RuneScape: A Christmas Warble

As expected the RuneScape Christmas event is here. Like for other holiday events in RS, you get a Christmas-themed quest called A Christmas Warble.

You'll return to the Land of Snow to see that Ebenezer Scourge has ruined the feast for everyone by stealing the presents and food, and by kidnapping Santa. Of course you can't let him get away with that, and with the help of the snow imps (from last year's event) you manage to save Christmas.

The reward for all this is pretty cool this year: the Christmas ghost robes, a candy cane and the new 'dramatic point' emote. Especially the robes look quite nice, but see so for yourself on the screenshots.

RuneScape: Blood Runs Deep Quest

There's a new quest-release on RuneScape: Blood Runs Deep. This quest continues the Fremennik storyline and will take you around most areas of the Fremennik Province. It starts out with a stranger washed up on the shore of Lunar Isle; and it's up to you to figure out who this person is. Eventually the storyline gets more complex and leads you to battle a new type of dagannoths.

The quest is rated 'master' so the requirements are kind of high for most players: 75 attack and strength, 65 slayer and full completion of the Fremennik achievement diary.
Of course you get something in return for helping out; 3 times 150k xp in a combat skill of choice (unfortunately, excluding summoning) and a new axe called 'Balmung'.

Blood Runs Deep seems to be a fun quest to do. The reward is nice as well; the Balmung is quite strong and grants a damage bonus against dagannoths, the new dagannoths might be useful for slayer tasks and the free xp is always nice. So I'd say it's definately worth doing if you meet the requirements. Happy questing!

RuneScape: Slayer update!

http://www.runescape.com/

Another update for RuneScape today; this time it's the slayer skill's turn. The update introduced Kuradal, the daughter of Duradel - the slayer master that lives in Shilo Village. Kuradal decided to follow in her father's footsteps and became a slayer master herself, you can find her in the Ancient Cavern.

To get a slayer assignment from her, you'll need to be at least level 110 combat and 75 slayer. This makes Kuradal the highest-leveled slayer master in the game. Obviously, you'll be asked to kill fairly strong monsters. Some examples are: abyssal demons, dark beasts, the more recent living rock creatures or even the level 702 TzTok-Jad (he falls under the TzHaar task and gives bonus xp).

There's also a new dungeon in the Ancient Cavern (Kuradal stands at the entrance). You'll only be granted access if you were given a slayer task by Kuradal, and you'll only be able to attack the monsters of your current task. Overall this dungeon seems awesome, because a lot of the most popular (and for that, crowded) slayer monsters are there in quite large amounts.

RuneScape: New spells & potion update!

http://www.runescape.com/

Potions and spells in RuneScape were updated today. First of all the update made the ‘extreme potions’ (high-level potions that offer a strong boost to your combat skills) available again in the safe PvP mini-games (Castle Wars, Soul Wars, Clan Wars Arena, Fight Pits and the Duel Arena).
The RuneScapers among our readers will know that these potions were disabled for these mini-games shortly after being released a few weeks ago, due to the fact that they gave people with a high herblore level a considerable advantage over those who didn’t have access to the ‘extreme potions’.

Now you may wonder why Jagex would undo their update to keep the PvP mini-games fair, which brings us to the second part of the update; the way the extreme potions work. Strange enough only the extreme magic potion is mentioned in the update; so the problem of high-level herbalists killing people (even those with max hitpoints) with a single attack is back now.
That said, let’s check out the updated extreme magic potion. Before the update it would temporarily give you a +40% magic attack. Now it will boost your magic by 7 levels (decreasing over time like normal potions), giving you a +3% magic attack bonus for every level. So basically the potion was weakened quite a bit.

It’s not all bad news for mages though, as the reason for the potion update was the introduction of new high-level spells (in the standard spellbook): Wind Surge (level 81), Water Surge (level 85), Earth Surge (level 90) and Fire Surge (level 95). All you need is 1 death rune, 1 blood rune (so yes; these spells are member-only if you were wondering) and some elemental runes.

