Welcome to the second edition of Combat Chat, where we once again lift the lid on upcoming changes we’re going to be making to the game.
Next game update we will be making two combat tweaks that we want to discuss with you: making pack yak banking obey the rules of the wilderness and increasing the difficulty of the Fight Kiln. This post sets out to explain why we're making these changes.
Pack Yak Changes
First, we will be changing pack yaks so they can't bank items when you are beyond level 30 wilderness. Let’s give an example scenario: you gear up, enter the wilderness and spend time hunting down your perfect target, you prepare your attack, run in to fight... only for them to bank their gear before you can kill them.
This is meant to be a dangerous area of the game and the end result is it makes PvP less rewarding that it should be. The pack yak is already one of the most useful familiars and it possessing an ability to bypass a game mechanic is something we've agreed is too overpowered.
This change means that anyone that brings their gear into the wilderness should be prepared for a fight to keep it!
Fight Kiln Buff
After EoC was released, the Fight Caves were buffed as the difficulty was too low making completing it and getting fire capes an easy achievement, instead of the challenge we expected players to face. Unfortunately, this was only ever looked at as a singular piece of content and the enemies in the Fight Caves were actually buffed to a higher value than their counterparts in the Kiln.
With this buff, we are correcting the numbers so the Kiln enemies follow a natural progression from the enemies you encounter in the Fight Caves. This means they'll be able to hit harder and have more health.
We are aware that many players are aiming for Shrimpy, the boss pet, and getting the kills for the Final Boss title so we have tried to balance around this - it IS harder, but we have tried to keep it in mind, and it is still very doable in level 80 gear which existed when the Kiln was released.
Also, due to the increased difficulty, we will be resetting boss kill times for all players so everyone is on a level playing field.
"You've had years to fix this. Why change it now?"
This is something that we're trying to improve on - we want to react quicker to content that is unbalanced. However, we have a legacy of content that simply hasn't had time for reworking in the past or has been overlooked. This doesn't mean we should leave it in this state; changing this will help maintain the health of the game in the long-term.
As with any change to the game, we will continue to monitor it after the game update and make any further changes should they be required.
Thank you for reading and we welcome your feedback.
Mod Daze & the Combat Council
The Combat Council is a part of the RuneScape development team that dedicates some of its time to trying to improve the health of both PvM and PvP. We are Mods Curse, Deg, Harrison, Shogun, Hunter, Pi, Daze, Ramen, Manti, Ollie, Chaose and Timbo.