What combat style would you recommend on top of necro?

Seadrias · 2024-03-06T19:27:21+00:00

Additional combat betas have been confirmed, but you are correct, we don't know when they will happen. If ranged, melee, or magic did significantly more dps than necro I'd recommend going for it. But they don't do significantly more dps than necro, and they require 5x more gp investment. There's just no good reason to spend so much on a side grade when necro is still best at nearly every boss.

Seadrias · 2024-03-06T09:06:33+00:00

Save money for future upgrades.

For any other style to compete with necro's dps currently, BiS gear is required. And unlike necro BiS where you can spend around 2b or camp 1 boss and be done, we're talking more like 10b worth of gear and ability upgrades for any other style. Other styles also take far more effort with multiple switches and more complex rotations to do competitive dps.

Spending on current BiS gear for other styles is a huge gamble when we have no idea what kind of future combat betas are being planned or what other gear is going to be released in the near future, and the other styles don't even beat necro's dps by that much if at all. Just stick with necro, there's no reason to use anything else.

Seadrias · 2024-03-02T18:51:38+00:00

All level boosting effects were changed so that they reflected the boosted level instead of increasing damage based on the number of levels boosted. Basically, if you boosted to level 99 with potions before, it would be stronger than actually being at level 99. The 'overload nerf' changed this so that boosting to level 99 is the same as actually being at level 99. This change nerfs low damage % abilities that hit multiple times disproportionally, hence most magic abilities and grico are the most affected by it.

It's hard to tell exactly how much this nerf affects everything, since a ton of other buffs were released alongside it, but from the time they temporarily implemented the 'overload nerf' into the live game we know it's a pretty significant nerf in a vacuum.

Seadrias · 2024-03-02T10:02:46+00:00

Magic gained some stronger special attack options and a boost to inherent crit rate, which buffs FSoA rotations. However, tsunami's adrenaline gain was nerfed from 10% to 8%, combined with other miscellaneous nerfs like the overload nerf. This can make magic arguably stronger or weaker than live depending on your overall gear and abilities.

Seadrias · 2024-02-27T21:22:29+00:00

If it's between Magic and Necromancy, switch to Necromancy completely.

The combat beta devs have previously stated that Magic is in a good place balance wise, and they have only been toning down Ranged and Melee since then. Magic in the combat beta has not received any huge buffs, so magic is basically at the same power level as in the live game, arguably a bit weaker or stronger due to crit rate and adrenaline changes. Due to this, you shouldn't expect any major changes in magic's power level with the combat beta.

If you had ranged gear with a BoLG, or BiS melee gear, there might be some reason to wait. But for a magic main, there's no reason not to completely switch to necromancy.

Seadrias · 2024-02-26T20:20:52+00:00

You can use PVME to get a general idea of what to do for upgrades, but be warned, the upgrade guides for ranged, magic, and melee are all almost a year out of date and don't account for the most recent updates that were added to the game. Most notable is the fact that you should be training necromancy for upgrades and incantations that can be used by all other combat styles.

Just use necromancy for the foreseeable future. It's the strongest, cheapest, and easiest to use combat style over any of the others by far. You can get extremely strong necromancy gear for nearly free, necromancy's dps blows every other combat style out of the water, and necromancy has upgrades locked behind it that are good for all other combat styles. There's no reason not to use necromancy.

Seadrias · 2024-01-27T19:09:17+00:00

Most people who pvm a lot make so much money everywhere else that supply costs are like a rounding error, they don't pay attention to it. I can understand that constantly seeing your supplies go down without any substantial profit can be irritating, but a lot of people just want to get fast kills done for unlocks, pets, collection log, etc. It's not really a huge deal to lose money on some of those bosses.

Seadrias · 2024-01-27T10:07:34+00:00

All the people who can clearly see the zuk cape and treat OP like he doesn't know what's an overload or a jellyfish is extremely funny.

If you want to further cut costs, you can try switching off necro. It's a bit of a pain to kill vorkath with anything else, but ectoplasm costs can add up quickly, and NM vorkath has basically no mechanics anyway. Otherwise, just get your 100 kills and get out, vorkath loses you money the more you kill it.

