OSRS Ancient Curses

Yeah yeah I know some people are going to see those two words next to each other and immediately reply with the usual dislike.

There's also a bunch of things I acknowledge in the back of my head, and hopefully this will actually address some of those.

I'm not trying to say that this would or should pass a poll. At least, the community is not in a position to do that this year.

I lightly promised someone on Q&A that I'd post this here, as they highlighted me on it ;o

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So, obviously, the main two points of contention are Soul Split and Turmoil. Both of these were widely considered to be OP in 2011, and now have stigma because they are viewed as part of the reason the EoC happened.

Turmoil from 2011 would just be straight powercreep. Even worse, it would make a lot of existing PvM content easier, such as GWD, which would result in those things being farmed more, solo'd more, and their drops coming into the game faster thus losing value faster as supply grows.

Soul Split sounds even trickier, because in OSRS, the Saradomin Godsword now actually has any value because we don't have the Enhanced Excalibur hard diary reward from 2011. And how do you balance things like unkillable mage tanks from Soul Wars?

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I intend to solve two major questions:

**-1.** How do we introduce Ancient Curses without destroy the integrity of literally all combat?

**-2.** How do we make Ancient Curses not be overpowered?

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At this point, the answer to **#1** sounds extreme, but might actually be realistic enough anyway. And if you don't think it's realistic now, let's just say that people couldn't imagine GWD being brought back into the game a few years ago, and I have ideas for other things that would lead to the slippery slopes necessary for people to accept what I'm about to propose for Ancient Curses.

The first possibility is that we try out Turmoil and SS again in a tournament world, just like we did with Dragon Claws, and realize that it's not actually that overpowered - since we don't have Chaotics, Overloads, or Steel Titans. In actuality, we still have quite a bit of space for powercreep before we hit the mathematical limits of our combat formulas.

I could ask you, what’s the difference between hitting 60s with current weapons versus hitting 60s with turmoil and damage soaking?

Oftentimes when I get into discussions about powercreep in OSRS with people, and challenge them with what they think will happen when we start reaching the mathematical limits of RS2's combat formulas, people are privy to agree with me and concede things like "IDK man, people could start one shotting people with elder maul or something I guess I would vote to bring back *damage soaking* or something for balance."

I doubt this first possibility is a strong likelihood because anyone who cares about 2011 has probably quit the game because of how toxic players vocally are against people who like that stuff. (Even though bringing back 2008-2011 content has made up for the majority of OSRS's best updates). We're still somewhat 50/50 in the community about that stuff, but the people remaining have started to concede that people just hate some things too much for it to ever become a reality.

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The second possibility plays on the lore related to Zaros, in that the Mahjarrat have trouble communicating with him because any connections to him on Gielinor are fairly weak.

We can use this to basically say, "Ancient Curses are available and you can unlock them, but you can only use them in locations that Zaros has a strong enough connection to".

In other words, we would literally need to be able to pick and choose what content we're allowed to have Curses with, and the community would be able to vote on what gets it.

The community could decide that only new content would be balanced around Ancient Curses, and that all content released before that will not have access to Ancient Curses, thus all old content in the game would be uneffected by Ancient Curses, such as GWD, Inferno, most of Slayer, the wilderness, current PvP minigames, etc. Zaros's connection to most of these places is weak.

In the mean time, a future release of Nex as a boss would allow you to use Ancient Curses against her, or some Ancient Dungeon far below Tears of Guthix would allow you to use them there as it's close to some ancient artifact that allows you to commune more closely with Zaros. Areas of great power would have it too.

And, if the community wants it, they could ask Jagex to poll allowing ancient curses into specific pieces of old content, such as the Corporeal Beast. Or perhaps we could poll whether or not they should be available in GWD, which would definitely fail the poll. But enabling it for Castle Wars or Pest Control might pass.

I know this may sound incredibly ad-hoc, and that's reasonable. This isn't really the best way to persuade anyone that Ancient Curses could be brought back into the game. I'm willing to contend some people had so much fun with curses that they would accept this. I wish people who were against it previously might be willing to accept such a thing as well.

But people tend to forget how much ***fun*** curses were, and how nice it was to actually have the flashy prayers with unique sound effects as opposed to the boring stale and dry normal prayers. Deflect Curses were also really nice in how they sort of aided teaching players about prayer flashing. High level PvMers also had the option to flash Deflect Curses and Soul Split which took skill and learning to do and allowed for much stronger enemies with more interesting mechanics.

