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EoC 2 Q&A Transcript

Hey guys!
Here's the transcript from the second Evolution of Combat live Q&A in which Mod Mark , Mod Pi and Mod Chris L answer all your questions ready for the launch of the Evolution of Combat! Enjoy!

1. When does the EoC come out?
Mark: The week commencing the 19th of November. We’re intending to launch on the 20th.
2. How long do you expect the update to take? Are the servers going to be down for a while or will it be quick?
Mark: The same amount of time as always. We’ll give the same notice that we always do. Just because it’s one of the biggest updates we’ve ever made to the game doesn’t mean we want to turn the servers off. It would be the same as normal.
3. Why are we doing this update?
Mark: We started thinking about this quite some time ago. We wanted to change some of the combat within RuneScape. We wanted to make it more exciting, make it more tactical about the choices you make within combat. We also wanted to change the ways players interacted with the game, so rather than spending so much time navigating between interfaces, we wanted to be able to put all of the features that you use in combat in one handy place so that you could focus on the action rather than focus on switching between the different tabs.
Also, it’s about the future. We realise that the combat system that we currently have was very old, it was very clunky, and it took loads of development time just to iterate that system. It was the idea of starting from scratch, the idea of being able to address all of the imbalances that existed within the game and create an awesome new launching point for fantastic new content in the future. We’re super aware that so many of our players have got really high levels and we know that the equipment and the bosses that we’ve got in the game don’t necessarily cater for those really high level players. We wanted to be able to put the content in for those people and the Evolution of Combat (EoC) allows us to do that.
4. How long did it take?
Mark: We started talking about it 18 months ago. Certainly, a lot of the ideas we’ve had for years we knew we couldn’t do with the current system so it’s almost like years and years worth of really cool ideas that had built up for a while and we got to the point where we realised we needed to make the change to the game. In earnest, from a development perspective we’ve been working on it for about eight months to a year, something like that but we expanded the team considerably about six months ago. So we’ve had loads of artists, loads of QA-ers and four developers that have been working on it solidly for the last six months and we’ve been bringing more people into the team to help make sure that all the different facets of the game have been updated.
5. Why is it released this soon? It seems quite rushed and you said you’d only be releasing it once the players are happy. Do you feel that everyone is happy?
Mark: It is certainly not rushed. The system, we’ve been beta-ing it since June, July. We’ve never had such a long period of the game in a beta format. We’ve had more feedback than we’ve ever had from any update, ever. We’ve obviously run the beta for a long time. We’ve had countless opportunities for people to give us feedback, we’ve run live streams, we’ve got the combat survey which is live in the beta, and we’ve got the tutorials which we launched early. We think it’s ready and we’ve been working on it ever so hard. We’re really confident, really proud of the system we have built now and we’re ready to launch it. So no, we don’t feel like it is rushed at all. It’s the right thing and it’s the right time.
6. It’s such a big change to the game. Why not make a poll or have a vote based on how people would like to see the EoC?
Mark: I was talking in my friends chat the other day and I said that if a company was going to make a new chocolate bar, they would give that chocolate bar to people and then give them the opportunity to give comments on the chocolate bar. You wouldn’t survey a whole load of people who had never eaten the chocolate bar because they wouldn’t know anything about it. So we decided that we wanted to do something like a poll and we decided on a survey, something in-game so people would have to be logged in to answer so they wouldn’t have to go to a different website or a different page, all things that they could actually do within the game that they knew and love.
We wanted to make sure that the players answering the survey had tried the latest version of the combat system that we’ve made. It has changed so much since we first launched the beta. Hundreds and thousands of different changes that we’ve made because of our opinions and our opinions change as we’re developing content, and of course all the awesome feedback we’ve had from the players. Putting the survey in the beta we felt was the right thing to do because it meant that people were trying it, they were trying the latest version of it and we were giving them the ability to answer those questions within the game and we’re really quite pleased with the results that we’ve had from the survey.
7. What about having two separate servers? One for new combat and one that has the old-school combat system?
Mark: It’s almost impossible to do something like that. We’ve fundamentally changed so much of the game, so many of the items, potions and different things so it would be impossible to have one grand exchange to work with both versions of everything. We didn’t want to split the game into two because we’re really proud of the community we’ve got and the idea of making another version of the game just wasn’t the right thing for us to do. It’s almost impossible for us to provide two versions of the game at the same time. All the way back in classic you know, we still have the classic function and then we made RuneScape 2, but those communities effectively split into two. The items and equipment meant different things, it’s just impossible to evolve the game to the degree that we have and still keep the old system as it was. I think it’s really important to say that you can still play the game in the same way that you always have. We’ve just added a whole load of new equipment and new awesome things that you can do. The game is still there, it’s still the same game; you can still pretty much do exactly the same things you were doing before.
