Project Rebalance Part One - Skilling

Welcome to the first of several bumper blogs about Project Rebalance!

In December last year, we announced Project Rebalance, a massive Game Jam project which will flesh out progression for both skills and gear throughout your Old School adventure.

Since this is such a huge project, you can look forward to several blogs on this topic – including all the details about NPC Defence adjustments, gear changes, and more. We plan to release further blogs in April to coincide with the hands-on Betas. Today though, we’re looking at some smaller, simpler tweaks to skilling content.

Agility, love it or hate it, is one of the most impactful skills in Old School. It offers access to a huge variety of shortcuts across Gielinor and, more importantly, increases the speed at which your Run Energy regenerates.

Despite this, it’s not exactly a fun skill to train. We think you can all relate to the feeling of dread as you level up and see how many laps there are to go until your next milestone! On top of that, some of those shortcuts aren’t so useful after all, and that boost in Run Energy is a bit too subtle for most players to see the benefits.

Our changes to Agility are simple; we’re tweaking the numbers to better position different activities and unlocks, while identifying prime candidates for shortcuts that make training the skill worthwhile. We don’t plan to significantly adjust the skill’s progression, or the speed at which you gain levels.

Got all that? Then let’s get going!

Agility Courses

Agility Courses are your primary training method from 1-99. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to unlock a new course, check the Wiki, and see that it’s not really worth your time!

These changes are all about making Agility Courses relevant again, giving you a nice change of scenery and a real feeling of progression in the skill.

These changes will smooth out XP rates between courses, give Rooftop Courses steadier progression, and reward those of you who’ve kept up with your Achievement Diaries with even better rates. Boosted Diary rates also let us improve some of the high-level courses like Pollnivneach and Rellekka, where we currently see players giving up on the grind.

Eagle-eyed readers will also note that this proposal includes swapping the requirements for the Draynor Village Rooftop Course and the Gnome Stronghold Agility Course. The Gnome Stronghold may be an iconic Agility location, but newer players aren’t even really sure how to get there, and experienced players get their early-game Agility levels from quests like Tourist Trap. This way, newer players have the opportunity to learn about Agility basically from the start of the game, instead of having to travel across half of Gielinor.

We know you love those little green guys, so we’re open to leaving the Gnome Stronghold Course requirements alone – but no matter what, we’ll be making the Draynor Rooftop Course available right out of the gate.

Also of note is the addition of Strength XP to the Barbarian Outpost course, in-line with the rest of Otto’s Barbarian Training.

There are two more changes we’d like to roll out across all ‘primary’ Agility Courses:

• Add Marks of Grace to all regular Agility Courses, including the Penguin, Barbarian, Shayzien, Ape Atoll, Wilderness and Werewolf Courses. That Grace gets around!
• Remove various points of failure towards the ends of Agility Courses. We shan’t name names… but it’s Canifis. Canifis is the problem here.

Brimhaven Agility Arena

This next Course is so special, it deserves its own category. The Brimhaven Agility Arena has it all. Rope swings, lava pits, falling rocks, parrots, dart traps, and a fiendish timer that keeps even the most agile adventurer sweating. Plus, it's turning 20 this year, which has us all feeling a little old...

Despite all this cool stuff, the Brimhaven Agility Arena is looking a little deserted these days. Our changes aim to retain its identity while improving its overall appeal:

• Make Brimhaven Agility Arena more suitable for its target audience of players with 40+ Agility, up to some reasonable drop-off point where other methods pull ahead.
• Make up for the lack of Marks of Grace with competitive XP rates for the level range, suitable for a high-intensity skilling method.
• Add some polish and reduce frustrations. The current ticket system heavily punishes failure and doesn't feel all that great when interacting with the Arena at the lower end of its intended level range.
• Encourage people to play on the same world to add a social element to the skill.

Those are the broad changes – now let’s see the specifics. If you liked that last list, you’re going to love this one:

• Update various traps to feel more responsive and smooth.
• Adjust fail rates so that the Agility Arena is better-suited to its intended level range.
• Give players a flat XP rate when handing tickets in to Jackie the Fruit, instead of an XP rate that scales with Agility level.
• Give players XP when they obtain tickets, scaling with Agility level every 10 levels.  
• Players currently do not get XP for obtaining tickets, so this would be totally new behaviour.
• Every X tickets obtained, players receive a 'Brimhaven Store Voucher' (name to be decided) which can be exchanged for any of the non-XP rewards from Pirate Jackie the Fruit’s Store.
• This means that players no longer have to choose between XP and the other rewards on offer. Graceful recolours for all!
• Add Amylase to Pirate Jackie the Fruit’s store – a more engaging way to stock up on your Stamina Potions.
• Remove the 'red-ticket' system, meaning you'll always get a ticket for your first pillar.
• To prevent world-hop metas, logging out or hopping worlds will now place players outside the Arena.
• On a 'Brimhaven Agility' themed world, the first player to touch a pillar will get an extra chunk of XP and a little hyping up in-game. This will improve on the social element of the skill and make the whole thing just a little bit more fun. We plan to start with just one world and see how popular the Arena becomes before adding more.  
• Potentially add 'sub-arrows' after you touch your 'main arrow' pillar. This would allow players who want to put the extra effort in to squeeze a little more XP out of the activity.

