Hello, my name is Dirtydavi. I recently maxed and I am a GM. Unfortunately, it is my time to quit and I care enough about the game to give an in depth review to the team. So, here is my unhinged rambling.There is no way when unsubscribing to give detailed reasons why you are quitting. OSRS is the best game on the market right now. The simplicity in the combat allows skill expression to really show(You are closer to me, than I am to Port) without making content impossible with a newer player in your group. The best content in the game is Duo Tob, Solo Cox, and the Inferno. My first inferno cape is one of my favourite achievements. Varlamore has been very good for the mid game. It is almost always the correct choice to skill in that area once you reach it. The main reason I am quitting is I only have Cox left to do on my GIM and resetting the raid for the fun version of the raid sucks butt. This combined with a lot of issues with recent releases falling short has left me frustrated with the direction of the game. NFL Tight End Chig Okonkwo had a quote about how applying our skills on OSRS to real life that stuck with me. With the company I work for losing $1 Billion dollars and inflation outpacing wage growth it’s time for me to go back to school and this is a wonderful excuse to get my writing skills back up to par. I imagine I will be back for Raids 4 but I have doubts that it will live up to the hype. The mods have a tough job now with how skilled most players are and how fast information is solved and shared. How the raid feels is much more important than how hard it is. Regular Tob is much more fun than HMT.
--Cox
Solo Cox is the best content in the game. Due to my skill level the only thing I enjoy doing is speed run no prep layouts. These layouts are ~17min raids for me on average. The downside is it takes ~5mins to find one of the raids that's acceptable, not even the preferred raid. With Cox having so many uniques and a low weight, you end up with just shy of 1 in 1k for a mega rare and needing about 80 purples to expect green(I believe LGR math). So, a quarter of the very long grind is spent resetting the raid for the fun one. The best way to get purples is mega scales which are a bastardized version of the raid. They talked about adding better raid setups but only added the baby cm. The baby cm sucks. Go do regular vanguards and see how many times you accidentally max a shadow hit and reset them instantly. CMs suck they were only done because people wanted a consistent layout and kits/dust/capes. Scaling boss defense and damage is not “challenging”. If they reduced the prayer scroll drop rate they would be worth the pain. Why can the good solo player not have a preferred/fun raid setup without having to reset through “unknown” raids when the best way to complete the content is to chin and barrage stacks of scaled shamans and mystics?
–Yama
Yama is a very good boss that gets extremely boring after 200 kills. When going for full oathplate on my gim I did not leave the middle 2 glyphs and played my main while my teammate handled the glyphs. The horn is a great addition to the game. I thought oathplate was going to be slash Inquisitor, having no negatives and decent defense makes the gear overpowered for a rather easy boss. I am very thankful for the dry protection. Since we were so bored doing this we discovered a VERY important bug with loot not spawning when you kill Yama from the entrance side of the room. My partner got the loot message for 6 oathplate shards and they never showed up, thankfully it wasn’t an actual drop. Still infuriating. Reported it through the in game system. Trudged through the ai slop bot to talk to a mod about LOOT NOT SHOWING UP in the KILL BOSS FOR LOOT GAME but the mods on that side of customer service have no power of any kind. The loot not showing up shows the boss wasn’t tested appropriately at all. Mod didn’t get so bored they started killing Yama from the entrance.
