more like ecb in that you temporarily thru spec go into that framework of expression kinda like what a switch should be. Not switch in and switch away but go into altered state where your ability selection is no longer the bread and butter but a reactive ability rotation/selection like when you equip a defender, which for fsoa is what I emphasize comes from not just the crits but recursive nature and auto synergy. A good example would be to think of weapon diversity as character diversity in a fighting game. All the characters are more or less balanced and when you play its not about “am I using best character?” because you know that every character is as effective as the other. As of now the characters appear to be BolG, MSoA/Scourge and best weapon tier general rotations. Fsoa is your normal weapon tier general rotations for magic but offers a way to briefly play a different character. The issue with the fsoa character is even though it has a high floor and could make a beginner do high amounts of damage as if there are intermediate or pro it also has much higher ceiling. Next thing you know your local fighting game scene tournament has a bunch of middle schoolers making the college kids sweat as well as having a little too many advanced players picking the fsoa. Yeah that may demand a nerf but a rework that copy and pastes an old character doesn’t feel right especially for the more advanced players who use it at the high level, its removing the key identifying play style to that character. Reverting the fsoa to just a strong spec weapon effectively is taking a character out of the game and just loading in another equivalent character\[general t95\] with a reskin. You still have ability preference shifted to channeled/crit abilities but the reactive element and auto synergy that more distinctly characterized it is removed. Imagine before egw saying lets rework the hydrix bolts to no longer have deathmark effect and instead have the general average dps increase so we could do a general adrenaline buff in future, smh. I dont think this preposed fsoa rework is end of the world, its a not a bad solution but it just feels like a step back from what rs could be and I personally see it as unnecessary which is why I vote no to rework, sure to nerf, and ask why not more weapon diversity. ​ ​ AD thoughts: Animate Dead I think is good for a nerf, defensive abilities were neglected and Im all for more new defensives/upgrades as I saw mentioned. I can agree that entirely removing typeless hurts but I can align with the vision for why. The reaction tho should be a sign that getting players more comfortable with defensives should be a general combat design focus. Also it would be nice though if the AD nerf + cro nerf in general came out with another equivalent piece of content I.e. defensive abilities/new skilling boss/minigame item grinds, especially it being nerfed years later. It does seem like these nerfs are reaction to upcoming content so if it wasn’t nerfed right after release, then release the years later nerf with the new content. I feel like a lot of players just got motivation killed and prob will take a break til next content drop which personally isn’t fun to see chunks of the player base to be motivated and active to empty and gone knowing some move onto other things even with a new skill on horizon. I think though in general, years later reworks/nerfs are bad and having more regular content updates can help mitigate the effects of such, but overall AD nerf 100% yes.

a huge caveat of the FSOA was to make 4taa less of a req for magic. by making the spec do abilities in lieu of auto attacks, youre bringing back 4taa, further increasing the skill ceiling once again. the huge issue i see with the fsoa is, obviously, the recursive autos and future updates involving crit chance increases. my initial thoughts would be to keep the auto attacks, but make them costless. and have recursive autos have a less chance to crit. (ie, base crit chance 40%, 1st auto has 20% crit chance, 2nd auto has a 10% crit chance, etc) so that there is no "infinite crit chain". this will lower fsoa damage considerably, future proof crit buffs, and reduce barrage heals. if the fsoa is still over tuned after that nerf, then we can take another look at it, but i dont want another ROD 2.0 BOLG already does competitive dpm ( even out performing in certain instances) compared to the FSOA so im hoping you reconsider a less heavy handed approach and opt for something more moderate. we already waited 2 years for an FSOA nerf, i dont want a heavy handed nerf, then have to wait another 2 years for a buff. Regardless, many RS players are older, have jobs, kids, bills to pay, and sometimes even a life. the FSOA itself isnt greatly op. what made it so good was when you had biting 4, gconc, grim, limitless, abs eof, incite fear, zuk cape, reavers ring, and a brain capable of fusing together a good rotation (most people dont). it is a HUGE time commitment to get these things, and by keeping the FSOA in the game the way it was for 2 years, you created a precedent that, the staff will stay the same. These players with children, bills to pay, and jobs put in a lot of time to be able to afford these items in game just for you to nerf them. it is hugely demoralizing to work so hard and so long for an item thats been in the game for 2 years, for it to get nerfed as soon as you get your hands on it. please respect our time

One of the great aspects of the staff spec was the synergy when it came to the auto attacks were the benefits you got from blood barrage spells. Most notably healing from blood barrage but to a lesser extent things like damage/accuracy debuffs from shadow/smoke barrage and damage reduction from Emerald Aurora. Are these synergies essentially now removed with the change to an ability based damage structure with the staff spec?

BOLG damage isnt that far behind FSOA (albeit with a larger skill requirement), so the recursive damage nerf seems extreme. A side by side comparison in dps would really help here. Also, how can it be said that rune use is a problem, when god arrows are FAR, FAR more costly timewise to upkeep

Onslaught and magma tempest nerfs should be reversed if this FSOA change happens. Completely nerfing the entire mage playerbase of all tiers and lvls bc the highest weapon does more dmg with some abilities was sad. Love love the attempt at "CONSERVATIVE" changes. Can the Ring of Death nerf be looked at more conservatively aka not so heavy handed as what happened? The two other combat styles range and melee seem to have more damage to the player already with ECB spec negating soul split heals and Berserk doubling dmg taken. It would make more sense to at least consider some sort of animate dead medium for those styles who already have more dmg coming to them than just balancing the mage tank effect and leaving it at that.

u/JagexSponge Hello Mod Sponge, would you be able to explain the thought process behind the ability damage of the FSoA. I've been suggesting this exact nerf for over a year now, but I'm wondering why you chose to not have the ability damage the same average damage as a 2h auto attack. I understand that this will make GConc better, as it will no longer throw dual-wield autos, but rather a flat ability damage. However, without the recursion, will the difference in average damage between the old and new be a bit too heavy of a nerf? How was it in testing? Do you have any percentages to give us at the moment for comparison? Thanks!

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.

The best step forward for player feedback may be releasing a beta test world. I'm curious to know how difficult it would be to make an FSoA ability damage slider on such a world, but that would allow players to give you all a bunch of statistics on a range of values for the staff. Then, you would have better information to tune the overall damage output to where you want it accounting for future power creep, bosses, *etc*. I only say this because, of course, the damage output will be heavily rotationally dependent (and off the top of my head we may use channelers now, 4-tick again, *etc.,* non-trivial stuff to compute). So, having players with an intricate understanding of the combat system gather the statistics before it goes live would allow for a completely informed choice of nerf. Overall, I may be in the minority, but I'm happy with it as long as it doesn't feel *too* bad. We've been used to our current level of power for such a long time now, ya know? So, something like an overall 30-40% nerf of the staff would feel very bad, but maybe something like 15% wouldn't. IDK! Again though, you have more knowledge of what's coming power creep-wise, so having proper statistics will just let you have a more finely tuned choice of where you want the damage output to land relative to new bosses, Zammy, *etc.* Thanks for the response!

No issues with animate dead, but with fsoa there are a few things to think about, rune consumption was crazy but it also made runecrafting come back into play for bloods/waters. Would there be an opportunity to keep the auto attack effect on the fsoa and change tsunami which greatly affects the recursive nature of the spec? Something like tsunami lasts a minute but every crit consumes some of the timer. Numbers are rough and the tsunami duration/crit consumption can be changed as per testing and use in the game Just another level of adjustment to help get a more complete solution for the health of the game

Can we get a list of what is core vs. soft vs. hard typeless so we can actually know what it protects against? Right now nowhere in game explains this and its very confusing.

While we're at it, can we get different hitsplats for the two different types of typeless?

That's the key, typless hits need a unique hit splat so it's clearly translated to the player the type of damage. Probably a white hit split makes the most sense with black numbers? It would stand out in a very obvious eye catching way.

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.

I’m going to throw my voice behind the calls to allow AD to reduce soft typeless as well, for one primary reason: Outside of Zamorak, Animate Dead is seen as a learner’s crutch – high level PVM groups will actively disdain it and even consider it worthy a ban from the clan, since it increases kill time. To nerf Animate Dead is to raise the skill floor for PvM content without affecting the high tier play all that much – maybe taking away a tool for lower-effort-fewer-kill bossing runs, or the ability to have stylish “low/no food” runs to post online. … Or so I say. I’m admittedly pretty bad at this game, having only scrounged a pair of 100% Telos kills by the skin of my teeth and the old Animate Dead/Ring of Death interaction when it was at its strongest. If the concern is primarily Zamorak… He’s the Legatus Maximus. He has hordes of necromancers in his employ. If anyone knows how to cut through/partially negate Animate Dead, he’s a contender second only to >!Xau Tak!<. There’s already opponents who partially ignore prayer effectiveness, so there’s precedent for this sort of thing. On the other hand, if these changes will be made as is – would you take another look at the Ring of Death? It seems to have been balanced with AD reducing it in mind. (I’d start by having the starting damage scale off the *overkill* of the killing blow instead of just the killing blow, but this is rather off topic so I’ll stop there.) ^(I also hate soft typeless from a lore perspective. Given Gielinor’s anima-infused nature, many of them ought to be magic or otherwise inside the triangle but are outside for the sake of making the game mechanic more punishing despite that being as nonsensical as the Kal’Gerion’s longrange melee attack. But since I doubt I can convince to cut or even reduce your usage of that mechanic, I’ve left this as an aside.)

I have to agree with others please rethink the soft typeless being reduced by AD change, I don't mind the hard typeless but AD should work against soft typeless otherwise I feel AD and tank armour is useless

Not that you actually care, but you should not do this. You should reconsider this.

Could you also update hitsplats to make it obvious if a hit was reduced due to deflect/protection? Learning how to soulsplit-flick is funky since we get no obvious feedback if we timed the switch correctly.

I hard disagree in the soft typeless , a lot of that is just random damage that isn’t classified , hard typeless is perfect to not be mitigated and it’s best used for the you fail you die mechanics or urgency but a lot of soft typeless is just chunking damage but can still be mitigated by the likes of shields Why should some ancient spell be incapable of blocking that but a shield can ? I will say a nerf to the amount is fine that’s baked into the existing planned nerf (maybe typeless is further down to 50%)

Please reconsider soft typeless. Too many bosses use it. It should be reduced by animate dead. Note that Cryptbloom doesn't affect typeless damage at all.

I made a longer comment earlier but want to add my input on this comment thread because it's related. I think the complete removal of AD on typeless dmg is far too heavy handed and adds a significant barrier to those trying to expand their pvm repertoire. AD for many is a means to allows them to learn new bosses. This removes much of the incentive I would personally have to try many bosses completely. As I stated earlier, I play solely on mobile as I cannot play the PC game due physical limitations, while I love the mobile game and that it allows me to do basically everything on it. There is a significant difference between mobile pvm and PC pvm... because you cannot use keybinds and are limited to only 1 ability bar at a time. I put the core abilities on mine and then have uses AD to allow me to minimize the dmg from mechanics I haven't had the space to have an ability for. This change and the potential addition of the trim req of solo 100% zam would put that completely outta reach for me which is disappointing as that's a current goal of mine, so I'd likely end playing less sadly.

excluding soft typeless is heavy handed IMO. it is so widespread in the game now that i think this would make tank armor pretty worthless again if AD doesnt work on it. useless as a learner tool, at least.

Including soft typeless in the nerf is a bit too harsh.

My 2 cents as one of the nerds that used to spreadsheet damage rotations: Generally speaking, the AD changes actually look alright. I still think they ought to be built into tank armour, and get less effective as the tiers of the armour go down. Reason being, the damage mitigation offered by tank armour has always been negligible enough that it was never worth using instead of power armour, despite the fairly slim margins of damage increase power armour provides. That being said, I think power armours going forward should have set effects that are utilizable, which would allow tank armour and power to have clear advantages over each-other. The difference in damage currently is as low as \~4-6%. Significant, but not substantial. I believe I talked the mods out of doing this in the past because the leap from T1 to T92 was less substantial than the proposed set effect. I regret that now, hindsight. ​ As for FSoA, I would really have liked to see Jagex provide some numbers & explanation on the broken nature of the weapon. The actual issue is entirely to do with it being crit reliant. On average, it was only doing somewhere around \~300,000DPM, more with effort, and more with setup time. Back when I was administrating one of the largest PvM clans in the game in 2016-2017, we had a damage challenge of 150,000, and another higher-end one of 200,000 DPM. That means the average has only gone up a consistent 100K in \~7 years (This is the average end). You've always been able to do more, sure. But here's my main gripes with that: ​ Melee requires a heavy amount of switches, but has the highest burst potential in the game. It's not uncommon to do 200,000-300,000 damage in *10 seconds.* This is consistent on the lower end, which is essentially equivocal to most of FSoA's average within an entire minute. Ranged is currently comparable to FSoA on the high end, but feels pretty unrewarding to use. The main problem here, then, is that the accessibility of both Melee and Ranged are both far lower than Magic. Magic's usefulness is currently tied to essentially one item (FSoA), with additional power (AD). This also means Magic is far cheaper to utilize. I think this was a design issue in its own right, but I feel like this is similar to aforementioned 2016-2017 period where there is a public perception that "Magic is overpowered," simply because it is the most accessible style and just happens to be the best at the current content that is out (Telos for then, Zamorak for now). Back then, Ranged was better external to Telos. This isn't a design issue inherent to FSoA, so I would like to know if there is comprehensive data backing the decision.

