Combat 2.0 and Other Updates

This page or section is incomplete and could use improvement. Reason: Refactor March 02, 2023 You can discuss this issue on the talk page or edit this page to improve it.

The following page is a brief summary of everything that was changed in the major update that took place on March 1st, 2023.

Concise Patch Notes (What’s different?)

• It’s a complete rewrite of the game internally
• Combat 2.0
• Smithing Rework
• Enchanting rework (auto-augmenting, soulbinding, item leveling)
• Idlescape Plus (premium monthly subscription for QoL features)
• Platinum Shop (premium currency to buy cosmetics / tokens for some QoL stuff)
• Lots of UI components rewritten (i.e. chat)
• 2 new sub-skills: Cloth Weaving for Runecrafting and Alchemy for Cooking
• 2 new combat skills: Magic and Range
• Foraging node rework
• Over 100 new items
• Over 100 new crafts (for above items or new crafts for existing items)
• New cosmetics system + several cosmetics
• Over 50 new combat abilities
• Massive combat drop rebalancing (junk items worth gold instead of resources)
• New mining zone (Slate Spires, level 1 zone)
• Runecrafting rebalance / minor overhaul
• 4 new combat zones (3 are duo zones)
• 5 new dungeons
• 4 new elite scrolls
• Over 30 new monsters
• Platinum Global Buffs Shop (29 options)
• Farming rebalance and enhanced endgame
• Skilling sets + legendary tools for mining and foraging

Player Session Handling

We’re using a new way to handle storing player sessions that mean disconnects should no longer affect gameplay, i.e. dungeons or long timers. Finally you can enjoy proper Chaos Wastes duos!

On top of this, there are now much better systems in place to handle interactions between players, such as during group content or elsewhere which should greatly enhance our ability to create and debug group content.

Leveling

We’re still using the RS leveling formula, but there’s a new addition to leveling that’s worth noting: Item Leveling! With the Enchanting Rework soulbound items can be leveled; when you gain XP in an item’s skill a portion of that XP is awarded to the item. Item levels scale at a different rate than skills, so expect them to generally level faster. See more in the Enchanting section!

Currently these are how we handle item XP:

Item XP is awarded to soulbound items as a split of the XP earned by an action. For example, if you have two soulbound items that should receive XP for an action and you get 150 XP from that action then both items receive 75 XP.

The slots: ‘Gloves, Boots, Rings, Necklaces, Arrows, and Capes,’ do not count towards this XP split but instead will always receive 1/16th the split XP reward as long as you receive over 8 XP. Using the above example of 150 XP split between two, all of these slots would receive 5XP (75 / 16 = 4.7, rounded up to 5).

Game Shop

Game Shop logic has been completely reworked to make it more extensible instead of being a really jank static shop. This basically means we can add league specific items or modify the shop more easily.

So far we’ve added several new purchases that are “packages” of items; think of them like mini-satchels or loot boxes. They mainly exist as gold sinks for ironmen to give them a chance to more easily get specific items that are easily obtainable with the marketplace, such as elite scrolls or gems.

Along with this you may also notice that boots are now in the general shop; gloves and boots have been rebalanced to require 100 total levels per tier (100 for bronze, 600 for styg) whilst being much cheaper to obtain in general. Also, the defense requirements for these items have been removed to allow skiller mains to take advantage of the equipment without needing to get defense levels.

The vials added in the shop are used to make potions that are a part of the alchemy subskill in Cooking, though they can be crafted as well using heat and sand.

Skills

Gathering

Gathering skills have received a general update to use a new system that I’ve dubbed the “Shard System.” Every 5 minutes spent gathering will award you 1 skilling shard unique to that skill which may be used to craft a piece of the skilling set or a piece of the skill’s legendary tool. This means that all 3 gathering skills now have their own skilling set as well as their own legendary tool! All gathering zones have received a facelift in their location art due to us getting access to some neat AI art generation stuff.

Mining

Mining hasn’t seen any significant changes. Our goal was to keep Mining simple compared to the other skills to be a good starter skill without much complexity. The major changes are balance tweaks to zones to make them more focused on a particular material as well as adding a new bar post stygian that is used exclusively as a secondary/tertiary material in crafting or augmenting instead of introducing a new gear tier.