The momentum ability that we’ve added is there specifically for people to still play in the old school way of combat. If you don’t want something that’s so engaging, if you don’t want to be activating all of the different abilities if you just want to sit back and do that one-click combat that people are used to, you can still do those things with the momentum ability.
8. Will you go back to the old combat system if EoC doesn’t work? If people don’t like it, would you go back to the old system?
Pi: Functionally, it does work to the point where we are happy to release it. I think you’d have to define doesn’t work. The old combat system is still there, we haven’t deleted the code although we’d be much happier to slowly phase things in to make the new combat system closer to the old one rather than just completely flip over because we do have that problem where we can’t progress, we can’t push forward and that’s not somewhere where we’d be happy to go back to.
Mark: The game is still there. You can still use the game in the exact same way as you were before. Slight different changes, no different from any other update. Every update that we add to the game will change some facets of the game. You have to adapt, you have to change the way that you look at combat. Don’t forget that this EoC will also change the way that players user certain skills and the way they train different skills. Whether it is combat or not combat, the ability bar will give you all sorts of functions that you didn’t have before, make it a lot easier to interact with and a lot more fun and a lot more engaging.
You’ve also got to remember that we have done this because of the future of the game. This allows us to do the most amazing things in the future. All these cool ideas that we’ve had over the years that we’ve desperately wanted to add to the game but we couldn’t because of the way that the old system functioned. The updates that we’ve got planned in the short term, things like the ranger slayer dungeon, the Kalphite king, we’ve got some awesome stuff planned for the wilderness, all those things are things that we just wouldn’t have been able to do justice to if we released them with the old system. It wouldn’t have been as cool and we wouldn’t have been able to add all of the awesome high level equipment we’ve got planned.
9. Reading through comments by the community on RuneScape’s Forum, Facebook and Twitter, a HUGE majority of people disagree with this update and have quit or are threatening to quit, many famous RuneScapians have already quit most of them because of EoC. What are you going to do to reignite the community or are you expecting a new player base to take hold of the new game?
Mark: As I’ve just mentioned, all of the really awesome content that we’ve got planned for the short term, absolutely one hundred percent sure that that content will get people excited about what we’ve tried to do and whether they are new players or are veteran players, elite players, they’ll all be excited about the content that we’ve got planned. We’re going to constantly be looking at the feedback, engaging with the players on the forums and in the game working out what principles we have to change, just to make as many people as possible happy about this system.
I’d disagree that the majority of people don’t want this update to happen. The survey that we recently ran in the beta world, that wasn’t the feedback that we got at all. It’s quite often the case with any update that you have a small group of players or a smaller group of players that don’t necessarily like the update and are very vocal on the forums. I always say that if you really like the content, if you really enjoy what you are playing with then you’re actually playing with it. You’re not posting on the forums about how much you dislike something. There’s no motivation for a player who really likes the system to go and post on the forums that they really like it because they’re engaging with it. They know we’re going to launch it, they know that it’s the best thing that we can do to the game so we’re really proud of what we’ve created and we’re absolutely sure that once you’ve got your teeth into these cool updates that we are doing in the future and you’ve had an opportunity to work with the system in the live game, we’re absolutely sure that people are really going to enjoy what we’ve done.
10. If it’s coming live in about two weeks, what are you going to change between now and the launch day? Are there big changes to come or is it just tweaks now?
Pi: One big change that I’m working on is a big buff to prayer and potions. What we’re specifically aiming at is turmoil and overload just to make it really good. We’ve had a lot of feedback from players saying that they’ve spent hundreds of millions of GP getting these and that we’ve just made them completely useless. We do agree that the current rates aren’t anywhere near as good. Recently this week I at least tripled the rate at which the buff that you were going to get from turmoil and overload and that went to our QA and came back from our QA saying no, it needs to be a bit more and I don’t feel that the money I spent is good so yeah, we are buffing turmoil and overload. There are a few other things that we’re changing as well.
Chris L: So, the momentum ability is designed for people who want to have a little bit more than no interaction with the system. We’ve made it so it increases your damage rates. I actually extended it on the sly just before this stream started. I read a few guys saying they like the system, they like momentum and they don’t want to spam buttons specifically, which is fine because that is a different level of interaction from everything we’ve described so far. So what I have done to momentum is it actually uses a basic ability for you every twenty seconds based on what you’re holding. So if you’ve got dual wielding and you just want to do slayer and just click a button and wait, it actually does some cool things which obviously increases your damage and it looks cooler to the outside, it looks cooler to you, you get better damage out of it and it’s quite a good improvement because it improves your DPM, ultimately gets the job done quicker and prevents the button mashing if you don’t want to do it, which is cool.
