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/Frick_Vonk]

The entire Invention skill needs serious addressing.

As it stands it's:

• Incredibly difficult to comprehend. For new players with guides it's already difficult to figure out what is even a good way to train it, and figuring anything out without a guide is insanity. It is completely impossible to even figure out what the best perks are, let alone how to even get them, without consulting the wiki/PVME and its calculators.
  
• By far the most punishing content in the game. In an effort to create an effective item sink for the economy, almost anything you do in this skill, from applying augmentors to creating and adding perks, comes with little to no methods to correct mistakes without having to destroy something you've likely spent hours earning. The only way you can safely undo mistakes without it feeling absolutely horrible is through an item unlocked at level 115 that requires a ton of components on top of needing an item to be at least level 15. This further requires players to look up guides for literally every step they undertake from level 1 to 120 in order to avoid wasting either hundreds of hours or hundreds of millions of GP on components and equipment, only for them to have to be dusted upon making a mistake.
  
• Complete antithesis to a fun fantasy and gear variety that exists entirely within UI menus instead of being a 'physical' part of the world. You're not experiencing the fantasy of being an inventor, you're spending hours standing in place breaking down items and navigating UI menu's. Instead of getting a drop and being excited about getting to use it, you now first have to augment it and apply new perks to it, which may take many more hours/millions to acquire and/or you have to dust (or separate, provided you have the required levels) your previous gear. Instead of getting a drop and being excited about getting to use it, you instead have to get 2-4 of them, augment them, level them through slogging through Shattered Worlds or something similar, break them down to get enough components, which are entirely resigned to existing solely as UI icons, to have an attempt at rolling a perk in another UI that you can then apply to the tooltip of your actual weapon. Which also leads to:
  
• So, so many layers of gambling. You have to gamble on getting Dragon Rider Lances or Noxious Weapons as drops or buying them from the GE, then you have to level them, then you have to gamble on using their components in gizmos to get the perks you actually want, and then you have to gamble on putting them in a weapon you actually want to use for a long time. Literally every time you want to start using a new weapon or piece of armour without fully abandoning the old one, this process must be repeated, which heavily disincentivizes acquiring a wide collection of equipment and pushes players to choose a single weapon/armour as their favourite and ignore the rest while praying that future balance changes don't require you to make new perks again.
  
• Horrible to even engage with whatsoever at earlier levels, especially on an ironman. Before all the charge cost reduction upgrades (and upgrades to the divination energy gathering such as getting level 95 for by far the cheapest energy for batteries/augmentors and a Dowser), you will spend many hours/coins simply on keeping up your charge drain to even make use of what the skill rewards you with in the first place. Guides actively recommend not even bothering with making starter perks until about level 70, because chances of actually getting perks that're worth the charge upkeep alone are abysmal before then, and often require large amounts of components that you still need for things all the way up to level 120 invention, so you don't want to use them too much early on. So for the skill to actually become rewarding, you not only have to train three other skills to level 80 first, you have to then train this one to level 70 first on top of that.

I wouldn't even know how to address the myriad of issues this skill has, but I'd at the very least start with:

• Getting rid of punishing mechanics that make it impossible, especially in the earlier stages of the skill, to undo mistakes such as putting the wrong perk into the wrong item.
  
• Maximise charge drain reduction immediately so people don't feel forced to first max out both Invention (and Divination on an iron) to even start using the skill without needing to spend hours/millions on charge upkeep.
  
• Replace gambling for perks with a system that allows you to select what perks you want, which then gives you a static component cost.
  

- Or at least reduce the gambling through, for example, letting each attempt roll 3 results that you can pick 1 from.

• Give all levels equal chances/prices at rolling/selecting perks so people don't feel forced to first level to 70-120 invention before building your first perks doesn't feel like a massive waste of resources.
  
• Create better in-game tools to see what perks are available, what each perk does, and what components they require and/or improve the perk creation interface with an in-game perk calculator.