So, what do you do with all that extra XP? Unlock a few more shortcuts, of course!

Agility Shortcuts

Warning: there’s another list on the way. Our proposals for shortcuts fall into three categories: removing Achievement Diary requirements, adjusting level requirements, and adding high-value shortcuts to the game.

These changes should ensure that skill progression feels good, that shortcuts are more relevant for their level bracket, and that players are more motivated to train Agility overall.

Ready for that list? Let’s see the specifics!

We’ll remove the Achievement Diary requirements for the following shortcuts:

• Wilderness - Lava Maze.
• Wilderness - Lava Dragon Isle.
• Morytania - Mos le'Harmless Estuary.
• Lumbridge - Draynor Narrow Tunnel.
• Lumbridge - Swamp-to-Desert Grapple.
• Karamja - Shilo Village Stepping Stone.
• Karamja - Brimhaven Dungeon Stepping Stones towards Red Dragons.
• Fremennik - Miscellania Dock to Etceteria Stepping Stone.
• Fremennik - Troll Stronghold Roof Rock Climb.
• Desert - Al Kharid Palace Window.

We’ll adjust the following shortcuts as follows:

• Draynor Narrow Tunnel moved south and sped up.
• Shilo Village Stepping Stone requirement lowered from 77 to 32 Agility.
• Mount Karuulm's Mysterious Pipe (towards the Alchemical Hydra) sped up considerably.
• Forthos Dungeon Spiked Blades Jump requirement lowered from 75 to 63 Agility.
• Fremennik Slayer Caves Spiked Blades Jump (towards Pyrefiends) requirement lowered from 81 to 43 Agility.
• Fremennik Slayer Caves Narrow Crevice (towards Turoth) requirement lowered from 62 to 61 Agility.
• Brimhaven Dungeon Stepping Stones (towards Red Dragons) requirement lowered from 83 to 56 Agility.

Finally, we’ll add the following new shortcuts:

• Fossil Island - Zip-line from the House on the Hill towards the small island where players can dive for Underwater activities. Requires 58 Agility.
• Waterbirth Island - shortcut added to speed up access to the Dagannoth Kings. Requires 85 Agility.
• While we’re not sure what exactly this shortcut might look like, we plan to position it after the entry door and ‘thrownaxe special’ areas.
• Shilo Village - add a shortcut entrance/exit to the north of the village. Requires 79 Agility.
• Falador/Taverley wall - add a shortcut near Alain's Tree patch. Requires 66 Agility.

There’s a survey at the bottom of this blog where you can tell us your thoughts about all the above changes. First though, how about some crime?

Have you ever slipped, fallen and accidentally stolen from a hard-working Knight of Ardougne? Ever done that thousands of times? Don’t worry, this is a safe space – we all love a bit of crime around here.

Our Thieving changes are largely about rebalancing failure rates, XP drops and stall respawn times. In turn, this should give players more options when deciding where to train this sneaky skill.

Pickpocketing

The following pickpocketable NPCs are receiving changes:

These changes mean that at higher levels you’ll be able to harass NPCs again, instead of relegating yourself to Ardougne’s southern Bank for all eternity. The tweaks to failure rates mean that pickpocketing should feel better, too!

Stalls

Outside of early levels and the odd pet grind, stalls have too long a respawn time to be worth engaging with, even when targeting a specific resource.

These changes aim to breathe new life into Gielinor’s marketplaces and are aimed at more casual players. We bet the stallholders can’t wait!

Our intention here isn’t for stalls to surpass pickpocketing in terms of XP/hr, but to provide attractive alternatives for low intensity skillers and those hoping to stock up on particular resources.

We’d really like to hear your feedback on these numbers – how rewarding would you like your criminal activity to be?

Slayer is an Old School classic, but newer players are often confused by its popularity – after all, the early levels can be a real grind. Beginner Slayer relies on lots of out-of-game research. The tasks you encounter are sluggish and slow, and unless you’ve been boosting your points somehow you don’t have a surplus available to skip the less exciting assignments you receive.

