TruthScape.com - RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card - New Areas, Dungeons and Skill Enhancements

Many RuneScape players find major new content additions to be the most exciting updates. I have split content add-ons into two pages; this one talks about new areas, dungeons and extras for skills, while the following one covers minigames and miscellaneous other features.

This interesting update consists of a new area containing a complicated maze filled with deadly traps and enemies, a miniquest with a boss and XP reward, and finally a new Slayer monster with a unique drop. It is an update that really seemed superb at first glance, but has ultimately turned out to be very disappointing. It represents a real waste of a good developer’s effort.

The miniquest portion of the update involves navigating through a difficult maze that I think is one of the most unique and interesting in the entire game. It is graphically beautiful, and at the same time treacherous, since it is loaded with traps and aggressive monsters—even spellcasting skeletons. Trying to find your way through the tunnels and corridors and looking for traps was fun and really tested your patience and skill.

The final fight was a bit of a letdown, only because the boss was too easy; you are more likely to die in the maze than from at the hands of Tarn himself. The rewards are nice though: 5,000 Slayer XP and a diary that enhances the salve amulet (e).

The maze is just as tedious and annoying the second and every subsequent time you do it as it was fun and exciting the first. It takes a long time to get even to the entrance, and there is no shortcut through the maze itself. The monsters within it are high level and hit hard, but have ridiculously awful drops (level 100s dropping iron medium helms?) And of course, even the area itself is quite a trek from any teleport spot in the game.

I don’t know a single person who has bothered coming back to this lair after completing the miniquest, except maybe for masochists training Slayer (see below). What’s the point of spending so much effort on a complicated new area that nobody has a reason to use? Why waste such a beautiful dungeon?

These monsters are a complete waste, and contenders for the title of “Slayer assignment most often automatically Burthorped”. You have to get down to the Haunted Mine and then go through the nasty maze to get to them. Then you face a bunch of aggressive green dog-beasts in a multicombat area with no safe spots, where your prayer gets drained faster than it does in the Barrows tunnels (Figure 61)! To add insult to injury, their drops are basically the same as those of blue dragons—minus the useful bones. Their special drop is the granite helm, which is basically worthless given that the dragon med is down in the 150k range.

**Figure 61: Terror Dogs? Why Bother?**
Did Jagex’s play testers really think that high-level slayers were going to waste 10 minutes getting to the Haunted Mine and navigating through a difficult maze filled with traps, only to get to a lair where they have to face tough monsters with lousy drops in a multicombat area where they can’t use prayer? A waste of a good monster and arguably the most beautiful dungeon in the game.

February brought to RuneScape a major new Fremennik quest called The Fremennik Isles, named for the two large, content-filled islands that the quest unlocks. These two islands, named Jatizso and Neitiznot, have quickly become favorites of mine for the excellent features they contain. With the exception of a couple of early bugs associated with the quest, Jagex did a superb job on this update.

This town is easily accessed via a free ferry from Rellekka, and features some nice, quiet fishing spots right near a bank, a place to buy cheap yak hides for training Crafting, and one of the best mines in the game. The island just north of town is loaded with ice trolls, one of the best monsters in the game for drops and the setting for my ice troll cannon training guide.

Almost as good as Jatizso in different ways, the town and the area around it contain some useful resources. These include the closest spinning wheel and furnace to a bank in the game, and yaks for mid-level training. There’s even a runite rock nearby.

Finally, Jagex hit the sweet spot with some new monsters. They are challenging due to being hard-hitting and in a multicombat area, plus some of them use ranged attacks that require special Fremennik equipment to be partially blocked. Yet they give nice rewards for those willing to fight them, making them worth bothering with. Good stuff.

The Tower of Life is a combination quest and bonus feature. After completing the (relatively short and easy) quest you get access to a room downstairs where you can create odd creatures and then kill them to get useful resources like red spiders eggs or unicorn horns.