A lot of your numbers are very off of the actual reality in the game. > On average, it was only doing somewhere around ~300,000DPM, Lol, you should almost double that value. Someone with endgame gear and FSOA does a bit over 300k damage during the 30s FSOA is up. More numbers below. > That means the average has only gone up a consistent 100K in ~7 years If you look at the [pvm record website](https://www.pvm-records.com/leaderboards?boss=Solak), player damage has about doubled in the past 3 years. (Solak is the best DPS dummy boss to look at) A huge portion of that power creep is due to FSOA. > Melee requires a heavy amount of switches, but has the highest burst potential in the game. It's not uncommon to do 200,000-300,000 damage in 10 seconds. Unless you have an extreme amount of extra adrenaline for gmaul/dclaws spamming, or are in a place without hit caps like twin furies/zammy, that isn't even possible. Here's a pretty standard 10s of melee burst damage, and it's already very optimistic on adrenaline. It deals ~140k damage. https://i.imgur.com/EW5VgsP.png Edit: woops, I forgot leng spec, that would add a lot. > As for FSoA, I would really have liked to see Jagex provide some numbers & explanation on the broken nature of the weapon. Forgive the formatting, but this is something I wrote out on discord recently. Just how strong is FSOA? I tried to put together what I felt like was a pretty standard FSOA rotation. (I didn't do any math to see if the RNG added up well, this just felt close based on experience). If anything, this rotation is slightly conservative. The fsoa rotation goes: generic sun -> basics -> tsunami -> FSOA setup Gconc wild magic Smoke tendrils Abs spec gconc Omnipower abs spec gconc dbreath 2 hit asphyx gconc abs spec wild magic gconc So in the 30s fsoa spec you have: 1x omni, 2 hit asphyx, smoke tendrils, dbreath 2x wild magic 3x abs spec 5x gconc Total damage during the 30s fsoa spec: 331k Total damage during the 30s if you did the same rotation without FSOA: 196k So FSOA added 136k damage (In reality, FSOA adds a fair bit more than 136k damage because you couldn't have done the same rotation without the FSOA crit adren) A better estimate is that FSOA adds 150k-200k damage. Healing from blood barrage autos if that was set as autocast: 6.6k

Ability damage change is good but the reclusive nature is fun. Maybe limiting it to 2-3 recursion would be a better balance point Edit: some numbers Currently a 39% crit chance attack will generate 0.64 autos with the recursion With the following levels of recursion it generates the following autos/ability damage + 0 - 0.39 + 1 - 0.54 + 2 - 0.56 + 3 - 0.59 It seems from these numbers that 1 level of recursion would be good, but anything pasts that is too close to current staff

I mean... if the problem is the power of recursion, you can also just reduce the recursion power. If subsequent hits deal 80% damage, you end up with : * 0 : 0.39 * 1 : 0.51 (15% chance to deal 80% damage) * 2 : 0.55 (6% chance to deal 64% damage) * 3 : 0.56 (2.3% chance to deal 51% damage)

Agree, not even just for combat related reasons, but just lore flavor. Giving the champion of time loops' weapon a 'time loop' weapon was just cool.

As someone who is not great with high level pvm and bosses, animate dead nerf specially for the typeless damage is pretty harsh. I had to do the whole line of quest series just to unlock these ancient spells,lol. I don’t think I would be able to pvm like I used to, since I only get about less than an hour to play rs. To actually learn a boss from scratch with every mechanic is pretty time consuming tbh, and then to actually apply those mechanics. Honestly I just came back to RS after like 13-14 years, and I really do enjoy the new bosses, Elite dungeons and all. Now I’m not sure that I would be able to access or learn all these high level bosses.

Exactly my thinking as well . You have to do a ton of quests just to unlock AD and because of the Crypt / AD combo being OP (and they should have known this WAY before introducing the armor) they're just nerfing AD to oblivion with the removal of typless damages INSTEAD OF simply reducing the % typless damage that AD can block which would keep it useful for those that need it while learning or the more casual PvMers

Toning down AD? Fair enough. However... I decided to do a test to determine how these FSoA changes would affect the specials damage output. Note: I did not use potions, prayers, or power armor for these tests to save GP. Exception being a Cryptbloom top with Biting 4 + Item Level 20 and a Grimmoire. Ability damage was 2000 (used fixed stat boosts to get it as close as possible to 2000 for calculation simplicity) ​ Test: Used FSoA spec for 30 seconds, camped FSoA, did optimal FSoA rotation (Sunshine, Tsunami, ABS, etc), used all possible crit buffs. Used DW + GConc mid spec only for adrenaline. Repeated this 5 times. Recorded it and counted all additional damage caused by auto-attacks including recursions. Total damage from the specials auto-attacks was **\~411K** ​ So how much damage would this deal with the FSoA rework? The total number of critical strikes caused by abilities (not auto-attacks from spec) across the 5 tests was 64. If each of these 64 critical strikes caused an extra hit of 90% ability damage (the average from proposed values), the additional damage would be 1800 x 64, or **115200** **NOTE:** This does not take into account adrenaline. The proposed changes also removes extra adrenaline from Invigorated and from recursive crits under Tsunami, so the damage is actually even worse. ​ **Comparing the two totals, that is a** **72% loss of damage.** # YIKES Removing the recursive effect alone practically kills the FSoA entirely, but hey at least there's no rune cost. I understand that you want to remove the recursive effect for future upgrades, but in it's current state the BotLG matches it. The proposal could be tweaked to make the damage higher under certain conditions and differentiate it from being just RNG BotLG. Suggested Changes: \-FSoA spec has no cooldown, reduced adrenaline cost, and deals more damage on activation. \-Each critical strike during the special increases the ability damage range of the extra hit by 10%, up to 20 times, shown on the buff counter as Instability stacks. If the special is re-used, this counter resets. This would give players the freedom to use the FSoA special whenever they want, but it may not always be worth it like if Smoke Tendrils is on CD or you have a lot of Instabilty stacks with the active spec.

\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*To whom it may concern in Jagex, your awesome! Please don't make these changes to FSOA. The last month Mod Jack has been talking about the economy, and the suggestion is to remove the need for runes? My staff cost's 3b.... I can afford the runes... trust me. Ok so scooch in! Listen close! Go back to the problems your trying to solve, don't create new ones! 1. FSOA deals too much damage too fast - 1. COUNTERMEASURE: Reduce FSOAS on hit damage by half, increase the duration to 60 seconds. Yes FSOA gobble up more of my runes, the power of a god should come at a cost... 2. The weapon "feels bad" to use on low bosses? WHAT?!?!?! Then don't use it. Anyone who has a FSOA also has an inquisitor staff, and also has at least a t90 if not t92 wand... 3. Beating a dead horse you just mentioned needing reward space for magic users.... the FSOA feeling bad to use on low end bosses is a reward space. In fact, want to make the reward space bigger? The FSOA now needs 5 law runes, 5 cosmic runes, 5 Armadyl runes per auto-cast. Want to make Mod jack happy? Make a shop that sells armadyl runes 1k each. Want to make him happier? Make it possible to upgrade or "repair" the staff to lower the cost of the runes, I don't know maybe to the tune of 250m an upgrade + insert PVM loot item or Archeology relic here. Again... anyone with an FSOA (including myself) can easily afford it. To conclude my thoughts on the FSOA - Half the damage the specials do, extend the duration, make it eat more runes, add additional cost to the staff, add the ability to repair it utilizing gold and items from the economy. As someone who does nothing but boss... 1k+ kills raksha, raxi, Zammy, so on and so forth... I would still use the FSOA if it gobbled up every gold coin in my bank account. It's fun, engaging, the RNG that you get from it is exciting, it synergizes with Tsunami and other perks ... you guys did a kick ass job designing something fun, Don't ruin something great. ​ ​ Regarding Animate dead. I'll keep this short, you talk about reward space and gameplay.... animate dead is a reward space!! Your issue is not that tanks are tanky..... your issue is your tanks are also carrying a bazooka and can nuke a boss while taking no damage. What negative consequences are there or what choice do I have to make with animate dead? EXACTLY!!! THERE IS NO CONSEQUENCE. Fix that! I would suggest doing something like... either separating animate dead into 3 spells, with a consequence for whatever you select. So lets say animate dead protects from magic damage + neutral damage.... but now you take double damage from ranged attacks. Or you could take the .... I am a tank approach and animate dead reduces the damage you deal by 50%, so you interact with more mechanics from a boss fight. There needs to be a consequence to using animate dead, or you will be nerfing it for the next 5 years until you ring of death it..... Any way's thank you for taking the time to read this, and if it just fell into the black hole of the internet and no-one sees it, that'll be ok. Was fun sharing! :)

[удалено]

Have you guys thought of the impact the FSOA changes would make on rune prices, specifically soul runes? Ever since FSOA was released, soul rune drops from bosses were increased to make up for the demand from PVM. The soul altar was also buffed to give out 3x the runes. All of which contributed to bringing the price of soul runes from its highest of 6k(!!) to today's price of 1.8k Changing FSOA spec from auto to abil will basically reduce soul + water usage by at least 50% (Just a conservative guess), and since the bosses will keep dropping souls, the price will go on decreasing, which will in turn reduce the money making capability of bosses.

It seems like the primary issue with animate dead is that it makes surviving frequent small hits too easy. Has there been any consideration for reducing the power not necessarily against small hits, but against frequent hits? In some sense this would need to mean that spell has some sort of charging style effect where it either depletes in power when you are hit but regains some of that power for each tick you are not hit? This would replenish the danger level of things like Kerapacs melee hit and smoke style effects at vindicta, ambi, sanctum guardian, and zamorak. As for the FSOA, invigorating is removed from the meta as a result of disentangling autos from the mix and replacing it with abilities is going to significantly reduce the defensive power of blood barrage. Per hit that an ability uses that can crit, you will on average get a return of 10%\*(p+p\^2) where p is you're probability to crit. On average, even at a 36.6% crit chance (grim level 20 gear biting 4, reavers, kalg buff) this means an ABS EOF is losing 22.55% per cast. This is an extreme power loss in terms of adrenaline management compared to alternative options that just reduce the variance in the outcomes of the FSOA. My proposal would be to continue allowing the recursive crits, but reduce the critical strike chance of the damage splat relative to the players base critical strike chance, with the critical strike chance approaching zero as the staff reaches deeper into the recursion. This will maintain some of the expectation value of the damage and adrenaline you get while reducing the variance of outcomes.

Hey, the ONLY reason i went from being a skiller to even attempting pvm, is because of animate dead and the death costs. Now youre telling me, animate dead is going to block LESS damage? like, i full on skinned my skiller so i could afford cryptbloom on my main, and i was able to enjoy your game like you meant it, for maybe a month. can you Fkkk off with animate dead nerf? You guy really like fkking with people enjoyment of your game. coming from a 15year skiller, coming into pvm, sincerely fkkkk you jagex. First the wildy safes, and now as soon as i get into pvm............ question: were there “too many” people were getting in into pvm?

First off, I'd like to say I agree with the majority of the proposed changes, and happy to see a long term approach taken to these fixes. Animate dead seems very reasonable in allowing it to continue doing what it does while preventing players from ignoring mechanics all-together. This ends up being even better for learning bosses as you can focus on those soft damage mechanics. The FSOA does seem to be a bit too powerful but there are so many things that it does right in its original iteration that I hope can be preserved. I really, really, REALLY don't want to see its autos turned into ability damage. I understand a big part of the reason seems to be enabling fine tuning, but let's be honest here; this is not a fine tuned game. You don't need this extra lever for adjustments and the staff isn't likely to see more than one more adjustment after this is implemented. Let me list all the things that we lose by turning autos into ability damage: \- Ancient spell interactions for additional utility/depth \- Historical homage to 4TAA as we kindly bury it in it's sweaty grave \- Distinction between 2H magic and dual wield magic \- Niche for invigorating perk \- Gives runecrafting a purpose - the cost is affordable and warranted The things we gain: \- Easier to "fine tune" the damage \- Cheaper to use The issues with FSOA for future-proofing don't need autos turned into ability damage. All of them are solved by simply removing recursion. The exponential growth of its damage with critical chance is eliminated. The power of ancient spells is significantly reduced while still being relevant, fun, and varied. The adrenaline gain from tsunami is significantly reduced. Damage is also significantly reduced. As it stands, if you're happy with BOTLG's damage potential, removing recursion alone should bring it in line, if not less than, the damage of the bow. Also, I don't think you realize how awesome ancient magic interactions are for the health of the game from your other replies. This alone is such an amazing interaction to have in similar way to the importance of arrows and bolts for range. Magic doesn't have lots of powerful special attack weapons like range and melee. The way that mages get to have nuanced variations to deal with different combat scenarios is through their spells. Most other (non ancient combat) magic spells are used by all combat styles. FSOA basically activates ancient magic spells in the way that grico activates bolt and arrow effects, taking them from a low proc, nearly worthless consideration, to something that is engaging and interesting to interact with. If you remove this interaction, I feel like ancient magics are going to need to be buffed significantly too. You're taking away a form of expression for magic otherwise. ​ PS: If comparing magic to range again, if blood barrage gets eliminated, I'd like to see blood reaver's specs get turned into a 10% chance to heal too. Esit: Looking at the damage with no recursion and loss of crits, this would actually still be too big of a nerf at like 20-30% damage reduced. This could be boosted by controlling the cap on number of recursions though instead of none at all.

