The Hunter Guild - Feedback

Thanks for all your feedback regarding the Hunter Guild, our first chunk of Varlamore content. We won’t hold back – let’s dive right into the changes we’re making! We've also updated the main Hunter Guild newspost to check out the updated blog once you're done here!

We were happy to see an overwhelmingly positive response to this new system, but have noticed concerns that it may be too much like Farming Contracts and Slayer Tasks.

To clarify, Hunters’ Rumours will not give you X number of wild creatures to hunt, like a Slayer Task – instead, it will specify a creature, and you’ll hunt them until you find a Rare Creature Part to hand in. We estimate that this will take around 8-10 minutes on average.

You’ve also been clamouring for streaks, noting that without them we encourage a ‘skipping meta’. We feel that the design itself prevents this – if you want to skip a Rumour, you have to reset the whole lot by taking on and completing a low-tier Rumour first. This results in a less efficient training experience.

For the record, we’re aiming for a moderate amount of XP per hour, including the bonus XP for completing a Rumour – but the travel time required to switch creatures means it isn’t as efficient as, say, hunting Black Chinchompas consistently.

As a final note, the Rumours will now range from Tier 1 (easy) to Tier 4 (hard).

Many of you wanted to hear the rationale behind introducing yet another Hunter pet, this time earned through your Guild activities.

We look at Hunter a bit differently when it comes to pets. Most skills have skilling pets obtained from training, and perhaps an activity-specific pet from associated content. Hunter is unique in that its pets are obtained by hunting specific creatures, which we think fits the theme of the skill. In the case of the Quetzal Pet, you’ll obtain it as a gift for all your hard work supporting the Guild – which we feel is a suitable and thematic reward.

We’d like to clarify that we don’t want the Quetzal Pet to be a reward from Birdhouses. Our design goal with this project was to breathe life into some of the less popular Hunter methods – Birdhouses already see plenty of use!

Meat’s back on the menu, boys – and your feedback tells us you’re really excited to chew on some new foodstuffs. However, one of the biggest asks we saw was to tweak the mechanics of how the delay on Hunter Meats works.

Now, you’ll be able to consume several Hunter Meats in a row, without needing to wait for the secondary heal. Crucially, however, this greedy gobbling will mean you miss out on that handy additional healing effect. This lets you heal up a bit faster in a pinch, at the cost of the main benefit to eating Hunter Meats. To take the sting out of this change, we’re also decreasing the difference between the heals from 85% upfront/15% delayed to 60% upfront/40% delayed.

We’ve reworked the healing table accordingly:

Bear in mind that we’re still open to further feedback regarding Hunter Meats, and will look to continue this discussion if they pass the poll. We’ve also revamped how the Hunter Meats are unlocked:

• Access to Varlamore: Low Tier Meats (Wild Kebbit, Larupia and Barbed Kebbit)
• 25 Rumours: Mid Tier Meats (Graahk, Kyatt and Fox)
• 50 Rumours: High Tier Meats (Antelope and Dashing Kebbit)

These light-loving critters were some of the most talked about new additions!

We want to clarify how their AoE mechanic works. It covers a 3x3 radius around the player that uses the Moth (that’s you!) and randomly selects three players within that radius to receive the buff. You’ll have to time it carefully if you want your besties to benefit!

We also want to clarify that this content is not intended to compete with Brews, but to add a new vector for interesting mechanics that affect other players.

Lastly, after talking it through as a team, we’ve decided that Butterflies should have the same effects as Moths. The poll question has been adjusted accordingly.

Two big points here. Firstly, we neglected to mention that the new Irit Tar will have +60 Ranged strength. It’s heating up in here!

Secondly, we’ve seen concerns from the PvP community that this will serve as easy access for some of the Wilderness’ least appreciated combat methods. To rectify this, we’re exploring an upfront cost to using these creatures in PvP. Dying to another player would mean you have to pay this cost again. Narratively, we’re leaning into the theme that these powerful beasts will need to be trained for PvP combat, as they’re a bit shyer than their mainland cousins.

In the same vein, we know that this set could quickly become a go-to for griefers. To mitigate this, we want to make the process of making this gear a little bit trickier, by requiring players to make the armour ‘combat-ready’ with the help of an experienced hunter in the Guild. It will still be perfectly affordable to create one set but will be much more expensive to have multiple in case of unfortunate PvP ‘accidents’. We’ll have more on this topic after the poll.

Firstly, we incorrectly stated that the range of the Bolas would be 1, when it is in fact 5. Oops!

Secondly, let’s talk about the Bolas’ baggage. We were aware of the Bolas’ history when we first came up with the design, but thought that its suitability for the Hunter skill would outweigh negative sentiment.

We also noted that many of you were unhappy that the Bolas didn’t have a use in Hunter. We agree that it would be better to tie them in with the skill, so we’ll be taking a step back to rethink the design.

In the meantime, we’re transforming the Hunter’s Bolas into the Hunter’s Spear, which will have all the same stats but won’t include the controversial special attack.

We’ve heard from some of you that even with our extensive changes, Furs still won’t be worth holding onto.

We’d like to counter this by noting that crafting Hunter’s Pouches will provide a significant chunk of Crafting experience, which we hope makes the whole endeavour worthwhile.

We saw a lot of feedback regarding balancing – in particular, you thought the Moonlight Hunter Crossbow required too high a Hunter level to create. We agree – you’ll now craft the upgrade from Sunlight Antelope Horns instead.

Sunlight Antelope Horns will still be used to craft the Bolts, however – you'll now be able to craft Moonlight Horns into stronger bolts that are around +92 - +94 in strength.

This change also gives us room to explore different Bolts in the future, which can be used exclusively with the upgraded Crossbow.

Some of you also wondered why the upgraded version of the Crossbow loses its unique 3-tick attack feature. In short, balancing a weapon of that speed is a lot more difficult than balancing a 4-tick weapon. Given the time allocated to this project, we would rather focus on making sure the other Hunter Guild features are in a great place.

• Reduced the Damage Reduction on the Hunter Outfits to 20%, 40% & 60%
• Antelopes will now be hunted with Pitfall Traps.
• Added the option to add a Whistle Blueprint to your Hunter Skill Cape.
• Added a quick option on Eagles to let players fly straight to their desired location, similar to the option found on Fairy Rings.

Lastly, we’ve seen loads of feedback regarding other areas of Hunter we could look to improve. We feel that the Hunter’s Guild is the first step in that direction, and your survey responses have reassured us that it’s the right direction for the skill.

However, we’ve also seen comments from high-level Hunters who feel they’re missing out on loads of fun content at lower levels. While we could simply introduce higher-level creatures, we don’t feel like this is what you mean when you talk about improvements we could make to the skill.

So, while we can’t make any promises just yet, know that we’ve heard you loud and clear, and that we’ll look to bring more challenging Hunter content to the rest of Varlamore.

We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to fill out the survey and read through our proposal, and we look forward to talking more about the Hunter Guild when the poll has concluded. Until then, be sure to tune-in to our livestream today at 17:00 BST on Twitch, where Mods Other and Sarnie will be talking everything Hunter Guild.

You can also discuss this update on our official forums, on the 2007Scape subreddit, the Steam forums, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel. For more info on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.

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