0.9 is dropping on September 9th, including Custom World Sliders, Creative Mode and, of course, the Ranged Skill Tree. We're talking new weapons, new skill spells, and rewards for grinding through those levels. Let's get stuck into what's on the menu:
New Weapon Archetype: Crossbows
The crossbow is a new 1-handed long-range weapon that you'll be able to craft and wield. While Shortbows and longbows allow adventurers to deal damage from afar, and stay agile and evasive, we've heard your feedback around wanting to be able to off-hand a secondary tool, whether that's a torch or a shield. The Crossbow offers a versatile, powerful alternative to the bows that lets you combine the weapon with a shield or torch so you don't have to compromise on attack OR defense.
Crossbows will be crafted with a new station:
The Fletching Bench! This is your new go-to place for all your Ranged crafting needs. Once you've gathered Wood and Flax to unlock it, you'll find every recipe – both old and new – for every Bow, Arrow and Bolt in one convenient place!
These can be cratfted with a range of wood types for frames, with limbs made from bone or metals. We've heard your feedback around the process of crafting equipment feeling more like RuneScape. So, expect the traditional RuneScape crafting methods. Mine rocks to get ores, smelt ores to get metals, forge metals to make limbs, craft limbs into crossbows, load them up and fire away. We want to hear your thoughts on how this process feels, so your feedback on this is super important!
This will be the start of your journey from humble hunter-in-training to a ranger of renown, mythical in speed, accuracy and carrying lots of arrows without making a lot of noise.
On the subject of arrows, we're working on an update to add an extra inventory stash, much like Runes or Quest Inventories, that will let you store arrows and bolts in a separate storage tab for easier organisation.
As you progress through both the Ranged Skill, and crafting tiers, you'll be able to acquire more potent resources to craft more powerful weapons. Much like with Melee and Magic before you'll be able to feel your progression with every hit. You'll also be able to pump that DPS up even more with Trick Shots, which we'll get into later...
Skill Spells
As with every Skill in RuneScape: Dragonwilds, your progression will unlock the power of Skill Spells. You're going to want to leverage the power of these spells to give you the upper hand in and out of combat.
We've got two new skill spells dropping in with 0.9 that we're really excited to share with you. We saw a lot of feedback from players early on when testing the bow and arrow, that there weren't enough options to open up space, or kite enemies from a safe distance. Feedback like this:
So, we got thinking - what could a hunter use to prevent their prey, or their enemy from moving - either too close, or too far? Snare is our solution to that problem.
Snare can be cast to mark an area of the ground that will trigger when an enemy moves into it. Upon triggering, the spell will entangle the target in roots, pinning them in place, and leaving them vulnerable to any and all forms of attack.
At later levels in your progression, you'll unlock the Skill Upgrade: "Venomous Trapper".
The Snares that you place now trigger a cloud of damaging poison when activated, causing enemies stuck inside to become poisoned over time. Once poisoned, enemies will continue to take poison damage even once the trap subsides.
Feel like you're being swarmed? Wish that you could hit more than one target with an arrow? Good news! You can! Introducing "Spectral Arrows".
Enchants a player's ranged weapon with Astral Magic for a period of time. While enchanted, arrows fired from the bow are able to penetrate through targets, allowing players to call on their accuracy and timing mastery in Ranged combat to hit as many enemies as they can with each arrow. There is no limit to the number of targets the arrow can pierce through.
Trick Shots
When you draw your arrows, you will see a particular glint at the tip of the arrow that may catch your eye. We've introduced "Trick Shots", a system that lets you get into a rhythm when firing your arrows. This will let you capitalise on hitting a particular rhythm when shooting that grants you an additional damage boost when you shoot, to keep up a more consistent, higher-damage output that rewards a calm, steady hand.
When you wield a crossbow, you'll see a small bar/meter that appears below your crosshair when you fire. That bar will fill after each shot, showcasing the remaining time on the reload between shots. It's only a few seconds, but there's a sweet-spot somewhere along the bar, part of the way through the reload. If you can time it right, and fire again in that sweet spot, you'll perform an Instant Reload, and immediately launch another shot, cutting the reload time down. If you can consistently hit that rhythm, you'll be dealing damage at a much higher pace, so find your rhythm and focus in!
Status Symbols
There are THIRTEEN new ammo types coming into the game with the 0.9 update - now bringing us to a total of seventeen ammo types. As we mentioned earlier, we're going to be adding an additional inventory tab to accommodate these ammo types in the near future, so listen out for that coming in an update very soon.
As you progress through your Ranged skill tree, you'll unlock the ability to brew new potions at the Brewing Cauldron using the new herb: Kwuarm. Brew this with a Poison Ichor to create - you guessed it - Weapon Poison. Use this on a melee weapon to poison your blade, or create Poison Arrows. You can finally poison enemies back. Give them a taste of their own medicine!
Then, there are Weapon Barbs - brutal spikes to rend your foes with every swing, stab or shot. Use these to create Barbed arrows, that apply stacks of bleed damage. Then there are also Fire arrows, which trigger (you'll never have guessed this) fire damage! Experiment with the builds, stack up DPS and turn those pesky Garou into pincushions!
Looter Shooter
The passive ability of the Ranged Skill Tree will be a chance to be able to retrieve your arrows from an enemy's body once they die. Arrows are brittle, delicted precision tools of dealing death from afar, but as you improve in your martial prowess, you might be a bit less cack-handed with them to boot.
Archery Target
Think you're a stupendous sharpshooter? Best-in-class Bullseye blaster? Tremendous target terminator? I'll stop now.
You'll be able to craft and place an archery target to test your sharpshooting. May the best marksman win!
All of this will be arriving as part of the 0.9 Update, along with Custom World Sliders, and a Creative Mode, which you'll be able to enjoy. That's just the start. We'll continue to iterate and build on what we've got here as a foundation, and there's some extra awesome updates coming later on as part of our 0.9.1 update towards the end of September.
We hope you're excited about what's coming with the Ranged update, and we're always listening to your feedback, so please dive in to the Official RuneScape: Dragonwilds Discord and get chatting with us across our socials. The JMods are always ready to hear from you and chat more about the Ranged update, and all things RuneScape: Dragonwilds! We're on Twitter, BSky, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube and TikTok too!
Until next time, be good!
We'll see you in Ashenfall.