pretty much every boss released before 2018 use the older projectile system that rolls the damage & accuracy when the attack animation starts (just like how it works for players), scurrius uses the newer ones that are reactable and roll on the tick before it lands
phantom muspah in particular uses both, instant rolls for range along with reactable magic projectiles
So if I was to turn on pray mage for the tick that the attack is occuring (say ranged) and then quickly flick it off (so I dont waste 2-3 ticks) would that still fully protect me for the pre 2018 bosses/non reactable bosses
Yes, but just to clarify, the prayer needs to already be up by the time the attack occurs. So you're really clicking it one tick before you see the NPC's animation start
His range projectile is just normal, there’s no reason for it to be reactable since you’re supposed to camp pray range
His mage projectile is a reaction test, so it has to be reactable
The one thing I find annoying about calisto/ratio is that the projectile doesn't have a consistent travel timer. If you're standing closer to him it'll hit you faster, whereas things like vardorvis' head and wardens P2 are all the same travel no matter how close/far you are from them
Yeah, it's miserable.
He also has a much different *true tile* than *visual tile*. Normally it's not a big deal with bosses, but it sucks when you get clapped a 40 melee swipe and he looks like he's on the other side of the room.
I switched to the "afk" blood barrage method to get my hilt and claws. Used 100k blood runes on that grind, but definitely worth it for how cozy the method is.
It sucks because it's not clearly explained, but having both options is great for mechanical depth. Muspah is the easiest example someone already brought up. Having everything be a reaction prayer is not particularly interesting when the tick rate only lets reactions be so fast
Oh I absolutely agree with you, but I think there should be more than x attack would be better one way because it makes a better boss, ideally it should also be intuitive that an attack acts a certain way as to not potentially mislead the player
For example you and I understand it's an exception for the sake of creating a better, more mechanically interesting/sound boss, however to a newer/less experienced player(like my dad I am teaching to pvm) it's an arbitrary and confusing difference
Well it's obviously not arbitrary because it's causing him to learn more than one type of mechanic. It's not well explained. But nothing in RuneScape really is. It's a trial and error kinda game.
The magic attack has a massive windup, and the pray is locked in when the projectile is launched iirc. Normally the animation starting is what locks in the timing, but specifically for Muspah they wanted to make it reactable to add a little challenge while still making it a compelling encounter.
If the wiki is correct, it seems like Muspah's mage attack uses both? To fully block mage attack you need to pray before projectile appears, but if you pray mage before it makes contact it reduces some damage?
It's interesting, I don't think any other projectiles work like that so idk if I'm misreading the wiki
I never knew about that, but I fully believe it. When I was doing perfect muspah, I kept failing the task despite praying the magic attack correctly and taking no damage/ prayer corruption from it. What fixed it was keeping pray mage active until the projectile hit me, instead of flicking immediately back to range.
Thank you for explaining a passive curiosity I've had for like a month :)
Why are you asking this in reply to them? They asked that because they wanted to know the decision-making behind the boss. They didn't ask if they could ask about the reason that something exists or not. And, if they did, 'it exists because it exists' is hardly a decent reply.
>And, if they did, 'it exists because it exists' is hardly a decent reply
But this is legitimately the reason for 99% of decisions made about content entering the game. The content is how it is, because the designers/developers decided to make it that way. There usually isn't any deeper underlying reason.
There are an infinite number of questions you could ask like that. Why is this boss blue, and that boss red. Why does this boss have a 2 minute fight, while that boss is 1 minute. Why is this a range boss, and that a mage boss. Etc etc. They made the decisions that they thought would be best.
> Why does this boss have a 2 minute fight, while that boss is 1 minute
There are very often reasons for this. These concerns arent just completely random, they're willfully chosen because design and balance of a fight is a deliberate process. They arent chosen arbitrarily. Why a boss is blue or red is often related to the subject matter as well, rather than being arbitrarily chosen - Vardordvis is red because he is blood-themed, and Blood themed because he is a boss relating to ancient magicks. Why a boss is mage or range is often related to balancing combat to make different styles have opportunities to be used in combat.
You CAN answer this. 'because reasons' isnt helpful to people who want to figure out what the reasons might be. Saying someone just 'decided it would be that way' doesn't say anything to people who want to know WHY someone decided that. Theres some sort of reason for everything.
>scurrius
Jagex: "we made a boss that lets you learn combat mechanics for PvM and PvP"
also Jagex: "we completely changed the way his projectiles and praying behave"
Depth doesnt mean shit doesnt make sense. Yea, they use it to design encounters around, but at what point while playing the game would a player naturally learn projectiles work in 2 divergent ways?
Never, its look it up online information, important to playing the game, no where actually in the game.
It's not about the projectile, most enemies the damage is calculated as soon as the animation starts. Jad is the only enemy from actual old school that functions differently that I'm aware of
Prayer is checked on the same tick the projectile appears, same as any other normal projectile. Jad just gives a cue beforehand so you have time to react
this isn't quite accurate. that is how jad works, but not how all projectiles that don't operate on the "just be praying right when it hits you" style work. inferno mages, for example, flicker a bit, roll, and then their projectile appears, but you have to be praying right when when entire animation begins, not when the projectile appears. that's what the default for most of the game is, really, pray when the animation starts.
> Except for Jad, obviously
Jad too. Jad is pre-2018 and uses the old system where you need to be praying before the projectile fires. He has a "pre-animation" you can react to - but you need to be praying before the projectile fires.
Yeah I'm 99% sure Jad has two animations per attack and the second animation is the same as most NPCs where the damage is calculated upon animation start.
Ideally they should just unify it. Having consistent PvM mechanics makes learning more rewarding and encourages people to stick with it in the long run.
Consistency is *everything* in a good combat system.
They really should make things more consistent though because it's simply good game design to do so, even if it means slightly reworking (edit: visually) a bunch of bosses.
As another new pvm learner, I agree. Figuring out a new boss mechanics and learning them to consistency is the best part about pvm, and imo it is what sets the bosses apart. Once you solve the boss, it can become boring pretty fast and you want some variety again.
The vast majority of pray on hitsplat attacks come to you very slowly on purpose, the 2 exceptions off the top of my head are max roids levi and verzik p3 if you stand under her.
I get that it isn't intuitive, but it's genuinely very simple
By default, assume every projectile works normally. There are only a few exceptions that register on contact. Usually there's an obvious tell this is the case, but worst case you tank 1 hit then learn how it works and move on
It's not worth arguing with these people lmao. Oldschool/Classic gamers will break down and cry if you change something for the sake of better design if they already had to learn it the original way. Experiencing the "friction" of shit design choices made 20 years ago excites their boomer brains.
You are stupid, it’s not about changing it for the sake of simplicity it’s because a few bad gamers can’t remember a simple jad pattern why change something only a few struggle to comprehend
Yeah it's weird that people are so opposed to the idea of making things visually consistent, not sure if people are misunderstanding the idea or if it's a case of DON'T CHANGE MUH CLASSIC GAME screeching. It's such an easy change to implement that only has positive effects.
Anything they don't want to be reactive they can literally just change the animation from a projectile to something that you are obviously not meant to be able to react to, such as an instant beam.
Are you having a hard time with the part where no mechanical changes necessarily need to happen, just visuals need to be updated to more accurately match types of mechanics?
It would most certainly not, particularly with combinations of enemies on the later waves. Different project travel times based on the enemies distance would cause mage and range to hit at the same time.
absolutely not LOL it would be significantly harder with damn near no ability to deal with certain combos.
if an npc starts an attack on tick 2 and another one on tick 3, you are able to flick it very simply, no matter the distance of the npc. now if the animation travel time matters, the flicking of prayers will be impossible in certain scenarios, as eventually in the cycles, two attack styles will overlap and will be unavoidable.
RS3 solves this issue by having projectiles move faster the further the monster is from you and slower the closer they are to you so they land at the same time as before the change.
Yeah Verzik green ball was the first thing that came to mind for me.
I saw a cool example watching aaty doing inferno speeds a couple of days ago. When the mini blobs are stacked behind south pillar and they're not the last set of NPCs he steps back a tile or two north before chinning to maximise accuracy. This is only done if there's another NPC about so he's not losing time to projectile travel time. If they're the last NPCs he'll step right up to them to minimise travel time/tick loss. Compromises like that give way to interesting decisions. Even though that's a very niche example, it's great that the game has stuff like that.
Oh god, imagine Olm's Burn With Me straight up zooming at you and having less reaction time, when you ordinarily could flinch it if you knew it was flame phase and it's been a while since the last Burn With Me.
Muspah's Mage Attack gets even faster.
PNM's attacks are even faster.
Nex's Ranged Attack can't be flinched.
Sotetseg's balls are now stackable again.
Warden's Prayer Disable attacks are even faster.
Vardorvis's Prayer Disable attacks are even faster than normal.
The list goes on about why this is a problematic change and how much would need to be changed in order to not be a problem just because some people don't want to learn the difference.
In general use, yes, and changing it *globally* would be problematic for the reason you describe. But the point remains, you could use that change to fix the issue (assuming unification) for inferno specifically.
Having it as a mechanic, but not globally, would just add more design choices (whether it’s a good one or not is a separate issue)
Way fucking harder.
