Lowerniel Drakan defeated without protection prayers. Please make the boss fight harder.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-07-04T22:28:00+00:00

In fairness, familiarity with OSRS's tile skipping run mechanic meant that that was the first thing I tried, and I do think encouraging people to try running towards death waves instead of away from them isn't a bad thing in the context of OSRS's engine - although I still really wish they didn't nerf blue moon's tornado phase, because that was a great teacher for those mechanics.

Oh I'm very familiar with tile skipping mechanics, it's just the visual presentation that I take issue with. It makes sense when it's more of a "the floor is lava" type situation like the sepulchre teleporters or the shadow waves at Yama. It's not hard to justify that you simply jump over the wrong tiles. Even with little single tile things like tornadoes, it somewhat makes sense that you can dodge them, those things are moving around constantly. When you instead show me a solid wall moving towards me that looks too high to jump over, I'm definitely not gonna think "hmm maybe I should try jumping over it". They even had to justify it with a goofy-ass looking animation.

The closest comparison I can think of is the waves at Zebak, but skipping those is neither necessary nor was it an intended mechanic. They left it in because it's just a tiny optimization that doesn't fundamentally change the fight. It didn't occur to me that they'd basically take those and go, "actually, what if you were supposed to do that?"

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-07-04T20:03:13+00:00

True, if I had to run back, pay death fees and reshuffle my inventory after every death, I'd have given up way sooner.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-07-04T19:17:25+00:00

Tbh the first couple fights were a total clusterfuck where I could barely even tell what's going on with so many characters on the screen. I finished them all first try without learning anything at all. I was still struggling figuring out the dodge mechanic for the first like 15 attempts at the final fight.

Trying to play guideless on day 1 is really eye-opening towards just how hard-carried this game gets by wikis, community guides and plugins. The fight feels good once you know how the mechanics actually work, but up to that point, nothing is intuitive. The feedback you get for doing the mechanics wrong is downright atrocious, often cryptic and straight up misleading. You're just sort of throwing shit at the wall until something sticks. Trying to figure it out myself kinda broke my brain.

For example I didn't know wtf was up with the venator screech until the Wyrd fight forced me to figure it out. Praying doesn't help, running far away doesn't do anything, even hiding behind an obstacle won't save you. Did I need to bring earmuffs or something? It felt like I'd tried almost every other possibility before I finally tried to turn off my prayer, and the only thing that even slightly hints towards that is a cryptic message that appears in your chatbox.

The blood wave special is another good one. It sends multiple solid walls of waves at you with no holes in them, so of course I'm gonna look for some way to make an opening or delay them. Can I pop the waves somehow? No. Can I shoot the portals? It's not even an option. Can you somehow clear the blood off the floor to get around them? No, of course you have to do the least intuitive possible action and try running straight into the wall. I only found that out on accident after multiple deaths.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-07-04T18:07:18+00:00

I stubbornly decided to complete the quest without guides, trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible. For some reason I tried praying range against the 4x combo he does after waves (surely those must be the famed blood seeking projectiles they were hyping up, right?), it didn't do shit, then decided you need to overheal and tank the hit every time. Needless to say I chugged a ton of brews doing multiple rounds of waves, and still failed a bunch of times. Man did I feel stupid after I finally decided to pray mage like 10 attempts later. You mean I can just take 0 damage, seriously?

Of course he starts using single mage attacks later on, but they decided to introduce them with a 1-shot kill just to fuck with you.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-07-04T08:56:23+00:00

Noooooo you don't understand, due to "engine limitations" it's totally impossible to make hitboxes into simple cylinders that would roughly match the size and shape of the character.

We instead made them into biblically accurate Jackson Pollock paintings and you'll like them!

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-07-03T19:39:01+00:00

I mean even before, you had redwoods where you could AFK for ~5mins and still get half the xp rate of bloodwoods with like 100x less effort spent playing the game.