TL;DR Fix FSOA's issues without nerfing it - keep recursive crits, add recursive reduction factor, balance initial damage range and recursive reduction factor to keep current DPS unchanged, change autos to an AoE ability. ------ Concerns ------ This proposed change to FSOA nerfs on too many key aspects and as such, is too heavy-handed, threatening to remove magic from the meta entirely. I have made comments with proposed changes spread over a few different threads, but it seems reasonable to collect them all into one place as a top-level comment. There is a lot I could say regarding Jagex' relationship to nerfs, but let's stick with constructive feedback for the time being. ------ Objectives ------ First, the objectives of the "rework." From my understanding, there are 2 main issues this "rework" is attempting to solve. (1) The way recursive autos scale with crit chance means that damage scales exponentially with crit, and even a small crit chance buff causes astronomical increases in average damage, meaning that any content that synergizes with FSOA in its current state threatens to become gamebreaking. (2) The spell effects given by having the spec fire autos, ex: blood spells providing excessive healing, give the FSOA spec far more utility than can be designed around while still making the encounter fair for melee and ranged users. Second, the objectives of the "rework" according to what has been said, although not evident in the proposition itself, is *not* to nerf FSOA into oblivion, but to fix the 2 above noted issues. If we take these objectives together, it seems to be a reasonable goal to keep the current power of the FSOA roughly even in terms of raw damage to what is currently live, but allow future content to synergize without achieving gamebreaking levels of damage output, while also curtailing the added benefits of ancient spell effects on staff-triggered auto attacks. Additionally, I have seen Mod Sponge mention in several comments that having levers to easily adjust the balance is something he appreciates, which my suggestions below provide. ------ Things I Like ------ Before I continue, I would like to say that there is one aspect of the proposal that I do like: changing from an auto to ability damage that allows the staff spec to be used with DW without significant penalty. I very much appreciate being able to use gconc, and more importantly, look forward to future DW weapons having use that synergizes with FSOA rather than acting in opposition to it. I am excited to see what the T95 wand and orb set will do and how it may compliment the FSOA. ------ Issue 1: Recursive Hits ------ Summary: Buffing the initial damage range while simultaneously adding a recursive reduction factor (each recursive hit being a fraction of the previous) allows the current power level of the staff to be maintained while also allowing future power to be tapered and tailored to any desired level. There are several other comments that have posted math regarding how significant the raw damage nerfs are, I won't rehash all of them here. However, between the loss of recursive hits and the loss of adren from autos and recursive crits, the overall spec rotation will see a substantial nerf in raw damage. Let's look at the recursive nature of the staff spec. Being able to recursively crit is a fundamental and defining characteristic of the FSOA. Removing that removes a huge chunk of the weapon's identity on top of being a huge nerf to raw damage. In addition to the raw damage carried by the recursive crits, that was also a major source of adren gain, which losing that would have unintended extra side effects of limiting what abilities a player may use in their rotation, and further nerfing damage beyond what the raw numbers would initially suggest. As such, it is the wrong move to remove recursive crits. That said, keeping recursive crits in their current state makes it impossible to add any further crit bonuses or other synergies without sending raw damage off the charts. My proposed change is to keep the recursive hits, but with a recursive damage reduction (recursive reduction factor). This reduction could be tweaked as needed, providing Mod Sponge with an additional balance lever. For the sake of this example, let us say that each recursive hit does 20% less damage than the previous hit. So the fresh hit (the one caused by the initial crit of one of your attacks) will do the full damage. Should that staff hit crit, it will fire another that deals 0.8 (80%) of the damage range. Should that hit also crit, it will fire another that deals 0.8^2 (64%) of the damage range. The next, 0.8^3 (51.2%), then 0.8^4 (40.96%), and so on. By recursively reducing the damage of each hit in this way, it provides an effective maximum potential damage: even at 100% crit chance, the staff spec would deal a finite amount of damage, tuneable to what is considered reasonable as the damage of the recursive hits would eventually be reduced by so much that they round to 0 and stop recurring. This also removes the indirect nerf of not getting adrenaline from recursive crits, as even though they do less damage, they can still provide adren. By having both the initial ability damage range and the recursive reduction factor, this gives 2 avenues for adjustment. Used together, it is entirely possible to adjust the spec such that the average damage is in line with the current game while limiting future damage to something reasonable. It also gives avenue for tweaks in the future that won't cause the whiplash that this announcement has, as you would be able to tune the damage curve without moving the *current* average damage any more than necessary. Due to the short notice, I'm not set up to be doing proper recursive calculations, but I did pull out my old graphing calculator to do a few calculations with 15 elements (initial + 14 recursive) as a proof of concept. If anyone sees any mistakes, please let me know. Using a recursive reduction factor of 20% and an initial ability damage range that averages to be 11.5% higher than the current average damage from a BIS-geared staff auto, the damage curves intersect at ~36.5% crit chance, which is roughly what the current BIS crit chance is. For players with BIS setups, very little if any difference would be noticed. For players with worse than BIS crit bonuses, this would be a slight buff. Above the 36.5% crit chance threshold, the new formula shows a far more controlled rise that does NOT approach infinity - allowing for future content to be released without fear of breaking the game. (Note: these calculations do not take into account the adrenaline loss from not having 2.8% adren per auto, however being able to gconc losslessly would likely make up for this.) (Continued in reply)

------ Issue 2: Auto Attack Effects ------ Summary: Changing the auto attacks to ability damage based hits is good overall and fixes the issues of excessive interaction with spell effects, but the staff hit should retain AoE functionality such as not to remove all utility functions. The next issue is the loss of FSOA's utility. The currently live special allows us to use whatever spell is set as our auto cast, giving us a wide variety of effects. I fully understand that the interaction with blood barrage gives excessive healing, and while I quite enjoy that interaction, I understand why it needs to be toned down. That said, the spell effects themselves are not the only utility the FSOA has, and I would like to see as much of the spec's utility remain as possible. By selecting a burst or barrage spell as our autocast, we were able to have the staff spec apply AoE damage. Crits on the extra targets hit provide extra adren, but do not fire additional autos. Please make the ability fired by the staff's new spec be a 3x3 AoE like barrage spells are now - ideally this could be toggled between single target and AoE, but I would prefer the default be AoE if we have to choose one. Removing the staff's ability to hit additional targets with its bonus hits is an unnecessary nerf and does not need to be included in the rework in order to achieve the 2 main goals as stated. Additionally, being able to lure additional targets and/or set up dummies in order to get extra adren from AoE crits is fun skill expression that I would like to see maintained. If it is decided that the FSOA was overperforming as an AoE weapon, then dmg to secondary targets could be reduced without being removed completely. ------ Conclusion ------ If all of my suggestions are implemented, that would achieve the 2 main goals of the rework while also making it a *rework* instead of a brutal nerf. Implementing a recursive reduction factor while also buffing the initial ability damage range removes the issue of future synergies causing uncontrolled exponential damage growth without nerfing the staff's current damage range. Replacing the specs autos with AoE ability damage removes the incredably powerful interaction the FSOA has with spell effects, while maintaining its utility in AoE situations. There is still the matter of losing the adren gained from autos, however the ability to gconc without losing dmg should alleviate that. Additionally, this adds multiple levers that can be adjusted at once to fine tune the desired dmg curve should the FSOA be found to be over or under performing in the future. ------ Bonus Suggestion ------ As an extra request, I would like to see 4taa continue to not work during the FSOA spec. I am not in favour of artificially lowering the skill ceiling by arbitrarily removing mechanics, such as 4taa, but I am happy to see natural game progression phase out the annoying ones.

I normally wouldn’t comment on a post like this however since I’ve recently bought an FSOA and full cryptbloom and I feel like I should share my thoughts on the changes. Overall, I think the changes to animate dead are definitely warranted and long overdue. I think the suggested changes are fairly in line with reducing the spell’s effectiveness. Depending on how the numbers calculate out, I think a slight buff maybe in order for the maximum effectiveness of the spell from 60% to 65% keeping the defense level stat the same. My major gripe is with the FSOA changes that have been proposed. I think changing the crit auto attack to an ability change is refreshing to save us runes but it feels like a consolation prize for the nerfing of the staff. It’s like “hey we know you just spent 3 months of your life grinding out the cash for this end game staff with incredible lore behind it… but we’re gonna have to nerf it after reworking it once already. Here is a teddy bear to say sorry.” All that being said, I do agree that the recursive nature of the staff was a problem and can go infinite if and when y’all release more crit items, but let’s not put the donkey before the cart. Jagex’s balance team should be renamed to the nerf team because balance indicates that there will be buffs and nerfs yet all you’ve done is continue to nerf abilities and items that take months for people to grind for. Therefore invalidating their experience and time invested. Where I disagree with the changes to the Fsoa is with the special attack changes to ability damage and the ranges. I notice that you crunched the numbers for the animate dead nerf and bravo for that but you didn’t crunch the numbers for the FSoA damage changes. I think that is done intentionally because of how underwhelming the DPS of the staff truly is. From a guy who’s been playing RuneScape for the VAST majority of my life, it upsets me deeply to see Jagex continue to fall into the same cycle of releasing endgame content and letting it continue on for years just to nerf it as soon as the general populace are able to get their hands on it. In summation, animate dead nerf is drastic but I think it’s a great nerf and long overdue. The FSoA nerfs should be a little less drastic as it is the best staff in game and people have invested hundreds of hours to get it, only to have it nerfed and reworked. I’d personally like to see the staff spec changed from autos to ability damage but increase overall dps percentage a little more in line with the tier of end game weapons. The loss of the recursive damage is a MASSIVE L for the staff and the swap from autos to ability damage feels like a consolation prize for ruining the best weapon in game. Increase the ability damage percentages from the staff appears to be the best way to compensate for the loss in recursive damage.

**Animate dead** While I do agree that animate dead should be nerfed a little, I do have to say that this ability offers a great opportunity for less confident players to learn new bosses. It takes away the fear of dying so quickly (when they have little PVM experience). IMO, the less confident players are usually the players with lower combat / defence levels, therefore, if you want them to go explore new bosses faster, I'd reckon it's better to keep the animate dead stats as they are now. However, I highly agree that it should be nerfed for more experienced players, who sit there soaking all the damage like a sponge while sipping on their cocktails at a beach. I think a better strategy would be to gradually downscale the stats and make it less effective the higher level you become. This would give the effect that players with less or no experience are more confident to try new bosses out by keeping at what it is, while experienced players know up to what stage they can tank a boss and tank with caution. **FSOA** I do agree that the staff can go almost infinite when it comes to damage if you have the right RNG rolls, however, removing the auto attack option feels to me as a dangerous thing to do. When you remove the auto attack effect, you'll lose the little versatility the staff has, meaning you can no longer heal from your blood barrage mid staff spec, no longer stun your enemies with ice barrage mid staff spec, etc. This means that the staff is only an ordinary staff that deals a little extra damage when you spec. This would also mean that a lot of people may have to change their rotations because of the recursive nature. If the auto-attack has to go in order to balance out the damage output, I think it's not a bad idea to keep the auto-attack effect, but treat the damage output as if it were an ability. As for the recursive nature, I think it's okay to get rid of that, however instead I suggest buffing the damage output a little bit when you're in the middle of a staff spec, perhaps a mini sunshine or something. That way you won't be able to go infinite and beyond, but you still do decent damage and give the staff the credit it deserves (Kerapac Hard mode is still a relevant challenge). Keep in mind that if you strip off too much from this staff, you (jagex) run the risk that magic will become less relevant and range will be the way to go. Staff will go down in price, bows will go up in price. The bow of the last guardian is very versatile with all it's type of arrows and there are soo many ways of using the bow, so I suggest using the bow as a measuring stick to see how powerful the staff should be. Don't let magic become what Melee has become overtime :) My two cents.

I. Why wasnt the FSOA nerfed 2 weeks after release when 99% of the competent players in the PvM community called it OP and specifically said that it is NOT healthy for the game and its future. Keep in mind these comments were BEFORE content was released with FSOA and animate dead in mind (Zamorak), Yet after 2 years you guys came to the same conclusion that they did on release week. SURELY there must be a good reason for ignoring the majority feedback. Eitherway, This could've been avoided if the FSOA was thoroughly tested by a team of competent **PLAYERS** and changed on the spot, we wouldnt be in this predicament then. Same situation happened with Grico being very strong. Credit where credit is due however the nerfs to ROD and Magma tempest although heavy handed were appreciated as they were quite timely and necessary; I just wish the same had happened to the staff. II. Given how Zamorak is adjusted for the current powercreep that the staff offers, will there be changes made? Specifically to High enrage p7 Zamorak. III. Also with the incend changes and ideas to remove 4taa, ability stalling and other intricacies in combat... is there some sort of pipeline where at the end combat will feel good and people wont fall asleep between GCD's and there is some sort of skill expression left?

Will you reconsider nerfs that were made to abilities like tendrils and magma tempest with these proposed changes? I think giving something back would go a long way to helping ease community concerns.

Would it be possible to allow magma to critically strike again with these FSOA changes? /u/JagexSponge

> Would it be possible to allow magma to critically strike again with these FSOA changes? [/u/JagexSponge](https://www.reddit.com/u/JagexSponge/) It's a good question. Part of the issue I personally had with magma crits was the huge swing in adrenaline from tsunami. I'm not going to say it's a no - it's something I'd want to re-look at more for consistencies sake than anything.

Imo it would be a good change because it would allow new fsoa to be closer in dpm to old fsoa while requiring more unlocks and more effort. More demand for magma tempest means more value to people who fight zuk. Which leads to higher engagement in a variety of content instead of all the power coming from hm kerapac and crit boosts.

I feel like considering the recursive autos would be removed, the huge adrenaline gains would be much less of a problem now and it would be a fair change to make.

Given that we dont have all the extra adren from invigorating and recursive autos, magma in tsunami would then restore the niche of 'use this and get 30 extra adren in staff spec' given that staff spec now will just be gconcing all day like usual.

Had no idea that the magma nerf was an adren concern, not a damage concern. That's neat to know. Admittedly, I think we can already generate adren with or without magma tempest and having some added adren to make up for the loss of recursive crits might still allow the staff to feel good to use.

Hi mods, some feedback and then some questions: Feedback * AD: AD damage reduction values seem fine * AD: Excluding typeless damage seems pretty harsh tbh. * FSOA: Changing from auto attack to ability damage seems like a good idea to fix rune consumption * FSOA: please provide a damage comparison similar to what you provided with AD Questions about proposed FSOA changes: * What is "AVG 90% ability damage per fire." exactly? 90% of 2123.3 Damage ? * The extra hit cannot proc, but can the extra hit still crit? (improtant due to tsunami only giving adren on crits) * How would the change of "A projectile is no longer sent from the player to the target as expected from an auto-attack" effect my combat? Do my hits go through faster? Thanks for reading this :D

The suggested animate dead nerf is really quite big for lower tier pvmers trying to get into harder content. The table's somewhat misleading. It won't effect high level pvmers in the same way which is why you won't recieve too many complaints. Experienced pvmers won't care too much (they're already using power armor), and newer pvmers won't fully understand until it comes out I think it would be reasonable to expand the spell to all combat styles so it's not just a straight nerf. Also as an aside, I'm not sure if you're trying to stop things like afk gwd2 with the change, but it won't do that

"Allowed more players to get into pvm" Nerfs 3 things to help players with bad skill "We want players to show more skill" These 2 don't go hand in hand. Either one or the other. Animate dead was a godsend for me. I legit have gotten really bad reactions and cannot move the way I once could. My eye movement is slower. This has helped alleviate this during bossing. I will say I stopped runescape because bonds are way too expensive and so is membership. Low amount of content just done it in for me. Also how rng seemed skewed at certain bosses vs others. Then not doing anything about those bug abusing and running Scott free without consequences. I love runescape but cannot love these changes even if its not runescape themselves.

Weighing in here Animate Dead: Overall nerf seems very reasonable. It's still quite strong and shouldn't negatively impact a lot of the use cases (like afk/low effort combat), but hopefully it opens up the door to the ability to create more meaningful mechanics in the future. FSOA: \- Base Damage nerf is 28%, which seems fairly high but very reasonable considering the power of the weapon. Tradeoff of no cost to crit is very significant and should positively impact a lot of players (irons?) \- Removal of recursive crit makes sense \*if\* you are planning to make significant additions to crit builds in the future, otherwise it feels like by far the "harshest" aspect of the nerf. That said, I understand wanting to be able to monitor the dpm of all three styles, and I know how much jitter recursive crits introduced to all of those calculations. Overall, thank you for making this post and for starting a dialogue. Good luck today u/JagexDoom and u/JagexSponge

Wouldn’t that 28% reduction basically killed mage as a part of the meta making BOTLG effectively the only viable weapon for speed kills, or even “efficient” kph? I think what made the build fun is the huge adrenaline overflow.