Foraging

Foraging has received the node system originally debuted with the original Fishing rework! It’s not as complex as the Fishing one; nodes have been separated into 4 categories: General (no focus), Plants (focus on ingredients), Seeds (focus on seeds), or Tree (logs). Balance has been shifted so that foraging rewards a lot more logs and a lot less plants/ingredients so that you’ll get the bulk of your ingredients from farming.

Fishing

Fishing has mostly just been ported over since the rework has already been done on it. The major changes to it is the inclusion of the new Aquatic Fiber materials that is used for magic equipment crafting.

Processing

Processing skills are skills that take the raw materials gathered and turn them into something you can actually do stuff with. For example, ores into bars, seeds into ingredients, or essence and fibers into runes and cloth.

Farming

There’s now farming totems! These are consumables that you ‘plant’ in your farm that grants passive buffs, they last a week and affect everything from harvest yield, fertilize requirement, free seed replanting, and growth speeds (of all plots at once, no more desynced plots). Mastery now increases maximum yield per plot and fertilizer now increases minimum yield rather than increasing growth speed. It will remain a passive skill. Hunting traps have been added that are crafted from basic foraging materials (logs/seeds/ingredients) to generate ranged crafting materials! Mastery now also increases the height of your plot every 10 mastery levels.

The little orbs are the totems, planted in the middle for demonstration purposes. You can stick them anywhere.

Runecrafting

Runecrafting has received a fairly substantial balance pass, here’s the new info card displaying what would appear for someone with level 99 RC:

Runecrafting also hosts a new sub-skill: Cloth Weaving! Weaving cloth does not use the same bonuses that essence and runes receive.

Additionally, you can now condense your excess essence into talismans by combining a lot of essence with an Unstable Talisman that is purchased from the General Shop.

Smithing

Smithing has received its long foretold rework!This rework adds a lot of new fancy mechanics for Smithing. Now you get to choose which forge you want to use which influences the type of bar you can create as well as the maximum Heat Intensity. Heat Intensity acts as a modifier for a lot of smithing stats and its effects are different for each forge but in general higher intensity means each action will require substantially more heat. For example, the starter forge, “The City Forge,” does not have any special modifiers and follows the general Heat Intensity curve where higher intensity results in more bars produced per action but an increasingly higher amount of ores; however, the City Forge cannot take advantage of very high heat intensities since it is a low level forge. Each forge has a calculated sweet spot and niche, such as a forge being incredibly fast but requiring a lot of heat, or one that is slower but very efficient. This rework should allow Smiths to produce bars in a more timely manner and finally burn ^haha all the excess heat that is inevitably stocked up since it is easier to generate heat than it is to use it. Refining has been updated; each forge has its own special refining table that drops specific items on top of the original gem table. I’ve written lore books but as of updating this page I have not yet distributed them, sorry!

Production / Refining

The production and refining skills have the same general intent as before with that being the refining of produced materials into their final form, i.e. bars into armor.

Enchanting

The Enchanting Rework is finally here! A whole lot has changed and I will probably forget a few things. Enchanting now has a tool: “Enchanting Tomes.” These tomes raise the max augment you can reach as well as give you a few effective levels. Additionally, mastery currently reduces the amount of resources required per augment attempt by 1% per if the item is soulbound. Augment costs are now slightly dynamic, meaning I can change them in the backend based on certain factors. Soulbinding an item makes it untradeable, enables the item leveling system, and changes its augmentation formula. Generally speaking, a soulbound item is leveled up by doing a relevant skill with the exception of generic equipment items like jewelry. The augmentation formula changes for soulbinding means that it will use the new scaling augment system; you have an 100% chance to augment the item up to its item level, i.e. you have a 100% chance to get a level 10 item to +10; however, the costs also scale moderately. Every 3 augments you will need to consume the base version of the item in question (at +3 you use 1, at +6 you use 2, +9 you use 3, etc.). Augmenting itself has undergone a massive change; there is no more active or manual augmenting! Now you simply put the item in a queue and begin the augmenting process. As long as you have the materials and there is a valid item to be augmented the queue will continue to process items. Augmenting time is no longer locked at 5 seconds per, now it scales based on augment.

