UPDATED - Project Rebalance: Skilling (2024)

Note: This is a feedback update on our recent skilling-focused Project Rebalance blog. Due to limitations on our backend, we've had to upload this as a separate blog because combining the two exceeds our character limit. If you're not sure what's being discussed in this blog, please read through the original first!

Apologies for the delay between blogs, we've been all guns-blazing on Varlamore over the past week and didn't think it would be a great time to get this in front of you!

Feedback Changes: 28th March 2024

Following your feedback since this blog went live, we've made a small number of changes to this blog (and the original linked above). It's clear that you weren't happy with us reducing the XP rate of the rooftop courses lower than our initial proposal, so we've reverted those back to what was originally proposed, with the added benefit of additional marks for both Pollnivneach and Rellekka courses remaining. In addition to this, we have re-priotised some work to fit in changes to Run Energy as part of Project Rebalance.

Project Rebalance is a perfect opportunity for us to fit in a huge plethora of quick wins and there is MUCH more to come! We want to maintain momentum as we move into discussing NPC Defence changes next week. Given the Run Energy changes will need to come out a little later in the year, we'll go over the full breakdown when we're able to provide a beta for you to test it out yourself in-game. For now, here's a quick overview of what these changes will include:

• Run energy restoration to be significantly more generous at low levels
• Run energy drain rate reworked to scale with Agility level, and also scale harder with higher weights

Agility

Around 85% of you felt positively about our Agility proposals, but there was clearly some room for improvement.

A lot of you mentioned that you’d like to see Agility’s XP rates improved significantly – but to be absolutely clear, that’s not what Project Rebalance is for. As we stated in the original blog, our aim is to make Agility more rewarding and varied to progress through, not just faster. This means that our efforts are concentrated on giving players a wider variety of entertaining and XP-efficient training options.

While the work we're doing here doesn't rule out more significant Agility changes in the future, we're looking to remain conservative with changes to the top end of Agility XP for the time being. Many of the best XP/hr methods in a number of skills have existed or not changed since Old School's release, we're not looking to slap a blanket 50% XP buff on Agility and call it a day as if it fixes the skill. Instead, we want to vary the existing progression and reduce the fatiguing 30-level stint at Seers' Village so that we have a stronger foundation to make the skill more rewarding and then see where we're at, rather than just making it quicker.

With that in mind, here’s what we are changing:

Rooftop Courses

Some of you weren’t happy about the XP rate nerf we’ve proposed for Seers’ Village – and no wonder, with the amount of time players spend there!

We'll open by saying that a handful of people pointed out the XP rates we provided for Seers' Village with the Diary teleport were higher than is achievable. We wrote 58,900 XP/hr when in actuality, this rate caps out in the ~56,000 XP/hr region (see this OSRS Wiki page for more info).

Mod Husky has done an excellent job explaining our thinking in this Reddit comment but to sum up:

• The Kandarin Hard Diary teleport speeds up the time between laps significantly, boosting XP in a way we hadn’t anticipated at the time.
• This means the Seers’ Village course (level 60) provides more XP per hour than Pollnivneach (level 70) and Rellekka (level 80)
• This means it’s more efficient for players to spend a whopping 30 levels at Seers’ Village instead of enjoying their new unlocks.
• Since we can’t remove the Diary reward at this late stage, we want to equalise things by adding the same reward for the other courses’ respective Diaries.
• However, to make moving onto new courses feel worth it, we felt we had to shift the other courses XP rate a little.

We've got other Agility changes coming up so please reserve your judgement for the time being!

Other changes include:

• Taking a look at improving the ‘feel’ of Pollnivneach and Rellekka by making clickboxes bigger, adjusting obstacles, and including longer stretches for alchemising items.
• Increasing Marks of Grace at both Pollnivneach and Rellekka, regardless of Achievement Diary completion. Again, the aim is to see a steady increase all the way up to Ardougne.

And the rest...

Outside of rooftop courses, we've a couple more things to chat about!