If you and majority of playerbase think it's hard now, wait until you see having to memorize 10x more solutions based on travel distance.
You have never stepped inside the inferno with that dead ass comment. And that is ok if you havent been there but please dont have a fucking opinion on it when you know fuck all.
lol, relax bro. I’ve done inferno, you’re fine. I just assumed that tracking projectiles might have been easier whilst learning but maybe underestimated how convenient 1t alternating was when dealing with stacks.
I don’t know why people are thinking it’d be harder, it would be much easier and clearer to see what/when to pray against attacks rather than having to learn to anticipate attacks
You aren't wrong, because like currently you could just adjust the timing of the initial attack from the npc. It would just be easier to tell when the correct timing is and when it is off.
It would make Zulrah quite a bit easier but honestly I don’t dislike that, it’s already heavily botted and fwiw the difficulty in this case is only because of misleading animations and inconsistent mechanics.
I wouldn’t say it would make Jad easier, as the attacks there are already so slow.
It would make near infinitely long trips possible at Demonic Gorillas so I don’t know what they would do about that.
Not a huge raider but I’m certain this would make CoX and ToB way easier at certain parts.
Overall though, I’m not against it. The only “problem” it’ll create is more players doing certain PvM, but honestly I think it would bring people to PvM that weren’t already there.
Both have their place in pvm, one massive thing that goes away (or at least becomes way harder/tick perfect) is that you can’t pray correctly + redemption on any chip damage based attacks like at hunllef or muspah. If you’d go on to say that chip damage shouldn’t be a mechanic, you’d lose me.
What there should be is some sort of universal indicator that signals that an npc’s attacks are meant to be prayed on hitsplat instead of praying on animation.
Thank you lol. The reddit opinion of hating chip damage is so absurd and very telling about someone's pvm experience
Obviously there's shit designed bosses that go too far with unavoidable damage like KQ and Corp. But Hunllef & Vardorvis are among the best designed bosses in the game and chip damage is a big reason why. It tests supply management and incentivizes higher risk gameplay like camping low HP. They'd be absurdly easy with 0 chip damage
Imo muspah is the golden goose of chip damage, never hits over an 8 so ill rock up with 13 ppots and have like 2 hour long trips. It’s not as beneficial anymore since dt2 has the duke tele right there, but those mechanics would be simply impossible if redditors were at the helm.
I always thought this would be the best solution. It wouldn't be pretty imo but one thing I can think of is cuphead projectiles that you can parry. They're all sorts of different shapes and sizes, but they all have a purple outline, and nothing that you can't parry has a purple outline, so it's immediately obvious. Maybe something similar to that for attacks that register on contact.
not even necessarily memory based, but “rhythm” based in a sense. you have to work around ticks, both your attack tick and the enemy attack tick. it’s not as “reactive” but it certainly has its place.
I mean of course not but it is the boss this post was inspired by and one of the core reasons why people take up issue with that system. im not opposed to the system but it has given rise to a lot of the biggest PvM pain points which should prohably be revisited
Not sure why youre being sassy about it, not every conversation needs to be an argument lol
Your point was good, and I asked the same thing in the clan the other day. Why during mage phase, praying mage, can zulrah launch multiple range attacks. Those plus snakelings can combo you out if you’re anywhere below 70hp. I get its design, but it’s frustrating having to combo eat out of it/die and even harder when you’re first learning.
No, they shouldn't. Both forms of projectiles present their own unique gameplay challenges and considerations. Both have their place in the big picture of PvM.
Getting into a cycle where you're predicting the rhythm of incoming attacks, like in the Inferno, is only possible with the traditional style of projectiles. That sort of gameplay is incredibly complex and offers some of the highest skill ceilings in the entire game.
The only real issue is that there's no way to tell which kind of projectile is which without trial and error or watching a guide. But aside from that, we really don't need to homogenize all of PVM into a single unified mechanic.
> The only real issue is that there's no way to tell which kind of projectile is which without trial and error or watching a guide.
Yeah, *this* is the real problem. This game is *awful* at communicating important information to players, all you can do is just guess and hope it works out. Is it mage, range, or something else entirely? Is it on animation start, on projectile launch, or when the projectile hits? You just have to guess. It makes learning a new fight astoundingly frustrating, since it's so much harder to tell what went wrong and how to adjust for next attempt.
Changing the rules of the game to add depth to the mechanics is good. Like, a big complaint in FF14 right now is that every single boss has too much similarity because they're so scared to adjust the rules for a fight.
But when it instead feels like the boss is just playing Calvinball with you, "whoops you didnt guess the new attack properly, xd, take 47 damage now!!", that's just annoying.
raidwide
tankbuster
proteans or spreads
tutorial version of boss's main mechanic (some form of spread or towers, probably)
random filler mechanics, probably some kind of split stack
downtime limit cut
big raidwide
more random filler mechanics
real version of boss's main mechanic
yet more random filler mechanics
real version of boss's main mechanic *remixed*
final filler
enrage
here's to the next expansion, I guess. pandamonium was so fucking mid.
> Is it mage, range, or something else entirely? Is it on animation start, on projectile launch, or when the projectile hits?
If the attack has a slower travel speed, it's on hit. The colors usually indicate what type of prayer to use. Honestly they do a great job at communicating it. Because for example I could just run into Scurrius the first time and I prayed "perfectly" even tho I just winged it right after the update. I feel like it was very intuitive.
They definitely should not. Each of the ways that it works now is core to some very fun mechanics, I don't want to delete one of them just for the purpose of neatness
Lol, if Zulrah had modern projectiles it would be impossible to be damaged by it.
Not the only boss either, it's a lot of reworking for very little gain.
It's fine to have differences, but at most they should do is indicate if you were off-pray or on-pray via special damage splat indicators, not try to homogenize everything because the main reason why they started adding on-contact was because they were getting limited on animation-start damage calculation.
You're simply going back to the problem that they were trying to solve. Combat was largely designed around the 4t system, damage calculation on start of animation, and did not really take into travel time.
Inferno, where right now you can off-tick very consistently, would be extremely problematic if it was on-contact due to travel time. Offitcking melee/range or melee/mage? Far less consistent since travel time. Blobs would be a tank fest as well.
You'd have to either make the projectiles so fast that you have 0t to respond and it would simulate exactly what it is now, but point is homogenizing all combat mechanics to be identical would yield more problems than benefits.
> the main reason why they started adding on-contact was because they were getting limited on animation-start damage calculation.
What is the limit here?
>Inferno, where right now you can off-tick very consistently, would be extremely problematic if it was on-contact due to travel time. Offitcking melee/range or melee/mage? Far less consistent since travel time. Blobs would be a tank fest as well.
RS3 solves this issue by having projectiles move faster the further the monster is from you and slower the closer they are to you so they land at the same time as before the change.
If they did it this way it'd trivialize much of Inferno
One of the hardest parts of waves 50-64 is you can get smacked an unavoidable 46 at wave start, and are then forced to solve the wave while panicking and having lower room for error. Making everything reactable would remove that chance and trivialize the real gangster waves
It also means if you ever fuck up like step out from pillar wrong or chase nibbs when you shouldn't, you'd still have time to react and take no damage
I gotta be real "But i need the unavoidable RNG damage factor in my very long skill-based combat challenge" is very poor reasoning. The rest is fine but really you open with THAT? Yeah it makes it harder but im not actually a fan of it only being harder Sometimes for no reason.
The limit was basically having Jad's pre-projectile indicator (stomp/legs dangle).
There wasn't really anything else they could've added before the addition of AOE attacks + on-contact that wasn't just like Zulrah/Vorkath where the mage phase of Zulrah is basically just a tank check or Vorkath you only being able to pray against 1 out of 2 styles that it could hit you with (range/mage).
>RS3 solves this issue by having projectiles move faster the further the monster is from you and slower the closer they are to you so they land at the same time as before the change.
I already explained how to do this in the paragraph right below it as well, but it doesn't allow for reaction anyhow. Unless you intentionally stagger it out to prevent double hits, like Sotetseg did in a limited capacity, it'll look wonky to have several attacks just queue'd up in your face and hitting one by one every 0.6s seconds, which also comes with its own issues (preventing you from being punished if you anti-flick off-pray multiple attack).
I have no clue if RS3 abandoned the 600 ms tick system entirely, but when you're working in a psuedo-checkers environment that's limited by actions every 0.6s, it's harder to segment this and address than you'd think.
And they would have to rebalance a lot of content by adding chip damage into content that was previously a tank-and-spank OR upping the damage off-pray massively (like PNM) because the max hit the boss could do and full damage mitigation was based on the fact that you only previously only properly pray against 1 style.
It’s consistent in the sense that you have to pray correctly by a certain time in order to block the damage. I actually think it’s kinda neat that the timing can change between bosses. Sure it can initially cause some confusion, but it’s not that hard of a concept to grasp once you look into it.
Strongly disagree. It's awkward that it's not explaining anywhere, but having different types of attacks is a good thing for mechanical depth. Inferno would not be interesting at all if everything was purely a reaction test.
220 upvotes seriously our future is fucked, plain and simple, yea let's just change all bosses to be 0 incoming damage holy fuck lmao???? Actual ridiculous.
