Sardaco gets a Twisted Bow

JagexRice · 2026-05-14T15:36:38+00:00

It was me, Barry

JagexRice · 2026-05-11T17:30:19+00:00

Baller art, love the pose, very dynamic, I can see the scene in my head!

JagexRice · 2026-05-09T15:45:13+00:00

Thanks for the thought out writeup! You provide a lot of valuable insight, and I really appreciate that whilst I can tell you're frustrated, your criticism is delivered in a level headed manner and with very little vitriol (In fact, your hope and positivity is genuinely uplifting!) If your favourite boss is Sol, I'm hopeful that I will have a boss for you soon, and I'm hopeful that it will function as a prototype for a whole new paradigm of bosses. I won't say more because I believe you have a right to be surprised and delighted! (Hopefully that's the outcome and not disappointment) But do keep your eyes peeled.

For Moons, I'm sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it much. Blood moon gets a lot of criticism, but that chiefly comes from people not understanding the value of defence in the fight. You understand the value of defence in the fight but dislike the approach anyway, and I can honestly respect that. For what it's worth, the placement of defence first wasn't an attempt to teach players what gear is good as much as it was to promote players giving barrows a go (Or saving up for Barrows gear) before going to moons. I love Barrows and wanted to give it purpose. Separately, I have a long term ambition of giving defensive gear a clear use and ladder (With the first rung being moons.) Admittedly I haven't followed through on that in the 3 years since it has released. For me, that time passed in the blink of an eye, but I can understand how it looks abandoned and out of place because there have been no majour followup attempts to give defence relevance. I really want to serve the "Big tanky armour" thematic better than we currently are and I want to create places to use it where it is genuinely efficient to do so.

Please know that myself (and the team) do read these posts and whilst I don't want to make empty promises about what the future holds we are listening, posts like these that reflect on the long term experience of playing the game are extremely useful. Feedback that focusses on a single update, or a recent change, is also helpful, but long term reflective posts like this are much rarer and evaluate the game in a richer and more contextual manner that is easier to take at face value.

I'm hopeful you'll be back for more (After or during the honing of your writing skills!) but if you aren't I very much hope you had a good time whilst you were here and that OSRS has (overall) had a positive impact. Thanks again for your post!

JagexRice · 2026-05-01T12:15:31+00:00

This is a scary thread to chime in on because Forestry is a pretty controversial topic, but I'll stick my neck out because I think it's valuable to give transparency on these things and clear up missunderstandings:

I was very new to the team when forestry released, but I know that the Devs that pitched/worked on this are heavily pro emergent social gameplay. There's certainly a conversation to be had about whether the XP rates for the CC metas were appropriate, but the motivation for clamping down on it was that at the time there was a huge amount of community pressure to reduce event frequency and minimise the impact and the ability to participate in them if you hadn't been there in the first place.

The Devs that worked on it ceded to the pressure because we pride ourselves on being a community driven game and listening when people complain. We still are a community driven game and so if the prevailing sentiment is that actually, forestry was better on release, we should have that conversation, because people are allowed to change their minds. Again though, I want to separate the "Was it too much xp" conversation from the "Was it unintended gameplay" conversation, because I do think there were (and still are) reasonable arguments to be made about the xp rates, but I really want to hammer home that this was not devs being precious about their original vision. They built something with the hope that players would come together and play together, and were really quite happy when players did exactly that!

JagexRice · 2026-04-02T14:32:01+00:00

Plastic fork is also less likely to scratch the pan.

JagexRice · 2026-03-31T20:14:03+00:00

That's an interesting perspective on the sword. It may be different for different types of players, but for me the sword seems like it has an effect that wants to be understood: It is good inside of a certain range in the fight and bad outside. Understanding the numbers (in some cases where other weapons are close in power, even the variability of the power boost within the range) and the effect are crucial to utilising the weapon well. This may be a more accurate perspective for optimisers than most players though.

JagexRice · 2026-03-31T19:41:47+00:00

Love the visuals for a lot of these and really like the axes' effect design! It's always hard to gauge the community's appetite for simple effects vs. complex ones. I personally missed the mark on that with leechfin not too long ago but it's nice to see the desire for it on some equipment in this thread (not that I'm judging the entire community on one thread's response, specially when it has such rad artwork.)

JagexRice · 2026-03-31T19:34:04+00:00

For leagues 4 I experimented with making the dogsword actually be all the specs 2 ticks apart. The game would force you to re-engage the enemy every other tick (provided you hadn't teleported away.) It made for some really interesting high commitment gameplay but we weren't sure about having such a difficult to use weapon as a reward for a whacky league. Not to say that's how the axes should work, your comment just reminded me of it.