In theory it’s a nice feature, but it’s not implemented in a way that is useful to most people. Of the six monsters you can create, two drop useless items (raw cave eel and jubbly meat), two drop useful items that are too cheap to bother getting this way (feathers and eyes of newt) and one drops a useful item that is easier to get through regular collection (red spiders eggs). That leaves the unicow, which is somewhat useful for getting unicorn horns, but even here it’s rather slow—you only usually net one or two horns per kill.

A good concept, but it could have been implemented so much better, and it was never tweaked for balance after release. As a result, it is rarely used.

This is a new, huge cave goblin city unlocked in the quest Death to the Dorgeshuun. It has lots to offer to a variety of players, including new features that enhance many skills. Some of its potential has yet to be exploited, though.

The town as a whole is quite interesting in many ways and worth a look around, but in my opinion it is much too big—it takes way too long to get from place to place, and all the up-and-down-the-stairs stuff is confusing. Also, while it has a variety of shops, they mostly sell rubbish, and the ones that buy items (such as the “gourmets”) don’t pay enough to bother with. Barlak, the shopkeeper who pays for curved bones, long bones and perfect tortoise shells with gold and experience, is a pleasant exception.

South of town is a new dungeon very similar to the Lumbridge Swamp Caves in terms of appearance and the monsters it contains. Among its positive features are better places for fighting rockslugs and cave slimes, and new level 96 cave bugs (along with the conventional level 6 ones). The new Slayer monster called the molanisk, though, provides poor XP and has generally lousy drops, and there really should be more new monsters for this dungeon to really stand on its own merits.

I have not had much experience using this feature yet, to be honest. From what I’ve tried and heard, the lower-level chests and pickpocketing are rather pointless due to lousy loot, but the high-level chests can be decent.

Many players really appreciated Jagex adding a new way to train the skill for high-level crafters.

I can’t honestly give this a grade because I don’t know enough about it. I understand that many players were happy to see a new high-level Agility course added to the game, but I am not yet sure if this is considered worth using compared to old standbys like the course at Ape Atoll.

With this update, Jagex filled in some of the missing gaps in the set of jewelry that players can create with Crafting, by creating four new enchanted necklace types using rubies, diamonds, dragonstones and onyx gems. This upgrade also created a completely new type of jewelry—bracelets—with magical effects for ones using each type of gem from sapphire to onyx.

Some of these items are very useful, such as the bracelet of combat that includes teleports to various locations and also updates slayers on the status of their current task every 10 kills. Others were major disappointments, especially the regeneration bracelet, an expensive item for which even I have so far found very few uses (and I’m rather creative).

The Dream Mentor quest, released on this day, gave as one of its rewards several new spells to players on the Lunar Magicks spellbook. Like other Lunar spells, most of these are of use only for very specific skill-related applications, such as filling vials or making planks. The highlight of the update is the level 96 spell called Spellbook Swap, which gives lunar mages the flexibility they need to occasionally cast spells from either of the other two spellbooks.

The heat of summer brought to RuneScape more wild and wacky barbarian fun. This time it was courtesy of Otto Godblessed, who offered to train players in new barbarian methods that enhance four different RuneScape skills. This was a nice update, though some of the skill enhancements have turned out to have very limited value.

One technique learned here is how to make a fire with a bow, saving you a slot as you don’t need a tinderbox. Handy, though not really that exciting.

The other aspect is the pyre boats for burning chewed bones obtained from mithril dragons. These provide some nice skill bonuses, but the bones are exceedingly rare and hard to get, making the feature rarely usable, and the rewards you get are often a joke, unless you are extremely lucky and get a dragon full helm. I just pyred two sets of chewed bones and got 5 silver bolts and a pair of mith grapples... gee, those barbarian spirits sure took a lot of utter crap with them to Valhalla, didn’t they?