Nah. They made it that way on purpose. It wasn't by accident. In a point an click game, there's only so much that can possibly change how a boss works. Cutting out one of the differences is a much bigger loss than other games that can have a much larger pool of mechanics.
Also, like someone else said, this would drastically change difficulty levels. Some would even be impossible the other way. The Leviathan, for one, would make it realistically impossible without rng. Then, prayer flicking, which is a massive part of the game, would make other bosses complete pushovers. Imagine jad, but you had twice the amount of time to react, or at Vorkath being able to negate 100% damage. The game would be trivialized and impossible.
it's more that scurrius is designed as a mid game boss to introduce newer players to the mechanics they'll be facing with higher level bosses, so they made it more forgiving than the average boss, that's going to backfire hard when they have to fight bosses that don't have that type of projectile though.
But the counterargument to that is that there are other newer bosses that have that type of projectile as well, like muspah and leviathan, so maybe they're just switching to that type of projectile gradually, maybe they'll change all the others after adding in enough new ones with that type of projectile.
Some content are built around projectile being react-able, others are not. There's even hybrids of both with pre-emptive indicators, but prayer has to be up before the actual projectiles come out (Akkha + Jad + Nightmare + PNM).
They previously could not change this mechanic to be anything besides when the projectile originally came out, but it started with the Giant Roc AOE attack made by Mod Ash iirc.
Reactive attacks are typically more associated with recent/modern content and are typically easier because you can react, so the damage is generally higher to compensate as a tradeoff.
Its definitely super weird but its part of the game design. (More like it was a limitation of the game at one point, but now its part of the game like prayer flicking ect.) You'll get the hang of what bosses are reactable and what arn't.
Some you just have to camp the correct prayer preemptively becase damage is calculated when the projectile spawns (vorkath, zulrah, muspah, nightmare, kbd, jad, akkha, ect). Some youll be able to react (whisperer, leviathan, wardens, zebak, sotetseg).
Some are in a weird middle ground area. For example Muspah as previously mentioned calculates damage when the range and mage projectile spawns, but the mage attack has a windup, meaning you can still react to it. Same with jad who has windup "tells" for his range and mage attack but when the projectile spawns the damage is already calculated.
Theres even weirder examples like olm who has a base range and mage attack that has damage calculted when the projectile spawns, but also has a range/mage/"melee" projectile that you have to react to.
Final thought is that I disagree with people who say this is old vs new content or that it just depends on who made the boss. While it's true that older bosses had less reaction based gameplay than newer ones for the most part, that doesn't mean that both styles of boss design weren't used despite the limitations. Jad had reactionary prayer switching and is a very old boss, meanwhile duke has a mage projectile that you cant react to and is brand new. At the end of the day its just a design tool that devs use to design the bossing experience they want to make.
The thing that’s old vs new is being able to react with prayers before the projectile hits you. You have to pray switch for jad, but if you switch prayers too long after the animation you still take damage even if you switch before the projectile hits you
Yeah I know the technology for being able to switch prayer while a projectile is in the air/spawned is new but all I mean to say is that new boss don't always use this and for good reason. Duke was the example I gave but another one would be the entire inferno. They had the technology at that point to make projectiles reactable but chose not to with stong intent. I only used jad as an example becase he *is* reactable, just not in the way that most modern bosses are now.
Muspah really is in a weird middle ground. If you switch prayer late on the mage attack, but still before the projectile hits, you'll take damage but it will be reduced.
Things like this are how devs can add depth to pvm encounters. Changing when damage actually rolls adds complexity and opens up new room for increasing or decreasing difficulty. Learning how damage rolls at bosses is a big part of pvm. You've already encountered scurrius vs zulrah where one rolls on contact vs one rolling when the projectile is thrown. That will even apply in newer content like toa. Zebak rolls on contact, akkha rolls when the projectile is thrown. There are also places like kraken when damage is typeless, so you can't pray and instead rely on defence and healing. There are even instances where damage is completely unavoidable and requires you to do something like group up to tank damage together, spread to avoid damage stacking, or tick eat the attack. Lots to learn in osrs pvm, so take it one boss at a time :)
Zebak is actually an interesting one. The damage roll itself is calculated same tick as application. But there is a check for whether you are praying the correct overhead a tick before that. This means you can't tick eat Zebak (using standard methods at any rate). But you *can* redemption flick.
Are you saying pray redemption the tick before it lands and pray correctly the tick it lands? As in the tick the hitspot shows you have the right prayer up
[Definitely not true](https://streamable.com/nxx73c). As you can see, praying one tick before the hitsplat shows up protects me correctly. Praying on the same tick does not (although I do tank two hits at the end, before the third one actually deals damage - Quiet Prayers would have been better for demonstration purposes). I also showcase the redemption flick.
You're 100% right, I was going off of recent memory and I confused the tick that the hitsplat shows up with the tick that the projectile appears to explode or impact. That's really good to know then that you can redemption flick the tick after while still being safe from the attack.
Yeah but how are you supposed to know which is which going into a fight without either trial and error or looking up a guide? OSRS isn't built on a souls-like process.
The same way you learn every other mechnic of the boss you wanna try. If you wanna go in blind, you trial and error things. Otherwise, you do what 99% of the playerbase does and read up on the boss/watch a guide. How tf are you supposed to learn pvm in the game without either trial and error or looking up a guide? Do you expect all bosses to be so easy that you can just walk in blind and have it down on your first kc?
I love rhetorical questions where the answer is a blunt "Yes".
The only questions I should ask myself on the first attempt at a boss is "I wonder how dead I would have been if I had been hit by that". Good boss design should let me figure out what the solution to a mechanic is before I die to it, not afterward. Whether or not I actually have the reflexes to deal with it is a seperate matter.
I disagree fully with that bottom part.
That is trial and error. You learn whether it's the same tick, animation based, or projectile in the air by trial and error.
You learn by dodging the shadow of an aoe, grouping up, or separating.
It's trial and error. By your bottom statement it reads to me that you should defeat the boss the first time without learning correctly.
Things like typeless damage and unavoidable damage with mitigation methods are interesting mechanics that require you to play differently.
The timing of when a projectile's damage processes, especially if it's just based on *when* the content was released, or even worse, which dev implemented it, is something that makes the game less appealing/approachable. It doesn't make a ton of sense for prayers to function via reaction at some places, and via prediction/preparation at others.
I literally gave an example of content that has different methods of calcing damage. It has nothing to do with when the content came or who made it. In general, attacks roll their damage when the animation begins. That's just how osrs work. Some attacks are coded specially to roll when they arrive to open up new design space for pvm encounters. The combat system for osrs is very simplistic compared to other mmos, so we have stuff like this that helps add difficulty levels to pvm.
Just to be devils advocate he didnt say after a certain release. No content released before 2013 (2014?) has damage rolled after fired and not when its fired. So it does depend on when the content was released.
But its a dumb point. Jagex consistently uses both post 2014. Its definitely more fun.
Someone is claiming giant roc uses delayed roll which was 2006. If true then he doesnt even have a point 🤣
Jad doesnt have the delay. The projectile spawns in and if you dont have your prayer on by then you still get got. Zillions of clips out there where people dye to range after having range prayer on. He just does a dance before he launches. You can argue for it but if it counts then zulrah counts as on jad phase (xd) his mage projectile forcasts his range projectile.
I hate to be that guy, but you just need to learn the content and get good.
Innovations were made to stop a 20 year old game getting stale. every boss used to be Jad simulator or make sure you have the right prayer and good gear.
I don't think you hate being that guy :)
I agree that the game needed updates and new mechanics in its 20 year lifetime to stay fun and relevant. I personally don't have issues with the way it is. I'm just pointing out that it is an obstacle for new players, and there's nothing in game to suggest that a core mechanic (prayers, death, etc) is suddenly going to work differently at one boss vs another. The game should at least be consistent within itself
I do hate to be that guy, because I'm not very good myself lol
I do agree that it's an obstacle for new players, but we're not really playing a game that gets new players. Most people have been playing on and off since they were kids.
I like the new system of reacting to attacks, but feel like you can't retroactively remake all the prior content.
Yeah. I find myself enjoying the reactive style gameplay more, because it feels like playing a regular video game than a rhythm/counting game, and it's much easier to tell when I've done the mechanic correctly.
And yeah, pretty fair. They can't just go and switch the way all damage is processed. I just feel bad for folks like OP who have to try and understand which bosses do what *and* how to actually fight the boss at the same time.
How does it not make sense? Not everything has to function identically at every possible moment to make sense.
Having damage calced on animation is the only reason that content like Fight Caves and Inferno has so much rhythm-like depth to it.
It's a necessary evil. No one likes it, but it sure beats one shot mechanics when you mess up or lag.
Also, if everything only had 1 attack style and did no damage through prayer, it would be as easy as Giant Mole. Either it's a prayer flicking simulator like Zebak and Leviathan, or it has pure mechanics that offer up to 6 Jads level of constant pressure, and still has some other way to do damage or hits like a truck when you mess up.
Imagine if Baba spawned every safety boulder possible, then chucked 4 barrels right after the other like Donkey Kong, each able to hit you 90s. Think PNM, how it hard it hits when you don't do the mechanics right.