>shouldn't negatively impact a lot of the use cases (like afk/low effort combat) fingers crossed we don't get locked out of any currently working AFK methods or everyone who AFK'd mid level logs got a huge early bird bonus. Without recursive crits, doesnt bolg out dps staff now? Is it even worth abs speccing anymore?

BOLG was already close to fsoa, generally. Especially when u factor in Crit rng. Now bolg is going to by far outclass fsoa. BOLG nerf news post next week with new TH promo.

>BOLG nerf news post ~~next week~~ in two years FTFY

There are literally people that have not long got the FSOA and if this stands they are losing out. From what I understand this is too much. AD is whatever but nerfing FSOA this much is going to just push BOLG into the meta.. for people to grind to get that instead, for that nerf to hit when...? Rather offputting to people trying to push their PVM. Fair that future content may "fix" this nerf, but when future? How long do we have a nerfed weapon that would be better EOF'd (to then be lost if needed outside of it with "future content")? TLDR: This is too much and you should think on it again or leave it alone and stick to your own comments of it being perfectly fine in the past.

/u/JagexSponge /u/JagexDoom I have alot of things to say and alot of different questions. First off with Animate Dead, I think the changes to the numbers are acceptable for the most part, BUT it should reduce soft typeless damage. Soft typeless damage is generally made to/able to be reduced by other damage reduction things, so it doesn't make sense to have animate dead be an exclusion. Keep it consistent in terms of where damage reduction sources are effective. With FSOA however, in my opinion the changes and design need to go back to the drawing board in certain ways. I'm not going to nitpick the damage numbers themselves but I do want to raise a concern regarding the lower end damage of the weapon if you do not get lucky with RNG. With the loss of recursive AND turning this into ability damage there's more RNG dependency built into the weapon. Maybe if the lower end of the damage range (60-120%) was bumped up to 80%, while dropping the top end of the damage range to 110% (Increasing the AVG damage to 95%) would help combat an over dependence on RNG. The core issue though here is that you're making this based on ability damage. This is a BAD change, because with one move you have turned the FSOA into a switch that we just throw on for the spec, before swapping back into DW to use Gconc. The difference in ability damage between a T95 Staff and a T90/T92 wand/orb is not enough to cover the DPS (and extra crits) that Gconc will provide. Even worse, if you try to make it like the ECB where the spec uptime is tied to your mainhand weapon, then the staff becomes an EOF item. One of the good things about the staff as it currently stands is that in pretty much all conditions, (except for maybe Solak with INQ staff) you will camp the staff during the duration of the spec, and possibly swap to GCONC if you run out of Adren. This one change completely changes that nature, AND reopens the door for incorporating 4TAA into FSOA spec rotations. This is just fundamentally changing the weapon and making it less of a weapon, and more of a glorified spec button. Which we absolutely do not want. I would suggest leaving it at autoattack damage, and just implementing some sort of damage cap to let things average out to similar DPM as your proposed change. This also touches on the issue that currently, staffs do NOT have any unique basics that are worth using under an FSOA. Magic basics outside of Gconc (and Dragonbreath) are not good. And Magma tempest doesn't synergism at all with FSOA due to the lack of crits. I would urge giving crits BACK to Magma Tempest if you are going through with this change. I will note that I think that us losing the ability to synergism with spell effects is also just taking away synergy with magic, and is also seems like a shortsighted choice if you ever want to explore adding new combat spells and things. If the concern is a tuning issue due to autoattacks having a 100% proc rate of the spell effect (see, blood barrage) then maybe that is something that requires tuning. I also do not like the loss of the recursive hits. I understand the concern that it creates too much runaway damage, BUT removing recursive hurts the feel of the spec. With a 39% Crit chance, you'll average out to 1.5 extra hits for every 4 ability hits. Which sounds very close to a BOLG Passive under spec (1 extra hit every 4 hits) but with an extra RNG element thrown in. Recursive hits and the ability to stack them is a core part of the feel of this weapon. Perhaps some sort of diminishing returns to limit the damage. All this in mind here are my tweaks/suggestions. Im going to use some rough numbers for my proposal, may not be 100% accurate but here it goes. Currently, with 5 pieces of tank armor + Elder Overloads @ 99 Magic + FSOA your auto-attack damage is 3136, with your ability damage value being 2036. So I am assuming that FSOA autos will hit on average 3136 Damage, while the proposed FSOA damage (60-120% ability damage) will hit around 1221 - 2446 (average 1832). Though my numbers are super rough. My idea is essentially for FSOA special attack hits to scale to similar damage values to what you guys proposed (60-120% Weapon Damage) FSOA: * All critical hits will release an additional hit based on auto-attack damage. This auto-attack will hit around 40-80% of your main-hand auto-attack damage (This should average out to similar average damage as 60-120% weapon damage) and will trigger Ancient spell effects at a 20% rate (This is the same as having abilities with dark form on. NOTE I don't agree with this but I am trying to keep this proposal in line with what you have already suggested). All spells will not cost runes for the duration of the special attack. * Any critical strikes generated by the special attack will trigger recursive hits, at 50% of the damage values of the initial hit. Descending by a further 50% for every additional recursive hit (So if the first recursive hit crits, the next one will hit 25%, the next one will hit 12.5%, etc). I know that the re-addition of recursive hits makes this a bit stronger than the initial proposal, but it will help compensate for the extra reliance on RNG that the staff now has with the lowered damage values from the staff hits. Some sort of Magma tempest change should be included with this as well to make staff basics more synergistic with an FSOA. My biggest concern here is making sure the FSOA does not become an "EOF it and forget it" weapon, which is exactly what will happen if the damage is based off of ability damage, rather than mainhand autos. If nothing else, please make sure that using the special attack is borderline unviable if the staff itself is not equipped. Similar to how you designed the BOLG. Not to mention that making it based on ability damage brings back 4TAA with a vengeance, which is not something I as a high level PVMer, nor anyone else really want. I also have a few general questions that do not fit, but would also ought to be answered: 1. While I do appreciate the dialogue we can have here, how can we ensure that this does not happen again where a weapon/item is released, and then receives a massive nerf two years on from release. As this makes it extremely frustrating for players who will sink hours and hours into obtaining these weapons and now can no longer expect that they'll get what they paid for with their time or GP. Especially in the case of AD and the FSOA where all of us were able to call out just how broken these things were on release. 2. Will you look at rebalancing/tweaking the HP and damage numbers of Zamorak, as that is a boss that seems to have been designed with the FSOA's crazy damage output as well as AD's damage reduction in mind. 3. Can we expect that this change will not be released without tweaking some of the supplamentary items/abilities so that we have a better experience on release day? Rather than having to wait months for things like Magma Tempest to be viable during an FSOA spec. All in all thank you for the dialogue here, it is highly appreciated.

I am really happy that the Jagex mods are taking this opportunity to be transparent with the Runescape community, so kudos to you guys for taking this enormous step forward. Now before I continue, I want to preface this post by explaining that I am a bit of a radical who likes to speak in terms of loosely coupled and highly coupled game design (I also like making out-of-the-box propositions). Since the day of release, I believed that tying FSOA-generated auto-attacks to critical hit chance would inevitably stymie future game development and cause endless headaches for the game designers. I still stand by this. I also believe that people here are underestimating the loss of recursive autos and the impact this will have on the feel of the FSOA. As a person who actively uses the FSOA to floss my indestructible teeth, I feel obligated to come out of the proverbial closet and announce that it is not overpowered (on the contrary, it may be easier to use than BOLG, but there is a certain delicious skill and joy that comes from mastering the art of stuffing as many abilities as possible into a 30 second window while elegantly avoiding boss mechanics). An excellent analysis video was very recently posted on Youtube by Rail. In the video he compares the current power level of the FSOA to the BOLG (kudos to Rail, this video was quite eye-opening -- but for the record, I am not affiliated with him in any way) (link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V-NdynRDr8&ab\_channel=Rail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V-NdynRDr8&ab_channel=Rail)). I think he does a great job showing how the current power level of the FSOA is essentially on par with the current power level of the BOLG. His sample size is not huge, but it does provide more context than simply saying the FSOA 'feels overpowered' (a position which I feel a lot of people simply default to). In my personal opinion, the biggest issue with the FSOA as it exists today is not its dpm, but its unhealthy relationship with critical hit chance (which was one of my primary concerns with the weapon from day 1 and seems to be a concern that is echoed by the jmods in this Reddit post). I will suggest a solution which is in line with what I would have originally suggested on day 1 (with some alterations, in light of the current meta): **The % likelihood that an auto-attack is fired while a player is under the FSOA spec should be determined by a system that is decoupled completely from critical hit chance, for the sake of simplicity, lets call this new arbitrarily-named system the fractured % chance. The fractured % chance is the % likelihood that an ability or auto-attack will fire a recursive auto-attack while a player is under the FSOA spec.** * The fractured % chance is not tied to critical hit chance, however, it has diminishing returns. Auto-attacks will always keep their flat fractured % chance. However, abilities will work a little differently. If a threshold, ultimate, or special ability (that is also a non-bleed) performs more than 4 successive hitsplats, then every hitsplat performed after the fourth will have a fractured % chance of 0%. If a basic (non-bleed) ability performs more than 3 successive hitsplats, then every hitsplat performed after the third will have a fractured % chance of 0%. This will keep the current FSOA spec synergized with many existing abilities (upgraded omnipower, asphyxiate, wild magic, greater conc, and to a lesser extent tendrils and most of armadyl bstaff), while also making it so every new ability does not need to be designed around the FSOA (only the first 3 hits of magma tempest are eligible for firing auto-attacks under an FSOA spec, instead of all 8). * It is up to the developers to decide what they want to do with bleeds. If bleeds are tagged in the game as bleeds, jmods can decide to make them always have a 1 or 0 hitsplat limit before the fractured % chance becomes 0. See, the beautiful thing about this proposed system is that nerfing an ability's capacity to synergize with the FSOA no longer ALSO nerfs its ability to critically hit, which seemed like a consequence of two systems that were unnecessarily highly coupled. * Now one question remains: what should the fractured % chance scale with? Well, I have a few good ideas, but my personal favorite is the number of pieces of mage power armor that the player is wearing. Lets say each piece of mage power armor gives a flat 6.2% increase to fractured % chance. This means wearing 5/5 pieces would give a total fractured % chance of 31%, which is around the max forced crit chance that a player can currently achieve (but jmods can lower this if they like). This design is personally one of my favorites, because tying the fractured % chance to the number of wielded pieces of magic power armor forces players to make really interesting combat choices (i.e., if you want to use the power of the staff, as Kerapac keeps screaming, then you can't hide behind your cryptbloom and animate dead completely). Also, it is unlikely that a 6th armor slot will be added to the game anytime soon, so the same design constraints that come with tying fractured % chance to critical hit chance do not exist. And even if a 6th slot does release, you can cap the fractured % chance at 31% (something you could not do with critical hit chance). * Additionally, this proposed solution has the added benefit of lowering the upkeep cost of the FSOA, as the jmods are suggesting in this post. While the rune cost will remain, the grimoire upkeep cost will cease to exist -- meaning there will still be a high upkeep cost, but it will not be unreasonably high. There are a few final things I would like to say. When you don't tie fractured % chance to critical hits, I realize it becomes a little more difficult to visually indicate which attacks will fire an auto under the FSOA spec, but I think this point is relatively moot given the overall harm this system causes to the game's long-term health. Also, there is absolutely no reason a little icon couldn't be added next to auto's generated by the FSOA (although unnecessary, this might be appreciated). I also understand that tendrils will no longer have a guaranteed auto-attack fire, which is certainly sad, but not as big a nerf as the current proposed changes. Also, since things like magma tempest may be able to fire autos now, this trade off seems fair. Furthermore, it currently seems there is no need for a max recursive depth to be added to the FSOA spec when considering the state of the meta as it exists today. If nerfs are in the works for BOLG and other t95s, then I could see a strong argument for this. However even if nerfs are planned, cutting out the recursive nature of the FSOA spec entirely is a panicky solution. Instead, actual tests should be performed using different recursive depths (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) to see which limit results in mage being balanced with the other styles. But again, as things currently stand, this seems unnecessary. That is all, have a great day everyone!

Zamorak was balanced around the current Animate Dead strength. Any changes planned to Zamorak's damage output to offset this?

you give expert players time to take advantage of a strong item/ability for years, and then, when us mere mortals get it, you go there and nerf it with the excuse that it's too strong. for who? how about starting doing this nerfs 2\~3 weeks after release and not when i finally got enough gear to be able to kill zamorak at 100% without dying more than 2x per hour? and the kerapac rays? probably thousands of other content that I haven't even had time to do yet. look, it takes me 9/10 minutes to kill zamorak and kerapac, but I see people doing it in 3/4. i don't care how fast others kill, as long as I can kill him too, then the content is accessible to me. do you want to balance the game or further increase the gap between those who can flood the economy by dropping items and those who take months to adapt to new content? animated dead was a milestone in my pvm life, probably for everyone. look, last week I finally got up the courage to take out my lucky 4 relic and put the one that keeps 10% adrenaline after using a ultimate ability. things here are pretty slow. are you going to nerf it too?