Crafting

Crafting equipment has been entirely rescaled to match the item tier. This is most relevant with Runite / Stygian / Unique gear as the general skill requirement to equip is the range that you will need to craft them at. For example, at Stygian Breastplate no longer requires 98 Crafting, but now only requires 72 Crafting. In the same vein certain uniques have been shifted down, such as the Shard of Kalanahmatti now only requiring 80 crafting, down from 99. The experience rewards have been scaled down as well though! Most of the new equipment has been implemented into crafting, such as skilling, magic, and range gear.

Cooking

Base food cooking is mostly unchanged outside of several quality of life features being added. I have incorporated some of the features scripts have added to cooking to the UI, chiefly adding a preview to what recipe you will end up creating as well as more stats to help you plan out the action.

There is a new Alchemy sub-system for cooking where new recipes produce special potions. Food has been rebalanced to mostly be HP focused rather than buff focused. Food gives large chunks of heals as well as heals over time. Potions are focused entirely on buff stacks and may include timed buffs. In combat there is now a cooldown to consuming food/potions. Most food has been given some attention to make them different from one another, such as meat or monster based food healing more but requiring longer cooldowns.

Alchemy functions in a different way than standard cooking: There are 4 rarities (common/rare/epic/legendary) as well as 3 different types of potions (normal/concentrated/large). Potions don’t use recipes like food cooking but instead are generated based on the size of the ingredients with enchantments in the recipe. Generally speaking the potency of a potion is increased by having high size ingredients with enchantments attached to them.

On top of this, there are now some new cooking/alchemy ingredients and tweaks to existing ones! Alchemy has some new specific fields to allow us to modify an existing ingredient to either be particularly potent or weak when used in alchemy as well as make new ingredients that are only decent in alchemy instead of cooking.

Note: preview image of potions do not have augment levels or enchantments applied, these were manually generated items for display purposes only. These were also taken very early on in the playtest and the UI may not be accurate to current.

Combat

Combat has finally received the massive rework I’ve been planning for it for the past year and a half.

Damage has been split into styles and types; any style can use any type, but styles generally have a favored damage type or subtype.

The three main damage styles are Melee, Magic, and Range.

The two damage types are Physical and Magical.

Melee and Range predominantly use the Physical type whereas Magic predominantly uses the Magical type.

Physical subtypes: Piercing, Blunt, Slashing

Magical subtypes: Chaos, Nature, Fire, Ice, Lightning

This system allows us to make weapons more unique as well as give abilities specific strengths or weaknesses. For example, a greatsword is exceptional at slashing and would benefit the most from using a slashing style ability, whereas a spear may be better at stabbing and would do much less damage if you tried to use a slashing ability with it. Exceptions typically exist in the form of unique items. For example, Melee may be generally focused on Physical damage but an item like the Shard of Kalanahmatti may also have Ice magic damage, allowing it to benefit from Ice focused abilities. On top of this item classes add specific abilities, such as the Kala giving the Ice Shard ability or a Greatsword giving a cleave ability.

Abilities now have specific scaling per damage type which allows you to exploit their strengths to create niche builds. You can now create your own rotation from a list of known or learned abilities. Known abilities are granted from equipment you’re wearing, such as item class specific abilities, whereas Learned abilities are granted when consuming an ability item. An example of a learned ability would be reading a spell tome to learn a spell; this allows you to use this ability regardless of worn equipment. Additionally, abilities also have the ability to buff or debuff self/target on cast. This includes supporting friendlies with a heal/buff.

New stats have been added and existing stats have been modified.

Damage is no longer based on the old RS Strength formula, but instead is a damage range based on your equipment and levels.

Accuracy is per damage type but can also be given on a subtype basis, i.e. you can have +50 magic accuracy with a +50 more accuracy when using ice magic.