11. Will all the new items coming into the game have a stock on the grand exchange or will players need to kill and make them first?
Mark: Another really cool aspect of what we’ve done is adding new equipment to the game and that is equipment that players will have to go out and smith or fletch or craft themselves, or they have to go and fight a specific boss monster first to get that equipment. We like that, the fact that we’re giving more value to smiths or players that have got decent levels in the different crafting skills. They’ll actually be able to go and make that equipment and make a bit of money from it on the grand exchange. Also, there will be new reasons to go and fight boss monsters that you may have got tired of in different areas of the game that we haven’t updated for a while. There will be loads of different things for combatants to do and for the crafters to do so preloading the stuff onto the grand exchange seems like a bit of a waste to me. We never do something like that anyway. When we add new updates to the game we want the players to get their teeth into it. We don’t want to just chuck them onto the grand exchange.
12. Will the EoC make fighting monsters tougher?
Pi: Not any tougher than they’ve always been already. We have changed a few things on the monsters so you might find that your load out for different monsters is different, specifically to do with the weaknesses but the weakness system has always been there. So for instance, you’d take Armadyl instead of Bandos if you wanted the magic protection. So I think it’s just a question of learning the new things and once that hurdle is finished it’s exactly the same as before. If anything, it is easier because you’ll kill one a lot quicker.
Mark: When you’re actually fighting the monster, it’s not going to be more difficult. I would argue that it is going to be easier in terms of being able to do a decent rate of damage to kill the monsters. The effort will be in the bank before you go out on your journey. It will be about choosing the right load out. Making sure you’ve got the right gear to fight the right monster.
Chris L: In the same vein, touching on what Pi said about the weaknesses, currently in live if I’m on my maxed character and I went on slayer, there’s nothing more annoying than hitting zero and missing and missing and missing. I’ve got 99 attack, why am I missing this Gargoyle? One of the great things that’s being introduced is that we’ve extended the whole stab/slash/crush weakness system to actually mean something now. So, if you’ve gone and put extra effort into your load out and you’re using the right style, I think we guarantee you a very tasty hit chance against that monster. I think it’s like, 90%+. So again, it is making sure that you’ve got the levels and the skill yourself as a person to make your avatar do the best it can. It’s much more rewarding rather than just missing all the time.
Pi: Bear in mind though, you’re not always forced to do this. If you go with the correct combat style for instance, you’re still given a very nice hit chance that still is better than the live rates. Just the weakness gives an insane boost to your accuracy.
Mark: It’s all about tactics. It’s about making sure you’ve got the right gear for the right job. Those tactical choices you make when you’re at the bank, for a lot of people there that is almost the most fun part about combat. Looking through all of your equipment, deciding what you want to take out with you and the fact that you’ll be missing a lot less if you’ve got the right gear with you again it’s those fundamental reasons as to why we changed the system: make it more fun, make it more rewarding, make it less frustrating than the current system. It’s about those tactical choices that combatants should be able to make.
Pi: It opens up you know, whether we use a rapier or a whip at the high end so if you only ever use stab or slash, this allows you to say, this thing is really good against crush, it’s worth bringing a maul or something like that. It varies what weapons you use rather than having the load out and that’s all that you ever use.
Mark: That adds to the variety of the product as well because it means you’ll be walking around and people will be wearing different stuff. They won’t all be wearing the same gear. It makes the whole place so much richer.
13. Won’t slayer be harder because everything is multi-combat? For example, more bank trips for food?
Pi: No. Everything is multi-combat but most of the things outside of the wilderness aren’t aggressive. So it’s up to you whether you want to take on one at a time or if you want to take lots on at a time, you can. If you do, you’re going to be hit by lots of things at once.
14. The action bar. Will it be moveable?
Mark: On launch, the action bar will not be moveable. You will be able to minimise it. If you don’t like the look of the action bar you will be able to minimise it so it’s not there which means you’ll be able to type as you’re used to. However, in the future with the things that we’re talking about with RuneScape 3, we’re doing some incredible design projects at the moment. We’re completely reworking the top level interface which is development speak for the screen. We’re looking into the ability to effectively build your own screen. So, you’ll be able to use all the different principles, all the different things you use from different interfaces to build your own screen to make it perfect for you. The plan for that is to make the ability bar moveable, which is a bit of a reveal. We’re working really hard on that and we’ll try to do as much as we can.