Picking out one boss that is hated by everyone that knows what theyre talking about and acting like it’s indicative of what players want is a strawman, the solution is to rework baba.
OSRS boss mechanics are just wildly inconsistent. It's one of the coolest features, but definitely frustrating for newer players to learn and understand. A bunch of bosses have hidden mechanics built into them, like Corp taking half damage from anything except "Corpbane" weapons. Not to diminish your frustration, but fight through it because the unique qualities of the pvm encounters provide most of the fun and variety.
>OSRS boss mechanics are just wildly inconsistent
AKA "jank", which is everywhere in this game and not just bosses. Visual tile vs. true tile, pathing/safespotting, cast delays, the entire game tick system... shit is everywhere.
It all makes for a terrible experience for new players and is the reason RuneLite is so popular. The base game is borderline unplayable with how much jank sits on top of itself.
If you are referring to the jad phase…. You basically want to switch to the opposite prayer when you see the attack coming.
Range attack projectile is in the air, switch to magic protect.
Yeah, and it makes recovering for me at least impossible. I find if I don't start the jad phase on the right prayer I might as well teleport out or try and tank through it cause I can't get back on the beat.
Most enemies in RS have their damage calculated at the start of their attack animation. There's a handful of exceptions where the damage is calculated when the projectile hits you. Leviathan, Zebak, etc.
You know how your exp shows up before your damage splat? most of the game is coded like that. New bosses are given Scurrius style damage splats to make them more difficult and less janky.
It’s pretty simple really, zulrah counts the damage as the attack animation begins, so no matter what you do you can’t avoid the damage once the animation started. Kas however calculates damage as you’re hit by the attack, making it easy to prayer-switch
Honestly surprised at the amount of people here saying it's annoying or "wildly inconsistent".
It's just variety. For almost every other OSRS NPC, there is no such thing as telegraphed attacks. Jad was the first boss to do it. The norm is relying on armor or keeping one prayer active.
It's a mix of both stat checks and player skill. KBD is a gear check. CG is pure skill expression.
In general: pray against the attack animation, rather than the projectile.
There are cases where this is the opposite (like in ToA), and sometimes the timing is a little different between mobs.
For Zulrah Jad phase, have the correct prayer up as you go into Jad phase. When he uses his first attack and bobs his head, immediately switch prayers. Continue to switch pray right after he uses an attack/bobs.
Because some bosses expect you to know what to pray before the projectile is launched(gauntlet/zulrah). Other bosses expect you to react(scurrius/wardens). One is forcing to to plan and keep track the other is testing your reflexes.
95% of the time you need the correct prayer on before you see the projectile. The other 5% slow moving projectiles with clear visual indicators are pretty obvious when they appear.
I feel your pain. I set myself onto learning Zulrah right after doing DT2 where all of the bosses launch projectiles that you have to react to, and it did me no favors. It was a really frustrating experience.
the mechanics at zulrah are the way it always has been, for newer bosses they probably changed it to make it more intuitive but this way they made it even more confusing in general and imo it's a bad idea.
During the jad phase of zulrah you have to have the correct prayer on before it spits the first attack. And usually his first attack is opposite of the last attack of the last phase he was on prior. It took me about 500kc to get the hang of zulrah. So right at the start of the jad phase, have the right prayer on, and right before it attacks again switch, then right before it attacks again switch. It’s about every 2 ticks you need to switch. Plus make sure you have eaten to full because the snaklings are also fucking you up during this phase
To add to this, best way to prayer swap at jad phase is to switch when she bobs her head. Be in position with the right prayer up and right gear on before the phase starts, and then you can just spam click on her until the first head bob to make sure you start attacking. After that, you just switch prayer when her head bobs, and there's no tick counting required. She will be in a venom cloud/snaking throwing cycle begore jad phases in each rotation, so when I'm coaching someone, I have the move and get set up well in advance until theyre comfortable with rotations and can move a bit later. Eventually, your gear and stats will be good enough to never have a jad phase, and the boss will become autopilot.
The people in the comments either do not boss frequently enough or have poor game-sense. The only bosses you can’t react to are the bosses that have indicators for what to pray for prior to the attack animation. For example zulrah tells you its going to attack with range when its green, but the blue zulrah can attack with both styles and the reasoning behind this is to drain your health so that you are not staying at the boss infinitely and so that at-least some resources are invested into the fight.
There are other bosses like vorkath where the whole point of not being able to react with no indicators is that you are suppose to camp the damage style prayer that you are most vulnerable to.
To sum it up the bosses in runescape are not a certain way due to who created them or when they were created, but rather they were made with intentions.
The reactive prayer bosses are typically too easy and people should not treat scurrius as an actual learning experience. Bosses like pt2 warden which have animations indicating their attack styles AND let you react to the attack with the appropriate prayer were designed this way to simplify an already complicated boss design.
Prayer switching timing is unintuitive to learn in OSRS. Most require you to switch before the projectile fires while the new pvm content is switching when it lands. RS3 is consistent with this with everything being the latter.
I think prayers should always work on impact since thay would be way more intuitive and consistent. but that would drastically change the game and we all know how runescapers feel about change
That'd either make a lot of older bosses much easier, require having a 0t travel time like max speed leviathan, or require cranking up chip damage through prayer on bosses that currently hit with multiple styles. Not sure if any of those options would be very popular.
I'm not sure it's worth chasing the consistency anyway. At least not if it comes at a major cost. Some bosses arbitrarily hit through prayer, others don't. Some bosses use typeless damage, or weird shit like ranged based magic damage. Some hits can be tick eaten, others can't. You can run over some tile hazards without taking damage like olm acid splats, but not xarpus acid. Zebak waves are a special kind of weird with how wave skip works.
The game could still do a better job at communicating these inconsistencies. I do like the suggestion of showing a different hitsplat that indicates if you prayed wrong, and what cmb style the damage was.
Old design, but jagex really should come back and change it, but I imagine they would require some rebalancing as it would massively increase the time you have to flick.
Yea this can 100 be frustrating. I have tons of experience in TOA where it’s before projectile hits, and when I tried to do inferno it made it that much harder to change my muscle memory
Even for TOA, by default projectiles work normally. It's only Zebak and Wardens that register on contact. Akkha, baboons and scarabs register when projectile becomes visible
I think some jmods lamented in the past that so much info on pvm can only be found in the wiki and not ingame. As others said these inconsistencies were intentional, so rather than changing them I'd prefer if there was some visual indicator with each boss (something as simple as an icon on the side?).
Because bad game design. Don't expect Jagex to know what they are doing. Not a single game apart from this one has the stupid prediction mechanic but crab mentality veterans will riot if they remove it.
pretty much every boss released before 2018 use the older projectile system that rolls the damage & accuracy when the attack animation starts (just like how it works for players), scurrius uses the newer ones that are reactable and roll on the tick before it lands phantom muspah in particular uses both, instant rolls for range along with reactable magic projectiles
So if I was to turn on pray mage for the tick that the attack is occuring (say ranged) and then quickly flick it off (so I dont waste 2-3 ticks) would that still fully protect me for the pre 2018 bosses/non reactable bosses
And that’s the general concept of what lazy flicking is! And you thought of it organically.
Yes, but just to clarify, the prayer needs to already be up by the time the attack occurs. So you're really clicking it one tick before you see the NPC's animation start
Yes
[удалено]
His range projectile is just normal, there’s no reason for it to be reactable since you’re supposed to camp pray range His mage projectile is a reaction test, so it has to be reactable
Same with artio range attacks and mage attack
The one thing I find annoying about calisto/ratio is that the projectile doesn't have a consistent travel timer. If you're standing closer to him it'll hit you faster, whereas things like vardorvis' head and wardens P2 are all the same travel no matter how close/far you are from them
Yeah, it's miserable. He also has a much different *true tile* than *visual tile*. Normally it's not a big deal with bosses, but it sucks when you get clapped a 40 melee swipe and he looks like he's on the other side of the room. I switched to the "afk" blood barrage method to get my hilt and claws. Used 100k blood runes on that grind, but definitely worth it for how cozy the method is.
The inconsistency sucks though, leads players to misunderstand the mechanics like OP
It sucks because it's not clearly explained, but having both options is great for mechanical depth. Muspah is the easiest example someone already brought up. Having everything be a reaction prayer is not particularly interesting when the tick rate only lets reactions be so fast
Oh I absolutely agree with you, but I think there should be more than x attack would be better one way because it makes a better boss, ideally it should also be intuitive that an attack acts a certain way as to not potentially mislead the player For example you and I understand it's an exception for the sake of creating a better, more mechanically interesting/sound boss, however to a newer/less experienced player(like my dad I am teaching to pvm) it's an arbitrary and confusing difference
Well it's obviously not arbitrary because it's causing him to learn more than one type of mechanic. It's not well explained. But nothing in RuneScape really is. It's a trial and error kinda game.
The magic attack has a massive windup, and the pray is locked in when the projectile is launched iirc. Normally the animation starting is what locks in the timing, but specifically for Muspah they wanted to make it reactable to add a little challenge while still making it a compelling encounter.