Our proposals aim to improve the early-game Slayer experience by removing the more egregious Slayer Tasks. We’d also like to help newer slayers stock up on Slayer Points by reducing the kill counts in early tasks – which should in turn smooth out the transition into the ‘fun bits’ of the skill.

On that note, we want to bring the thrill of obtaining a special drop into early-game Slayer by adding a small number of uniques which will provide limited utility against other low-level Tasks.  

Slayer Task List Changes

The following Slayer Tasks are being removed from these Slayer Masters' task lists:

Mazchna

• Earth Warriors

Vannaka

• Rock Slugs
• Earth Warriors
• Green Dragons
• Bronze Dragons
• Crawling Hands
• Cave Bugs
• Cave Crawlers
• Banshees
• Cave Slime
• Lizards
• Wall Beasts
• Killerwatts

Chaeldar

• Infernal Mages
• Molanisks
• Wall Beasts
• Harpie Bug Swarms
• Mogres
• Cockatrice
• Pyrefiends
• Lizards
• Rockslugs
• Cave Slime
• Banshees
• Cave Crawler
• Steel Dragons
• Iron Dragons
• Bronze Dragons

The remaining Tasks now better reflect the stats we expect low-level Slayer players to have, and keeps them doing level-appropriate content throughout the grind.

In addition, the above three Slayer masters have had both the minimum and maximum quantity reduced for most of their remaining Tasks. This means that lower-level players will complete Tasks faster and unlock their Block Slots nice and early, in a more organic way than the current Turael-boosting meta.

Slayer Monster Changes

We’ve also made a couple of changes to some under-utilised Slayer monsters you might encounter early in your monster-hunting careers:

Killerwatts

• Ranged defence reduced from +20 to -10.
• New chance to drop Grounding Bolts, which are equivalent to Mithril bolts but deal 30% bonus damage against Electrical creatures… a category which only includes Killerwatts for now.  

These changes intend to make Killerwatts a much faster task and less of a guaranteed 'Skip' for players, while giving players the satisfaction of having the right tools for the job.  

Fever Spiders

• We’re actually giving them a loot table!

Revolutionary, we know! These creepy crawlies won’t become goldmines overnight, but we hope to have them drop something – especially considering that you require specialist equipment and a quest to unlock them in the first place.

Cave Bugs

• New chance to drop the Bug Basher, a new degradable weapon that breaks after 1,000 uses. Has a 3-tick attack rate and a minimum hit of 5 against bugs.

This relies on us actually defining ‘bugs’ as a class of NPCs. We could roll this out to spiders, the nylocas… if it’s got more legs than charisma, it just might make the cut. There's a survey question on this exact topic, so if you know a bug that needs a good bashing, let us know!

That’s all we’ve got on the Slayer front for now, but we’d love to hear your feedback!

While 2023’s changes to Shooting Stars have resulted in more Mining levels than before, there are still a huge variety of training methods that players just aren’t interested in.

To set expectations, we’re not overhauling Mining in the style of RuneScape’s Mining and Smithing Rework – but we are looking to bolster a few activities, make them more approachable, and help players experience all the skill has to offer.

We’re not ruling out a wider rework down the line (we know that Smithing progression is a particular point of interest), but for now we want to try maximising what we’ve got rather than deviating from the core concept of the skill.

Mining Minigames and Activities

Motherlode Mine

• Lower floor veins to run on 23-27 second timers, rather than having a chance to deplete.
• Upper floor veins to last longer, at 36-40 second timers.
• Have coal provide XP when revealed by cleaning Pay-dirt, improving XP rates at lower levels without muscling out Adamant and Runite Ore.
• Give the Default Sack an upper cap of 107 Pay-dirt. This avoids punishing players for not doing a full deposit at 80 Pay-dirt.
• Add a Super Hopper, unlockable for 50 Golden Nuggets, allowing players to deposit Pay-dirt from the upper level.
• Reduce the upper level unlock requirement to 57 Mining.
• Adjust the Falador Hard Diary Task to require one piece of Prospector rather than the whole outfit.
• Improve obtaining Golden Nuggets so players don’t feel they have to hand in Pay-dirt nine at a time.

These changes make unlocks more impactful while making the activity more reliably low intensity. Additionally, increasing XP rates at lower levels mean the activity is more worthwhile for newer players – and less like a chore to tick off your Falador Hard Diary.

Volcanic Mine

• We’re exploring ways to make solo play more viable by removing some of the guesswork, while ensuring that team and group play is still the most efficient way to earn points and XP.
• Add the Prospector's Outfit to Petrified Pete's shop.
• Remove the Kudos requirement and the requirement to claim rewards from building up the Fossil Island camp.

These changes give players more reasons to engage with Volcanic Mine by presenting a faster way to get your hands on the Prospector’s Outfit.