Critical damage and critical defense are now a base stat, usually determined by the item class. For example, a dagger has a 5.5% chance to crit with its damage multiplier being 1.75x whereas a battleaxe has a 3.5% chance to crit and does 1.13x crit damage. Critical defense is rolled whenever a crit is landed and reduces the damage dealt by a set amount. For example, a monster I’ve designed that is heavily defense focused takes your crits and makes them normal attacks 50% of the time. Similarly, tank armor has a built in critical defense that most other armors do not.

Affinities now exist in combat, affinities are the sum of each damage type/subtype of your entire equipment set and affect the damage taken or given compared to its counterpart. For example, a Mantle of Flame has a Fire affinity of 1.5, meaning it will generally reduce fire damage taken by a massive 50%. This gets much more complicated when you take into account that most attacks are not purely one type, subtype, or style; each damage roll is broken down into each of those groups and compared to the defender’s affinity to each scaling based on the ability’s own scaling. This may sound complicated but it’s quite intuitive in play if you’re not worrying about the exact numbers. For example, if you’re fighting a tree it should be obvious that slashing damage from an axe type weapon will be most effective for physical damage and fire damage will be the most effective magical damage. Conversely, casting fire magic at a demon will not be as effective. Affinities are based on item class and are not scaled by augmenting so your base build entirely determines your build’s strength or weaknesses.

The main combat stats have been broken up into Protection, Resistance, Agility, and Stamina.

Protection is your defense against physical damage and reduces physical damage taken by a scaling amount; the base skill for this is defense.

Resistance is your defense against magical damage and reduces magical damage taken by a scaling amount; the base skill for this is constitution.

Agility is your ability to dodge attacks entirely; it has no base skill and is dependent on your equipment used.

Stamina is a new modifier that changes your max HP. Tanks will generally have a very high stamina and thus very high HP pool with the opposite being true for glass cannons / dps.

Generally speaking this is how damage is calculated:

Attacker targets Defender -

Defender rolls to dodge by comparing Attacker accuracy to Defender agility and other defensive stats, if successful attack misses, otherwise attack hits -

Attacker’s ability generates a list of strengths/weaknesses to compare against Defender -

Minimum and Maximum damage (they scale differently) is calculated from those strengths/weaknesses then is multiplied against a coefficient made from protection if the ability is mostly physical or resistance if the ability is mostly magical -

Now that final damage max is found, attacker attempts to roll crit; if successful it applies the crit multiplier and defender attempts to roll crit defense; if successful the defender’s crit defense multiplier affects this new final damage -

A random damage amount is selected within the Minimum and Maximum damage and that is the damage that is now dealt to the Defender

Zones, Dungeons, Elites, Bosses, etc. have been completely redesigned.

A new difficulty modifier mechanic has been setup that allows me to dynamically modify an existing zone to generate new enemy types or waves. This replaces the Treasure Hunter bonus from clearing augmented elite scrolls. For example, clearing a +5 Valley of Giants scroll allows you to increase the difficulty of VoG to 15 (10 base + 5 from scroll), meaning you will unlock new waves of enemies, enemy types, etc. At high enough difficulties elites may have a small chance to spawn as minibosses!

Group combat has been enabled for enemies. Now you can fight multiple enemies at once! Fun! This is generally limited to high difficulty or group zones. For high difficulty zones this should allow lower tier zones like Lava Maze to scale up to endgame equipment tiers more sanely.

General changes to Combat:

Accuracy has been significantly increased across the board. Combat is much more HP-centric instead of dodge-centric as a general rule of thumb, but don’t let that stop you from making an agility build to dodge everything!

Healing is much slower in combat, you can’t spam heal due to new food cooldowns and a large portion of healing coming from a heal over time applied when healing.

Constitution

Constitution now scales separately from HP. Generally speaking you take your Constitution level * 7.5 to get your HP and add on your stamina bonus to get your max HP. It gets XP from getting hit or mitigating damage taken. Constitution affects your magical resistance.

Attack

Attack is the accuracy of all your attacks. It gets XP from successfully hitting things.

Strength

Strength is your ability to deal melee damage. It gets XP from damaging things.

Defense

Defense is your physical protection. It gets XP from getting hit or mitigating damage taken.

Magic

Magic is your ability to deal magic damage. It gets XP from damaging things.

Range

Range is your ability to deal range damage. It gets XP from damaging things.