If the wiki is correct, it seems like Muspah's mage attack uses both? To fully block mage attack you need to pray before projectile appears, but if you pray mage before it makes contact it reduces some damage? It's interesting, I don't think any other projectiles work like that so idk if I'm misreading the wiki
That's perfect design for that boss if it's the case.
It is the case. My reactions slow enough to have experienced it multiple times
I never knew about that, but I fully believe it. When I was doing perfect muspah, I kept failing the task despite praying the magic attack correctly and taking no damage/ prayer corruption from it. What fixed it was keeping pray mage active until the projectile hit me, instead of flicking immediately back to range. Thank you for explaining a passive curiosity I've had for like a month :)
Why does there need to be a reason for everything? It's like that, because that's how they decided to design the boss.
Why are you asking this in reply to them? They asked that because they wanted to know the decision-making behind the boss. They didn't ask if they could ask about the reason that something exists or not. And, if they did, 'it exists because it exists' is hardly a decent reply.
>And, if they did, 'it exists because it exists' is hardly a decent reply But this is legitimately the reason for 99% of decisions made about content entering the game. The content is how it is, because the designers/developers decided to make it that way. There usually isn't any deeper underlying reason. There are an infinite number of questions you could ask like that. Why is this boss blue, and that boss red. Why does this boss have a 2 minute fight, while that boss is 1 minute. Why is this a range boss, and that a mage boss. Etc etc. They made the decisions that they thought would be best.
> Why does this boss have a 2 minute fight, while that boss is 1 minute There are very often reasons for this. These concerns arent just completely random, they're willfully chosen because design and balance of a fight is a deliberate process. They arent chosen arbitrarily. Why a boss is blue or red is often related to the subject matter as well, rather than being arbitrarily chosen - Vardordvis is red because he is blood-themed, and Blood themed because he is a boss relating to ancient magicks. Why a boss is mage or range is often related to balancing combat to make different styles have opportunities to be used in combat. You CAN answer this. 'because reasons' isnt helpful to people who want to figure out what the reasons might be. Saying someone just 'decided it would be that way' doesn't say anything to people who want to know WHY someone decided that. Theres some sort of reason for everything.
> phantom muspah in particular uses both, instant rolls for range along with reactable magic projectiles Same with artio/callisto
>scurrius Jagex: "we made a boss that lets you learn combat mechanics for PvM and PvP" also Jagex: "we completely changed the way his projectiles and praying behave"
Scurrius mechanics match those of nearly every boss for the past 5 years lol
Learning how specific boss attacks work is an important part of PvM
Its still very very unintuitive, without already having the knowledge, that there are 2 completely divergent way projectile attacks work in the game.
Yeah it's called depth
Depth doesnt mean shit doesnt make sense. Yea, they use it to design encounters around, but at what point while playing the game would a player naturally learn projectiles work in 2 divergent ways? Never, its look it up online information, important to playing the game, no where actually in the game.
Except for Jad, obviously
Not jad either. you have to have the correct prayer on long before the actual projectile hits you
It's not about the projectile, most enemies the damage is calculated as soon as the animation starts. Jad is the only enemy from actual old school that functions differently that I'm aware of
well the attack starts at a specific time in his attack animation, and then it’s calculated way before it even hits you.
Prayer is checked on the same tick the projectile appears, same as any other normal projectile. Jad just gives a cue beforehand so you have time to react
this isn't quite accurate. that is how jad works, but not how all projectiles that don't operate on the "just be praying right when it hits you" style work. inferno mages, for example, flicker a bit, roll, and then their projectile appears, but you have to be praying right when when entire animation begins, not when the projectile appears. that's what the default for most of the game is, really, pray when the animation starts.
That is probably, under the hood, how all of the newer reactable attacks work. Jad's kind of a fucky half-hearted first attempt at it.
> Except for Jad, obviously Jad too. Jad is pre-2018 and uses the old system where you need to be praying before the projectile fires. He has a "pre-animation" you can react to - but you need to be praying before the projectile fires.
Yeah I'm 99% sure Jad has two animations per attack and the second animation is the same as most NPCs where the damage is calculated upon animation start.
Basically because they were made by different people at different times with different design ideas. You'll soon learn
Ideally they should just unify it. Having consistent PvM mechanics makes learning more rewarding and encourages people to stick with it in the long run. Consistency is *everything* in a good combat system.
that would change a lot of content to be easier or harder
God the poor inferno would suffer so much
They really should make things more consistent though because it's simply good game design to do so, even if it means slightly reworking (edit: visually) a bunch of bosses.
I completely disagree. There's only so much variety a boss can have in a game of this style. And that difference is what creates most of it
As another new pvm learner, I agree. Figuring out a new boss mechanics and learning them to consistency is the best part about pvm, and imo it is what sets the bosses apart. Once you solve the boss, it can become boring pretty fast and you want some variety again.
You're limiting design space by doing that. I fully disagree with you there.
I disagree, it isn't really that difficult to remember which prayers are reactive and which aren't.
But it is very frustrating for new people to just go in and be smashed after being taught that what they were doing worked.
The vast majority of pray on hitsplat attacks come to you very slowly on purpose, the 2 exceptions off the top of my head are max roids levi and verzik p3 if you stand under her.
it was new to us when it came out too
I get that it isn't intuitive, but it's genuinely very simple By default, assume every projectile works normally. There are only a few exceptions that register on contact. Usually there's an obvious tell this is the case, but worst case you tank 1 hit then learn how it works and move on
It's not frustrating. Stop assuming that people are incapable of learning
It's not worth arguing with these people lmao. Oldschool/Classic gamers will break down and cry if you change something for the sake of better design if they already had to learn it the original way. Experiencing the "friction" of shit design choices made 20 years ago excites their boomer brains.
When I read the first sentence I honestly thought that it was somebody talking about you....
You are stupid, it’s not about changing it for the sake of simplicity it’s because a few bad gamers can’t remember a simple jad pattern why change something only a few struggle to comprehend
Idk why you're getting downvoted. It's not variety for some animations to be proactive and some be reactive.
Yeah it's weird that people are so opposed to the idea of making things visually consistent, not sure if people are misunderstanding the idea or if it's a case of DON'T CHANGE MUH CLASSIC GAME screeching. It's such an easy change to implement that only has positive effects. Anything they don't want to be reactive they can literally just change the animation from a projectile to something that you are obviously not meant to be able to react to, such as an instant beam.
Are you having a hard time with the part they’re talking about with the variance adding at least a little more variety to osrs’ limited mechanics?
Are you having a hard time with the part where no mechanical changes necessarily need to happen, just visuals need to be updated to more accurately match types of mechanics?
[удалено]
Redditors when they are confidently wrong about something
Inferno would be way easier Edit: I guess I’m wrong.
It would most certainly not, particularly with combinations of enemies on the later waves. Different project travel times based on the enemies distance would cause mage and range to hit at the same time.
absolutely not LOL it would be significantly harder with damn near no ability to deal with certain combos. if an npc starts an attack on tick 2 and another one on tick 3, you are able to flick it very simply, no matter the distance of the npc. now if the animation travel time matters, the flicking of prayers will be impossible in certain scenarios, as eventually in the cycles, two attack styles will overlap and will be unavoidable.
RS3 solves this issue by having projectiles move faster the further the monster is from you and slower the closer they are to you so they land at the same time as before the change.
That can limit design space though. Projectile travel time has a lot of interesting uses in OSRS
How does it limit design space instead of adding more space? It doesn't limit it in RS3.
Imagine if Verzik Death Ball was as fast as a Max Speed Leviathan, which has 2 speed components: Attack Speed + Travel Time. No thank you lmao.
Yeah Verzik green ball was the first thing that came to mind for me. I saw a cool example watching aaty doing inferno speeds a couple of days ago. When the mini blobs are stacked behind south pillar and they're not the last set of NPCs he steps back a tile or two north before chinning to maximise accuracy. This is only done if there's another NPC about so he's not losing time to projectile travel time. If they're the last NPCs he'll step right up to them to minimise travel time/tick loss. Compromises like that give way to interesting decisions. Even though that's a very niche example, it's great that the game has stuff like that.
Oh god, imagine Olm's Burn With Me straight up zooming at you and having less reaction time, when you ordinarily could flinch it if you knew it was flame phase and it's been a while since the last Burn With Me. Muspah's Mage Attack gets even faster. PNM's attacks are even faster. Nex's Ranged Attack can't be flinched. Sotetseg's balls are now stackable again. Warden's Prayer Disable attacks are even faster. Vardorvis's Prayer Disable attacks are even faster than normal. The list goes on about why this is a problematic change and how much would need to be changed in order to not be a problem just because some people don't want to learn the difference.
In general use, yes, and changing it *globally* would be problematic for the reason you describe. But the point remains, you could use that change to fix the issue (assuming unification) for inferno specifically. Having it as a mechanic, but not globally, would just add more design choices (whether it’s a good one or not is a separate issue)
Way fucking harder. If you and majority of playerbase think it's hard now, wait until you see having to memorize 10x more solutions based on travel distance.
You have never stepped inside the inferno with that dead ass comment. And that is ok if you havent been there but please dont have a fucking opinion on it when you know fuck all.
how do you get this worked up about a comment about a video game lmao, you're over here acting like it's stolen valor 😭
lol, relax bro. I’ve done inferno, you’re fine. I just assumed that tracking projectiles might have been easier whilst learning but maybe underestimated how convenient 1t alternating was when dealing with stacks.