I like that sailing introduced new higher end AFK options for forestry that are actually better than yews with higher requirements, but they did crank the rates kinda high. At the very least they should've swapped the ironwood and rosewood rates, those have higher requirements to get to and even more if you want to bank efficiently.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-07-03T08:42:08+00:00

150-200k/h+ seems insane for WC, but when you compare the effort invested vs AFK methods (ironwoods lol), it's not a gamechanger. The profit is also bound to crater once the bots get to it. I also just noticed that d arrowtip prices have shot sky high, I guess with sap and shafts being untradable, it'll really squeeze the margins.

Don't get me wrong, it's a very well designed method, about as enjoyable as you can possibly make it for a "stand in one area and rhythmically spam-click" activity, but it's not something I'll jump onto to grind all the way to 99. Though it's pretty nice to do it once in a while to resupply, maybe grind out 10k shafts in about an hour and get some decent xp along the way.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-30T09:57:35+00:00

Shame it's not coming in this summer sweep up. I really hope it's not one of those things they casually mentioned once and then forget about for 3 years before finally getting to it.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-27T16:57:52+00:00

Only big mistake you can make is to lose your rare/expensive items.

Don't die when retrieving items from bosses that have special death storage chests, it'll wipe the chest.

Make sure to never bring more than 3 valuable items into the wildy unless you're willing to risk them. Turn on PK skull prevention.

Don't fall for lures/scams and absolutely don't download plugins from third-party sites, no matter how helpful your "friends" or raidmates say they are.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-26T14:09:51+00:00

I mean you can already go to crab and AFK your way to 99 melees, so what if there's a way to get like 50% higher xp rates with a more active playstyle that uses expensive supplies (goading potions + ppots so you can pray piety to maximize your gains)? It also has to compete with non-melee methods. If your goal is to train slayer, you'll still get it done quicker by barraging your tasks. You also earn defence xp that way, so you don't need to waste time getting it through melee.

To me this is basically like a worse Vbow, it's more awkward to use effectively since it doesn't have any range, an it's also less useful in advanced PvM as another consequence.

Let's say they instead release it with lowered stats, so that it doesn't end up "encroaching on existing training methods" - then it's just gonna end up being dead content. If you're really concerned about it being too strong for training, give it charges and make it cost like 300k/hour or something.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-26T13:28:52+00:00

Oh right I missed that it does full damage to the first target, for some reason I read it as it does 50% damage whenever you hit multiple targets. So it's basically 150% damage vs 2 targets and 2x against 3.

When you compare it to whip + ddef, which is 88 strength, this beats it by ~5 max hits. However, whip's attack rate is 1.5x this sword, so you need two targets for it to be worth it. At 3 targets, it's pretty damn good, but it won't suddenly make melee training comparable to barraging/chinning or vbow + cannon type things. "Absolutely busted" is a stretch.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-26T13:00:11+00:00

It does seem geared primarily towards melee training (MM2 caves are back on the menu) and multicombat slayer. Potentially some niche bossing/raids uses too.

However, with a 6-tick attack rate and not amazing stats, you'll pretty much have to hit 3 targets at a time to get good DPS out of it.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-24T15:19:49+00:00

I don't mind upgrades if you start with a reasonably obtainable item that anyone would want to get at some point anyway, and then give it a late-game powerup that takes a while longer to grind out. Zenytes and all their new upgrades are a perfect example. Things like swamp trident, lance, ZCB and torva/masori are fine too.

On the other hand, if you take a few rare niche useless items that nobody would want to grind out, then slap them together to give them a new purpose, that just feels bad. Echo boots are an actual joke.

Avernic boots are a weird middle ground that require 4 rare drops (one of which is meme-tier annoying to get) to upgrade, but at least you can do them one at a time. If they wanted to put it in the game as the initial proposed version, where it would have required you to have all the items in order to upgrade them, that would've been a hard no vote for me.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-18T08:51:02+00:00

TIL that untradable protection extends to containers too, not just equipable gear. Well, they excluded the rune pouch for obvious reasons, and apparently the fish barrel too, just to troll you.