There are two related updates here: bare-arm fishing and the ability to catch leaping fish. The first option lets you fish for tuna, swordfish or shark without needing a harpoon, and even gives Strength XP, but requires your Fishing skill to be 20 levels higher than normal, so it’s not for most players. The second one lets you catch special fish that aren’t for eating but rather are cut open for roe or caviar used in Barbarian Herblore. I really appreciate this option because it provides small amounts of Agility XP (and Strength XP) too, and I hate training Agility. J

You can use the roe or caviar from Barbarian fishing, as mentioned above, to make special “mix” potions that combine regular potion effects with a small amount of healing. Unfortunately, these potentially great potions are really hamstrung by the limitation of only two doses per vial, which means that instead of being fantastic new additions to the game, they are only useful for very specific applications.

Otto will teach you how to make spears (which previously were not player smithable) and hastas, which are one-handed Barbarian spears. Okay, fine, but how many years does it take Jagex to figure out that nobody likes spears because they are weak and slow? Well, they still haven’t made javelins worth using so I guess it could be a while.

Along with Barbarian Training came a new dungeon, featuring the most difficult dragon ever to set foot in RuneScape: the mithril dragon. With no fewer than four different attacks, it rules the Ancient Cavern that also contains new brutal green dragons and other monsters.

While these dragons suffered from poor QA in their first few days, they were quickly tweaked and are now a great example of what a high-level monster should be like. They are challenging, while rewarding those who rise to that challenge with the chance for a great high-level drop (the dragon full helm or draconic visage) and even some good routine drops. Plus they also drop chewed bones, which can be used for pyre ships to give you XP bonuses in a variety of ways. A great update.

These are wonderful, underappreciated beasts that provide high-level players who want green dragonhides a viable alternative to the Wilderness. They are tough but can be fought efficiently with the right preparation, and have good drops. My main complaint about them is that they are at least as hard as black dragons but don’t drop the draconic visage.

The Ancient Cavern also contains barbarian spirits and high-level skeletons, the latter of which can be used for those who like a challenge in a skeleton Slayer assignment. The waterfiends are more of a nuisance than anything, though.

These two new prayers are unlocked by completing the King’s Ransom quest and then beating a small combat minigame. They are the first expansions to the Prayer skill in a long time, and another sign that Jagex is finally starting to provide content updates for high-level players. Piety is a powerful prayer that has revolutionized melee combat; at this point I can’t imagine the game without it (see an example of it in use in Figure 62 below).

This large new dungeon was much promoted by Jagex all through the summer of this past year—and amazingly, when it was finally released, it mostly did live up to the hype. It contains tons of new monsters, including some excellent ones for training, others for Slayer, and four of the toughest sets of bosses in the game. It also brought with it lots of new items.

Jagex did a really nice job here with the different requirements to get into the dungeon, and then the four god areas within it. The need to have a 40 monster kill count adds to the challenge and prevents people from “farming” the bosses. The boss monsters themselves are very high level and not to be trifled with, basically requiring team cooperation.

The spiritual rangers, warriors and mages are pretty decent new high-level Slayer monsters, the last of which drops the new dragon boots.

Within an hour of stepping into the GWD and killing a few of these flying Armadyl followers, I knew I had found something special. They are now one of the best ways of training Ranged or Magic in the game; see my dedicated guide to fighting them.

This feature provides a new and interesting dimension to the otherwise boring Runecrafting skill. Its biggest benefit is that using it allows higher-level Runecrafters to get much faster XP than is possible with conventional altars. And as an added bonus, it even allows you to make runes that can’t be crafted in other ways, or that are above your normal RC level.

One of the rewards of completing the Back to My Roots quest is the wild jade vine, which is a feature that lets high-level players get decent bonuses in Farming and Slayer. In practical terms, you can get 1,500 Farming XP and 2,500 Slayer XP every two days for a few minutes’ work, which is not earth-shattering, but still quite nice (Figure 62).

**Figure 62: A Nice Bonus for Slayers and Farmers!**
The wild jade vine allows you to obtain a nice, regular XP boost to two notoriously slow skills.

TruthScape Special Reports - RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card

RuneScape 2007 Year in Review and Report Card - New Minigames and Other Features

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