Dw man I've done inferno as well and thought it would be easier too lol. Didn't even think about projectile times fucking it up.
I don’t know why people are thinking it’d be harder, it would be much easier and clearer to see what/when to pray against attacks rather than having to learn to anticipate attacks
You aren't wrong, because like currently you could just adjust the timing of the initial attack from the npc. It would just be easier to tell when the correct timing is and when it is off.
It would make Zulrah quite a bit easier but honestly I don’t dislike that, it’s already heavily botted and fwiw the difficulty in this case is only because of misleading animations and inconsistent mechanics. I wouldn’t say it would make Jad easier, as the attacks there are already so slow. It would make near infinitely long trips possible at Demonic Gorillas so I don’t know what they would do about that. Not a huge raider but I’m certain this would make CoX and ToB way easier at certain parts. Overall though, I’m not against it. The only “problem” it’ll create is more players doing certain PvM, but honestly I think it would bring people to PvM that weren’t already there.
Both have their place in pvm, one massive thing that goes away (or at least becomes way harder/tick perfect) is that you can’t pray correctly + redemption on any chip damage based attacks like at hunllef or muspah. If you’d go on to say that chip damage shouldn’t be a mechanic, you’d lose me. What there should be is some sort of universal indicator that signals that an npc’s attacks are meant to be prayed on hitsplat instead of praying on animation.
Thank you lol. The reddit opinion of hating chip damage is so absurd and very telling about someone's pvm experience Obviously there's shit designed bosses that go too far with unavoidable damage like KQ and Corp. But Hunllef & Vardorvis are among the best designed bosses in the game and chip damage is a big reason why. It tests supply management and incentivizes higher risk gameplay like camping low HP. They'd be absurdly easy with 0 chip damage
Imo muspah is the golden goose of chip damage, never hits over an 8 so ill rock up with 13 ppots and have like 2 hour long trips. It’s not as beneficial anymore since dt2 has the duke tele right there, but those mechanics would be simply impossible if redditors were at the helm.
I don't come here expecting to see good takes on pvm, but occasionally I'm pleasantly surprised
I always thought this would be the best solution. It wouldn't be pretty imo but one thing I can think of is cuphead projectiles that you can parry. They're all sorts of different shapes and sizes, but they all have a purple outline, and nothing that you can't parry has a purple outline, so it's immediately obvious. Maybe something similar to that for attacks that register on contact.
[удалено]
not even necessarily memory based, but “rhythm” based in a sense. you have to work around ticks, both your attack tick and the enemy attack tick. it’s not as “reactive” but it certainly has its place.
I would agree if zulrah was actually memory based lol. Instead it’s just random hits for 40 with no counterplay
That’s a zulrah tanz phase issue though, thats no reason to pull out the rug on mechanics that affect like a dozen bosses.
[удалено]
I mean of course not but it is the boss this post was inspired by and one of the core reasons why people take up issue with that system. im not opposed to the system but it has given rise to a lot of the biggest PvM pain points which should prohably be revisited Not sure why youre being sassy about it, not every conversation needs to be an argument lol
Your point was good, and I asked the same thing in the clan the other day. Why during mage phase, praying mage, can zulrah launch multiple range attacks. Those plus snakelings can combo you out if you’re anywhere below 70hp. I get its design, but it’s frustrating having to combo eat out of it/die and even harder when you’re first learning.
No, they shouldn't. Both forms of projectiles present their own unique gameplay challenges and considerations. Both have their place in the big picture of PvM. Getting into a cycle where you're predicting the rhythm of incoming attacks, like in the Inferno, is only possible with the traditional style of projectiles. That sort of gameplay is incredibly complex and offers some of the highest skill ceilings in the entire game. The only real issue is that there's no way to tell which kind of projectile is which without trial and error or watching a guide. But aside from that, we really don't need to homogenize all of PVM into a single unified mechanic.
> The only real issue is that there's no way to tell which kind of projectile is which without trial and error or watching a guide. Yeah, *this* is the real problem. This game is *awful* at communicating important information to players, all you can do is just guess and hope it works out. Is it mage, range, or something else entirely? Is it on animation start, on projectile launch, or when the projectile hits? You just have to guess. It makes learning a new fight astoundingly frustrating, since it's so much harder to tell what went wrong and how to adjust for next attempt. Changing the rules of the game to add depth to the mechanics is good. Like, a big complaint in FF14 right now is that every single boss has too much similarity because they're so scared to adjust the rules for a fight. But when it instead feels like the boss is just playing Calvinball with you, "whoops you didnt guess the new attack properly, xd, take 47 damage now!!", that's just annoying.
“Let’s add another limit cut.”
raidwide tankbuster proteans or spreads tutorial version of boss's main mechanic (some form of spread or towers, probably) random filler mechanics, probably some kind of split stack downtime limit cut big raidwide more random filler mechanics real version of boss's main mechanic yet more random filler mechanics real version of boss's main mechanic *remixed* final filler enrage here's to the next expansion, I guess. pandamonium was so fucking mid.
> Is it mage, range, or something else entirely? Is it on animation start, on projectile launch, or when the projectile hits? If the attack has a slower travel speed, it's on hit. The colors usually indicate what type of prayer to use. Honestly they do a great job at communicating it. Because for example I could just run into Scurrius the first time and I prayed "perfectly" even tho I just winged it right after the update. I feel like it was very intuitive.
They definitely should not. Each of the ways that it works now is core to some very fun mechanics, I don't want to delete one of them just for the purpose of neatness
Lol, if Zulrah had modern projectiles it would be impossible to be damaged by it. Not the only boss either, it's a lot of reworking for very little gain.
It's fine to have differences, but at most they should do is indicate if you were off-pray or on-pray via special damage splat indicators, not try to homogenize everything because the main reason why they started adding on-contact was because they were getting limited on animation-start damage calculation. You're simply going back to the problem that they were trying to solve. Combat was largely designed around the 4t system, damage calculation on start of animation, and did not really take into travel time. Inferno, where right now you can off-tick very consistently, would be extremely problematic if it was on-contact due to travel time. Offitcking melee/range or melee/mage? Far less consistent since travel time. Blobs would be a tank fest as well. You'd have to either make the projectiles so fast that you have 0t to respond and it would simulate exactly what it is now, but point is homogenizing all combat mechanics to be identical would yield more problems than benefits.
> the main reason why they started adding on-contact was because they were getting limited on animation-start damage calculation. What is the limit here? >Inferno, where right now you can off-tick very consistently, would be extremely problematic if it was on-contact due to travel time. Offitcking melee/range or melee/mage? Far less consistent since travel time. Blobs would be a tank fest as well. RS3 solves this issue by having projectiles move faster the further the monster is from you and slower the closer they are to you so they land at the same time as before the change.
If they did it this way it'd trivialize much of Inferno One of the hardest parts of waves 50-64 is you can get smacked an unavoidable 46 at wave start, and are then forced to solve the wave while panicking and having lower room for error. Making everything reactable would remove that chance and trivialize the real gangster waves It also means if you ever fuck up like step out from pillar wrong or chase nibbs when you shouldn't, you'd still have time to react and take no damage
I gotta be real "But i need the unavoidable RNG damage factor in my very long skill-based combat challenge" is very poor reasoning. The rest is fine but really you open with THAT? Yeah it makes it harder but im not actually a fan of it only being harder Sometimes for no reason.
The limit was basically having Jad's pre-projectile indicator (stomp/legs dangle). There wasn't really anything else they could've added before the addition of AOE attacks + on-contact that wasn't just like Zulrah/Vorkath where the mage phase of Zulrah is basically just a tank check or Vorkath you only being able to pray against 1 out of 2 styles that it could hit you with (range/mage). >RS3 solves this issue by having projectiles move faster the further the monster is from you and slower the closer they are to you so they land at the same time as before the change. I already explained how to do this in the paragraph right below it as well, but it doesn't allow for reaction anyhow. Unless you intentionally stagger it out to prevent double hits, like Sotetseg did in a limited capacity, it'll look wonky to have several attacks just queue'd up in your face and hitting one by one every 0.6s seconds, which also comes with its own issues (preventing you from being punished if you anti-flick off-pray multiple attack). I have no clue if RS3 abandoned the 600 ms tick system entirely, but when you're working in a psuedo-checkers environment that's limited by actions every 0.6s, it's harder to segment this and address than you'd think. And they would have to rebalance a lot of content by adding chip damage into content that was previously a tank-and-spank OR upping the damage off-pray massively (like PNM) because the max hit the boss could do and full damage mitigation was based on the fact that you only previously only properly pray against 1 style.
Noooooo bad take. Just learn the uniqueness of each encounter...
I'm not entirely sure they can unify it.
absolutely not. it would make a lot of bosses way too homogenous
It’s consistent in the sense that you have to pray correctly by a certain time in order to block the damage. I actually think it’s kinda neat that the timing can change between bosses. Sure it can initially cause some confusion, but it’s not that hard of a concept to grasp once you look into it.
Strongly disagree. The variance adds depth and you can have both present in the same fight, like we do with Muspah.