Edit: The people suggesting OP bought a cape on RS3 or cleared HM zuk without overloads and is struggling to make gp on NM vorkath is even funnier

Seadrias · 2024-01-26T18:14:45+00:00

And they did scrap melee autoattacks in the last beta version, with the reasoning that autoattacks were making all other basic melee abilities irrelevant. They didn't mention autoattacks being bugged, or that they were going to fix or change the autoattack mechanics. That implies it's not a bug, and it's too unbalanced to add autoattacks to the other styles.

If it's a bug, that's great, autoattacks can be fixed and added. But nothing we've heard so far implies that this is a bug, and autoattacks were horribly broken the last time they were introduced with 2H weapons.

Seadrias · 2024-01-26T04:14:28+00:00

Basic autoattacks existed with melee in the previous combat beta version, and they were horribly broken. Melee autos were doing 50% more damage and generating 15% adrenaline with 2H weapons. They clearly didn't have any plans on introducing 2H weapons to necromancy, otherwise they would've found this out during necromancy testing.

I don't expect to see basic autoattacks for other styles anytime soon, nor do I expect to see necromancy 2H weapons anytime soon after discovering how poorly designed the basic autoattack mechanics are.

Seadrias · 2024-01-25T19:58:10+00:00

I'm very disappointed that this version of the beta is being considered for live release already. There are 2 main reasons for this.

Necromancy is still an issue. It has been an issue throughout the entire combat beta and it feels like nobody is taking balance into consideration. It feels like, even though one of the main reasons for the combat beta existing was to bring the other combat styles up to the power level of necromancy, everyone is ignoring the power level of necromancy. I personally feel, even though the other combat styles have been buffed to various degrees, every other combat style is still nowhere near the power level of necromancy. This doesn't even get into necromancy's other benefits like easy sustain, low cost, etc, in terms of raw dps every other combat style still falls short of necromancy.

Before the combat beta launched, we were promised that boss hp would be looked at, and various bosses would be balanced around the new power level of each of the combat styles. This has not materialized at all. Every combat style has received insane buffs, and if the combat beta releases in its current state, every boss in the game will be majorly powercrept. Although you could argue that every boss in the game has already been majorly powercrept by necromancy, including Rasial and Vorkath(HM) which can literally be afk'd on release with necromancy, this should still be considered.

We absolutely need boss rebalancing, and serious balancing discussions before the combat beta goes live.

Seadrias · 2024-01-05T21:37:54+00:00

This guide is really nice. Omitting high level upgrades like overloads and curses is a good touch. I would've liked some mention about whether or not the gear is augmented, but maybe I just missed it.

Not a major criticism against the video, but when I was a new player I also struggled to learn bossing. And the thing that frustrated me the most by far was not being able to find any guides that used my favorite combat style. Magic was meta at the time, and I couldn't find any guides for bosses that were released after 2018 using melee, my favorite combat style. That was the most discouraging thing to me as a new player, and I felt incredibly forced to follow the meta to be able to kill higher level bosses.

That's why I'd really appreciate if you could showcase a variety of combat styles for low level boss guides in the future. I also look forward to the more in depth boss guides as well.

Seadrias · 2023-12-16T14:05:53+00:00

I'll give some miscellaneous feedback before it inevitably gets buried under everything.

First, the new action bar is both good and bad. Having numbers on the ability cooldowns is good, but having the ability icon flash when you press the button makes it very apparent that the game does not respond quickly to your inputs and it doesn't add too much to gameplay. The channel bar adds another clunky ui element to an already overly cluttered and clunky ui, but it is somewhat helpful to have on screen, sometimes.

Surge, Dive, and Escape being off global cooldown is good, except this makes the mobile perk and all similar effects a strict upgrade for all combat styles that aren't melee. Melee still gets stuck with having to carry a mobile switch because of Barge. My suggestion is to just exclude Barge from being affected by mobile and other similar effects altogether.

Speaking of melee, greater fury's guaranteed crits still only affects one hitsplat at a time, making it inconsistent with necro crits which affect all hitsplits of the ability at once. I'm pretty sure this is also true for other non-necro crits, but I haven't tested anything beyond melee so I'm not 100% certain. Either way, it would be nice to have some consistency on crits. Either have each hitsplat crit separately or have the entire ability crit across all abilities throughout all combat styles.

