chbachman

OSRS: Leagues V

Oldschool Runescape has a problem. It’s a good game, stretched out over too long of a time. For example, Theater of Blood is a endgame raid, and a well designed one. I enjoyed my time with it. But in it requires:

That adds up to an astonishing ~350 hours of just grinding to get to the minimum required to raid. This is ignoring anything that isn’t gold or xp, as those things are harder to calculate.

If I want to do that with a friend, that conversation gets hard quick. “Hey, want to play a fun game with me? It only requires at least 350 hours of grinding to get to it.”

So what to do? Speed that up. Leagues turns that 350 hours into maybe 10 hours of grinding if you know what you are doing. And those 10 become fun, as you are progressing so quickly that it avoid becoming tiring.

However, we are not covering the idea of Leagues, we are covering Leagues V. Boosted XP and large benefits are the same in every League. What made this one different?

A note here that the audience here is going to change from “people who are aware of gaming in general” to “people who know about runescape generally”. For the former, I’ll leave this sentiment. Oldschool Runescape isn’t a game you should play. It’s not worth the time. Oldschool Runescape: Leagues is a thing that can be super fun if you have a willingness to dump time into it, and friends to play with for at least some of the time.

Preface

I chose 6 Magic - 4 Ranged Combat Masteries and Desert, Morytania, and Fremmenik regions. This will influence my thoughts on the whole thing.

Echo Weapons

A great idea. Don’t just add some new relics, add new weapons. A ton of these were super fun. The Drygore Blowpipe was great, the Fremmy Jewelry was super powerful, and the Gloves of the Damned were alright I guess. The main issue I have with this is the breakdown of Echo Items: 1 ranged, 4 melee, 2 hybrid (but really melee), 4 hybrid, 1 magic. Melee was blessed. It got super cool items like the thunder kopesh, the sunlight spear, and the dogsword. All of those are super cool items that make you feel powerful. Ranged got an accurate blowpipe that isn’t actually that great compared to the normal blowpipe for ranged and really only good for a secondary style. Magic got essentially nothing.

Completed Drops

This was one of the best changes made. Making items drop completed meant that so many more items were available, which is a positive thing. I personally feel like the region unlocking is a gimmick that shouldn’t stick around, but people generally seem to like it.

Relics

The relics this year were well done. I feel like they shouldn’t have pit Banker’s Note against Total Recall, as it just felt like eliminating Total Recall which is one of the best part of Leagues. But everything else was really well done, especially the Clue Compass.

Regions

The regions are well balanced for the most part. I really do feel like they should have 4 regions unlocked though. I would have loved to experience Wilderness or Asgarnia or Varlamore but didn’t have the region budget to do that. As they have more regions, they should increase the number of ones we are allowed to unlock.

Combat Masteries

I feel conflicted about combat masteries. They have a couple good ideas, with the main one being separating out combat choices from relics to allow more relics to be about skilling/utility.

However, I feel like having to pick a specialty in Leagues is really annoying. I wish that there wasn’t a choice between Magic/Ranged/Melee. All it does it make it feel really bad when you do need to use one of the styles that you are not good with. I think they should bring back combat masteries, but let you get equally good with all styles by the end of the game. Make it hard, but make it achievable.

Also, the balancing this game was horrible. Magic got shafted, hard. As someone who took Magic and Desert, my highest DPS for 90% of the game was a Drygore Blowpipe with T3 Ranged. It took until a Shadow to beat that, which is ridiculous.

Conclusion

Leagues V was a ton of fun. I went from never really having done a raid before to having done 50+. I went from never wanting to do the Inferno to having done 20+. I wish that it was more approachable, and I think that they have more tweaking to do, but otherwise this was a standout year.

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