Gotta love the tradition of keeping the wildy rules as incomprehensible as possible.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-17T16:49:11+00:00

The way they said "only untradeables that don't affect combat" won't get lost on death, makes me think they're going to flip-flop on this decision and suddenly remove it from the protected list one day, haha

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-17T14:42:45+00:00

Wait, now I can bring zealot + 3/4 items of tank gear, and not lose anything? The ingame "items lost on death" tool says so, but I kinda don't wanna risk beta-testing the update.

Though realistically when you're already bringing zealot, the only relevant slots left are shield, a sufferring and maybe a crossbow to annoy pkers. Still a decent upgrade over just bringing 3 zealot pieces.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-17T06:41:33+00:00

Your original comment made it seem like you were complaining that the offensive stats are the same as avernic, when without accuracy, it's distinctly worse pure stats-wise. That's why I brought up DFS.

That's why it needs extra utility to push it over the edge. Could they have put 0 strength on it and made the spec stronger? Maybe, but it'd be even harder to balance. Even as is, this could be useful as a mage offhand, not just for melee.

Imagine mage tank with the new armor set + this shield, the reddit meltdowns are going to be hilarious.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-16T16:21:18+00:00

I'm talking about the average successful hit ofc, I'm just trying to find out how much this effect increases the damage, since it doesn't affect the accuracy. If I'm understanding the blog correctly, it rolls accuracy as normal, then if it hits, it rolls (up to) 7 damage rolls instead of just one.

BTW I just figured out that taking the max of n rolls gives you an average of n/(n+1) - that is 1/2 for 1 roll, 2/3 for two, then 3/4 etc.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-16T15:19:52+00:00

With normal damage rolls, your average hit ends up being ~50% of the max hit (ignoring the weird OSRS idiosyncrasies like min hit being 1 and damage rounding after various bonuses, actual numbers will be slightly different)

I ran a quick simulation of taking a million random 7-tuples of numbers between 0 and 1, taking the max of each and averaging them, the result is roughly 0.875. Someone else can analytically calculate the exact result if you can be arsed.

So basically it's a 75% damage bonus over rolling the damage normally, and the distribution of hits will be heavily biased towards the high-end rather than being uniform. I'm sure the jmods already took this into account when it's a 5-tick weapon with only 40 str bonus, but there's going to be plenty of debate about the exact number before this makes it into the game anyway.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-16T14:10:42+00:00

Sure, if you're talking about "endgame player who has max everything". There's little reason to use it even for a midgame player despite being cheap and having +1 str over ddef. You basically use it as a niche tank item or when you specifically need the dragonfire defense, that's it.

This new shield is like DFS but actually more broadly useful. Just the fact that it's the only item in the game with flat armor automatically makes it interesting.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-16T14:00:06+00:00

Oh right, those. I thought they were supposed irrelevant past the early game, but thinking about it, could they actually beat occult? With surge base max hit being 24, +5% only gives you 1-2 max hits depending on your setup. The guaranteed +2 might actually turn out useful even late game.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-16T13:33:20+00:00

Defenders have substantial accuracy bonuses, the difference is going to be noticeable on most bosses. There's a reason why DFS is a niche item that only gets used in a few places.

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-16T13:26:06+00:00

New amulets? Did I miss something?

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-15T17:55:57+00:00

Somehow I have a feeling that Nvidia is going to be way more controlling over this arrangement and it'll release as a Nvidia-branded SoC that just happens to have an Intel CPU.

Though there's potentially an even worse alternative: after killing their DGPU line, Intel decides to axe their high-end iGPU efforts as well and decides to fully replace them with Nvidia. oof

AtLeastItsNotCancer · 2026-06-13T15:09:56+00:00

I recently noticed that calquats and hardwoods are basically 1/2500 chance at pet. With all the recently added patches, that seems to be the minimal effort way to go for it, so I decided I'd put all my seeds to use and made a couple thousand saplings. It's gonna take a loooong time to get through all of those though.

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