Bandos gear will be completed with the addition of a new shield, gloves and a brand new helm. Armady gear will get similar treatment! Rangers will find delight in the new cockroach armour; ranger “tank” bucklers; and awesome off-hand crossbows. Mages will find new safety decked out in spider silk robes and bat wing robes, while wielding new off-hand wands and orbs to increase their damage (or defensive) potential. The option to hybridise your combat technique by using multiple styles at once, by dual wielding, is probably my favorite. Anyone for dual crossbows, or an epic sword, crossbow and auto-cast spell triple-combo? We’ve also made some changes to existing gear, modifying some of the wield requirements: rune gear, for example, will now only be available at level 50.

We’ve done this to spread out some of the gear at the lower levels, and to make progression through those levels a more balanced experience. Other gear has also been modified to work as an off-hand weapon, like the enchanted Excalibur reward. Fix the Defence and life points. It’s really difficult to create a balanced experience for players if they use items intended for players far higher in level than they are. While we can control this quite nicely with wielding requirements, it’s much more difficult with things like food. After all, there’s nothing stopping a low-level player eating rocktails and drinking brews all day (aside from the cost, of course) but, if they do, it makes it nigh-impossible for us to create balanced, challenging content for them.

You can hardly balance a fight assuming that all players are using high end consumables…unless they are high level. So, we made the difficult choice to link life point healing directly to the Constitution level of the player. So, if you’re eating food intended for a player of a considerably higher level, we will be limiting the amount of healing it can do. For example, players around level 50 in Constitution should really be eating lobsters. If they choose to eat sharks, they still can, but it won’t heal any more than the lobster will.