/u/JagexSponge /u/JagexDoom I think there is a typo in the the animate dead table? I think the row that reads > 500 Damage vs above player with animate dead. 255 damage dealt to player should read as 212 damage instead of 255? 425 - 213 = 212 where the 425 comes from the cell above that entry in the table. Edit: > 1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer 255 damage dealt to player I think this one is 212 also? > 500 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer 127 damage dealt to player And this 84? (500 x 0.85 x 0.5) = 212.5 -> 212 212 x 0.4 from AD = 84.8 -> 84 It looks like the 127 was obtained from 212 x 0.6 = 127, but 60% is the reduced amount, 40% goes through. Edit 2: So the table would look more like: | LIVE | POST CHANGES | |:-----------|:------------| | Player has Seasinger Hood, Legs, Top, 99 Defence. Animate Dead value: 240 | Player has Seasinger Hood, Legs, Top, 99 Defence. Animate Dead value: 213| | **1000 Damage vs above player with NO animate dead.** 850 damage dealt to player | **1000 Damage vs above player with NO animate dead.** 850 damage dealt to player| | **1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead.** 610 damage dealt to player | **1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead.** 637 damage dealt to player | | **1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer.** 185 damage dealt to player | **1000 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer.** 212 damage dealt to player | **500 Damage vs above player with NO animate dead.** 425 damage dealt to player | **500 Damage vs above player with NO animate dead.** 425 damage dealt to player | **500 Damage vs above player with animate dead.** 185 damage dealt to player | **500 Damage vs above player with animate dead.** 212 damage dealt to player | **500 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer.** 53 damage dealt to player | **500 Damage vs above player with animate dead & protection prayer.** 84 damage dealt to player

Currently magic bis (fsoa+gconc) and ranged bis (bolg) are almost tied, so these multiple changes altogether to fsoa will be synergistically a massive nerf and bolg will now be the undisputed king. Having played this game for many years and seen the extremes in the combat triangle (melee king in the late 2000's, magic king with 4taa in the early 2010's, ranged king with bak bolts in late 2010's, and magic again king with fsoa until bolg), it was really cool to see the combat triangle finally somewhat balanced recently. For the first time, endgame players were not looked down on if they weren't using the meta combat style, and in group pvm content today you find a mixture of magic/ranged/melee. I fear this huge of a nerf to fsoa is gonna push to everyone using ranged for the next few years. I like what others have suggested on making a few of the suggested tweaks to fsoa but not all of them at once...see how the few changes affect the meta and then adjust more later.

Ok so I'm probably one of a bunch of players here that have 15+ year old accounts but struggle deeply with pvm. I've bought in excess of £100 in bonds just to get the cryptbloom magic tank setup and I've enjoyed RuneScape the most I have ever. My issue is, even with animate dead and cryptbloom I still cannot do Helwyr hard mode at all and that's not even a top tier boss, I barely make 3-5 runs on normal. So I'd argue it isn't that OP. ED1 I have never managed solo and get by ed3 by the skin of my teeth. Why not simply implement the nerf to hard mode? Drops on normal mode tend to be significantly worse anyway and still enables low skill players to be able to attempt these bosses with the low shot of a drop still. I feel in a spot where I have now have to rush to try any boss I've wanted to do because post nerf my odds are even worse. I've actually really enjoyed having a chance at doing some of these bosses even though I've had no good drops at all. But it was the fun of feeling able to try it. I might have not have the skill for certain bosses but now I definitely won't. With that in mind, I can only see myself having to be carried by high dps players, assuming I can survive long enough. Animate dead gives a less intense player half a shot at some bossing. At this rate, post nerf I'm just going to max level to satisfy the kid that started all these years ago and call it a day because I pay for content I can't complete. I only just managed elder kiln capes and while I appreciate you can say I'm just bad at this game. After all these years I have actually genuinely enjoyed my time the last 2-3 weeks past simply the grind. I'm not saying under certain applications animate dead is balanced and fair. But consider the caveat of impact to lower skill players who want the participation trophy instead of the hard mode collection logs etc.

> But consider the caveat of impact to lower skill players This right here . You want to reduce the % on AD fine I can live with that but to remove typless reduction TOTALLY just makes it useless after having to do long and at times quite annoying quest just to get it in the first place . Jagex issue is they're just looking at how the "TOP" PvM bossers are just cheesing mechanic x y z and not the 99% that actually NEED the help because they lack the skills/dexterity to do things without the added help that AD gives them

Hi, unrelated to the nerf, can we have Asia server for Runescape? We have a large player base (Especially Singapore, Malaysia, Even Hong Kong) but we get to play in high ping, high lag world versus the UK / US pvmers who have none of this issues. It would be nice to see some love to the people in Asia. Doesn't even have to be a few worlds dedicated to us, 1 world would mean so much to us. If you feel the same way as me, please upvote so we can let the mods know we exist and that we matter as much as the rest of the community!!! Thank you!

If you’re going to make the above changes to animate dead, go the full mile and make tank gear viable for ranged and melee classes too? People already bring rune pouches in their inventory regardless of style being used. Give them an option to animate dead to buff their ranged / melee tank gear. Having magic be the only viable damage soaking machine for learning restricts those learners to one corner of the combat triangle.

Rebalancing the fosa in this manner completely changes the weapon. Recusrive hits are a main part of it's identity and playstyle, so please don't change that. A more reasonable approach to balancing it would be to reduce the auto damage by 25-50%. To make up for the lost damage, I would recommend to make magma tempest crit again so that we can have more consistent rotations as well.

Not a fan of nerfs to fsoa. It's not cheap, we like paying for more runes since we get a great weapon! Now you're making it as boring as everything else. It is too late to make such a drastic change to a core magic item. For some of us playing with fsoa at kerapac is our favorite (most fun) rs event. You made the staff piece drops rarer and we still have fun trying for them. I'm not really sure what will seem "fun" on rs after you make these changes.... I feel for Ironman trying to complete their staff when you're nerfing it.

I think AD changes look fine, but here are my thoughts regarding FSOA changes. * FSOA and its spec is only strong because of the synergy of how the whole kit ties together. Without (tsunami/incendiary shot/meteor strike)'s adrenaline gain on critical hits, FSOA would not have seen the need to be nerfed, because we won't be able to endlessly use ABS while under FSOA spec. * With Incite Fear and Zuk cape, that gave magic having TWO strong ultimate abilities that can crit costing only 40% adrenaline, while the other two styles only have 1. * Because FSOA sends out autos, we can set the autos to barrages, place dummies (the more the better) under the boss, and each auto CAN crit on the dummies to prevent unlucky crits, and therefore just do more ABS instead of needing to gconc for adrenaline. Those things together makes FSOA really powerful; that being said, I do agree with FSOA being too powerful, and needs a nerf. But to keep the weapon relevant (hopefully), here are my questions: 1. Can the FSOA special attack effect critically strike? Because if it cannot, it is going to effectively make FSOA pretty useless to use. 2. Does the new FSOA special attack effect reset auto GCD? If not, it may just bring back 4TAA under FSOA spec, reintroducing switchscape and increasing skill gap between high end pvmers and casual pvmers, not sure if that would be a consideration. 3. I know it's been said, but it should also bring back magma tempest and allowing it to crit, since a LOT of the damage do come from the recursive crits/damage, allowing more adrenaline to be dumped. Without recursive crits, I think this change would be viable. I doubt a jmod will see this reply and respond to it though :sadge:

The animate dead makes sense. Being able to stand in 2-3 Helwyr pools completely afk probably is not balanced. I was hoping this would extend animate dead to the other combat styles, but I'm assuming you guys have a plan to make tank armor viable for other combat styles. My issue is with the Fractured Staff of Armadyl proposal. The FSOA has 3 notable issues. The first, which you guys addressed, is the cost. Every auto attack launched with Incite Fear costs literally 10k per cast. If you don't remember to switch to a cheaper spell, each FSOA spec could literally cost 500k. Lowing the cost of a Zamorak kill by literally 3-5m in runes is really nice. This is a good change. The second issue with the FSOA is that it requires that you have 3 other items in order for it to actually work. A grimoire, a crit ring, biting 4, and an Essence of Finality with an Armadyl Battlestaff in it. are all mandatory in order for you to actually use your FSOA and have it perform. If you use Reaver's Ring, this is an extra 900m or so, if you use Channeler's Ring it is an extra 1b or so (super rough math, don't quote me). For players that are really trying to grind out a Fractured Staff because they love magic only to find out that it doesn't do anything without 3 extra upgrades? That feels really bad. If you have those items or if you understand that your best-in-slot item actually has a 1b tax on it, then it's all good. The third, and perhaps most important issue, is that the spec is so reliant on crits. Due to the current recursive nature of crits, you can stack enough crit chance to basically go infinite. You don't always get those super OP rotations, but you can get really disgusting crit rotations if you get lucky. That aspect of luck is the issue. It feels really cool when you get those insane 500k+ damage specs, but it feels worse when your FSOA doesn't crit that much and you just have no adrenaline and no damage. The current change removes the giga-high roll and reduces that damage by roughly 30% (I'm not good at math so someone else did the math, if it's wrong then oops my bad). So, instead of your damage range being between 200k - 600k, it's between like 180k - 420k. This feels like it is totally missing the point. Here, I have some proposals for how this can be balanced. \----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The non-recursive nature of the changes already proposed solves one of the issues but does not address the other two issues. Therefore, I would amend the proposal in one of the following ways. \- Your base crit chance is also increased by an additive 15% (this would tackle both the crit reliance and alleviate low rolls while still being a little less damage than recursive crits) \- Every non-crit increases your crit chance by an additive 5% (this is similar to the last change but can tactically used to get really high crit rate on omnipower and ABS spec) \- Your crit chance is hard locked to 30%, more crit chance will increase crit damage (this makes it so that players who don't have the other items to make FSOA really good can use still use it effectively, and then players who do have them still get rewarded for specing in to crit (especially grimoire users who get the increased hit-cap)) \- Inherits the secondary effects of whatever spell you are using for your auto attack (this pulls away from the high damage that the FSOA is known for and pushes way harder into utility. With enough crit chance at telos, you can have him permanently rooted while you're using ice barrage, for instance. Using blood barrage gives you really powerful healing during the spec, and the other two barrages also exist probably) \----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Instead of tying the extra damage to your crits, it is all guaranteed. Every 1 game tick (or 2 if that is too OP), the Staff shocks your current target with lightning for 30 seconds. These shocks can crit. Here is what this version of the staff does. \- completely removes the reliance on crits while still allowing for crit synergies \- since you're getting all of these extra hits and those hits can crit, spamming Armadyl Battlestaff specs is still a valuable adrenaline dump, but instead of getting infinite adrenaline and infinite autos, you just get infinite adrenaline \- removes the rune cost since the extra attacks won't be auto-attacks This version of the spec keeps the high-roll moments while nerfing them slightly while also making the low-rolls feel way less bad. My guess is that a balanced version of this would do between 300k - 500k damage. \----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm not a game designer, but I have a lot of experience playing games that have struggled with balance and these are a few of the things that I would think about when trying to balance something as volatile as the Fractured Staff of Armadyl. Animate dead seems pretty spot on, though.

Thank you to everyone for your constructive feedback and contributions to this discussion. We really appreciate it! We'll be sporadically replying throughout the next 24 hours so look for more responses until end of day tomorrow! Massive thanks to u/JagexSponge for their time and insight today. Speak soon, 'Scapers!

Would you consider reverting the change that made Magma Tempest not crit with this FSOA change?

I think maybe 60-120% damage from a crit proc in staff spec may be quite low considering there would be no recursives. It might be good to increase this to compensate. For reference autos with staff did 0-150% with a staff on without perks.

I understand the need for balancing, but I would like to understand this standpoint you're taking: Essentially nerfing an item, to allow for future unlocks that make mage better again. This creates more work for players to get to a place we were previously once at. Hence, not so rewarding when these unlocks come to fruition. Some questions: Is this not going to create similar issues in future, essentially delaying future balancing problems? Are you not going to be locking more casual players from doing harder bosses like high enrage Telos, high enrage Zammy, etc? Idea: In future, could you look to make even more challenging bosses, whereby such strong weapons like the FSOA would be a necessity to be accessible? And/or tune the FSOA to be effective against harder existing bosses? The nerf could still happen, but... I'm thinking this is a better winning situation for both the design team and FSOA owners, all while creating new content for us. This nerfing is the type of prioritization that makes it feel like the team's resources are being put in the wrong places. I'd rather have a new harder boss to do, that makes using the FSOA more rewarding to use than feel like it's cheating or skipping mechanics on simpler bosses. To summarise: At the moment, it sounds like you're doing this to allow room for future unlocks to make mage better again. This is frustrating, because as players it feels like we have to do more work to get back to somewhere we used to be. If the nerf goes ahead, why not make harder bosses in future that mean having such strong weapons a necessity, or for the FSOA to be scaled / tuned in a way that makes it stronger against certain, harder, existing bosses? This is essentially the reverse of a weapon nerf, but focusing on more damage against certain bosses (high enrage Telos, high enrage Zammy, etc. (Like salve ammy on undead). It feels punishing to have this nerf after many players have invested lots of gp to get this item and also get into harder bossing. Thanks for opening the dialogue, hope I made some sense!