The strongest new spell, Fire Surge, has a max hit of 28 without any boosts and goes up to 37 if you use an extreme magic potion and a magic-boosting staff. Overall an interesting update; I think this will give standard mages some more punch in P2P PvP-ing, with damage that can compete with the ancient spellbook. As some of the standard spells (teleblock and binds to a lesser extent) are a must for playerkilling in members, I think some ancient mages may switch their spellbook and use the new spells instead.

Please tell us your opinion about this update and in case you've missed our RuneScape article, be sure to read it here.

RuneScape

http://www.runescape.com

One of the biggest strengths RuneScape (RS) has is that basically anyone can play it. You just need the latest version of Java and a decent internet connection and you’re good to go. On top of that a part of the game is free-to-play (F2P) so you can just try it out without having to pay money.

Of course Jagex has to get their money somewhere so there’s a pay-to-play (P2P) version of the game as well; this offers more items, more skills, more quests, more of everything actually.
Another strong point is that there’s plenty to do. Doing quests, training skills, playing mini-games, killing monsters (or eachother), earning gold or just hanging out; you’ll always find something to do.

Skills

A large part of the game will be training the various skills (24 in total). These can roughly be divided in a few categories: gathering resources, processing them and combat (of course there are some exceptions). At first you’ll be gaining levels every few minutes but after a while this becomes hours or, at the higher levels, even days. This makes training rather repetitive, but while talking to other people it’s not too bad.
Most skills don’t have any new things you can do past around level 80 (of 99), however, Jagex has been releasing more high-level content lately.
There will probably be a new skill later this year (Jagex tries to release them on a yearly basis), but there hasn’t been an official announcement regarding to which skill this will become.

Combat

RuneScape doesn’t have any classes, meaning you can use a single character to use all combat styles (melee, ranged and magic) . All you need to do is get the right equipment for a style and train the skills you’ll need for it. You also have more supportive skills that can be used regardless of your combat style; these skills are prayer (to boost your damage and/or defense for a limited time) and summoning (to create a familiar who aids in combat or carries extra food for you).

You’ll most likely be training on fairly weak monsters or using the slayer skill, but there are bigger things out there as well in the form of bosses. There are some bosses that have been around for years, such as the Kalphite Queen, but the most popular (and profitable) farming area in the game as it is today, would be the God Wars Dungeon. In this dungeon there are 4 bosses that drop some of the strongest weapons (Godswords: the name says it all I guess) and armor (Bandos for melee, Armadyl for ranged) in the game. Obviously, I won’t have to tell you that these items are worth quite some gold. There is a new dungeon in development, but again there hasn’t been an official announcement or any hints about new high-level items.

PvP

Personally I’ve never went pking (playerkilling, mostly done in an area called “The Wilderness”) in P2P so I’ll just say that it’s unbalanced (due to overpowered weapons that can kill players in a few hits without them being able to do anything about it) and move on to the F2P aspect.
In F2P you can’t use the higher-level gear P2P has, so you’ll never have to run away or maybe even die only because the other guy can afford better gear. Most of the RS pking is done in clans and over the years a solid clan community was created. As a result of having no classes, most clans will request that you bring more than one combat style (generally melee-ranged for damage or melee-magic to immobilize your target using the bind spell).
Pking isn’t the only PvP in the game, there also are competitive mini-games. My all-time favourite here is Castle-Wars, which offers team-based capture the flag action.

To view some pk videos please visit the (recently created) YouTube channel of The RuneScape Warhunger Federation (TRWF):
http://www.youtube.com/user/TRWFWarhungers

Trading

Trading has gone a long way in RS; from flooding the chat (with all sorts of text colors and effects) on the nearly-always-full servers 1 and 2 to the smooth system there is today with the Grand Exchange (GE). The GE is located in the capital of the F2P-area, so everyone can use it. It pretty much works like an auction house in any other game; you place your offers and continue doing whatever you were doing or log off. The GE also introduced an item database which gives you all the prices of any item you search on it, and in addition you also get a graph showing the price evolution of the last 6 months. This became a valuable tool for merchants, who buy and sell items at the right time to make profit.

Watch the official RuneScape trailer here:



Have you played RS as well or have any comments? Don’t hesitate to share your opinion with us!