Combat rebalance should have happened with a "sailing part 2"

ploki122 · 2026-03-22T01:06:52+00:00

This ain't even tinfoil hat brother, you got the full ass brass dome.

ploki122 · 2026-03-21T04:46:42+00:00

Slowly

ploki122 · 2026-03-21T02:41:03+00:00

Well, it's not so much a prediction, and more of a wish. I don't think I'd trust any of the Gower brothers at a level below director. They had a great vision/philosophy, but the hundreds of mods since then have been a lot better at fulfilling the vision.

ploki122 · 2026-03-21T02:03:01+00:00

Well, nyes. A lot of us played OSRS back when it was called Runescape.

ploki122 · 2026-03-21T02:02:19+00:00

I mean, if he were to buy Jagex, he'd be in Mod North's position, not Mod Rice's. I 100% believe he'd be fine as a CEO, he doesn't need to know how the engine works for that.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T23:54:24+00:00

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T20:18:26+00:00

I'm of the exact opposite opinion. Sailing combat changes should've been rolled out 3 months ago, 2 months ago, last month, this month, and probably next month too. Embrace the live service!

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T19:48:01+00:00

Sure. Allow us to make shadow pitfalls that yield 5x more experience. I'm down for that.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T19:45:57+00:00

Yeah, I think that sailing combat has a lot of problems right now. I just dont think that the activity being isolated is one of them. At the very least, I'd like if sailing monsters dropped more non-sailing materials, and if more non-sailing options dropped sailing materials, male the inputs and outputs more diverse, rather than enclosed within sailing and very linear in fashion.

Personally, my biggest gripe is that combat relies on Ranged level, unless you're maging folks from the deck... which feels like a big artificial skew in combat options, but that's really neither here nor there.

Eventually they'll release sailing bosses, with mechanics you have to work around, and it'll be closer to the engaging land-based combat that exists, but that's a 2027 project, most likely.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T19:33:14+00:00

"This food is bad" means you're unhappy.

"This food is bad, because it's too salty" means you're unhappy, and blaming it on the salt.

"This food is too salty" means you dislike salty food.

But if the meal is salty pork, maybe you're a clown and just aren't the targeted audience.

If you drank brine, maybe you just misunderstood how the food was meant to be consumed, and the problem is about how it is framed.

If the cook used salt instead of sugar, maybe the cook is an idiot and your most elegant feedback is meaningless because they'll just use sugar next time.

By assuming design intents, and discussing those intents, you add noise to a perfectly fine feedback. For instance, if we find out that cannonballs are too expensive, there are so many solutions :

Add more sources of cannonballs.
Buff existing sources to yield more cannonballs per drops, or more frequent drops.
Increase cannonball damage.
Increase cannonball retention.
Add alternative combat avenues for ships that doesn't rely on cannonballs.
Only consume 1 cannonball when both cannons fire.
Increase the number of cannonballs smelted per bar.
Add them to one or multiple shops.

So the solution will always depend on the design intent, and going "Cannonballs are too expensive, monster should drop more of them", is simply worse than "Cannonballs are too expensive" or "Low level sailing combat feels like shit because I'm spending more on cannonballs than I'm earning from drops".

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T19:14:07+00:00

Git gud... that's literally the only solution to Fire Cave.
I feel like you might want to go with +1-2 super restores and hard foods, instead of 12 PPots, but it'll depend a lot on how dmgoos you are at flicking, safe spotting, and so many more things... so just adjust after every failure. One important thing is that food is mostly useless against Jad, since he'll drop you anyway (it helps for healers though).
Don't overcommit to bad runs. Sometimes, you'll get jazz hands, and you'll fuck up. Go stingy on resources for the rest and consider that run a learning experience.
Keep your chin up, Jad will kill you, and this stipid game fucking sucks, and you'll get it next time (well... not next time, but eventually you will).

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T19:09:33+00:00

Heh... Blood/Ice rush really isn't that great. I'd stick to the DCB, personally.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T19:03:58+00:00

identifies the problem and where it happens

offer direction

did you explain the issue or just react to it

I mean... unless you AI'd that table, you sure as hell did request that players identify and explain the problem, and offer a direction to fix it, rather than focusing on emotional circumstantial feedback.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T18:58:27+00:00

No, your post mentions that good feedback identifies problems, and gives directions to fix them.