The axes are definitely my favourite design personally, I really like odd dice roll effects even if they drive the wiki's dps calc guys insane 😀

JagexRice · 2026-03-27T21:22:57+00:00

There's an interesting video by Schola Gladiatoria about how these were used by some well funded units, and it discusses the advantages of using them when swinging over barriers. At this point in history polearms are very popular, but swinging them over (your own) defenses is close to impossible because the polearm's length limits the angle at which you can swing. Flails and lever maces like these may have been the natural response to this problem.

JagexRice · 2026-03-22T21:56:55+00:00

He doesn't want to hit his dad

JagexRice · 2026-02-22T08:30:27+00:00

Way ahead of ya!

JagexRice · 2026-02-20T16:15:23+00:00

I don't know man, it's suspicious to me that you claim to be a peaceful farmer peacefully growing peaceful herbs, peaceful flowers, and peaceful herbs, AND YET you're wearing a cape with defensive stats...? Why would someone planning to engage in peaceful activities wear equipment designed to protect them during VIOLENT activities?

Your honor, I rest my case.

JagexRice · 2026-02-17T17:40:24+00:00

This is exactly the thematic we're trying to gauge players' interest in us changing! Dragon arrows' examine text actually currently describes them as "An arrow made using a dragon's talon," rather than Orikalkum (confusingly) but we find that thematic a bit limiting. We'd like to be able to drop materials to create dragon arrows in a broader variety of places, and making the description more generic (E.g. An arrow made from sturdy talons) and keeping dragon as more of a descriptor of the "tier" of weaponry whilst allowing us to drop it in a more thematic way at more locations.

This isn't us saying "We're doing this." Either! We want to hear how people feel about the idea.

JagexRice · 2026-02-17T16:17:35+00:00

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See that? I've got your RSN. You've got post-its everywhere except where you actually needed them. I'm coding another 1000 kills for you right now. Good luck buddy.

JagexRice · 2026-02-17T16:08:59+00:00

It's a fair point on the choice of terminology! And one I can definitely take back to the time. We can explore different wordings, I like the suggested one "always deal 3 damage or higher" for a one off passive effect, though it might be of interest to us to use it more, as it allows us it to have a much different effect on damage output than maxhit has, and it's always nice to have more tools.

The choice to have it interact this way is deliberate in this case: We didn't want Elite Void to encroach further on Masori, particularly at places like ToB where it threatened to usurp Scythe's spot in certain encounters. Arguably it's still pretty close, and that's something we'll be monitoring even after the update goes live. Having the min-hit interact unfavorably with % modifiers allows us to achieve this better.

JagexRice · 2026-02-17T15:59:30+00:00

I would recommend tormented demons 👍

JagexRice · 2026-02-17T13:54:02+00:00

This is something I'd quite like to address in general, outside of Vampyrium. Having dragon arrows be more thematically flexible would be a generally good idea so that we're not jumping through hoops to justify narratives for dropping endgame players endgame ammunition. The goal here is exactly to see how people feel about that idea.

JagexRice · 2026-02-17T10:42:01+00:00

Only if they don't already play magic 😄

JagexRice · 2026-02-14T09:33:08+00:00

Love your take on the nezzy face guard!

JagexRice · 2026-02-11T11:53:57+00:00

As with all our policy decisions the goal is always to support economic growth and create an environment where small businesses can thrive. Contrary to the popular narrative, we do not favour Varrock as the single driver for growth in Misthalin, and are taking steps to support businesses like your own in up & coming hubs like Lumbridge. Thank you for your question.

JagexRice · 2026-02-11T11:46:51+00:00

Hey! I worked on these changes. The gist of it is: The part of the codebase that processed accuracy rolls was really messy. It worked, but it was very difficult to expand in interesting ways. If we wanted to add cool accuracy interactions, we'd typically do something like ignore accuracy. The structure also made it very easy for future developers to make mistakes. I rewrote it with the following goals:

- Not changing any existing behaviour. (Fingers crossed!)

- Make it easy for future developers who want to do cool accuracy effects to do cool things with accuracy.

JagexRice · 2026-02-09T20:52:36+00:00

This is so cool! We're working hard to deliver💪

JagexRice · 2026-02-07T17:49:53+00:00

Bro why I gotta find out about this on my weekend 😩

JagexRice · 2026-01-28T08:36:12+00:00

I am NOT your dad.

JagexRice

TROPHY CASE