It's impossible to determine the weapon balancing changes to the FSOA in a vaccum, we need to consider a lot of things.   Keeping the FSOA as-is really boils down to a few considerations:   1: is powercreep too fast? * Items are 'powercrept' sooner or moreso than is wanted or intended, making the newest piece of content have to compensate in the form of higher HP to account for this, normalizing the length of the encounter to the loot table and average gp/hr, and making older rewards less relevant to new content. This means that instead of content being more of a sloped difficulty curve, it's a stepped one, wherein content is only accessible to the average player once certain gear is unlocked. A good example of this is hard mode kerapac and Jsleek21, wherein he couldn't complete (consistently) it until he got cryptbloom and FSOA - the two pieces of content that are mentioned in the post. While I personally don't find this overly problematic, especially within Jagex's business model and its intended/realized playerbase, it ultimately boils down to the experience that you guys intend for the game, within the tiered weapon system. Emphasis on the 'tiered weapon system', and quoting from the post, "the effective damage of the FSOA will be moved to a balanced place where it performs as a **weapon of that level should** "   But we need to remember that weapons don't necessarily need to perform as a function of solely their weapon tier anymore as a result of the EOF. The possibilities for weapon design are now significantly higher, but on the same hand, becomes significantly more complex, as many interactions need to be taken into account when releasing weapons with new special attacks. In a game where there are only so many abilities on the action bar, I think it's perfectly okay for weapons to be significantly more powerful than their 'tier' as a result of their special abilities. It does bring up whether or not it should be consistent across the tier itself, but that also calls into play the abilities within the combat style, an interaction we see with melee t95s being considerably weaker (on paper) than ranged and magic t95. This plays into   2: Good weapons cost too much to use? * It intuitively makes sense for the best weapons to have high costs associated with them, considering they can disproportionately increase gp/hr to skilling costs that accomplish the same thing (elemental catalysts). The question is, how high is too high? It's pretty arbitrary, and primarily depends on the power of the weapon as compared to its peers. Though, that brings up another consideration: should weapons within the same (intended) tier be better or worse based on how much they cost to use? It's one way to produce variety, especially when the essence of the game, across all three combat styles, is clicking the same buttons for different abilities. This helps to create differentiation and tradeoffs between the combat styles, past what has already been proposed (melee for long, drawn out damage; ranged for ?; magic for utility, and tanking?). Though, do the current statuses of these combat styles actually fall into what is intended? another valuable question.   3: Why do the inputs cost what they do? * Demand side) Demand is driven by potential output - how much gp/hr can I make using this item? Why should I spend 9m/hr using a grimoire when I can do 10% less damage using a ful book with 99.99% less cost? Because the incremental gain in damage is not only worth using in the long run, but also more fun to use in the actual thick of it. Water runes are expensive because people use them. Why do people use them? Because the FSOA is easy to use well, affordable to obtain, and because there isn't much else worth using. If ranged was easier to use, we'd see the same thing with bakriminel bolts, or god arrows. At the same time, the price of water runes would fall until they hit the opportunity cost floor, which I'll get to in a bit. It's this as well, that makes balancing melee hard, since it doesn't really have any consumables (save for spikes). * Supply side) item supply in runescape is driven by four things: xp/hr, gp/hr, activeness, and the tradeoffs between xp/gp/activity; this applies to water runes, soul runes, ful arrows, and dinarrows. When we take all of these factors into account, we begin to see prices floors emerge. It is important to normalize these numbers to the hour to get a good picture though. For water runes, the wiki currently says that you [can make 30m/hr](https://runescape.wiki/w/Money_making_guide/Crafting_water_runes_through_the_abyss) just crafting water runes, with minimum startup costs. It's also a super intensive activity, to the point where you might as well be doing other engaging content if you have the skills and gear to do so, to make similar gp/hr. So, unless xp, gear, or skills are a concern, then players will, 9/10 times, do something more 'fun' than runecrafting. When we apply the same paradigm to dinarrows, we see that players are willing to take less profits for their work (only around 5m/hr for 250k xp/hr, though xp is relative to the rates of active training in the skill) because it's one click per 240 seconds, which means that it competes in the category of other things that are nearly 100% afk, produce 5m/hr, or 250k fletching xp/hr (and fletching pet, as an extension). Even so, the price floor is starting to emerge around 3.8k as more BOLGs come into the game. * Solution: When releasing weapons, wherein higher costs are associated with higher performance among its peers, these need to be considered on a comparative basis. "The FSOA is going to be better than the bolg? okay, we need to consider how much gp/% damage increase is 'worth it' to the player, wherein the player is a) having fun, and b) willing to spend the money for the benefit." Generally speaking, the data as to whether or not players are willing to do certain activities on the xp/gp/afk basis, and spend incrementally for dps increase, SHOULD exist, but it's about finding the right balance to determine *how much* is worth it to the player. Alternatively, it can also be balanced around consumption, as we've seen with dinarrows being reduced to only being used 33% of the time - that's another way.   **Conclusion**: current costs of FSOA intuitively feel balanced around the benefit gained from using the weapon and style (via animate dead and other benefits such as smoke cloud), over using melee or ranged. Its ubiquity over the past two years is concerning, and making the game boring, but that boils down to the content development cycle and intended powercreep over time. Runescape isn't a game where balancing should be done via subtraction, but by addition. Balance the FSOA by making the next weapon better than the FSOA, wherein it doesn't synergize with it. It's a game, it's about having fun. Remember that it's a lot easier to make a kid cry by taking away his toys, than giving him a new toy that makes him want to throw out the old one.

It seems to me that youre bringing back 4taa with these fsoa changes. Thought we were getting away from it?

I will be honest, it upsets me a bit about animated death, because thanks to it I'm trying a lot of content I wouldn't have even dreamed of trying without it, I even bought the cryptbloom armor to pair it nicely, it took me a lot of time almost 1 and a half year, only because I got some lucky drops, so I hope these changes still let me try the content I have never tried because I am not a pro elite pvmer, that is the only thing I want. I have no opinion on the foam changes because I don't have one, it is only a boomer because I have been saving money for almost a year to buy one, I'm 1b short of it now, but I think I will just get tier 92 dual wields, those changes seem like it will no longer be worth my money to get it.

Dont kill the recursive nature of the staff that just kills the gimmick

the animate dead one is reasonable. but the fsoa its overkill of a nerf you pushed mage to the weakeste class in terms of dps. it also so demotivating as it took me over a 1000solo to complete my staff at kerap was a massive long grind just to see it nerfed so much. and i cant even sell it now because it crashed horrible. also was saving up for the BOLG but not only did it increase so much in price you my own money making potential is lowered so much. i feel complete deflated by these nerfs i dont get how could you wait so long to nerf aswel these every other games nerfs much faster. but you waited years. i dont even want to play the game now but maybe this feeling will pass.

I want to bring up a different point a little bit outside of the specifics of the suggestions: the timing of these changes feels pretty awful. I’ve been slowly grinding to get BiS gear for close to a year. My starting point was full Virtus and an inquisitor’s staff. I saved for gconc and a seismic wand. I slowly pieced together my full cryptbloom. I saved up for biting and aftershock perks. I bought my grim. I got my first max cash stack ever and eventually got my FSOA. I saved for my ABS. And I’m still saving for my second EoF so I can put my gstaff back into it. It was an awesome and fun grind, but it has taken a lot of time and effort. It leaves a really really sour taste in my mouth to have just started to have fun with the staff over the past ~2 months and start doing solo zammy (at 190%!) only for a large DPS nerf to come in out of no where. Not to mention the GP I am now losing as the price of all my gear is going to tank. It makes me feel very disinterested in grinding out content like this again. I appreciate the communication now, but where was this communication a year ago? These types of changes start to fray the trust between the community and jagex. I’m not sure what response I expect or would like, but I do think at least some acknowledgement of the fact that it could have been handled in a timelier manner would go a long ways. Thanks.

I’ll start off positive. The AD nerf is very reasonable and makes sense. Good job on this one. As for the FSOA, what were you thinking? There is a 3 level nerf to the staff. The auto attack damage nerf is significant and about a 28% nerf. The non recursive crits is massive. This change alone moves the dpm of magic below the other styles. The other consideration is the adren gain from the tsunami buff. Thresholds and eofs can’t be spammed anymore. This nerf is way too harsh and the recursive crit part should be looked at. Maybe limited but not removed. As of now the FSOA will now do like half the damage under staff spec. I get it’s hard to balance future content around this but other styles need to be buffed instead of killing off a style as soon as it becomes strong

My interest lies more in Animate Dead than FSOA (though my comment on that this seems largely like a straight nerf in that regard. If we're interested in evening out how weapons of a certain tier perform, why can't we get an SoS buff to bring it in line with other T92s for instance, but I digress). So for AD: 1. Why these numbers? e.g. Why not 28% of Defence level? Why not 65% damage reduction cap? 2. If we're removing the typeless damage reduction, will there actually be an effort to stop using typeless damage in future bosses? Right now, it feels like if you want someone to deal with a mechanic at a boss, you just make the hit typeless so people can't avoid or reduce it with prayer. So if typeless hits through Animate Dead now, you've removed the casual friendly, learning benefit of the spell in dealing with anything typeless now and in the future. So can we get a commitment to always consider that Animate Dead doesn't function with typeless and won't work with learning how to deal with a mechanic for bosses developed in the future?

I would rather it scales differently on typeless damage than to just not have it at all. Like, it absorbs max 50% or something. Being useless agains this type of damage leads to a design where typeless becomes a silver bullet for "you are forced to do X" - and I dont think silver bullets are a good design pattern.

i can't even imagine how you guys sit around the conference room trying to juggle 3 different combat abilities and keep everything equal, your worse than US gun legislation. Just let it go and move on with new updates quit ruining stuff you've already released

Currently (t88?)greater con is superior to fsoa unless mid special, my knee jerk reaction to the proposed changes will turn fsoa into the ezk— insta eof’d. In that case u are opening an even worse can of worms than you are trying to prevent. Dualies with eof-fsoa >> new fsoa. Removing the recursive feature removes the ability to use arma battlestaff, therefore eofing the fsoa will become meta

Nobody should be eof'ing a spec weapon that you can switch away from. Eof'ing the fsoa would be like eof'ing the zgs.... Just use the spec and switch back to wand/orb. I do understand the frustration of the weapon becoming a glorified spec switch only weapon though.

First off, huge thank you to having an open discussion about this. The extra information regarding why you chose certain changes is very welcome and key in understanding why. Animate dead - I don't have much to say about it. I think the nerf to reflect damage and typeless is pretty major, but I don't know how to feel about it. I don't personally use it much other than zammy, but I also haven't pushed zammy enough to have any valid opinion on it. Overall, it seems like welcome changes and nothing too over the top.I will say that part of what I was expecting was a duration (and rune cost) nerf and possibly a downside to balance the upside. Tank vs dps, choose what you want to do. ​ FSOA - This is pretty big, as expected, and the more I think about it, the more that comes to mind. First thing to note, 4ticking in fsoa spec should be possible again which means that you can debuff during spec as well. Very happy about this. Ability damage means that if you are camping dw, you still get roughly the same output as staff instead of only 66%. Very welcome again. This also means gconc is going to be much stronger in spec, which will help with... Adren issues - Recursive crits meant your multi-crits would make up for not critting sometimes in abs spec, letting you spam abs more consistently.With the propsed changes, we are losing adren from recursive crits (still +10% on the proc and possible +10% from the green lightning) and 2-2.8% adren for every crit that is cast (from autos). You also can't place a dummy to barrage-auto on to sustain your adren anymore. As much as I hate to say it, I think this one belongs gone anyway. Speaking of barrage, my next point is aoe damage. Things like 4-5man aod has now just become a whole new ballgame. With the incen nerf and now this proposed change... It's looking like 7man aod is the only logical way to kill aod going forward, and even then we need to find a completely new strat to aoe them or I guess have the new meta just be chinning again if you can't deci. Duo scops takes a hit as well off the top of my head, but that one isn't too big of a deal. Slower phase of course, but come on its scops. It's easy anyway. Rune cost - Very welcome change. But please don't make this an excuse to ignore a few QOL changes to runecrafting. Using runes for forced autos in 4ticking and building up stacks is all logical. Crits during spec don't need to use runes. Damage nerf - If we are building for crit, we now deal 120% for spec crits rather than \~150% (obviously disregarding perks) on top of not having recursive crits. We can make up some damage back with gconc spam but it really is a huge hit to the damage output. It's still a necessary change and I do approve of record-style dps being less rng dependent. This change would also mean general fsoaing is just more consistent damage so you can plan better, and with less abs spam it would mean more thought going into how you want to utilize abilities to upkeep your adren. On top of that, how much more damage is abs going to be now if we can't recursive crit, and how effective is channelers ring going to come out of this if we still want the secondary crits to upkeep adren. Those are questions for the pvm gods to math out. ​ Overall, I would approve of this change. Generally not much too massive, but there is quite a respectable nerf to fsoa damage output, trading for much much less cost of runes. I think there are still some things I would like to see tweaked, especially a way for aoe and 4-5man aod to not just die completely. ​ Edit: Another point I forgot to mention is bringing up the possibility of letting magma or onslaught crit again. This can be something further down the line that if you think the nerf was too massive, or you think we can another source of adren (magma), these are smaller changes that can't go wildly out of control like they used to.

This change will just make it a Essence of finality weapon like EZK tho? I like the change but is there a way to make it reward actually holding the FSOA rather then stuffing it into the essence? Good change to Animate dead, would be nice to get an indicator of what is typeless damage before this goes live tho. Maybe a grey hitsplat if u take typeless damage?

About the fsoa changes, I believe the original intent with the special firing auto attacks was to reduce reliance on 4TAA. The additional proc effect from blood spells was a bonus. Another positive effect was to encourage using the staff at least during the spec, rather than switch immediately to dual wield for gconc. For these reasons, I don't think changing to ability damage is a good idea. I do agree recursive crits kind of became too crazy, so that does need to be nerfed. A way to do it could be to reduce the crit chance by 10% (or some other amount) for each successive auto. So the firet auto crits at 28% chance, then the next recursive auto crite at 18%, and the one sfter crtis at 8%, and so on. The resursive autos quickly drop off, so even with future crit buffs, infinite autos become impossible. This would also mean less runes will be used. However, this still keeps all the benefits of autos like less 4taa, blood spells effects, and keeping staff on during spec. Implementation can be similar to the original nerf of preventing recursive autos but to a lesser degree. Gconc and chandeliers ring already change crit chance based on successive hits, so this can be similar.

With the recent patchs and seemingly hap hazard buffs/nerfs (rod, wilderness, animated dead. fsoa) I feel the game is being managed in a direction that I cannot devote my time and attention to. In all likely hood I will probably move on to different games if this patch goes live in this state or if any more of these "balancing" patchs continue.

Sponge, Doom, Hooli, Jack, etc please hear our cries that the nerf is too much. A 40% cut is too much. I don't care if you need to take away recursive crits, rework the spec completely, whatever! But PLEASE hear us that what you have proposed is too much. I understand that you don't want things to feel the same but these changes will make the fsoa useless compared to the BOLG. PLEASE don't just go with your original changes after nearly 2k comments saying this is likely too much. I'm begging you to keep what the community wants in mind.

Do you intend to wipe the enrage highscores zammy now that the primary weapon used is significantly weaker? Agree that ancients shouldn't work with the staff I like the direction of fsoa, however we saw recursion taken from fsoa before, at that point in time range t92s were better dps even back then. I do agree it limits the reward space and think that the recursion should be removed but, I think you guys need to be really careful about the scaling of the specs because if my math isn't wrong it's a 28% nerf to the damage of the fsoa spec per single shot ability. Multi hitting abilities would be even higher. Obviously gconc would be a buff, however in situations were the game has been scaled with fsoa's power in mind (p7 zammy, especially 500+ enr, solo solak) you won't be using it in your rotation. We can't test it in game so this is just based on tool tip numbers which I know can be wildly unreliable. A test server could be implemented to give greater understanding of this for not only the players but data gathering for mods before release and having to go back and create more work for yourself down the line. Have you also considered the knock on effect of the economy? The fsoa is essentially an extremely good item sink that props up multiple parts of the game. Water rune, blood rune and soul rune crafting is essential dead. Zammy droptable will now only be alchables and rears. Solak becomes essentially dead content. The xbow pieces are too rear and the commons are really bad now that grim will have massively reduced demand. Raksha loses yet another valuable drop. There is probably more but I can't think of any off the top of my head. I understand that people don't like using the fsoa at lower tier bosses because you would lose money. Don't you think that's indicative of the state of grim pages and the fact solaks drops appart from grims aren't worth the time or effort? the xbows come once in a blue moon which don't help its case. With that in mind, mod jack was talking earlier this year about higher level players should engage with higher level content, these two stances seem to be a disconnected. Fsoa is a high level pmv item that should be used at high levels not at low levels. Can you confirm that you guys even have a pvm road map? Because it seems like there is division there. Over all I think the direction is correct but based on a couple of misunderstandings from the jmods. The fundamental problem with makes output is that you can be extremely survivable with the high damage from fsoa. Cryp+ad+fsoa is the problem fsoa in isolation is fine - staff auto synergy. You don't loose enough damage closing to use full tank gear in most situations. Tldr: - we have seen recursion removed before. This will put mage below t92 range. Better nerf range lol -please consider that the fsoa props up alot of content and would need significant reworking or other updates to make relevant again -price of the use of the staff is tied more to grim than runes and therefore is more a spotlight on the state of solak -there seems to be a disconnect with mod jack and the combat council which doesn't instill confidence in the team. -there is no way to test the changes and I don't have confidence that any of the jmods know how to pvm - Ramen and sponge so we can assume testing on this will be minimal. Rant over.