–Doom
A good boss designed for high end players that is riddled with inconsistencies and better off done 1-7 spamming instead of deep delving. I have 1278 deep delves on my gim with rune arrows and no tbow. The common loot is laughable when considering the difficulty of the content. Congratulations, you completed delve 20! Please enjoy less earth runes than a pack from the store. This makes the decision to delve deeper always correct. I have been in many scenarios where I am delve 16+ and have 20hp with no food and it is correct to continue for the chance at a rare drop. You are unable to consistently solve deep delves without abusing the “rock block” technique because they don’t spawn enough boulders every time. The timing on the dirty bubble is inconsistent for when you need to hit it and how fast it paths. The slam phase is incredibly inconsistent with what tiles are safe behind rocks. The diagonal tile is safe, until it's not. Being 4 tiles behind the rock is safe, until it's not. If you are out of range for the slam animation you shouldn’t get hit either. There is a game breaking pathing bug involving the 2x boulders that never got patched. If the first boulder drops anywhere in your path you stop moving once reaching the boulder instead of running around it. This kills you when you need to flick 2x boulders while following a dirty bubble when you clicked into proper spots. I had so many kc because I was unfortunate enough to receive 8 cloths before 2 ayaks. Having to farm 5 zenytes to drop trade this to my main is bad design, the only correct option is to complain enough and hope it gets changed in 2 years.
–TOA
Invocations ruin good content. They offer an illusion of choice once you get to a certain skill level. The fixes were quite good, especially Baba. The puzzle rooms offer no unique experience and should be a 50 point invocation allowing you to remove them. They have been solved by a plugin since like the 2nd week. In a 500 invo I was killed by a warden in p2 when I made no mistakes after healing with the keris before I got 50 spec back. Horribly designed phase.
–Colo
Sol is one of the best fights in the game. Feels like a boxing match where you fight for the centre and don’t let your opponent get you on the wall. Unfortunately, it is ruined by the invocations. Illusion of choice again, there is always a best option. Roguelikes are not for me in general but they usually offer a buff instead of only negatives. Rolling 3 unusable invos and now you have to leave feels bad. RED FLAG DOES NOT WORK AS STATED. The way it is worded the minotaur should move around other mobs to get to you. In reality it makes the minotaur stackable like you are barraging. The other mobs should not walk through the minotaur when this is selected.
–Refusal to calculate
Some of my main issues over the last year or so have been calculation misses by the Mod team. I am sympathetic as it’s not as easy as I will make it out to be. But, it needs to be much better. I remember using a spreadsheet calculator back before we had Gearscape. The company making the game should have a correct calc(short for calculator). They completely whiffed on sailing calcs. The theoretical exp per hour on the crystal extractor was laughable and not even a correct use for it(Farming). MolgoatKirby (the goat) will tell you he has a 1/x chance at getting world records with perfect play. The mod team will fix sailing combat by making it worse. The Yama drop rate was nerfed because players were killing it faster than expected on release before people even discovered donofly. How was their expected kill time far off enough to justify a nerf that fast? Yama contracts were literally impossible on release! They are either not calcing, failing to test their calcs, or incapable of using the calc to design the content. This is much more difficult in reality. Like when you hear players say masori blowpipe is better than bowfa everywhere. Are you sure you’re not missing ticks on your 2 tick weapon? People thought the Fang was bad before release.
–Bug abuse vs emergent gameplay, CAs
Accepted bug abuse and high level OSRS go hand in hand. Tick eating, Red X, Infinite Prayer are all not designed parts of the game that are deemed acceptable. There is a very thin line between bug abuse and emergent gameplay. They are fine at large because they are either a pain in the ass or a form of skill expression and should not affect boss design. It should never have been included in combat achievements made by the mods and they should be ashamed it’s still included. The acceptance of these allows them to ship content that is not tested and will be not fixed once people find a solution to bad design. For example: Pre fix Baba, Rock block at Doom, Step under at moons, Resetting Nex, Flame skipping Hydra, Red X Bandos. All of these are unintended player solutions to bad design. While on the topic of bad combat achievements, any perfect kill that requires another player is garbage. This leads to a market for people selling/buying carries because most people do not want to do these annoying tasks, especially once they have already completed them. Perfect Akkha is impossible(I think) without one person staircasing the memory puzzle(BUG). Perfect Tob was my last task for GM for about 8 months before I could convince my awesome friends to help me. We one and doned it. The strategy for Nylo room in perfect tob is to use a plugin to remove the option to attack certain Nylos. This is the strategy because when you left click attack and the Nylo switches, you will stop attacking. However, if you right click attack and the Nylo switches, you will still attack and fail the task. This is certainly a game breaking plugin as the room is designed to recoil you when you attack the wrong colour. As a GM, I would have no issue with these being reverted to single player tasks, even in a group setting.