By improving the viability of solo play, we’re also encouraging players to explore different roles at their own pace, with the end goal of finding a team and maximising their gains.

Blast Mine

• Add more 'good' layouts per world. This means more layouts similar to the commonly used '6 vein' spot, within a reasonable distance of a deposit.
• Marginally increase the XP offered by ~10%.
• Reduce the shop price of Dynamite, so that Irons could feasibly engage with Blast Mine without having to build up a stock of Dynamite from other content.
• Improve how Run Energy is handled during the activity. At present, it's not possible for us to allow Run Energy to regenerate while interacting with the veins, but we'd like to see if there are any places we could give players a little bit of Run Energy back.

Blast Mine is chill, fun, and the massive XP drops offered when claiming ores make it a unique kind of satisfying. These changes are about making the activity more approachable, especially for Irons looking to stock up on ores and players hoping for something more engaging than Motherlode Mine.

Amethyst/Mining Guild

• Adjust Amethyst veins to run on a timer, rather than whenever a single Amethyst is mined.
• Rebalance Mining Gloves in terms of both price and passive effect so that they're more desirable and have more utility across the skill.

Gem Mining

• Unlock the Gem Mine with the Karamja Medium Diary instead of the Hard one.
• Improve messaging regarding the use of a charged Amulet of Glory while Gem Mining.

Sandstone and Granite Quarry

• Add more viable spots per world to reduce competition if players are looking to engage in common tick manipulation methods.

'Regular' Mining

• Improve Clue Geode rates across the board.

Our changes to ‘core’ Mining don’t overhaul the skill in any significant way. Instead, we’re hoping to cement the AFK status of Amethyst Mining for high-level players, strengthen the utility of Mining Gloves, and making Gem Mining more approachable.

Zalcano

Zalcano gets a section all to herself, in the biggest change we’re proposing today.

Right now, Zalcano is a potent moneymaker, but we see a lot of calls to make this high-intensity boss a more viable training method. Our intent has always been to put profit over XP here, so we’d like to propose something new.

We’d like to add a new currency to Zalcano’s regular loot table, which players will be able to trade in to an NPC. The unique loot table will not be affected. When handing over currency, you’ll be able to choose whether you’re paid back in XP or cold, hard cash. This neat solution lets players get more XP out of Zalcano if they want to, while keeping the boss a consistent moneymaker.

We will still be capping XP rates somewhere in the 50,000 XP/hr region, to make sure there’s still a good balance. We don’t want Zalcano to become the one-stop Mining shop!

Lastly, we want to resolve scaling issues so that it’s easier to jump into this activity without world-hopping to find the perfect group size. This may mean making instances available, changing how Zalcano scales, or adjusting the way contribution works. Stay tuned!

With that, we’ve covered the majority of our skilling proposals – but before we sign off, we have a few more miscellaneous improvements to tell you about.

Final list, you're on the home stretch!

• Improve the Dorgesh-Kaan Light Orbs activity.
• Offer double Cave Goblin Wire when thieving from Cave Goblins, Dorgesh-Kaan chests or the Wire machine near Dorgesh-Kaan's furnace, as a reward from the Lumbridge Elite Diary.
• Reduce fail rates for the Wire machine for players with higher Thieving levels.
• Grant 50% of the Firemaking XP as Crafting XP when replacing a Light Orb.
• Grand Bonus XP every 50 Light Orbs replaced, instead of every 100.
• Add a counter to track how many Light Orbs you've replaced.
• Allow players to make Guthix Rests in a single action. This assumes the player has all of the necessary items in their Inventory and means you can no longer fail to make a Guthix Rest by doing things in the wrong order.
• Add the 'Make-all' functionality to Barbarian Potions.
• Have Necklace of Faith provide 25% Prayer Points when triggered, up from 10%.
• Give Ring of Pursuit a 100% chance to fully reveal Hunter tracks, up from 25%.
• Improve Efaritay's Aid:
• With the ability to hurt all Vampyres with regular weapons, for 50% reduced damage output.
• With a 15% buff to the accuracy of Vampyre-specific weaponry like the Blisterwood flail.
• Adjust requirement for creating a Toxic Blowpipe to 78 Fletching instead of 53.

There’s a lot to chew on in this first blog. For dessert, might we suggest this survey? We’re keen to hear your thoughts on everything we’ve covered above! Fair warning, there are a lot of questions - so make yourself comfortable!

Meanwhile, those of you interested in combat will want to keep an eye out for our next Project Rebalance blog, where we’ll be taking aim at a variety of combat improvements. Until then…

That's everything for this week's game update. We'd love to hear your feedback so please let us know what you think via our official forums, on the 2007Scape Reddit, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel.

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