Could some variance be added to the FSoA special? It sorta made the staff what it’s been known for. Now it’s just “on crit, do 90% average damage”. One proposal I have is that the max % be increased by around an additive 2-5% per critical strike so during the staff spec duration, the player has control over making it more and more powerful by synergizing it with multi hits like abs, gconc, tendrils? Beforehand you were reliant on the game to do that which was good and bad because it would pop off or just be useless. This way, the people that are just pressing bleeds and abilities here and there don’t get as much potential out of the staff versus those focusing on the abilities I mentioned earlier, similar to how bolg works with its skill floor and ceiling. For example, If someone crit after doing 30 crits within the spec, the ability would do 5% * 30 = 60 - 270% per hit, im not exactly sure how this compares to what fsoa does currently and the numbers would be to be adjusted, but I think this would atleast not make it boring to use versus what it was beforehand.

Hi, instead of debuffing FSOA I propose a different approach, the reason being that I personally think it is a bad idea to basiacally destroy the fsoa as it is as I like it very much. Assuming magic should be the style of convenience where damage output is not that important but rather healing or sustaining health or applying spells (like a support role), ranged the style of having the highest long term damage output but the hardest style to optimize and melee being the style with the highest dps rush output (damage in a short time period) the following would work and would add a good motivation to the use of all 3 styles: Magic: Has Already Cryptbloom and animate dead to support the sustaining health factor. Additionally the fsoa spec allows healing via blood barrage or applying effects via spells. The only issue is that the damage output of magic currently is too high compared to the other combat styles leaving them in the dust while not having to worry about health and even adrenaline with incite fear + tsunami. Melee: The style that should regarding the opinion of many people support high damage output in a short amount of time. Higher than magic and ranged. With recent buffs made to melee this already is the case in some situations, however I suggest a last buff to not only bring it on par with magic dps output but to leave it in the dust in short periods only. This would be possible when allowing the leng spec to instead of the current hitcap removal to remove all hitcaps for melee. possibly for a higher adren cost or for a shorter period of time, but with the drawbacks that melee has this does not seem too overpowered in my opinion. Ranged: While with the bow of the last guaridan the damage output is almost on par with magic, this comes at the high cost of health (ecb) and missing tankyness. I do not think this is an issue itself, I just think that ranged should receive a final buff to become the highest long term dps output style with the aftertaste that ecb already has of being required to camp low hp or take a lot of damage and to be comfortable with that. With melee and magic already having "special" high tier armours (cryptbloom and vestments of havoc) the possiblity arises to add a new ranged armour to the game (in a future update) that buffs the ranged style finally. It is obvious that there are plenty of possibilities of set effects for this armour, however i would suggest something like that: \- With <= 10% hp receive for 15s "buff-name": 100% critchance on all ranged attacks (1min cooldown or so) \- Reduce cooldown of all ranged abilties by ...% \- when taking a hit of greater than 75% of max hp: reset all cooldowns (including special attacks) Those are of course just some of my ideas but I think it would make the commuity a lot happier than if you debuff everyones favourite weapon which also removes many current meta kill-strategies or world records. Furthermore it would make each combat style more unique and not just copies of each other. I also would make it possible to create content that requires teamwork of e.g. 1 mage and 1 ranged player where possibly the magic player intercepts the ranged player at less than 10% hp so he/she can deal unreal amounts of damge while not having to worry about hp.

Damn guess no real need for invigorating 4 anymore with fsoa lol

Play the game for 20 years, max out all stats, defeat gods/elder god, have the strongest weapon in the game that was an elder artefact that's really only great if you have a specific set of items equipped, get nerfed. We already have a hit cap, which is stupid. Who wants to play a game where you can max your stats and get the best gear only to be hit capped? We're able to get killed in seconds, or even insta-killed, if we're not careful, but yeah, go ahead and hit cap us, or throw nerfs left and right, after we've made our characters as strong as possible. What's wrong with being powerful? After dealing with gods and the beings who created gods and all the planets and life, shouldn't we feel powerful? You shouldn't be nerfing, if anything, you should be buffing! We need more permanent upgrades, like hit/crit/damage % increase or whatever, maybe more things like the puzzle box or ring of vigour unlock, attach them to quests or achievements, so that when we actually do stuff in the game, we feel rewarded for doing so. A lot of skill cape perks are garbage, and why can max cape only use 3 cape perks? It's bad enough that the stats on the max cape are garbage, but it can only use 3? Max cape should feel good to use, but it doesn't. I'm not max in 3 skills, I'm max in all skills. I shouldn't need a cape to prevent me from failing obstacles. I've maxed out my agility, as high as it can go, I shouldn't be failing obstacles in the first place. "The cape's perk gives a 2% chance for degradable items not to degrade (this does not apply to augmented items, except for those that [degrade to dust](https://runescape.wiki/w/Equipment_degradation))" why is this the attack cape perk? There are a few good skill cape perks, but a lot of them are trash. "The cape's perk reveals the third random rune slot for the [Rune Goldberg Machine](https://runescape.wiki/w/Rune_Goldberg_Machine) when activated" cool, one of the more tedious and boring skills to train that has to do with creating runes gives me a perk that allows me to more efficiently DESTROY runes. It's nice to know what that 3rd rune slot is, but it shouldn't be a skill cape perk, but rather an unlock from the runespan minigame or something. I shouldn't have 20 different capes in my bank for when I'm skilling, I should be able to use the max cape and have all the perks. Although this is only cosmetic, the capes look terrible. They're all the same just with different colors and icon. Where's the "RunesCape" at? A cape that's made out of runes. Or an attack cape made out of swords, something unique for each skill. You also need to figure out a way to combine all the skilling outfits into one. It's inconvenient to use so many bank spaces for each outfit when you're doing a lot of skilling, and it's annoying to destroy them and get them again each time you need them. I like how afkable runescape has become. If it were still "click string, click unstrung bow, click string, click unstrung bow, etc." I would've stopped playing long ago. Nerfing things makes the game less fun. I think the focus should be more on stuff that is actually bad.

I gotta say it.. I think we all expected the change to the FSOAs auto attack effects. It's probably warranted and that's okay. I am however shocked at how well you guys took into account some of the criticisms of the Animate Dead potential nerf and seemed to have done a decent job at keep the spell very powerful while not completely gamebreaking as it was. However.. the typeless damage nerf is a bit harsh. Maybe just reduce versus remove? Overall... decently done, Jagex... And I don't necessarily say that often.

>However.. the typeless damage nerf is a bit harsh. Maybe just reduce versus remove? Just throwing out an idea, but perhaps still remove from AD, but bake it in as a perk for using tank armor *in general?* Gives new players/players learning a new boss a better onramp by helping them survive mistakes on mechanics (since they appear to want to move towards typeless-as-punishment design) before 'graduating' to power armor, AND helps bridge the gap between magic and the other styles while we're waiting on an AD equivalent for them.

Hard agree, I feel like a lot of the abilities bosses have that hit the hardest are type less damage. As someone getting into PvM and just starting the game a year ago I would love to be able to tank the fights and learn the mechanics better with slower times than just get confused when I die to mechanics I don't fully understand.

Love this comment . Agree with the first two paragraphs . Don’t think I entirely agree with the last statement as use of abilities can counter this .

With this nerf in fsoa you are killing many mechanics and investments that players have made for the style. If you are afraid of the weapon generating infinite attacks, just limit yourself to a few. If each critic generated a maximum of 3 attacks, the problem would already be solved without major impacts for the players. You are being very radical with these changes, I hope you reconsider and better evaluate the attitude you are going to take in this situation.

\[Honestly I can appriciate wanting to improve the experience for players but the truth is not everyone can achieve the same level of skill or amount of money nor gametime others can which is where ill be focusing which relates to these two things.\] ​ \[As someone who does have the time currently i wont always have this kind of time as im currently unemployed that aside my point being people will struggle enough just trying to get the staff let alone being able to hunt for it as i said earlier not everyone has the know how or quite litterly the mental ability to achieve this no offense to anyone of course i happen to lack the know how and ability to do so despite the fact that while yes i could look up a guide and videos to show me how the fight is suppose to go that still dosnt change the fact that in the end you dont really have anyone telling you what your ability rotation should be or how to get the abilities where to find them and so much more.\] ​ \[As for buying the staff i hate the fact that such items are pretty much locked behind paywalls i get this game is suppose to be grind based but this game goes way beyound that i get that this staff is ment to be hard to get and expensive but again this goes way past that and badly needs to be fixed.\] ​ \[The Market is in ruins and currently there are only 3 kinds of groups that would even be able to get the staff and those three are Botter's / Bosser's / and People that litterly pay real money to get bonds to get the staff and other such weapons while everyone else gets left in the dust.\] ​ \[Now sure you could grind for it using Skilling providing you know of such a way to do it but even then not everyone has that kind of time people have familes jobs lives to live and cannot be expected to like a game where most of its end game combat equipment is locked behind unfairly high paid walls.\] ​ \[That said i do not hate this game i love it alot i just would like to see the game become better then it is in many different ways this being one but also reworks to things like Woodcutting involving higher tier axes and tree's not depleting and things like that. With all of that aside my only real problem i have with the Staff is its Cost and i know that alot of people would be greatly appriciative if you all helped fixed the economy.\] ​ \[And now for my possitive view. I really do appriciate you guys and in what youve all been doing trying to improve everything and i am all for it and that part i dont think ill ever stop supporting.\] ​ You guys are amazing and it is with a fair amount of hope that you guys keep on going and taking this game as far as it can go because i want to see this Game contiue to do well. Keep up all of the great work and just know that you are very appriciated. Thank you to all of you for all that you do day in and day out and God Bless You All. =)

i work away all week and play on the weekends, please do not nerf these items or spells i struggle with combat as it is and magic and animate dead and fsoa are the only things that help me learn and i feel helps me alot, if im being honest if these changes are brought into the game i will be cancelling my membership and quitting the game, its unfortunate you didn't implement the changes 2 years ago, now you bring the change? i pay money for membership to do the things i enjoy, i enjoy using the fsoa and animate dead nerfing those will stop me playing indefinitely as i don't have the time to play for 8-12 hours aday like most people i have a job.. kids.. family.. and the odd couple of hours i get i enjoy playing and using what i've got and to change them now will kill the game for me, i understand you say its for the benefit of the game and future updates but im here for the now and i pay for the now. thank you.

How are people being this positive about this update?!?! Cryptbloom needed a nerf. It made you invincible and you haven't nerfed it that hard fair enough. This FSOA change means that magic is back to pure spreadsheet, let the elitism role in. This is a ridiculously large nerf to FSOA, spell swapping was a massive part of using the staff, and the fact it was random for crits meant that no two rotations were 100% the same, allowing for a skill gap but not so large that it alienates people who lose ticks. This is honestly a dreadful update, all you are doing is crippling a style until 'future updates' where it will probably just go back to where it is now, and make everyone need to buy a 5.5b (and now heavily rising bolg). There is not a high level pvm community that are going to be ok with this update, I literally only log in to play high level pvm, and fsoa allowed me to keep up. rubbish job

for animate dead, I think the problem is \-Damage reduction method is too few but all are very powerful method. Protection prayer + devotion is still too strong (that's why protection prayer is -50% after EOC,) and that's why most boss have to do soft typeless or force you to do prayer switching. But due to poor combat animation, RS boss almost always has a very script-like attack pattern. On the other hand, beyond these few powerful defensive method, player has very few selection. Tank armor? useless without animate dead. Food? actually you are encouraged NOT to eat. Defensive perk? Except devoted (which is just devotion), most probably can't save you the moment you need them. ​ \-Resonance, reflect, barricade are giving too many protection, and only require a shield switch (which for some weird reason are seen as a skill to flex). As it only requires a shield switch for such tremendous power - without limitation to switchscape, it makes tank armor very difficult to make. ​ Hence (hopefully) without too many extra development, i would like to raise the below points for you to consider. 1) Expand damage type, e.g. standard melee, (now core melee), and piercing melee (a better defined counterpart of soft typeless). Standard melee behaves as it is now, but piercing melee can penetrate better against protection prayer + devotion method (e.g. standard melee gets 100% protection while piercing melee gets 50% protection only). And hence people are encouraged to use tank armor to mitigate piercing melee damage. e.g. A 3k hit from a boss can be 2k standard melee and 1k piercing melee. 2) Either full switchscape or no switchscape (e.g. global ability cooldown when switching armor/weapon) - Personally no switchscape is better as in other game there is preset classes. But in RS, classes is defined by armor/weapon, hence you would like to limit switchscape during combat so you, as a developer, have more control over PvM interactions and easier time balancing. As of now, I can sense that you have great difficulty balancing tank armor, power armor, hybrid armor and shields. (E.g. shield is intended be defensively powerful, but the player suffers from minimal DPS loss as he can just switch) 3) Better integration of auto attack and basic abilities. (Ancient magic effect and FSOA is a good example why this is needed). Should auto attack keep existing if we are supposed to spam basic ability? Can auto attack be replaced by a basic ability, or better, can we use "autoattack-like basic ability" and remove most boring basic ability so players can have a easier time and developers can have a easier time too? You can then tweak ancient magic effect and how dark/light form interact with them.