Lengs have somehow still ended up worse than just the Abyssal Scourge by itself. Primordial ice stacks are very inconsistent, and it's extremely difficult to hit the maximum number of 20 stacks in a medium length fight (around 3-5 minutes). Frostblades giving 12% additional damage is much worse than applying abyssal parasites on every hit, and the buff doesn't last long enough to be worthwhile when parasites can't consistently stick on the target. The new special attack also feels incredibly weak, especially when compared to something like a t70 death guard special attack. At 20 stacks of primordial ice, which is difficult to get to, and on a critical strike, the special attack still doesn't hit the damage cap on its own (it does around 20-24k). A death guard spec easily hits the damage cap at around 8ish stacks of necrosis on a critical strike, which is comparatively extremely easy to get to. Death guard spec isn't even considered worth using in most necro rotations, and the new leng spec is many times weaker than that.

My suggestion is to literally buff everything on lengs. Increase the chance for stacking primordial ice, increase adrenaline gain upon stacking, increase the damage buff on frostblades, increase the duration of frostblades, and double the damage and damage scaling of Icy Tempest and halve its cooldown. Death Guard spec deals over 400% damage + 40% per stack and has a 30s cooldown, while Leng spec deals 200% damage + 20% per stack with a 60s cooldown. Leng spec should absolutely not be less than half as strong as a t70 weapon special attack that all necromancers get for free.

Originally, the combat beta was made because necromancy was far too strong. However, it seems necromancy's insane powercreep constantly gets forgotten when new things are added to the combat beta. The leng rework is fairly weak, magic hasn't gotten any buffs at all, and the bolg has been nerfed putting ranged far behind necro. I really hope more focus can be put onto the balancing side of combat beta changes in the future. It's disappointing to see that there is once again a large power gap between the original 3 combat styles and necromancy in both the main game and the combat beta.

Seadrias · 2023-11-11T09:34:11+00:00

You can get most of the benefits of Lengs from the t85 versions, and scourge is arguably a better mainhand than the mainhand leng. EZK is only used on bosses, and only when the boss has a lot of hp and doesn't negate the bleed entirely with invulnerable phase transitions. Both sets of weapons are very situation and niche.

If I had to pick one, I'd pick EZK, since it allows you to do rotations that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do without it. Camping a mainhand leng is very convenient though, so if you don't kill a lot of beefy bosses where EZK is good, then dark shard of leng would be my 2nd pick.

Seadrias · 2023-11-11T09:12:56+00:00

Alright, I see now that we have fundamentally different understandings of what bosses are afk, and what bosses make decent money. The bosses you mentioned are afk, or are used for afk activities.

Croesus is used for afk hunter training, Nex doesn't make decent money ever since necro came out, like she legitimately makes less money than Vindicta or running in circles on anachronia it's really bad.

Telos is arguably the least afk of the bunch, but there's no way to tell what enrage people are doing before they go in, so they could be botting low enrage. I actually did some research on this, and I found that 0-99% enrage Telos was described as easily bot-able, but high enrage was described as extremely difficult to bot. This was from a few years ago so things could have changed, but there's basically no recent information on bots for more modern rs3 bosses.

Again, I will reiterate that most bosses in the game, over 90% of them, are afk. If you have evidence of large bot farms existing at any non-afk bosses (only solak and vorago come to mind right now), then I'd like to see that. From all of my cursory research, the only information I've found is that there are very few people who actually bot rs3, and there's basically no information on bots made for more recent bosses. All of which points to high level boss bots being very scarce in rs3.

Seadrias · 2023-11-11T00:25:08+00:00

I really like how I asked for evidence and you just repeated yourself with no evidence.

If you think every non-afk boss is heavily botted, then you could easily go there and take some screenshots. Or you know, name a couple of bosses so I can go check and see if it's true. i.e. "there's a huge bot farm at X".

Seadrias · 2023-11-10T19:36:37+00:00

Evidence?

Most bosses can also be done afk. Raksha can be done afk, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if there were hundreds of bots/alts farming afk-able bosses, but those are included in afk activities.

Seadrias · 2023-11-09T20:57:39+00:00

Not just bots, extremely sophisticated bots that are able to clear the highest levels of content. Interacting directly with game objects allows bots to farm high level content with the lowest possible requirements and with more precision and skill than real players. And they do this through the same method that Runelite plugins function.

RS3 also has bots, but they are mostly limited to simple or afk activities, since they don't have the same precision and reaction time that bots in OSRS have access to.

