In the recent Rewards Blogs for Nex and Tombs of Amascut, and we revealed the rewards on offer and gave you the chance to try them for yourselves in a special feedback Beta.
The feedback we received was largely positive, although a few changes appear to be required. We’ll be discussing the changes we’re making to the Tombs of Amascut rewards in a separate blog – today, we’re going to focus on Nex!
As always, we refer to the in-game timings as cycles. Each cycle is equal to 0.6 seconds and is also commonly referred to as a 'tick' by the wider community.
Powercreep
It’s become clear from your feedback that many of you feel it’s time for new items to claim the spotlight. Too many items have remained best-in-slot for ages, and players now expect rewards that will shake up this status quo.
To 'fess' up: we’ve been hesitant to introduce more best-in-slot items, as doing so inevitably creates powercreep. This can result in a number of issues, particularly the devaluation of older content. We want to avoid this at all costs: OSRS thrives because old content is kept as relevant as possible!
Therefore, we’d like to slow the process of powercreep where possible, but we’re aware that we also need to provide powerful incentives to play difficult content. We’ve set a precedent for ‘big ticket’ items, and we want you to feel truly rewarded for taking down the toughest foes!
For this reason, we’re making a number of changes to strike a better balance and better reward you for the risks you’ll take in fighting Nex. Let’s have a look at what’s changing!
Rewards
Introducing... Torva Armour!
We received some great feedback about the Virtus Armour, but it’s clear that it didn't excite you as much as the prospect of a new best-in-slot melee set.
In light of this, we’ll be swapping the Virtus Armour set from Nex for the highly requested Torva Armour! Torva was a powerful warrior who once directly served Nex. She still holds on to his powerful armour, and may drop it to those lucky enough.
This doesn't mean we have no plans for Virtus in the future, and there are more details on these plans below.
This is a melee armour set, consisting of a Full Helm, Platebody and Platelegs. It offers better offensive and defensive capabilities than Bandos, with slightly worse defensive capabilities and Prayer bonus than Justiciar. Therefore, we think this makes Torva a very appealing offensive armour set upgrade over Bandos, whilst still leaving Justiciar in a solid place for its purpose.
As we mentioned above about power creep, we don't want Bandos armour to devalue as that could make General Graardor less worth doing, and we want it to still have a purpose in the game. We think that a good way to keep it within the ecosystem of the game is to use it as a component to upgrade Torva Armour.
Pieces of the Torva set are going to drop as broken and unequippable, and must be revitalised using components salvaged from the Bandos set. You’ll be able to break down your Bandos pieces in a furnace found within the Ancient Prison and receive tradeable Bandosian Components in return. Combine these with the broken Torva pieces, and you’ll assemble the set!
There are no skilling requirements to break down the Bandos pieces, but you’ll need level 90 Smithing to attach the Bandosian Components to broken Torva pieces.
Here’s how many components you’ll get per armour piece:
- Chestplate: 3 Components
- Tassets: 2 Components
And here’s how many Components you’ll need to repair the Torva pieces:
- Helm: 1 Component
- Chest: 2 Components
- Platelegs: 2 Components
The broken Torva, Bandosian Components and repaired Torva are all tradeable. We did consider Bandos Boots providing components, however this takes away from the potential Bandos Chestplate/Tassets item sink, and those are the items we really want to keep a decent value.
As detailed above, since the Virtus Armour got generally good feedback, we aren’t scrapping it completely. We’d still like to introduce it as a reward a little later down the line, and with a few tweaks based on your feedback. You might remember that our original plans were to release Torva later down the line alongside a different update themed around a certain ancient god. With the changes in this blog, we now think Virtus would be a suitable reward for that update instead.
The inevitable question is: why not both sets, right now? Well, other content of the same difficulty level has the same number of rewards, and we don't feel like she needs any more right now. What you get is pretty awesome.
As always, please do share your feedback on this decision – but first, let’s take a look at the other changes we’ve made.
Zaryte Vambraces
Nex is the only survivor of a mysterious race known as nihil. The nihil were deemed a failure by Nex's master, but some of their remains were repurposed to be used as armour by Nex's army.
We’re very happy to see that so many of you are excited about the Zaryte Vambraces!
However, we’ve noticed that the 50 Defence requirements locks certain restricted accounts out of using this awesome equipment, so we thought we’d change that so it's more accessible for ‘zerk builds looking to try the Vambraces out. The Defence stats are close to this threshold already, so it makes sense.
We’ll be lowering the Defence requirement for the Zaryte Vambraces to level 45.
Zaryte (Cross)Bow
Concept Art of the Zaryte Crossbow.