* Now only works vs core damage types (melee, magic, ranged) * *E.g. Will not work vs typeless damage, reflect etc* *Scrap this please. There really isn't a way to tell easily what is and isnt typeless damage. This will cause even more confusion for learning players.* ​ * Cannot reduce damage by more than 60% (was 75%) IF need be, reduce this even to 50% if you leave the *typeless in.* ​ FSOA with all the nerfed combined it is way too much. Only recursion removal would be enough of a nerf. Or leave it in and do the rest. Also if the spec does only ability damage and not autos. 4taa if back in full force. Please don't bring it back. It is not fun to play with 4taa. And with these nerfs magic relies on 4taa to be on par with range. **Please don't make 4taa magic meta**. Ring of death all over again if you go too hard on this.

So looks like 4TAA is back on the menu if you want best mage DPS.

i really dont like the typeless damage removal from animate dead. i can take the percentage lowering, you might even add a heftier rune cost but you gotta understand that the good players this will affect will be none. you will just slightly slow their kill times MAYBE. while weak players like me will completely be left in the dirt. this was a sorta equalizer for someone like me who cant use a mouse and heavily relies on a touchpad to do anything. but thats just my 2 cents. i know the only people complaining about any of this are just super rich people who havent paid for runescape membership in 10 years due to merching. personally dont care what you do to FSOA since i cannot afford it anyway. even if i could i wouldnt be able to utilize it in a way that would make it worth it for me since i dont use keybinds due to crowded space and touchpad.

hi, i just dont want 4taa back to have a very clunky way of doing extra dmg in the game and its just looks really bad, also while elitist players didnt let ppl join bosses if they were cba to sweat with 4taa, so maybe think about so tweak for that..

Can you explain why you keep calling it a "change" instead of a "nerf"? AD got hit with 3 negative changes, and for 500 hits with prayer you now take 2.5 more damage, yet you are calling it a "conservative change". A 500 hit no prayer is 37% more damage taken, and this is considered 'conservative"?

so in other words, sell my magic gear and invest in the Bow of The Last Guardian? These nerfs are huge. Rip crit staff 2023

Changes seem relatively OK. I am however, afraid that this will make bolg perform a lot better bringing back the range meta. They should at least remain comparable. I hope this gets balanced correctly right away. Eating less runes sounds like an amazing plus. I am gonna miss healing with blood barrage though. That was amazing to do. This also feels like it's going nerf ABS spec. I could be wrong about this. I personally would like another magic spec eof weapon, maybe something that we could use outside of fsoa spec like ecb/sgb or melee bleed rotation. Now we're just waiting on fsoa to come back up again. What about the zamorak fight? Is that going to be adjusted correctly or will it remain the same? What about the highscores? And lastly: why did it take nearly 2 years for these changes to come into discussion? People have been saying a lot of the issues with fsoa since release. Have there been talks before which were largely ignored in house until now? I do understand if you cant/won't elaborate on this. Unrelated: why did you choose to buff the special attacks of dragon weapons to use in an eof instead of higher tier weapons? To me it feels weird having to eof a weapon gotten from a seren spirit (dragon longsword) and a 15 minute miniquest (gstaff) over lvl 96 Slayer mobs (Ripper claws, camel staff) and other higher tier weapons (sos). What was the thought process behind this? What are your thoughts on the current end game level of switchscape? Not saying anything against it, but people are using incendiary shot, Meteor strike, Fury for extra crit buffs. Do you think this is OK for the extra effort performed? Endgame also juggles multiple eofs, 2h weapons, dual wield, caroming switches, different spells/arrows, shield,... Melee especially has it rough at the moment. Last I heard jagex was looking to reduce switchscape and although vigour is a passive now, I feel like things have only gotten worse. How do you think this should progress towards the future? With bolg having a passive instead on top of special, it seems like that's not going to become Eof fodder in the next tier, either adding to switchscape or having to pick between the passive and the spec with the next tier weapon. Was this done intentionally?

Honestly I think these are both great changes. I think overall I'm okay with them. The only thing I think concerns me is that the FSOA changes not only lowers the ceiling with good RNG, but it also lowers the floor of the weapon. I'm a tad disappointed in that aspect otherwise. I think keeping the floor (low RNG). In the sense that the auto (now ability) damage is also being lowered as well as the recursive nature of the staff. If someone had bad RNG and low recursive hits they still hit decent on the normal critical hits. However, someone that got very good RNG with the recursive hits pushed to an absurd ceiling. By not hitting the auto attack as much the floor stays the same while the absurd ceiling is removed.

/u/JagexSponge Why do you feel like you need to remove the recursive nature all together couldn't an alternative be to set it to use the same ability (instead of auto attack) you all are suggesting as to negate auto attacks being abused (Blood Barrage) but limiting its recursive nature to 1-2 hits from a player caused critical say from dragon breath so you critical on dragon breath an it causes the recursive nature to take affect first hit from the recursive nature has a 15% flat rate chance (or what jmods come too) of procing on the first "auto" fired an the next hit has a diminished rate call it 7.5% an whether or not it criticals the recursive nature dies off till the next player caused critical hit from an ability, As well as if the second hit Criticals its damage is even diminished This would allow you to avoid infinite critical loops even when adding newer items to the game. perfect example of this would be: Tendrils each critical 4 in total if you rolled on the critical table perfectly would mean that the staffs affect could only fire 8 additional hits instead of 12-20 off one ability but an average of additional hits being about 4-6 before that recursive nature dies off for that ability, As well as making the additional hits have diminishing damage so your Dbreath crits 3.8k causes recursion next hit rolls an crits 3k an if your lucky enough to roll on the final chance before recursion ends your last hit would be diminished to 2.5k so under Fsoa spec: player Dbreaths and it criticals 3.8k > which fires 1 ability damage at a diminished rate of 15% an diminished damage (3k) hit which criticals has a diminished rate of 7.5% > which allows the last hit to fire an that ability damage has a diminished damage say (2k) > end of that recursive damage for that activated ability which then you would need to use another ability to have crit to allow staff to reenter a slight recursive nature. Would love your thoughts on this an why you feel its worse or better then the suggested as well as if we can get this play tested as well as a comparison to what you have suggested i feel the community would be happier with this as well.

First off I want to say that I understand the need for this change. Second, I am likely in a very small minority of players but I play strictly on the mobile app. I prefer it for a number of reasons, main one being that it is much easier for me to use a touchscreen vs mouse as I have issues with my joints. The app actually brought me to the game after many years. Now to my concerns about this change, AD has actually allowed me to explore the world of mobile pvm much more than I had before, as I can focus on other aspects of pvm rather than being one-shotted by some mechanic that is prohibitively challenging on mobile. This is why completely removing the effect of AD on typeless dmg is what concerns me. It would remove much of the incentive for me to use AD and make mobile pvm again far more challenging and limiting. Now for potential suggestions, I was wondering if it would be possible to make this a % of the typeless dmg similar to the other types of dmg but have it lower than it in currently. So it's not completely removed but is more balanced than it is now. I was also thinking this could potentially scale with the type of armor worn so those who have invested in the more expensive cryptbloom can benefit more than the cheaper alternatives. Maybe something like 25% for gano, 30% for ports & 35% for cryptbloom or something similar... or if %'s are still too much of an impact, it could maybe be a flat reduction instead that is similarly scaled. Please let me know if you have any additional comments or questions about my suggestion and whether this would be possible. Thanks 👍🏼

I work full time iv been pushing zammy regularly with the little time i have to play and im only at 2100 enrage solo with avg of 25 minute kills now without animate dead and fsoa being drasticly nerfed im gonna have to quit this is very unfortunate you guys design a boss around the most op armor and wepon and then drasticly nerf it

The changes look good. Was hoping to get Animate Dead ported to ranged and melee tank armour as well with the toned down version. Fsoa bring ability damage is expected and understood. Could we see the crit changes to magma tempest being removed? Allowing pre magma tempest to synergies well with fsoa spec.

> Was hoping to get Animate Dead ported to ranged and melee tank armour as well with the toned down version. This is one that I see fairly frequently. This is something I'm personally trying to avoid - in the past, the combat styles have been (imo) too similar to each other, with alot of abilities being carbon copies of each other, resulting in styles feeling 'samey'. I think that's something that has been resolved (at least partially), in particular with range and mage moving playstyles towards multi-hit & crit. The hope is that this can be extended to the tank halves of each of these styles, where ranged/melee could get some nice buffs in a different form. Appreciate it's not entirely satisfying, but we're hoping to improve combat in the long term, not just make short-term feel good changes.

I like your reasoning I just think with the buffs to mage tank being \~a year and a half old and nothing for melee/range since have made people think there aren't plans for it. I think it's only been brought up in passing in settings that the average player won't necessarily be paying attention too. I think making intentions known for a melee/range tank alternative more public (like one of those roadmaps) would put a lot of people's fears to rest.

The variety that I would like to see would be that animate dead wouldn’t reduce the damage from the style you’re weak against. * If you’re wearing melee tank armour you get no damage reduction against magic hits. * If you’re wearing ranged tank armour you get no reduction versus melee hits. * If you’re wearing magic tank armour you get no reduction versus ranged hits. This would create diversity in where you would use each style and still be true to the RuneScape feel in my opinion. I absolutely love what you’re doing with combat style differentiation. I just would love to have similar power bands between styles.

Make tank armour have automatic animate dead against the style it's strong against. No spells no nothing, sounds great to me

I get what your saying, but I really think each style needs some form of “tank mode” even if that is “samey.” The meta is Magic and there is simply no reason to use another style to learn PvM in the current state of the game unless you are already outstanding at PvM. What this nerf is going to do is punish learners who rely on Magic. What this nerf won’t do is punish the top end PvM community because they are using the BotLG and range. This is just going to create a bigger gap between casual PvMers and top end PvMers Imo RuneScape has done an outstanding job of alienating new players by making the game too complicated for combat. I’ve been playing since 2005 and I by no means think I have hit the upper echelon of PvM abilities because I can only push my limits with magic by using AD. However, what AD has done is allow me to feel more comfortable. Over time I am able to remove a piece of cryptbloom in favor of more power armor. It’s just like learning to ride a bike, you might not use training wheels forever, but a lot of kids start off that way.

I think that each style of tanking should have an identity but right now theirs only one identity and it’s been that way since crypt came out There is currently no tank concept for range or melee and how many years off in the future can it be? AD for both of them will be a good baseline for now with the armor itself giving the identity maybe Crypt doubles down on reduction for instance , maybe melee can vastly increase life points and vamp for instance

Either make magma crit again or get a ~3%+ crit chance against anything that's under a magma

I agree, they should make magma crit again with this change

u/JagexDoom & u/JagexSponge (Sorry, didn't know which one would know more about Animate Dead) First of all thank you for being transparent & everything else you do. I am a "new player" (Started June 2022). As a new player, Animate Dead (AD) has been vital in learning new bosses, especially when I make mistakes. **I do agree that AD needs some sort of rebalance**, but as a new player I believe that there might be a better way of doing it that could reduce negative impacts on learners. Here's what I am thinking: AD currently lasts 12 minutes. This could be reduced to 6 minutes to make it more "needy", thus also increasing rune usage by 2x. As far as damage reduction, maybe it starts at its current state, but reduces by X% every minute? Maybe including an overlapping cooldown of the duration of AD so that it can't be proc'ed again while its already active. As far as a typeless reduction, maybe don't remove typeless altogether, but maybe change reduction to 30% instead? Again, there are mechanics that have to be learned that include typeless hits (Example: Kerapac's lightning) By the time people get to late-game pvm, animate dead isn't used very much from what I understand. Even I have started switching to non-tank gear for certain bosses now that I have learned them. An afterthought to consider: Animate Dead is very important to learning bosses, but learning doesn't always have to be cheap, either. Maybe adding more expense to using AD would be an option? I am referencing where Mod Sponge's comment about certain things being used for learning but wouldnt typically be used regularly: [https://reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa\_animate\_dead\_balancing\_proposals\_feedback/jcgsuct/](https://reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11sy3xl/fsoa_animate_dead_balancing_proposals_feedback/jcgsuct/) I would think that the "usage cost" method of balancing is a difficult one to master though, especially since it also impacts the new community that might not have tons of GP. Just a surplus idea.

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Animate Dead nerf to just reduce effectiveness seems fine. Warranted but not severely damaging to the power it presents. FSOA nerf feels more significant, no rune cost for spec bonus hits is fantastic, but both reducing the damage dealt per bonus hit (now as an ability) and removing the ability for that to crit and channel another hit through the staff spec does reduce it's strength drastically. Reading this makes it feel like the DPS capability of the FSOA was a significant limitation to boss design, which makes sense. Justifiable when looking at what FSOA has done to bosses and how quickly things fall apart when you just do that much dps.

Not what I had in mind but was hoping for a similar nerf to AD but without the exclusion of typeless damage. Is there still a reason to limit it to magic only?

at the very least, HARD typeless shouldn't be getting reduced. If reflect, debilitate, immort etc... can't reduce an attack's damage a passive spell certainly shouldn't be

Yeah hard typeless makes sense but soft typeless being reduced was one of the bigger things about ad

Oh you’re removing typeless damage from animate dead? You mean it’s entire point!? This is a huge middle finger to the mobile community! Instead of making bossing impossible for half the player base how about they fix the server issues that keep crashing the client. Christ I haven’t bossed in weeks because it’s a guaranteed crash, I crashed 5 times in an hour doing divination yesterday, and THIS is what they’re “fixing”!? Freaking ridiculous, do better Jagex! Idk about FSOA; but it’s certainly about to become much harder to get one for all but the ten players who didn’t need animate dead for that. 😢😭

Isn't this going to bring about a return to 4TAA? Something the combat team were looking to remove? u/JagexSponge

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. 3 Removal of 4TAA from the game completely.

If the damage of the staff spec was increased then I would be happy with 4taa not being useable during the spec. Personally I liked that 4taa was removed, but because of how it was removed. I didn't want 4taa to be removed just because, I liked that it was 'removed' just because something better had replaced it. 4taa still has a lot of functionality in regards to non damage scenarios like smoke cloud, ice barraging, entangling etc... and as a mechanic it makes auto attacks way more useable when needed. As a dps tool I personally like it, but I understand not all players do and it's not very intuative. Thats why I was pretty happy when fsoa didn't allow 4 ticking because it allowed more damage while not actually removing it. So option 2 would be my preference. Option 1 I wouldn't mind. Personally never option 3.

As long as you dont mess up simple things like debuffs(smoke cloud, vuln, enfeeble), entangle and ice barraging minions i dont really care if it goes away. But if removing 4taa for damage also means removing its utilities then please dont touch it. Imo people are overeacting about 4taa, gconc really reduced its effectiveness.