15. Can you explain the momentum ability fully?
Chris L: The momentum ability is an AFK (away from keyboard) solution for those people who don’t want to be using abilities or using the system. You just have to generate it to ultimate level once and you click it, and for twenty minutes you’re doing more damage, you’re more effective than I think if you were using basic abilities constantly. You’ve now got this extra effect of it using some cool abilities for you so it increases your damage rate, DPM and makes it look more interesting for people to watch who are in the area. The level of interaction with the system is purely down to you. It will work if you make it work for you. If you don’t want to do anything, if you want to use the existing live system, just minimise the action bar and its business as usual except that we’ve got the cool stuff like dual wielding and stuff. This is a step up from that where you need the little bit of abilities and momentum gives you more output. It makes you look cooler, and then you’ve got the next step up which is using any ability you want and being super-effective.
16. Are the XP rates in the beta now balanced? Will we get those XP rates in the live version?
Pi: The XP rates currently in the beta aren’t final. We still want to do tweaks to them. Obviously we want to get them as close to the live version as we possibly can. It may not be possible to get them bang on but our aim is to get them the same if not slightly better.
Mark: I wouldn’t consider any XP rate in the live game to be final. Its things that we’re constantly tweaking and changing. We’ve got updates coming into the game every single week and that changes the game, changes the way players interact with certain skills, so we’re always changing XP rates and this is no different.
17. Will dungeoneering be more difficult?
Chris L: No, is the short answer. I’ve played through plenty of dungeons because I’ve worked on the rebalances coming out next week and I’ve also looked at it in the combat branch of the new stuff. It’s much more effective and easier. Everything in the dungeon has the weakness but we’re not as harsh on the combat triangle so if you use the wrong style against something that you shouldn’t be using it against we still allow you a pretty decent hit rate. I’ve run some dungeons with a party in the beta servers and we were blitzing through it. You’ve got some really cool stuff like the hurricane ability where you spin a two-handed weapon around and it does an AoE hit. That’s really good for clearing out guardian rooms and stuff like that. It makes it more interesting and if you fully interact with the system you’re going to get a lot more rewards. It’s definitely not harder.
18. Are we going to get more binds in dungeoneering?
Chris L: Yes and we’re also going to do it this week. I’ve reworked the bind system partly for combat and partly because it is very old and it’s never really been done. So after a few goes at it we’ve now got this system where anyone can bind up to ten items. It does sound like a lot but hear me out. You’ve got ten items in a pool, and you have three load out bars all in a separate interface accessed from the smuggler. Based on your dungeoneering level you’ll have one, two, three or four or five slots available, with the maximum now being five. You can drag items into different set ups. You can have a mage bar with five things from the ten pool. Basically you can make a mage bar, a range bar, a melee bar or even three different melee bars with a different weapon. You can choose which one you start with at the start of a dungeon and you can switch them on the fly by going to the smuggler and taking it and it all auto-equips like before. It’s very cool and much more flexible.
19. Are there going to be formula changes to dungeoneering XP when the EoC is released?
Mark: We’ve got the update planned next week which is increasing the average return that you get for smaller dungeoneering parties. That update is in the bag and will happen next week and we’ve got no further changes planned for any kind of formula calculations for dungeoneering.
20. Will there be any offhand dungeoneering weapons?
Pi: In the future, yes.
Mark: Hopefully we’ll have them by the end of the year with any luck. We wanted a focus on the main game and the surface world, if you like. We’ve got a lot of the assets we needed for dungeoneering but there are lots of different things that we need to think about for dungeoneering. Things like rangers for example are only limited to using bows within dungeoneering so they don’t have dual wielding options right there. We’d have to add new equipment and new ways of building that equipment within the dungeons.
21. What will be happening to the Enchanted Excalibur? It's the best reward from the achievement diaries and it will be a massive shame for it to be wasted as a reward when its special attack it removed.
Pi: The enhanced Excalibur is actually going to heal you again. Roughly one in every four attacks, so you’ve got one in four chances of it happening, it will heal you a set amount of your life points. If you have completed the elite achievement diary then it will heal you more.
22. We have seen generals of 5 gods of RuneScape will there be anything like that to do with Guthix in the future aka a god sword or perhaps level 90 plus gear?
Mark: We’ve got an amazing year planned next year. The gods will feature heavily and Guthix will certainly not miss out. There’ll be all sorts of things that we’ve got planned for future content including level 85 equipment and above.
