News:
Legacy Mode Launch, Global Combat Improvements and Gear Guide
At the beginning of the year we started the Power to the Players initiative, and in the last six months the RuneScape community has used it to shape the game in over 50 polls.
Today brings the biggest player-driven releases so far: the launch of Legacy Mode and return of the 138 combat formula.
This year, we vowed to work with the community on making Evolution of Combat the best it can be, as well as finding an alternative for players who preferred things as they used to be. Our aim has been to allow all types of players to enjoy combat their way, and to have them able to play side-by-side.
Read on to find out the details of Legacy Mode and the many other combat improvements - available in-game now.
Legacy Mode
Legacy Mode is an optional setting which allows you to play the modern game, but with traditional interfaces and old-style combat, without the need to learn the new Evolution of Combat system.
Legacy Mode can be turned on or off in either the Game Settings or Powers - Combat Settings interfaces, and when activated enables the following features:
No abilities, with auto-attack damage scaled up
Pre-RuneScape 3-style interfaces, both resizable and fixed
Old-style combat animations and stances
Old-style minimap icons
Health and damage visually scaled down (e.g. 9900 life points in EoC becomes 990 in Legacy)
Global Combat Improvements
For those of you who enjoy Evolution of Combat, we’ve also made significant improvements to the system, based on your feedback. We've fine-tuned these on the beta servers in recent months.
The 138 combat formula has been reinstated, tweaked to have equal contribution from melee, ranged and magic
Special attacks on weapons have returned
Strength bonuses have replaced critical hit chance
Ability damage has been fine-tuned to address some long-term imbalances. Damage output potential remains the same, but weaker abilities have been improved and overpowered abilities toned down
More life points come from stats than from armour, and combat triangle penalties and bonuses are slightly relaxed.
The Loadout interface has been updated to give clearer info for offensive and defensive stats.
Today’s update also brings a few Legacy-only and EoC-only game worlds. While the systems have been designed to be played side-by-side, we appreciate that PKers will want to know which mode their opponents will be using.
Fancy seeing this for yourself? Tune into our Twitch channel at 6pm BST today for our special Legacy Live Stream to spend 4 hours getting the lowdown with Mod Pips, Mod Pi, and Mod Slayer.
Future Combat
Today’s launch of Legacy Mode and the Global Combat Improvements are a landmark point in our quest to make RuneScape’s combat the best it can be – but our ambitions don’t end here.
In the short term, we’ll continue to tune both EoC and Legacy in response to your feedback, and we will also soon be offering limited stat rollbacks for those who used to have pure accounts but lost these in the change to EoC or re-introduction of the 138 combat formula.
In the longer term, we want to do more to revive PvP minigames and the Wilderness; to bring back monster aggression; to rework equipment that has lost its relevance; and to offer options to have Legacy Combat within the New Interface System, and vice versa.
To keep up with our progress on any outstanding issues, visit our 'Known and Fixed Issues' thread.
Please always give us your feedback, both what you’re enjoying and what you’d like to see changed. We’ll do our best to make it happen.
Gear Guide
Having the right weapons and items can help you take your adventure in Gielinor even further and that’s why we created our brand-new Gear Guide.
Use it to find out the very best weapons, accessories, and armour available to your character; simply select a combat method and a skill level to populate a list of all the best gear!
The Gear Guide will be live shortly!
Summer Special Membership
The Summer Membership Package has been flying off the virtual shelves, and plenty of you have saved yourself over 25% on three months’ membership, plus got your hands on those XP boosting auras and amulets.
To make sure everyone is prepared for the launch of Elf City, we’ve decided to extend the availability of this awesome package. You can now get your hands on your discounted membership and XP boosting items until 28th July.
See our previous news post for more details on what’s included in the package.
In Other News
Keepsake Boxes have been updated to be much more flexible. There are now 20 Keepsake Box slots within the Wardrobe Interface and any type of item can be put into any of the slots.
Treasure Hunter has had its prizes refreshed. They should now be even more relevant to your skills, especially at higher levels.
Read the patch notes for other updates released today.
Mod Pips and the RuneScape Team
Patch notes:
14th July 2014
Graphical:
The skin tone on the Beta scientist headgear has been fixed.
The completionist cape emotes no longer get corrupted by teleport animations.
The God Wars Teleport spell icon now has square background.
Skills, D&Ds & Minigames:
Treasure Hunter will no longer pause indefinitely on the "attempting to approve key" screen.
Players can no longer take pets to Pest Control Island.
Quests, Challenges and Achievements:
An issue has been fixed where the Fairy Queen refused to wake up in Fairy Tale Part II.
The Spirit Realm, which can be accessed through portals around the wilderness, no longer leaves the spirit overlay on the game screen after players have left the area.
Mentions of My Arm changing the Trollheim teleport to God Wars Dungeon have been updated to mention the new standalone God Wars Dungeon teleport spell.
Lucky challenges and Rhino daily challenges no longer overlap one another.
Other:
A calculation error with repairing multiple Player-Owned Port armours has been fixed.
The tool select interface will close properly using the escape key.
The close button on the bonds popup interface now works correctly.
Players can once again click on basic challenges if the player disables and re-enables the path system during the basic challenge stage.
An additional button to toggle the Featured interface to the What's New interface has been added for existing players.
Ninja Fixes:
A players combat level will now show on the skills interface.
Quick presets can now be accessed by using keys '1' and '2' when the bank is open.
Acquiring black ibis pieces from Pyramid Plunder will now replace artefacts if the player has no space available.
Players can now close the Dungeoneering map with the same keybind used to open it, which by default is 'M'.
The "You don't have any left!" message from dropping objects from the actionbar has been added to the spam filter.
Using the quick-entry option in the Queen Black Dragon rewards room now only uses one chat window, instead of two.
Engine Fixes:
A lighting effect in DirectX has been brightened. Please send a bug report for any areas that appear too bright.
Some tweaks have been made to the engine for Legacy mode.
HTML5 Engine Fixes:
A fix to the HTML5 client has been applied to let the preload get past 3%.
A fix to stop the HTML5 client crashing when hopping from a P2P world to a F2P world has been implemented.
Other stuff:
window appears upon login (first time only, after than you can switch between combat modes in settings):
navbuttons have changed a bit:
combat level is now shown on the skills tab:
legacy looks like this:
heh, tiny bit of nostalgia right there
we've also got new hitsplats:
i'll add moar as they become apparrent