That, and I have more to say about how Ancient Curses wouldn't just overshadow normal prayers.

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**Fixing the OPness of Ancient Curses**

Before discussing rebalances of Ancient Curses, let me point out that they weren't as OP as people made them out to be.

In 2011, we had a much larger amount of reactive casual players who don't take PvP seriously, but were very vocal whenever a high level player killed them, even more so if they were using curses. We were all also just teenagers and kids.

It's perfectly natural if a level 120 kills a level 70, or a level 89, or a level 109. That player probably has far higher combat stats and gear. People should not see this as a problem, but back in 2011, a lot of the people complaining about how overpowered stuff was, was because they were complaining about high level players ganking them in PvP minigames and whatnot. Casual players like this vocalized their displeasure often. If they were using curses however, which was often the case, then curses became the scapegoat for this otherwise normal combat level disparity.

It's also perfectly natural if a 1def pure kills an evenly level player of the same combat level, at least nowadays, but in the past it led to more complaints which also led to that goal the EoC had to actually kill off pure builds.

Two players of the same stats with similar gear fighting each other though? It was fine and balanced. Heck, if you actually took PvP seriously, and actually bridded a little bit like I did, you could overcome higher level players using max gear and curses. A lot of the people giving knee jerk reactions about higher leveled people killing them, were probably people who use only melee and wear rune armor. I had a lot of fun in Soul Wars fighting and sometimes taking down people 15-20 levels above me wearing Nex armors, before I even had access to Turmoil or Soul Split, while I was only bridding with a void deflector and minigame hybrid armor. Considering bridding skill, prediction, spec timing, and so forth was the dominant strategy over just stacking the most powerful equipment and not trying, I'd say it was actually well balanced ASIDE FROM A FEW LOOSE ENDS.

With that ramble about player perception of balance aside, there was only one thing that ever stuck out to me as being really overpowered: Mage Tanks.

In 2011, Soul Split healed you for 20% of your damage. If you combined this with Ice Barrage against 9 targets, which was often the case in Soul Wars, then your healing was effectively boosted by 900%, because you healed from all 9 targets. It enabled mage tanks to constantly instantly heal any and all damage they took, so even with no ranged defence and a ton of rangers piling the mage, the mage often wouldn't die.

The solution to this is incredibly simple: Soul Split would only apply to the main target of any multi-target attack. Done. No more 900% healing.

And you can bet that Jagex will design it that way if they ever bring Soul Split back.

https://twitter.com/Chdata/status/868147562003484674

And well, I have a google document about ways to rebalance Turmoil and Soul Split to somewhat nerf them or move around how they worked, but let's discuss an even bigger topic about their balancing:

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**Wouldn't Ancient Curses just be an upgrade to Normal Prayers, thus obsoleting Normal Prayers? What if I'd prefer to see prayers be tradeoffs to eachother instead of upgrades that leave old ones in the dust?**

Just now I talked a lot about PvP, but what about PvM? Technically, PvM is directly solved if we decide to limit curses to only specific pieces of content, but there's things that could be said about what'd be like if curses were enabled everywhere.

My google doc covers that a bit too.

My suggested Turmoil nerf involves making the base bonuses 15%/15%/15%, while gradually increasing to their full value over a period of time. This prevents rushing being a possibility, but also means that Piety would be better for prayer flashing than Turmoil, meaning you have scenarios where you would pick and choose which one you actually want to use. In the case of bosses that you fight over time, you'd use turmoil. For ... rushing... or stuff you might flash, you'd use piety.

Leech curses would also be more likely to be used and cared about in this era of runescape. In 2011, people mostly ignored those because we didn't think about efficiency or anything. Today, people would realize that we'd want one player to use leech curses instead of turmoil in any cooperative activity involving multiple players, because leeching the boss's stats (especially defense) works out to be increased DPS for everyone around you, as opposed to turmoil which only boosts one's own stats. You can bet that teams would designate one player to be the designated "leech", which adds interesting variety to team strategies.

On the topic of leech curses, we would most likely not bring back *Leech Spec*. Or it could be polled I guess. But it's not one of the things people generally care much about when they think about bringing back curses, and it didn't exactly lead to the most fun gameplay.

But let's get to the meat of this - we can give the Normal Prayers and Ancient Curses different competitive purposes, just like Jagex is doing now in trying to make the Normal Spellbook compete with Ancient Magicks.

The Normal Spellbook has Fire Surge, which is significantly more DPS than Ice Barrage, and it also has teleblock.