23. In the equipment screen, will you be giving offense/defence ratings numerical values or will you be keeping them as stars?
Pi: Both, I believe is the current answer?
Chris L: We’re aware of the star system… the top half of the interface has gone down really well, the bottom half isn’t doing what the players need it to and it’s not really doing what we need it to so we’ll be looking at that. There’s going to be numeric there and there’ll be a better sort of inbuilt comparison. It’s one of the things that will be changed before release.
24. Do you have any plans to change back the protection prayers so they fully protect 100% against monster damage?
Pi: Not your level 43 ones I’m afraid. Getting 100% protection after something that’s level 43, bit overpowered. However, we have created it in such a way that we can buff them quite healthily and would be quite happy to look into the ways in the future where you can say, you have an ability or a potion which does push it back up to 75% or even 100% for a short amount of time so you put in a bit more effort. The panic around the prayers not protecting you 100%. If you take a shield, the defensive abilities can do quite a staggering amount to mitigate your incoming damage and in fact, one of them even heals you from the hit you take so we’re not going to switch them back but we’re definitely look at possibly buffing them in the future and there are still ways in the EoC to mitigate your incoming damage.
Mark: If you’re a player that’s used to that kind of level of protection from protection prayers, investigate the defensive skill. One of the things I said really early on was that we wanted to make the triangle mean something and we wanted to make the defence skill actually mean something. For me the idea of being able to defend against certain attacks, the defensive skill should do the lion’s share of something like that and the abilities that you can trigger when you’re in shield mode as we kind of call it, you know, the stuff that you can do with your defence abilities are seriously cool and in many circumstances much better than the old prayers.
25. Once the EoC is implemented, what is next for the game in terms of high level content/quests?
Mark: In December there will be player-owned ports. That’s entirely for high-end players. Currently we’re looking at skills over level 90. I’m not going to be specific on those skills right now. We’ll have some more reveals coming up on that but certainly you want to start levelling up your skills over level 91 probably. So that is December. We’re also working on things like the Kalphite King. The cool things that we want the Kalphite King to be able to do we just couldn’t do with the old system. EoC allows us to do some awesome stuff including high end equipment. We’ve also got a new ranger dungeon planned. This is the first time we’ve mentioned this so it’s an absolutely brand new reveal. It’s a ranger-oriented dungeon so you’ll be encouraged to use your ranging skills while you’re down there. There will also be a big slayer element to it as well. Again, more high-end equipment coming in through that.
We’ve also got a massive update to the wilderness planned, something I’m currently calling wilderness war bands which is the concept of NPC camps being set up across the wilderness, massive bands of warriors rampaging across the wilderness, clashing in the middle, so lots of NPCs fighting each other, the players getting involved in the fight. You’ve got non-combatants going to the war camps. Again, this is all just an idea in my head at the moment. It’s really early on in development. People have just got started in terms of writing design briefs for it.
We want to put more life, more energy into the wilderness, encourage more people to be there and looking at those things the players have been talking about all year to do with the pecking order, the vicious circle of functions within the wilderness. Giving people reasons to go there for increased returns, if you want that additional risk of being PKed. This is specifically looking at the things players have been talking about before we started talking about the EoC, the things that they really wanted us to add to the game and things we simply couldn’t do justice without the EoC. So many ideas from the players and from us. That’s just the tip of the iceberg and we’ve got even more awesome things planned for the rest of next year.
26. Are you thinking about adding more abilities in the future? I've heard something like obtaining through quests etc. But what about minigames or specific monsters?
Chris L: Technically there’s no limit as to how we can unlock them so we can do any ways that you have described and there is a quest in development that will unlock more than one ability.
Mark: We’ve got some serious grandmaster content coming out. There’ll be all sorts of things associated with that. Don’t think about it any differently from the current system. The idea of unlocking new weapons, new equipment, potions or anything like that as you complete minigames or quests or unlock higher elements of skills is absolutely no different. We don’t want to change that part of the game. It’s really rewarding so we don’t want to change that.
27. Will certain features not included in the beta right now (miasmic spells, god spells, etc) be implemented at a later date?
Pi: Currently the god spells have been turned into one spell called Divine Storm to make sure that the mage training arena isn’t fully depreciated. We felt that miasmic spells weren’t really bringing much to the table. You had to jump through a ton of hoops to get them and hardly anyone used them anyway so they have been removed. As far as the original question goes as to anything being missed, tell us what we’ve missed on the forums.
Mark: We try to be as thorough as we possibly can but if we have missed anything do let us know. Every day we’re combing those forums looking for feedback.