The Zaryte Bow got a lot of great feedback, but we noticed that many of you were hoping for a new crossbow instead - especially following the introduction of the Bow of Faerdhinen. So, we’d like to introduce the Zaryte Crossbow! Like with Zaryte vambraces, Zaryte crossbows were crafted from the remains of long dead nihil, taking full advantage of the magical abilities of this ancient race.
This item is best-in-slot Tier 80 Crossbow, and that’s especially exciting because Nex just happens to be vulnerable to Crossbows!
The Zaryte Crossbow requires 80 Ranged. It comes with a neat passive effect that makes bolt effects 10% stronger – for example, Ruby Bolts would hit 22% of the target’s current HP, instead of 20%, with the cap also being raised by 10%, from 100 to 110. It also has a special attack which guarantees that your bolt effect if you succeed at hitting the target/passing accuracy at the cost of 75% of your energy.
Now, you might be wondering – if there’s a new Crossbow in town, what happens to everyone’s favourite noisemaker, the Armadyl Crossbow? We’ve decided to take a similar approach to the Torva Armour; the Zaryte Crossbow will drop as a broken item that comes from Nex herself, which must then be combined with an Armadyl Crossbow and 250 Nihil Shards to make it usable.
We heard your suggestions that crossbows haven't had enough love lately, introducing this new T80 crossbow should make them a stronger and more appealing option. We look forward to seeing how this will shake things up!
Ancient Godsword
When Nex escaped her icy prison, she found herself in the middle of the battle over the Godsword. Realising the potential of this weapon, Nex arranged for a fifth hilt to be made. However, the four armies joined forces to imprison Nex one more, meaning her hilt never saw use.
It seems that players weren’t quite sure how the Ancient Godsword’s special attack would stack up against the others, especially in PvM situations.
We want the Ancient Godsword to excel in its own way. It’s not our intention to replace the existing Godswords or make this newest one better than the others. For this reason, we focussed on its PvP abilities – but that doesn’t mean we won’t create interesting PvM encounters that might benefit from this type of weapon in the future.
Basically, we’re deciding to keep changes to this item modest. Now that you’ve seen the changes to Nex’s loot table as a whole, we hope you’ll all be more comfortable with the Godsword remaining in its own cosy niche.
However, to give it a little more oomph, we’re increasing the damage and healing on the Ancient Godswords special attack from 20 to 25.
If the special attack hits, it deals a normal hit with 10% extra damage. In addition, an eight-cycle (4.8 seconds) timer starts. If the target doesn’t move more than five tiles away before the timer ends, they’ll be hit for 25 damage, and the attacker will be healed for the same amount.
During the recent Beta, we also noticed that in PvP situations, Praying Mage would completely negate the Ancient Godsword's special attack. This was unintentional, and we would like to clarify that this effect would not be present in the live game if the Ancient Godsword were to pass poll.
Further Clarifications: Blood Essence
Before we go, we’d also like to explain a bit more about Blood Essence, since we previously kept those details pretty sparse. Blood Essence is a semi-rare item dropped by Nex and various other monsters in the Ancient Prison. It is both tradeable and stackable.
A player can activate a Blood Essence to toggle it to its ‘active’ state. If they then craft Blood Runes with the active Blood Essence, they’ll have a 50% chance to create extra runes. Each blood essence has 1000 charges (or can craft 1000 runes per essence).
A player can only have one active Blood Essence at a time. An activated Blood Essence will become untradable.
This is intended to promote skilling moreso and alleviate the complaints about blood rune generations via skilling somewhat, we're aware that shops are still the most efficient way to get blood runes, and hope to introduce stronger ways to craft runes in the future.
Nihil Shards
These have remained unchanged. Nihil Shards are consumables dropped by all foes in the Ancient Prison – including Nex. They can be used to charge the Zaryte Bow, or they can be crushed to make Nihil dust, which is a secondary ingredient in new Ancient Brew potions.
An Ancient Brew is a combination of Nihil dust and a Dwarf Weed potion, and requires 85 Herblore to make, giving 190 Herblore XP. When drunk, this primordial concoction boosts Magic by 5% +2 and restores Prayer by 10% +2 with the ability to boost up to 5% over the player’s base Prayer level. However, it also drains Attack, Strength and Defence by 10% +2, so think before you drink.
Ecumenical Key Shards
For those that missed it you can gather 50 of these for one Ecumenical Key. Please note that you can't convert the Shards to a Key if you already have the cap on Keys.
Remember to keep your eyes peeled for a second rewards feedback blog, focusing on the loot from Tombs of Amascut.
That's everything for this blog. Remember and we'd love to hear your feedback so please do...
- Let us know what you think via our Official Forums.
- Join the Official Old School RuneScape Discord server and head to the #nex channel in the Blog Discussions area.
- Use the #Nex hashtag on Twitter.
- Reply to this Reddit thread or make your own threads with '(Nex)' in the title.
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