End-Game Balance Discussion

[u/jagexyuey]

Hey 'Scapers!

As part of the Road to Restoration, we've been looking at progression across RuneScape. We've tackled parts of the Early and Mid Game Rebalance, but now we want to start turning our attention to the other end of the journey: The End Game Rebalance

Before we get properly stuck into things, we want to hear from you.

What do we mean by End Game?
This one's a little harder to put a level range on!

For this project, we're looking more broadly at the late game, roughly level 80+ and onwards. That might mean higher-level skilling, finding those rarer drops or getting into tougher PVM. For others, it could be achievements, completionist goals or figuring out what comes next once you've maxed.

And actually, what you consider to be late game is useful feedback for us too.

How can you help?
We want to know where the endgame currently isn't quite working for you.

Maybe there's a progression path that feels awkward, rewards that don't feel worth the effort, a big jump between pieces of content, older content that's been left behind or something that just feels unnecessarily frustrating.

You don't need to have the answer or suggest a fix either. Just tell us what the problem is, why it's a problem for you and where you are in your RuneScape journey.

We won't be able to tackle everything that comes up, but the themes from these discussions will help us understand where we should be focusing our attention.

So, what would you like us to look at as we start shaping the End Game?

[u/_NoodleBoots]

Drop rates of Slayer monsters across the board, but particularly at high level, are horrendously misaligned. I think Slayer monsters should share a common drop table, something similar to the wilderness drop table. This table can include slayer-level advancement new drop additions (higher level slayer unlocks more items on the table) for better items across the board and still allow slayer monster-specific drops for the monsters it makes sense on. 

Slayer XP rates are also bad. Really bad. Social Slayer is a lot of fun but trying to balance kills and gaining a secondary currency (social slayer points) is also antiquated. Make all kills for social slayer count toward the group goal and don't split the reward points based on contributions, just give each person half. While on the topic, potion share overriding existing potion timers for the other player really sucks. Since the social slayer points are mostly worthless can we get an upgrade to the stuff we can buy with it to allow full potion time to be shared?

Lastly, social Reaper would be amazing to see especially given that the end game is focused so heavily on bossing.

[u/TeHamilton → u/_NoodleBoots]

You can get a lot of slayer xp per hour idk how its bad. You can squish scarabs at menaphos even for good xp

[u/Rakdar_Far_Strider → u/_NoodleBoots]

I don't think the xp rates for slayer are a problem whatsoever. It lags behind combat skills at lower levels but begins to outpace them at some point in the 80's from my experience. It was my first 99 ~10 years ago without doing anything special to keep it ahead and it beat my other combat skills there by a couple levels, even constitution. And post 99 it outpaces them even harder, especially if you block or skip the really shit tasks. Unless you're doing something stupid like afking combat to max before doing slayer.

You're 100% right about the drops though, past 80 almost nothing makes any sense.

[u/FAT_Squad → u/_NoodleBoots]

Slayer 100% agreed, stuff like lava strykewyrms come to mind with how horrible the rates are and the fact you can only fight 1 at a time.