28. With the launch of EoC, will we start to see progression (and more importantly, news) towards other big updates that were hinted at such as Player-owned ports, the two new skills, the P-Mod recruitment Mod MMG hinted at, and the RuneScape apps?
Mark: The two skills are currently at the design phase. The PMod recruitment stuff, I know that it is something the CM team are looking at at the moment. It’s not something that we’re directly working on. The RuneScape apps, that’s very exciting. We’ve had meetings about that recently. We’ve been looking at the kind of things we want to produce, the different kinds of apps, what kinds of things we want to be able to support RuneScape, it’s really exciting. I’ve wanted to have the idea of different games using that RuneScape logo, using that IP. The rich, the fantastic world that we have, the idea of getting that out on different devices is really exciting. This is brand new stuff and it’s literally stuff that we’ve just started working on and thinking about really. Talking to all the different departments and what we’d need to do to actually make something like this happen, but it is a reality and it is not a pie in the sky dream. This is something that we’re actually going to do so it’s really cool.
29. Are you going to add more food in the future?
Pi: the amount of food that we currently have especially at the low end is incredibly chock full. As for the high end, currently we have rocktails at the top end and possibly sharks that people use. As the game moves on, we’re going to want more and more food. Just like we introduced new armour at the high end, yes we can introduce more food when we feel that it is appropriate.
30. I really enjoyed the new Combat Academy, but I find it very simple and it's reaching more for lower level players. I made a video guide about it and most comments were asking about more high level stuff. Will you be adding more to it in the future so you can learn more advanced stuff?
Pi: Certainly the way in which it is made allows someone to come along and add a session if we feel it is needed. I will agree with you that the lower end sessions, say the first four, are pretty low-end stuff but that’s to allow F2P to come along and learn our new combat system from scratch. The higher-end ones such as sessions five to seven, especially session 7 is for advanced combat users. But there is something else I put into the combat academy that isn’t a session which I’ve deliberately put in there for high level players. The sessions give you a basis to build on. The training dummies that are there, however, are there for you to play around in a safe environment to work out your own style, exactly how the abilities fit together for you and it’s a safe environment. I understand that at the moment some of the dummies are killing players but when it is live the dummies will not kill you, I promise you!
31. I'm curious what you on Jagex had the most fun working on with the EoC. Adding abilities? The new animations? Or anything else?
Chris L: To start with I enjoyed when graphics provided us with the new animations because we always had to test that they worked and when you first clicked a button to see and you jumped in the air and did this crazy meteor strike animation, that was pretty cool, and fun to plug in and see it when you’re actually in combat. I like the first time we used to plug in the special attack animation because it was a much more high-calibre animation which was awesome to see. I think the most fun I’ve had since that level was definitely prototyping what we can do with the future so I made Max, the guy who sells the max cape; I made him clever and watched him get severely underestimated by some players near the duel arena. He killed five players in a row and he spawned out steel titans and stuff. He’s very clever and that was definitely enjoyable. And also, working with players in general and feedback about stuff that we didn’t have at all like the AFK aspect and momentum. It makes it much more similar to the live system, just catering for the people that aren’t happy with stuff we’ve done, there is still something there for them and it’s enjoyable to make that side of it as well, to make sure there is something for everyone.
32. How do I sheathe and unsheathe my weapons?
Chris L: You can press star (*) on the num pad or you can right click on the minimise button and there’s a little button there for you.
33. Is there a wiki page where I can read about what the abilities do? I’d like to know what abilities can be combined together.
Pi: Currently, no but Mod Michelle has been working incredibly hard creating a very expansive wiki for you.
34. I’m confused about weapon and armour stats and how the damage is calculated. I don’t understand the star system!
Mark: Don’t be confused. As mentioned earlier, we are reworking that entire system to make it easier to understand.
35. What are the channelled abilities?
Chris L: The channel abilities are what we call combo attacks where you can clip on the ability and instead of having to mash or do more abilities straight after it does something cool where it lasts five to ten seconds so that it’s much more impressive and does more damage over time.
36. How is defensive rating calculated? There is no weakness set up.
Pi: So I think what they’re asking is if there’s a defence rating for each style and is there a no weakness set up. So basically we take an average of all of your armour and work out how effective you are at each style and we compare that against the style of your opponent. So your defence relates to what class you are, how powerful your armour is and the opponent you’re actually fighting.
37. How do prayers work in EoC?
Mark: They work exactly as they did before. You still trigger them in the same way. Of course it’s a lot easier now because you’re able to use your quick prayer functions on the ability bar but they are all still there, they still function in the same way. We have obviously made some tweaks such as the changes to maximum protection like level 43 prayers etc. and we’ve obviously improved other abilities/prayers as well.