–Moons
Having everything in one area is really cool. The gear is all awesome. That is the end of the nice things I have to say. Defense first design is bad to teach new players as it is not used anywhere else. Defense is more important than people will tell you but it’s not the design pretty much anywhere else. The curse mechanic is not mentioned anywhere and snowballs to feel awful. Blood Moon is the worst boss in the entire game. Complete and utter nonsense. It heals more, the more it hits you. It heals more than you hit. It heals more than Verzik and Olm who have counterplay. This content was not tested by someone on an account in barrows at base 75 stats. Why does hitting the jaguars not do damage?
–Sailing
Sailing around the sea and having everything be relatively clean was nice. Charting other than the troll stuff was pretty fun. The fish are really good. That is the end of nice things to say about sailing. OSRS has amazing movement and they added an entirely different way to move that is worse. Enough has been said about ship combat already. It was an insane blunder to have weapons not work properly while at sea, and to have creatures have outsized HP pools as well. Inconsistencies when picking up crates while doing barracuda trials was maddening.
–Random gripes
-They could solve a lot of problems if someone tested content to expected completion. I don’t think someone doing 300 moons at base 75 or whisperer/levi 800 times would say that they are fun.
-Adding the minigame teleport to all spellbooks and moving everything is incredibly tilting. It’s understandable when it's a new teleport like Fortis. You did not give us an option to remove it and it is so jank runelite can’t get rid of it.
-Consistently need a plugin to fix bad UI.
-I spent hours putting together a hunter rumour blocklist and it was reset without warning by the first guy. Bad Design. Back to Herbi, Pookie
-The customer service was better when it literally didn’t exist. There was no hope you would talk to a person with any power to fix things.
-Atlatl fletching was such an incredible let down. You do not receive anywhere near the amount of darts you need to progress in the game from green logging moons. It is a 3 tick weapon and by far the best option in the mid game. You use it everywhere until bowfa and blowpipe. It is multiple times faster to just run moons than to fletch the darts.
-Moonlight moths are also an incredible let down for mid game players. Prayer pots are tough to come by in the mid game on an iron and this really doesn’t fill in the gap in a meaningful way. Especially with no exp for mixing them into 2 doses.
-Buying runes on an iron. Why can I not put an order for 100k Soul Runes at max price? Baba Yaga could figure it out.
-Amethyst should be at like 80 mining
-DT2 boss drops are abysmal. This has been beat to death but it was not addressed in the fix. Chromium ingots are the most puzzling inclusion to a drop table in recent memory. The rings are luck protected, not dry protected.
-Untradeable dupes/drops are incredibly lame. Signed the guy with 5 cloths on his iron and 3 axe heads from Vardorvis on his main.
-I should not have to hide thralls to see raid mechanics.
-PvP information imbalance is part of why the wilderness sucks. If a person has made their character invisible and can now see my gear and weapon when stacked I am at a severe disadvantage.
-Skulled players should not be allowed to logout in the wilderness to prevent ragging.
-Freezes should have diminishing returns on players
-I am good enough that only real demons or horseshoes can kill me in the wild. But the inventory limit makes it so fighting back is not worth it. You need to punish the attacking player more if you want the wilderness to feel fair to the mouse.
–Conclusion
This is my way too long insane rambling about the issues I have been having with the best game in the world and this is unfortunately the only way to get a mod to see anything. If you are looking to get better at the game you need to accept dying. All the GMs have died more than you. Play on a smaller window size. Turn 117 off, The original art is amazing. Watch how good players move, a good tobber will correctly run the sote maze even when a learner is the one running the top. STOP SPAM CLICKING! Put the graceful away and skill in cool gear. I have belief the mods can figure things out. While I am optimistic, I have my doubts for raids 4. I will see you then.