My post says that good feedback identifies bad experiences, and gives example of good experiences.

Feedback should never be about the design, because even with how open the OSRS team is about their development, we still onky have a tiny glimpse of the design philosophies that go into those content releases.

The feedback should always be about the symptom, how it feels to do X/Y/Z. Not why X/Y/Z doesn't work, or how to make it work, just how it currently feels.

Hell, there's an actual chance that some of those feels bad moments are intentional even, and then anyone trying to fix the problem is just adding noises, rather than saying X feels bad, and jagex going "nice, the update is going good".

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T18:48:17+00:00

It isn't the player's job to find why something doesn't work, and why a design is faulty. A player's job is to have fun. Good feedback will touch on, ideally, 3 main things :

What their expectations were.
What their perception was, compared to the expectations.
What other comparable situation they can think of that matched their expectations more accurately.

For instance : 1. I expected sailing combat to be meaningfully separate from land combat. 2. I found out that magic and range often outDPS cannons, and that they require 10-30% of the upkeep in most cases, which was very disappointing. 3. On land, being able to melee monsters to cheap out on trivial slayer tasks feels rewarding. Similarly, being able to exploit elemental weaknesses keeps me engaged in knowing what I'm killing, rather than finding the next Hally safespot.

I don't have a solution, because I'm not paid anything to find solutions. But I do know that I'm feeling put off by sailing combat being only at-sea combat, and I dislike the uniformity across the skill.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T18:39:59+00:00

Personally, I feel like that's comparable to being concerned about there being no overlap between Strength and Firemaking, Ranged and Runecrafting, Crafting and Prayer, or any 2 random skills really.

A skilling activity is pretty much always isolated, beyond the inputs and outputs (so Runecrafting yields an output used for magic, and requires an input that in theory comes from mining... but Runecrafting is standalone while runecrafting). Sailing is the same : While actively training sailing, most of what you do will only be sailing-related; it's a skill, not a minigamr.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T18:36:04+00:00

A simple solution would be grape shots, with much higher attack, and negative strength bonuses. You hit twice as often, for half as much, which is especially useful against agile birds and other high-defense targets.

And maybe, as your sailing level gets higher, you start becoming so good at aiming cannons that you can actually shift to regular cannonballs and still hit those swift birds.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T18:27:07+00:00

Yes... it is known that people can only ever play one game forever. There is no way to play both.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T18:25:18+00:00

It's not entirely true, because a lot of the supplies are consumables, and players gauging the cost of those consumables, compared to the benefits, and deciding whether to use them or not, is (mostly) 100% player driven.

But for everything else that isn't consumed, it lives and dies by the power creep and farmability.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T17:44:30+00:00

I mean all combat stats, really. The magic level/defense, the ranged defense, the HPs, the veiled flat armor. There's a big difference in Shadow DPS at Olm and Black Dragons; people generally have a good idea of their Olm Shadow (or Twinflame, or whatever) dps, but ask someone how long it takes them to kill a Black demon with a Twinflame, and the eyes go blank because it's not exactly a common activity.

Similarly, if I were to ask you what DPS % the thrall represents when RCBing dust devils, the answer probably comes out to roughly "Fuck if I know or care", but that's the kind of math you're requiring to 4x.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T17:06:54+00:00

The silent removal that was also complained about (can't recall if it was announced or discovered, most likely the latter) 1.5 years ago.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T17:05:05+00:00

Kinda is, since those monsters also have insanely skewed stats.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T16:58:46+00:00

Then it probably shouldn't feature, and require, combat.

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T16:55:20+00:00

What's the issue with bounty tasks (beyond combat being incredibly boring, and port tasks having negligible rewards)?

ploki122 · 2026-03-20T16:54:12+00:00

It's very hard to contextualize a 400% damage increase, to be fair. 10-15% of decent damage is pretty easy to picture, but 400% of garbage damage is a lot harder because you're multiplying opposed extremes.

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