Outside of rooftop courses, there were a couple more points we want to address, starting with the Brimhaven Agility Arena. Our aim here was to make the Arena a higher-effort alternative to rooftops in the 40-70 level bracket. You like the sound of that, but had a couple of feedback points for us to address:

• It’s been raised that giving bonus XP on ‘themed worlds’ for touching a pillar actually encourages players to be less social. To clarify, this XP is XP for the Token, which makes the XP boost negligible – although we’ll be keeping an eye on this mechanic at launch to ensure it meets our aims.
• We’ll take the same approach to the sub-pillars, as we’re confident that they’ll provide a smoother alternative to tagging a pillar and then repeatedly climbing over the same wall for maximum gains.

Next up, shortcuts:

There were concerns that removing Diary requirements for some shortcuts will make Achievement Diaries less rewarding. Regardless, we’re sticking to this change – the reward space is going to move to the skill itself, making it less dependent on other content and therefore more rewarding to train.

We've picked out a handful of extra shortcuts (or more specifics) that we'd like to include, and we're still on the lookout for more

• 66 Agility - Taverly Wall shortcut next to Tree Farming patch
• 71 Agility - Pollnivneach Stepping stone shortcut to Nardah
• 72 Agility - Barrows Wall jump shortcut on the west side
• 79 Agility - North Shilo village shortcut, between the trees at the eastern corner
• 81 Agility - Dagannoth Kings tunnel in the first 'Giant Rock Crab' room on the far wall
• 82 Agility - Asgarnia Ice Dungeon shortcut from ladder into Skeletal Wyvern area
• 84 Agility - Crandor Rock climb shortcut on the south side of the island's peak
• 85 Agility - Waterbith Island rock climb south of the Lunar spellbook teleport location, skips thrownaxe + pet rock section
• 96 Agility - Viyeldi Caves shortcut from the main room (with the fire pentagram) closer to the relevant Clue step.

For the Hallowed Sepulchre, we’re adding two additional changes:

• Allow players to unlock an instanced version of Hallowed Sepulchre, allowing skilled players to maximise their gains without having to be lucky enough to be the first player to start the Floor’s trap cycle.
• Move some of the Floor 5 completion XP onto Floors 3 and 4 to make it feel more worthwhile.

On that second point, here’s how the new XP rates square up against other popular training methods:

Bear in mind that these numbers are really only attainable for non-looters who are already comfortable with the Hallowed Sepulchre.

While the difference between Ardougne and Floors 1-5 might be as much as +50% in some cases, the difference for other courses is much smaller (especially when considering our proposed tweaks). With this in mind, we're looking to redistribute some of the total Floor 1-5 completion XP onto Floors 3 and 4 to make the Sepulchre more worthwhile in the ‘deadzone’ between 70 and 90 Agility.

Course Requirements

• The Tree Gnome Stronghold requirement remains level 1 Agility.
• The Draynor Village requirement has been lowered to 1 Agility.
• The Shayzien Basic Course requirement has also been lowered to 1 Agility.
• All level 1 courses provide 10,000 XP per hour, so pick your favourite!
• The Shayzien Advanced Course requirement has been lowered from level 48 Agility to level 45.

Thieving

Again, these changes were all about making sure progression through the skill felt smoother and more healthy.

Earlier we said that we were being conservative with top-end XP rates… so what’s going on with pickpocketing? While you’re all keen to reduce fail rates, you’ve made the great point that increasing XP drops at the same time is a step too far.

As such, we’re instead adding value to pickpocketing through different means:

The new XP rates are about on par with Knights of Ardougne at the same Thieving level (i.e. the proposed Paladin XP rates are roughly in-line with the Knight of Ardougne at 70 Thieving), with the added incentive of extra Clue Scrolls that might make players think twice about which NPC they plan to rob. Incidentally, the extra XP here is derived entirely from reduced failure rates, so these training methods should feel a lot more fun, too!

Note that Yanille Watchmen and Tzhaar-Hur are missing from the revised list. Ultimately, we realised that they didn’t fit into this approach – especially since it would give Tzhaar-Hur better rates than Pyramid Plunder, Piscarilius Artefacts, and even Blackjacking!

In other news, we’ve compiled your stall suggestions and filed them away for later. We’re not currently looking to expand our stall selection, but we still think we can give them a stronger identity than ‘low effort, some resources’ in future. Stay tuned…

Lastly, some of you were wondering why Elves and Vyres are missing from the list. We feel that players are already engaging with these NPCs regularly, as they represent some of the most profitable skilling methods in the game. Adjusting their fail rates would mean adjusting their loot to compensate.