38. What about potions? Will they work in the same way?
Chris L: They will work in the same way. Drink a potion, get an increase and again we’re looking at the increase Behind the Scenes that’ll be increased.
39. Can you dual-wield in Dungeoneering?
Pi: Not currently, but in the future, yes.
40. What is a critical hit and why does it matter?
Mark: Critical hits are cool. They do one and a half times the damage that an attack would. You will notice that there are various different pieces of equipment that you can use to increase your critical hit chance. Pieces of jewellery, amulets, and rings, there are also certain weapons that will give you increases to your critical hit chance. Very importantly, if you hit a critical hit on an ability, it will do maximum damage return. So, hitting crits is a really important new thing to the system and all of the information will be there, have a play around and see what works for you.
41. Do enchanted bolt effects even do anything now?
Chris L: They do the same thing they’ve always done, I believe.
42. What is the freedom ability?
Pi: Freedom is an awesome ability. It frees you from stuns and binds. It will remove all DoTs (Damage over Time effects). It’s generally a get out of jail free card and it will also make you immune from stuns for six seconds.
43. How do you calculate the life points restored by a food knowing your constitution level?
Mark: The easiest thing to do is look at the cooking level required for certain types of food. Find the cooking level that’s most appropriate to your constitution level. So look at your constitution level, then look at the cooking levels for all the different food, that’s the best food for you to use. It is the most efficient food for you to use. You can still use higher-level food and that will still give you a really great rate of healing but it would be much more effective for you to use the food that is intended for your level. The reason why we’ve done that is to balance the system accordingly. It’s really difficult to balance a low level monster if everyone is eating shark because they effectively have a greater healing potential than their character is designed to have. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use shark, it just means more efficient, more effective, better GP value if you’re using the food designed for your level.
44. Accuracy. Penalties. On. Armour. For example, how does wearing ranged armour affect my use of melee?
Pi: Using the wrong type of armour for your current attack style will lessen your effectiveness. However, it will not completely nerf it to the ground such that you no longer can use it. The reason why we’re putting so much work into this effectiveness rating is so that you can see your skew in different kinds of combat styles. We want to support hybriding, if anything. With the strengthening of the combat triangle, supporting hybriding becomes a lot easier and a lot nicer. You’ll find that a really good hybrid that was owning beforehand will own even harder in the new system.
45. How does Adrenaline increase? Does eating reduce it?
Mark: Adrenaline increases from making attacks. You’ve got your basic attacks that will generate adrenaline. Your auto attacks will generate adrenaline. Using thresholds and ultimates will cost you adrenaline. If you do anything in combat that isn’t swinging a weapon that will drain your adrenaline slightly so when you’re outside of combat, adrenaline will go down. When you’re eating things like food, your adrenaline will go down as well.
46. Since special attacks are removed due to the EoC do items such as dragon claws have any special abilities or upgraded stats, and where do you get offhand weapons from when EoC hits the game?
Chris L: You can check out all your offhand weapons in the current beta. You can make X on in smithing, where you’d expect, basically. In answer to the first one, dragon claws have a critical bonus. Like Mark was saying, special items get special stats, and special attacks have been removed however we are still allowing special passive effects so the god swords still have something in a similar way to the Excalibur, they still do very similar effects to what they do in live so they’re different from each other but they are still very unique and worth having.
47. What does the EoC allow you to do that the old system could not?
Mark: Tactics. It allows you to make tactical choices within your fighting. It also makes combat much more tactile and by that I mean that you feel the combat rather than spending time navigating between interfaces you can drag everything to your ability bar and really get stuck in. it makes combat more engaging, much more fun, much more rewarding. It makes the game look better, feel better and it means that when you are involved in combat you are actually involved in combat rather than doing a whole load of things which aren’t combat related at all.
48. I have a feeling that everything is going to get standardised in tiers. Can you shed some light on that?
Mark: I don’t quite know what is meant by this question. RuneScape has always been a game where you’ve got levels. You go up levels and the monsters that we want you to fight also increase in levels as well. That kind of tiered system has always been there. It is absolutely no different and it is just that what we have the ability to do now is all those updates that have evolved over nine, ten, eleven years, we’ve taken them all and balanced them from the ground up which to a lot of people means that it looks as though everything has been standardised but that is certainly not the case. What we have done is, we’ve increased the reasons to have different kits and different load outs. We’ve changed it so that you’ll see a lot more different styles and different equipment being used throughout the game.