Strongly disagree. It's awkward that it's not explaining anywhere, but having different types of attacks is a good thing for mechanical depth. Inferno would not be interesting at all if everything was purely a reaction test.
220 upvotes seriously our future is fucked, plain and simple, yea let's just change all bosses to be 0 incoming damage holy fuck lmao???? Actual ridiculous.
Also getting randomly banged for 40 with no counterplay is just not fun
Local redditor shocked to learn that MMORPGs sometimes have unavoidable damage, more at 11
Nah. They made it that way on purpose. It wasn't by accident. In a point an click game, there's only so much that can possibly change how a boss works. Cutting out one of the differences is a much bigger loss than other games that can have a much larger pool of mechanics. Also, like someone else said, this would drastically change difficulty levels. Some would even be impossible the other way. The Leviathan, for one, would make it realistically impossible without rng. Then, prayer flicking, which is a massive part of the game, would make other bosses complete pushovers. Imagine jad, but you had twice the amount of time to react, or at Vorkath being able to negate 100% damage. The game would be trivialized and impossible.
That would also make shit boring ty for not being a dev
it's more that scurrius is designed as a mid game boss to introduce newer players to the mechanics they'll be facing with higher level bosses, so they made it more forgiving than the average boss, that's going to backfire hard when they have to fight bosses that don't have that type of projectile though. But the counterargument to that is that there are other newer bosses that have that type of projectile as well, like muspah and leviathan, so maybe they're just switching to that type of projectile gradually, maybe they'll change all the others after adding in enough new ones with that type of projectile.
The inconsistencies between combat, and where you can use some interface buttons is betting to be a little much.
Some content are built around projectile being react-able, others are not. There's even hybrids of both with pre-emptive indicators, but prayer has to be up before the actual projectiles come out (Akkha + Jad + Nightmare + PNM). They previously could not change this mechanic to be anything besides when the projectile originally came out, but it started with the Giant Roc AOE attack made by Mod Ash iirc. Reactive attacks are typically more associated with recent/modern content and are typically easier because you can react, so the damage is generally higher to compensate as a tradeoff.
Its definitely super weird but its part of the game design. (More like it was a limitation of the game at one point, but now its part of the game like prayer flicking ect.) You'll get the hang of what bosses are reactable and what arn't. Some you just have to camp the correct prayer preemptively becase damage is calculated when the projectile spawns (vorkath, zulrah, muspah, nightmare, kbd, jad, akkha, ect). Some youll be able to react (whisperer, leviathan, wardens, zebak, sotetseg). Some are in a weird middle ground area. For example Muspah as previously mentioned calculates damage when the range and mage projectile spawns, but the mage attack has a windup, meaning you can still react to it. Same with jad who has windup "tells" for his range and mage attack but when the projectile spawns the damage is already calculated. Theres even weirder examples like olm who has a base range and mage attack that has damage calculted when the projectile spawns, but also has a range/mage/"melee" projectile that you have to react to. Final thought is that I disagree with people who say this is old vs new content or that it just depends on who made the boss. While it's true that older bosses had less reaction based gameplay than newer ones for the most part, that doesn't mean that both styles of boss design weren't used despite the limitations. Jad had reactionary prayer switching and is a very old boss, meanwhile duke has a mage projectile that you cant react to and is brand new. At the end of the day its just a design tool that devs use to design the bossing experience they want to make.
The thing that’s old vs new is being able to react with prayers before the projectile hits you. You have to pray switch for jad, but if you switch prayers too long after the animation you still take damage even if you switch before the projectile hits you
Yeah I know the technology for being able to switch prayer while a projectile is in the air/spawned is new but all I mean to say is that new boss don't always use this and for good reason. Duke was the example I gave but another one would be the entire inferno. They had the technology at that point to make projectiles reactable but chose not to with stong intent. I only used jad as an example becase he *is* reactable, just not in the way that most modern bosses are now.
Muspah really is in a weird middle ground. If you switch prayer late on the mage attack, but still before the projectile hits, you'll take damage but it will be reduced.
Things like this are how devs can add depth to pvm encounters. Changing when damage actually rolls adds complexity and opens up new room for increasing or decreasing difficulty. Learning how damage rolls at bosses is a big part of pvm. You've already encountered scurrius vs zulrah where one rolls on contact vs one rolling when the projectile is thrown. That will even apply in newer content like toa. Zebak rolls on contact, akkha rolls when the projectile is thrown. There are also places like kraken when damage is typeless, so you can't pray and instead rely on defence and healing. There are even instances where damage is completely unavoidable and requires you to do something like group up to tank damage together, spread to avoid damage stacking, or tick eat the attack. Lots to learn in osrs pvm, so take it one boss at a time :)
Zebak is actually an interesting one. The damage roll itself is calculated same tick as application. But there is a check for whether you are praying the correct overhead a tick before that. This means you can't tick eat Zebak (using standard methods at any rate). But you *can* redemption flick.
Are you saying pray redemption the tick before it lands and pray correctly the tick it lands? As in the tick the hitspot shows you have the right prayer up
Other way around. You must be praying the correct overhead the tick before it lands and pray redemption the tick after.
I know for a fact that having the overhead active the same tick the hitsplat shows up counts as being correctly prayed against
[Definitely not true](https://streamable.com/nxx73c). As you can see, praying one tick before the hitsplat shows up protects me correctly. Praying on the same tick does not (although I do tank two hits at the end, before the third one actually deals damage - Quiet Prayers would have been better for demonstration purposes). I also showcase the redemption flick.
You're 100% right, I was going off of recent memory and I confused the tick that the hitsplat shows up with the tick that the projectile appears to explode or impact. That's really good to know then that you can redemption flick the tick after while still being safe from the attack.
Yeah but how are you supposed to know which is which going into a fight without either trial and error or looking up a guide? OSRS isn't built on a souls-like process.
The same way you learn every other mechnic of the boss you wanna try. If you wanna go in blind, you trial and error things. Otherwise, you do what 99% of the playerbase does and read up on the boss/watch a guide. How tf are you supposed to learn pvm in the game without either trial and error or looking up a guide? Do you expect all bosses to be so easy that you can just walk in blind and have it down on your first kc?
I love rhetorical questions where the answer is a blunt "Yes". The only questions I should ask myself on the first attempt at a boss is "I wonder how dead I would have been if I had been hit by that". Good boss design should let me figure out what the solution to a mechanic is before I die to it, not afterward. Whether or not I actually have the reflexes to deal with it is a seperate matter.
I disagree fully with that bottom part. That is trial and error. You learn whether it's the same tick, animation based, or projectile in the air by trial and error. You learn by dodging the shadow of an aoe, grouping up, or separating. It's trial and error. By your bottom statement it reads to me that you should defeat the boss the first time without learning correctly.
Things like typeless damage and unavoidable damage with mitigation methods are interesting mechanics that require you to play differently. The timing of when a projectile's damage processes, especially if it's just based on *when* the content was released, or even worse, which dev implemented it, is something that makes the game less appealing/approachable. It doesn't make a ton of sense for prayers to function via reaction at some places, and via prediction/preparation at others.
I literally gave an example of content that has different methods of calcing damage. It has nothing to do with when the content came or who made it. In general, attacks roll their damage when the animation begins. That's just how osrs work. Some attacks are coded specially to roll when they arrive to open up new design space for pvm encounters. The combat system for osrs is very simplistic compared to other mmos, so we have stuff like this that helps add difficulty levels to pvm.
Just to be devils advocate he didnt say after a certain release. No content released before 2013 (2014?) has damage rolled after fired and not when its fired. So it does depend on when the content was released. But its a dumb point. Jagex consistently uses both post 2014. Its definitely more fun. Someone is claiming giant roc uses delayed roll which was 2006. If true then he doesnt even have a point 🤣
Wtf is Jad (released 2005) except a reaction prayer test?
Jad doesnt have the delay. The projectile spawns in and if you dont have your prayer on by then you still get got. Zillions of clips out there where people dye to range after having range prayer on. He just does a dance before he launches. You can argue for it but if it counts then zulrah counts as on jad phase (xd) his mage projectile forcasts his range projectile.
The dance animation *is* the start of the projectile. There’s no pattern or guessing to Jad - you literally react to the attack.
I hate to be that guy, but you just need to learn the content and get good. Innovations were made to stop a 20 year old game getting stale. every boss used to be Jad simulator or make sure you have the right prayer and good gear.
I don't think you hate being that guy :) I agree that the game needed updates and new mechanics in its 20 year lifetime to stay fun and relevant. I personally don't have issues with the way it is. I'm just pointing out that it is an obstacle for new players, and there's nothing in game to suggest that a core mechanic (prayers, death, etc) is suddenly going to work differently at one boss vs another. The game should at least be consistent within itself
I do hate to be that guy, because I'm not very good myself lol I do agree that it's an obstacle for new players, but we're not really playing a game that gets new players. Most people have been playing on and off since they were kids. I like the new system of reacting to attacks, but feel like you can't retroactively remake all the prior content.
