A couple of things I would like to point out:
1. The goal of this change was not to make bosses as hard as on OSRS, or even harder at all.
Yes, we want to start using the boss
stats from OSRS, but that doesn't mean they need to be just as hard as they are on OSRS. Until now all of the old bosses had custom stats assigned to them fairly haphazardly. In addition to their lack of weaknesses rendering many weapons useless, this also created inconsistency and made life hard for us every time we wanted to add a new boss. After all we could often not just use the OSRS stats as that would make them too strong, so we just sort of had to guess our own stats.
We agree with you, this is an RSPS and it should be easier. We don't want to remove that "difficulty modifier". What we want to do is build that modifier into the combat system itself, rather than into the stats of each boss individually. That way we can make it, for example: exactly like OSRS but 30% easier across the board. In our view this offers nothing but benefits. We get all the proper strengths and weaknesses opening up many more viable gear choices, we get more consistency and we can get the difficulty of new bosses exactly right on release without having to expend a lot of effort each time balancing them.
Of course, when all is said and done, some bosses will be stronger or weaker than they were before, compared to other bosses. This is something we intend to balance out by adjusting their drop tables.
2. This was always meant to be a two-step process. It was fully expected that a number of bosses would be entirely unbalanced now.
I can't stress this enough: we
knew this would cause havoc. However because there is such huge diversity in boss mechanics and gear setups it seemed almost impossible for us to simulate all of this, and I doubt we could've gotten people to extensively try out all the bosses with all the gear setups on a test server.
Therefore our strategy was the following:
- Release pure OSRS stats for all bosses, upsetting many of them
- Gather community feedback on both overall difficulty as well as individual bosses and gear
- Within days, tweak the combat system to bring the difficulty within normal RSPS levels
Unfortunately the feedback we got is
"IT'S SHIT, REVERT IT!!!" which is frankly about as useless as feedback gets.
So, new strategy:
- Run simulations ourselves anyway, even though we feel this could be very inaccurate it should still give us more useful data than we are getting now
- Release overall balance changes based on the simulations ASAP
- Hopefully, now that PvM balance is more reasonable, get some useful feedback from a calmed-down community
- Further finetune the system based on that feedback
Don't get me wrong, I totally understand the impulse to say: it's worse than it was before => just revert it and ditch the idea. But please try to understand what we are trying to do here. Just because it's bad on day one doesn't mean the whole thing should be abandoned. A rough transition period of a few days is a small price to pay for all the benefits it would give us. I hope you will all help us speed up this process by providing useful input about how much balancing the various bosses and gear setups need, instead of just going on a "this is an RSPS so it needs to be easy" rant. We know that too and we agree, so no need to convince us of that.