As you level up and the targets you fight increase you use different pieces of equipment. It’s no different. We’ve always had bronze, iron, steel, addy, mithril, rune, dragon, god swords, whatever. They are different tiers. It is absolutely no different to what we’ve done now; it’s just structured in a better way, better balance, better for the future of the game and much more effective. It is much more transparent and everyone knows what’s going on rather than being confused about everything.
49. Are the XP rates using momentum better, the same or worse than that of the current XP rates in game?
Chris L: Momentum should be the same. I don’t think anything should be worse. Even if you don’t use momentum, you should still be on par. I think momentum will boost that to more of a definitive level and then anything from that above is going to be a likely increase.
50. Is there a chance that the beta servers will be used for something else after the EoC goes live?
Mark: It’s a good test for us. It’s a massive change to the game with the beta servers working. In the future, if we’re making big fundamental changes to the game and we feel that there are updates that are worth beta testing, and we want to get five, six months’ worth of feedback about how or when we’re trying different things, then we’ve got a platform to do it now. It is a brand new thing and we’re really excited about it because it allows us to try out new things, get the players’ feedback and the content we make is so much better when we get feedback from the players and it just gives us a better platform to do that so the sky is the limit.
51. What is the reasoning behind changing from single to multi-way combat in the wilderness?
Pi: There is no reason as to why everything was made multi-way as we made the whole game multi-way. However we listened to a lot of the feedback saying that they really like single-way and what I really like is how single-way PKers can be introduced into clans because definitely the coolest thing for me about PKing is PKing with your friends and in a clan and we did not want to put a hard, separate area between these two so what we’ve actually implemented is a way in which solo and multi-way PKers can actually PK in the same place. Hopefully the two groups can actually speak to each other and the whole PKing community can grow and help itself build because you’re not in two separate camps.
52. Is an offhand rubber chicken possible?
Chris L: It is possible. Graphics actually made offhand weapons for pretty much everything they could find. There’s even offhand cutlery. The best thing I’ve found in my travels is an offhand defender which is in the right hand so you can dual-wield defenders.
Mark: It might be cool to have an offhand rubber chicken in the game. Dual wielding rubber chickens sound quite cool.
53. Why do you say fake statistics for positive/negative opinions of EoC?
Mark: None of the statistics that we’ve given out on any of the news posts have been fake at all. They’ve all been generated from the results we’ve had on the combat survey. We put the survey in there because we wanted to have an honest opinion from the players. It is not in our interest to fake those statistics. We don’t want to lie to the players and we’ve always had a really healthy relationship with our community and we don’t want to change that. We’re never going to lie about stuff like that.
54. Why have overload/extreme potions effects been downgraded?
Pi: I am in the process of buffing them, and I buffed them once and they’ve gone to QA and I’m buffing them again. The original reason as to why we downgraded them is when I looked at the original buffs that they give you, the buffs that they give is another half of your combat effectiveness on top. When you add turmoil and overload at the same time, you’ve got such a big jump between having these things and not having these things that creating an engaging boss for everybody who has the high levels but doesn’t necessarily have turmoil and overload which are untradeable it severely limits the amount of people that can interact with the thing that you are designing, and that for us is a really bad thing. You get people saying yes, you can come to Nex but not if you don’t have turmoil and overload. That’s kind of harsh as you want to be able to take your super set and be able to sit there with piety.
Mark: What Pi is saying is that if we are effectively going to balance a boss monster we need to be able to balance it against the target group of players that we’re aiming it at, and because high level players were over reliant on things like overloads it meant that we had to balance content for people with overloads whereas actually what we wanted to do was balance content for the right combat level, not for the right combat level plus access to things like herblore. It is a really interesting design challenge for us because we want to preserve the value of accessing things like high level herblore but we don’t want to make it dominate the combat situation. We want it to be a buff or a boost but not to the 50% level that Pi was talking about. I don’t consider that to be good design. I‘d rather the lion’s share of the responsibility of what makes you effective in combat come from the direct combat stats rather than things like herblore or that kind of stuff.
Obviously we’ve got a long way to go on that and we’re still tweaking it. We are changing these things right now and have been working on these things for months and months. We’re still making changes to the system and want to make it as good as it possibly can be but we’re still thinking about the future. We’ve got to make sure that we’re building a system that allows us to make these awesome boss monsters that we’ve got planned and we don’t want to create a situation where we’re in the same trouble that we were in before so finding that sweet spot between effective, useful but not dominating, that’s the design challenge for us at the moment.
Pi: And like I’ve said, I’ve made them three times more powerful in beta than live so you can expect them to be even more powerful than that when we do actually go live.