Meanwhile, Ancient Magicks has Ice Barrage, along with its other useful stuff.

We can do similar things between Normal Prayers and Ancient Curses. But what?

Well, I recently came across an interesting suggestion for two new normal prayers, which I tweaked a little and think would be interesting additions:

https://imgur.com/HPMePt4

That prayer alone would give lots of players situations where they'd want to have 90 prayer and use Normal Prayers instead of using Ancient Curses, if they want the fallback of emergency survivability, especially for content they're new to.

Ancient Curses would generally be for the stronger combat stuff, but Normal Prayers would still have their skilling appeal with Rejuvinate / Rapid Regeneration, and more importantly have Salvation.

This is just one suggestion to get the ball rolling for ideas of having both books be trade-offs to each other, instead of one just being an upgrade to the other.

If we ever some day somehow end up with that "Stamina Prayer", you can bet it'd only be available on Normal Prayers, for example.

Soul Split also had this kind of thing going on. Smite was actually better than Soul Split for actually smiting someone. We could make this disparity more apparent. But even with the same stats as 2011, you'd see some PKers opting to smite instead of SS.

Also keep in mind that the Judgement Prayer Jagex polled recently is actually Turmoil in disguise. Its stat bonuses would've stacked with Piety to achieve the same bonuses that Turmoil had. And interestingly, people didn't have a problem with that part of it. The problem people had when it only increased accuracy was that it was too situational and pointless - so they added the 10% strength bonus that literally bumps it to Turmoil damage. Other than that, it was a messy hodgepodge of way too many downsides to justify using it, which also didn't really solve turmoil's 2011 problems that well, and was overall just messy sounding. Even I voted no for it.

Also, Soul Split "existing" wouldn't necessarily make SGS useless. People still used Enhanced Excalibur despite having Soul Split, because prayer points aren't infinite, and EE was more reliable for healing.

Take Inferno for example. There's lots of times where you just wouldn't even be able to put up Soul Split, and there'll always be times where you'd want to use your SGS for a burst heal and prayer regen. Heck, being able to flash SS and deflect curses while doing Inferno is something that'd require woox level of skill to even juggle properly without screwing yourself over. Skill is rewarded.

Also, SS doesn't use special attack energy, so there would be value in having both an SGS and SS, instead of getting SS and selling your SGS. SGS wouldn't be made useless here.

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In any case, here's my doc discussing Turmoil / Soul Split rebalances.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZZyt7nw3vrcaIR8pDUWqHAqUXP1KeqQmUjx3xhpd5YM/edit?usp=sharing

And I guess I'll quote the interesting stuff about the Turmoil changes.

https://imgur.com/yoOlsCQ

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**Cap the boost gained from the enemy, to be based on your own stats, instead of 99.**

Just something extra to reduce its power. Doesn’t change much for a maxed player in PvM or PvP, but helps at mid levels and possibly some types of PKers.

**Increase the Defense bonus from your own stats to +20%:**

This is mainly for PvP.

Turmoil made it so you would consistently hit incredibly high numbers, even against other people who were using Turmoil.

With these changes, it can assumed that everyone would be using Turmoil in PvP and would in turn reduce the amount of ridiculous hits.

+15% / +15% Strength Bonus

The strength bonus was too high.

While it might just look like I shuffled around the numbers and removed 3%, this change is bigger than it seems because it removes 8% extra damage from the boost of your personal levels.

In situations where you're the higher leveled player this is a huge nerf. It gives the lower leveled player a more standing and fair chance.

On the other hand, it won’t really enable pures/zerkers to suddenly be able to compete with mains, due to the gap in power from their gear, and because mains can use Curses and hybrid as much as any pure can.

**Delaying or gradually building up the boost gained from your enemy’s stats.**

Having no activation delay gives rushers a huge advantage. Forcing them to engage in combat for a few seconds negates this. However, the raw boost can still be used for prayer flashing. If the gradual build-up is made long enough, such as being similar to the amount of time it takes to max your boost from a Leech Curse (which was pretty long), then that also means Turmoil would only be efficient to use for bosses, and not for individual enemies (like slayer monsters) that you can kill quickly, because you'd never reach the max boost against individual enemies as they'd die much faster than bosses. So you'd want to use piety there. We could separate how this works in PvM and PvP, so that the max boost is gained faster in PvP, though still delayed so it's not good for rushing.

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And I guess that's all I have to say for now. Let the hate mail roll in.