Instead, we’re doubling down on unique ways to reduce fail rate via items and other buffs as potential for future reward space or activity design. Varlamore’s Thieving activity showcases just one of the ideas we’ve had so far, where street urchins will distract your targets for you. We’re keen to add more methods like this in future and really improve the ‘feel’ of pickpocketing.

Slayer

There was concern that our Task List reductions will reduce the variety of low-level Slayer. That is true, but early-level Slayer Masters already have bloated Task Lists, and we feel that chopping a few will leave the variety and prevent players getting ‘walled’ by particularly nasty tasks.

Here's a look at how many tasks each of the masters will have even after the change:

• Mazchna - 30 tasks → 29 tasks
• Chaeldar - 51 tasks → 36 tasks, though some of these require higher Slayer levels to be unlocked.
• Vannaka - 56 tasks → 44 tasks, though some of these require higher Slayer levels to be unlocked.

We believe there's still a really healthy amount of variety here, offering up around 40 tasks for both Chaeldar and Vannaka means you're definitely going to be seeing a massive spread - just ask anybody who's ever actively pursued a TzKal-Zuk task from Nieve's list of 45!

Other changes include:

• Making Sourhogs Spria-exclusive Tasks, removing the most complained-about task for Turael fans.
• Making storing tasks (after unlocking Task Storage) completely free, as the initial unlock is already quite expensive.
• Adding the ability to Skip tasks (for 30 Points) as a dialogue option, rather than requiring players to open the Rewards interface.
• Upon receiving a task, you'll have a third dialogue option to choose from that lets you Skip for 30 points, without needing to open the Rewards interface.

Finally, we’re removing Grounding Bolts and the Bug Basher from our proposal, as excitement regarding these items was limited. Don’t worry – we see all your suggestions and think it would be absolutely worthwhile to flesh out Slayer uniques at a later date.

Mining

82% of you said you’d feel more positive about Mining with our proposed changes, so we only have a couple of changes here.

Firstly, we know you want to see bigger changes to this unpopular skill. We still think these changes are beyond the scope of Project Rebalance, and that the skill will be much improved by encouraging players to enjoy the variety of Mining training methods that are already in the game.

With that in mind, your feedback regarding more Blast Mine changes was particularly welcome. Here are the changes:

• Increase the Blasted Ore 'crumble' or despawn timer.
• Increase the capacity for depositing so that players can claim more ore and ultimately see bigger XP drops – big number good!
• Add a counter to track how much ore has been deposited.
• Add a reward for the Kourend and Kebos Elite Diary that improves the chances for players to receive higher tier ore. This change will also buff XP rates, in addition to the ~10% XP rate we’ve already proposed.

Finally, we have a few more miscellaneous points:

• The Falador Hard Diary task will now only require the Prospector Helmet, rather than any piece from the set. Safety first!
• To clarify, we expect obtaining Prospector Outfit pieces via the Volcanic Mine to be slightly less efficient than at Motherlode Mine. We want to avoid repeating the Aerial Fishing model and discourage players from engaging with the alternative option altogether.
• We'll look to remove some elements of the NPC interaction with our Zalcano proposal and try to find more organic means for players to receive their XP or traditional loot. Additionally, we'll re-examine the balance of its 'all or nothing' nature for loot, though we're not aiming to make it a hyper-competitive training method while also offering over 1.4 million GP per hour!

And that's almost all we've got to update you on, strap in for an action-packed final bullet point from the 'Miscellaneous' changes...

• We'll add a settings toggle for the Barbarian potion 'Make all' functionality, similar to the setting for dart-fletching. Barblore enjoyers rejoice!

Let us know what you think of these updated proposals! We’re always open to your suggestions.

To catch up on the original blog after reading this one, click here!

You can expect more from Project Rebalance in April. Next up, we’re talking about NPC Defence changes, including more granularity for both Ranged and Elemental weaknesses. What’s more, we should have beta worlds ready-to-go as soon as the next posts go live, so you’ll be able to give us your hands-on feedback straight away!

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