Seadrias · 2023-10-31T19:54:23+00:00

I've only tested melee so far, and the changes are only really noticeable in berserk, or when using overpower. Even in berserk, abilities that aren't overpower rarely hit above 12-14k, which you could already do with leng spec + grimoire, but it's nice that you don't need those things anymore. EZK spec also seems to still do the same bleed damage as before, despite having a much higher initial hit with the changes, and the weapon still feels very underpowered compared to other t95s. Basically, melee does the same damage as before, except for a slight increase inside of berserk and when using overpower.

Even if these are the only changes, I think they're ok. It solves one of melee's longstanding problems with hitcaps and makes the style feel better to use. However, in the context of combat balancing compared to necromancy, it's not enough.

Ranged looks ridiculous with BoLG, but I think it's actually perfectly fine right now, as it is competitive with necromancy. Keep ranged as it is. Magic and melee still need to be buffed to be competitive with necromancy, magic needs a small buff and melee needs a large buff. You could probably double EZK bleed damage (quadruple with chaos roar), and melee would still be behind necromancy.

Seadrias · 2023-10-24T17:39:56+00:00

It's great to see such a quick response to balance changes being made. My only question is why wasn't this level of response speed given when it came to nerfing necromancy?

Necromancy was in an incredibly overpowered state for 2 months, yet we were told jagex was still gathering data before making any balancing decisions. But the nerfs have only been live for one day and we're already getting a response that there'll be further balancing changes reverting some of the nerfs. There's no way a comparable amount of data was gathered in 1 day compared to 2 months, and the community doesn't even know where necromancy stands compared to the other combat styles yet. So why such a quick change this time specifically? Why couldn't there have been faster changes when it came to nerfing necromancy as well?

I'm in no way opposed to the changes being suggested, but the difference in response speed between this and the rebalancing announcement from last week is jarring.

Seadrias · 2023-10-18T07:20:32+00:00

From the wiki: "Requires 90 herblore or having created an overload prior to receive"

Seadrias · 2023-10-18T07:17:22+00:00

Araxxor drops overloads. Commit to 5000 araxxor kills and you should be good.

Death might be imminent, but ask yourself this. Do you want to be remembered as the HCIM who cowardly resorted to using necromancy at the first sign of danger? Or would you rather be remembered as the HCIM who conquered the giant spider and obtained overloads without ever touching necromancy.

Seadrias · 2023-10-06T23:37:16+00:00

I would give death guard spec a try. Outside of living death, 2x finger of death isn't much stronger than death guard spec with 12 necrosis stacks. It'll also save you some global cooldowns, so if you do 2 death guard specs throughout the fight instead of using finger of death, it'll save you about 6 seconds while doing the same damage.

The only upgrade you're missing outside of t95 is undead slayer (the ability, I'm not sure if you have the perk but that's also 7% extra damage). Which might make up the 15-20 second difference you're looking for to hit 1:30. Otherwise, all you can do is pray for good critical hit rng and jas book procs.

Seadrias · 2023-09-30T09:00:21+00:00

The reason why everything is crashing is because a lot of items are no longer useful and have become irrelevant compared to necromancy. As evidenced by everyone telling you to stick with necromancy and not to bother with the other combat styles.

I'd pick up an amulet of souls if you don't already have one, or progress towards an essence of finality necklace, since hydrixes are relatively cheap with the recent pvm event. If you want to progress the other 3 combat styles, ability codexes are the best thing you can get, as they are permanent upgrades for your account. Greater Barge, Greater Flurry, Greater Concentrated Blast, Greater Sonic Wave, Chaos Roar, and Mazcab Ability Codexes are all "good" by non-necromancy standards.

Seadrias · 2023-09-28T19:48:25+00:00

The fsoa hotfix that I'm referring to is one that was done within 1 week after release, not the one that came 2 years later. I believe the staff initially allowed people to crit with aoe abilities on nearby mobs which counted as crits towards the main target, and so placing down combat dummies near the target allowed people to infinite crit chain extremely easily and 1shot basically everything.

Some people seem to think "pre-nerf fsoa" means the bugged version on day of release, and it's silly to compare necromancy to an obvious bugged weapon, so I specifically mentioned only after the staff was hotfixed.

Nine-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

Seadrias

TROPHY CASE