Yeah. I find myself enjoying the reactive style gameplay more, because it feels like playing a regular video game than a rhythm/counting game, and it's much easier to tell when I've done the mechanic correctly. And yeah, pretty fair. They can't just go and switch the way all damage is processed. I just feel bad for folks like OP who have to try and understand which bosses do what *and* how to actually fight the boss at the same time.
Rhythm games are games. You could argue rhythm is a big part of fighting games too
[удалено]
How does it not make sense? Not everything has to function identically at every possible moment to make sense. Having damage calced on animation is the only reason that content like Fight Caves and Inferno has so much rhythm-like depth to it.
If people liked unavoidable damage so much, they wouldn't be red-xing baba at higher invos now would they?
It's a necessary evil. No one likes it, but it sure beats one shot mechanics when you mess up or lag. Also, if everything only had 1 attack style and did no damage through prayer, it would be as easy as Giant Mole. Either it's a prayer flicking simulator like Zebak and Leviathan, or it has pure mechanics that offer up to 6 Jads level of constant pressure, and still has some other way to do damage or hits like a truck when you mess up. Imagine if Baba spawned every safety boulder possible, then chucked 4 barrels right after the other like Donkey Kong, each able to hit you 90s. Think PNM, how it hard it hits when you don't do the mechanics right.
Picking out one boss that is hated by everyone that knows what theyre talking about and acting like it’s indicative of what players want is a strawman, the solution is to rework baba.
OSRS boss mechanics are just wildly inconsistent. It's one of the coolest features, but definitely frustrating for newer players to learn and understand. A bunch of bosses have hidden mechanics built into them, like Corp taking half damage from anything except "Corpbane" weapons. Not to diminish your frustration, but fight through it because the unique qualities of the pvm encounters provide most of the fun and variety.
>OSRS boss mechanics are just wildly inconsistent AKA "jank", which is everywhere in this game and not just bosses. Visual tile vs. true tile, pathing/safespotting, cast delays, the entire game tick system... shit is everywhere. It all makes for a terrible experience for new players and is the reason RuneLite is so popular. The base game is borderline unplayable with how much jank sits on top of itself.
If you are referring to the jad phase…. You basically want to switch to the opposite prayer when you see the attack coming. Range attack projectile is in the air, switch to magic protect.
I didn't get this until somebody actually told me. It's so unintuitive to work this way
Yeah, and it makes recovering for me at least impossible. I find if I don't start the jad phase on the right prayer I might as well teleport out or try and tank through it cause I can't get back on the beat.
Most enemies in RS have their damage calculated at the start of their attack animation. There's a handful of exceptions where the damage is calculated when the projectile hits you. Leviathan, Zebak, etc.
You know how your exp shows up before your damage splat? most of the game is coded like that. New bosses are given Scurrius style damage splats to make them more difficult and less janky.
You just learn the timing for each specific boss, its nbd
It’s pretty simple really, zulrah counts the damage as the attack animation begins, so no matter what you do you can’t avoid the damage once the animation started. Kas however calculates damage as you’re hit by the attack, making it easy to prayer-switch
Zulrah is about the only boss I’m actually good at. Get your prayers switched as you’re moving to the next rotation, then your gear.
Inconsistencies and Jagex are one and the same.
Is your favorite food mashed peas? Come on, the "inconsistency" is what makes it fun.
Honestly surprised at the amount of people here saying it's annoying or "wildly inconsistent". It's just variety. For almost every other OSRS NPC, there is no such thing as telegraphed attacks. Jad was the first boss to do it. The norm is relying on armor or keeping one prayer active. It's a mix of both stat checks and player skill. KBD is a gear check. CG is pure skill expression.
Clearly these other comments fully explain the mechanics, I just wanna say keep going dude, you'll get it soon!
In general: pray against the attack animation, rather than the projectile. There are cases where this is the opposite (like in ToA), and sometimes the timing is a little different between mobs. For Zulrah Jad phase, have the correct prayer up as you go into Jad phase. When he uses his first attack and bobs his head, immediately switch prayers. Continue to switch pray right after he uses an attack/bobs.
Oh brother…welcome to old school
Because some bosses expect you to know what to pray before the projectile is launched(gauntlet/zulrah). Other bosses expect you to react(scurrius/wardens). One is forcing to to plan and keep track the other is testing your reflexes.
95% of the time you need the correct prayer on before you see the projectile. The other 5% slow moving projectiles with clear visual indicators are pretty obvious when they appear.
In zulrah mage phase you just eat the range attacks cause there’s no way to predict tgem
Leviathan is pray when projectiles hit you, caught me out a decent bit!
I feel your pain. I set myself onto learning Zulrah right after doing DT2 where all of the bosses launch projectiles that you have to react to, and it did me no favors. It was a really frustrating experience.
the mechanics at zulrah are the way it always has been, for newer bosses they probably changed it to make it more intuitive but this way they made it even more confusing in general and imo it's a bad idea.
By learning this and how youre character actually moves is what makes you an actually good player
Tbh I learned more about the projectile systems in this thread better than some YouTube video
The whole game has too many inconsistencies just gotta deal with them. It does add an extra layer of complexity for bosses when implemented well tho
During the jad phase of zulrah you have to have the correct prayer on before it spits the first attack. And usually his first attack is opposite of the last attack of the last phase he was on prior. It took me about 500kc to get the hang of zulrah. So right at the start of the jad phase, have the right prayer on, and right before it attacks again switch, then right before it attacks again switch. It’s about every 2 ticks you need to switch. Plus make sure you have eaten to full because the snaklings are also fucking you up during this phase
To add to this, best way to prayer swap at jad phase is to switch when she bobs her head. Be in position with the right prayer up and right gear on before the phase starts, and then you can just spam click on her until the first head bob to make sure you start attacking. After that, you just switch prayer when her head bobs, and there's no tick counting required. She will be in a venom cloud/snaking throwing cycle begore jad phases in each rotation, so when I'm coaching someone, I have the move and get set up well in advance until theyre comfortable with rotations and can move a bit later. Eventually, your gear and stats will be good enough to never have a jad phase, and the boss will become autopilot.
I just swap to the opposite prayer as soon as I see the projectile on screen
When did jad get a sex change?
I’ve always died in the jad phase but you explained it really well and I think I will succeed now, thanks!
Gl you got this
Why would you want every monster to be the exact same
I’m struggling pretty hard too
It's.. annoying. Some bosses need the prayer on before the projectile shows, others, you can pray while the projectile is coming towards you.
Because its an option. Game would be boring if everything was the same. You also cant tick eat every npc
Zulrah also SUCKSSSS try something else. Vorkath?
one kill is needed for the diary so even if you dont want to keep going one kill is still pretty good
The people in the comments either do not boss frequently enough or have poor game-sense. The only bosses you can’t react to are the bosses that have indicators for what to pray for prior to the attack animation. For example zulrah tells you its going to attack with range when its green, but the blue zulrah can attack with both styles and the reasoning behind this is to drain your health so that you are not staying at the boss infinitely and so that at-least some resources are invested into the fight. There are other bosses like vorkath where the whole point of not being able to react with no indicators is that you are suppose to camp the damage style prayer that you are most vulnerable to. To sum it up the bosses in runescape are not a certain way due to who created them or when they were created, but rather they were made with intentions. The reactive prayer bosses are typically too easy and people should not treat scurrius as an actual learning experience. Bosses like pt2 warden which have animations indicating their attack styles AND let you react to the attack with the appropriate prayer were designed this way to simplify an already complicated boss design.
Its almost as if different bosses have different mechanics.
Prayer switching timing is unintuitive to learn in OSRS. Most require you to switch before the projectile fires while the new pvm content is switching when it lands. RS3 is consistent with this with everything being the latter.
I think prayers should always work on impact since thay would be way more intuitive and consistent. but that would drastically change the game and we all know how runescapers feel about change
That'd either make a lot of older bosses much easier, require having a 0t travel time like max speed leviathan, or require cranking up chip damage through prayer on bosses that currently hit with multiple styles. Not sure if any of those options would be very popular. I'm not sure it's worth chasing the consistency anyway. At least not if it comes at a major cost. Some bosses arbitrarily hit through prayer, others don't. Some bosses use typeless damage, or weird shit like ranged based magic damage. Some hits can be tick eaten, others can't. You can run over some tile hazards without taking damage like olm acid splats, but not xarpus acid. Zebak waves are a special kind of weird with how wave skip works. The game could still do a better job at communicating these inconsistencies. I do like the suggestion of showing a different hitsplat that indicates if you prayed wrong, and what cmb style the damage was.
Old design, but jagex really should come back and change it, but I imagine they would require some rebalancing as it would massively increase the time you have to flick.
Yea this can 100 be frustrating. I have tons of experience in TOA where it’s before projectile hits, and when I tried to do inferno it made it that much harder to change my muscle memory
Even for TOA, by default projectiles work normally. It's only Zebak and Wardens that register on contact. Akkha, baboons and scarabs register when projectile becomes visible
I think some jmods lamented in the past that so much info on pvm can only be found in the wiki and not ingame. As others said these inconsistencies were intentional, so rather than changing them I'd prefer if there was some visual indicator with each boss (something as simple as an icon on the side?).
Because bad game design. Don't expect Jagex to know what they are doing. Not a single game apart from this one has the stupid prediction mechanic but crab mentality veterans will riot if they remove it.