The Fractured Archive has finally gotten it’s balancing changes and there is some good and bad to it. Many of the rooms have been either buffed or nerfed for overall speed. The big change is the overall nerf to purple chance in general, as well as 10% increase in health for duo scale. I personally think that increasing health for different scales is very unnecessary and just slows the raid down. I’m also nervous that purples might not have been nerfed enough, as prices on items such as the rondache and obligator have come down significantly over time.
Blog:
Join this channel to get access to perks:
Check out the stream!
Want more guides? Click here:
Keep up to date!
Join my discord!
Wanna chat in game? Clan chat: Gnomonkey
source
considering the regular drop table is literally negative gp an hour and the uniques are what’s holding it up , hard to change drop rate of purples.
Abuse early and often, otherwise you are screwed.
TOA
"lets just pull up the ladder after i made 20bil running the raid myself"
i wish magic would be feasable in this raid. i played for roughly 300 of days ingame playtime on several accounts which is 6000-7000 hours. outch. never thought about that. anyways. i never really used mage for combat. perhaps a thrall here or death charge a few times during bossing. but generally speaking i went almost the entire game without mage. why? cause in the early game it feels just quite expensive compared to the alternatives (avas accumulator makes range just waaaay superior to mage mostly) and other than that really i use mage entirely for utility spells like high alch or plankmake or such. i also played ironman and there the same issue. its just much more expensive than the alternative and i never saw the point. also the defense is much worse with the gear. so really if youre not using barrage to speed up slayer then i really dont much advantage at all with mage. perhaps once you can afford the actual strongest mage weapon in the game I will start using mage but till then it seems like there isnt really much where mage is CLEARLY the preferred option. and to then top it off they make mage almost entire non-feasible though the raid 4 even drops a mage weapon is nuts to me.
idk if others view it the same way. never spoke about this with others. perhaps you see something i dont see. but thats my point of view at this point.
i'd love if they could put mage into more bossing activities since right now range seems to be the blind go-to for any mid-to (early)late-game content. i havent yet been at a point where you have scythe and torva and those things. i usually enjoyed making new accs and quit at some point due to life responsibilities and such and then heard the lumbrige music one day in a random youtube video only to want to start a new acc.
They scaled the raid to 2 players so duo should be the goal for meta and something to work towards if ur improving. In their effort of making larger scales more desirable they made the raid objectively worse.
The harsh truth is that Jagex knows that the raid is too rewarding. They wanted to nerf it, but if they say the quiet part out loud it will cause pandemonium in the community. Imagine how mad people would be if you found out they severely nerfed purple rates and all the fomo that would cause for not having "abused early and often" enough. These changes probably will put only slightly more purples into the game. The number of players stuck in 5+ scale because they aren't good enough for lower scales is a small minority of players. They will see more purples now, but not so much more that the prices will crash because of them.
At first I wasn’t really a fan of these changes but tbh they were needed, pre changes it felt like there was absolutely no reason to do anything other than duos. Now it feels like there’s actually a viable and more enjoyable choice with duos still being meta if you really want it. Increasing the HP of duos might be annoying but at the end of the day it is supposed to be a team raid.. I was never in favor of duo even being a scale for a raid. Duo bosses are really awesome but a raid? Teams should be incentivized imo.
You can’t be concerned about the price of the purples on the GE when you also advocated for limiting the rare table to only 5 uniques.
That’s basic economics. The unique drop table is entirely too small. Hence, purples had a high spike and are now having a sharp decline.
i dont think that tome and rondache are cheap because people think they are bad. i think they are cheap because they are the most common purples. for every 1 obligator that comes into the game, there are 5 rondaches and 4 tomes that come alongside it. theres always a huge divide between the mega rare price and every other purple. and thats the case for every raid
making the chance to hit the purple drop table wont really fix it because the issue is the purple drop table itself. they really need to make a raid that just doesnt have common purples. imagine the cox chest if it didnt have prayer scrolls. the most common drop would be a 1/15 and there would be alot of variety. that would help things keep their value high over time. thats the only thing that has kept the kodai wand expensive even when its been outclassed for a long time now
There should have been 1-2 more purples in hindsight, too few purples in my opinion is contributing to the crash.
I have not tested Xarth changes yet, but curious how the fire spread works. I hope it isn’t just random but either 1.) works like Xarp where he targets your tile or 2.) starts on a single tile and “chases you”, meaning over time if you stand still his fire attack will eventually consume your tile.
AFK check and soft dps check is fine. Random targeting will feel bad.
This guy reminds me of that one food reviewer. Anyone know who I'm talking about? He always says ladies and gentlemen it's time for the food review.
Are the 10 bosses where the rondache beats the avernic defender in the room with us right now?
Waters feel really awkward at Xarth for groups. The travel time makes it tricky to freeze things on Xarth vs ice barrage that freezes next tick. Bet this is great for solo, but was hoping it would be fun to experiment with for different group routings to maybe run something like EMX to change things up.
10/10 update no notes. All negative opinions belong in the shredder
Redditors told me it was fine that the raid didn't scale to solos, I just had to find 1 player to duo with. Then when duos were too good they told me I had to find 2 players. Can't wait until I have to do a full 8 man to farm purples or I can go fuck myself.
I’ve been waiting for my opinion on the loot changes for a few days now. Thanks for the help
What’s super frustrating is how they develop the first ever dou scaled raid and yet completely cater to 3+ teams with these nerfs. It felt like a difficult raid and fun pacing previously but now Bork feels horrible in dou and almost always 3/4 down if not in max gear with double tanking resulting in constant brew sips. Like why are we catering to the 3+ on a DOU raid. Such nonsense
Getting purples = fun. You cant nerf the rates and have normal people getting 1 drop per week
They drop rate is always increased when it first comes out duh.
I am 150 dry – this is not a fast raid
How much accuracy you talking with to be better than bowfa (asc crossbows)
Keep in mind: right now this raid is done by ALOT of people. In a few months that won't be the same, and thus prices will go up
at risk of forming my own opinion, I would point out regarding prices that everything has hard crashed, so even if the prices of these purples are pretty low, they are less low than they look relative to everything else in the game. Still think they could be rarer but prices are in a really bad spot across the board right now
"fun and money maker dont have to be mutually exclusive" Maybe not exclusive but they are definitely inversely proportional. Imagine the triangle Money, Fun, difficulty where difficulty gets less and less important over time. You cant have everything. And I am definitely investing in the tome. For someone like me without BiS gear this is such a big upgrade.
If we were curious 12h after this was posted Rondache was up over 3m.
If they wanted to be concerned about prices they shouldnt have released a raid with 5 items… It’s not fun to not get unique drops.
the hp update was insanely bad. I agree with the purple update tho
Randache and tome are trash. We are in a 2h weapon era. No one is using a whip and randache bro lol. Same with tome. No where do you mage spec.
the problem with prices of drops is that everyone wanted only a few drops so thats what we have a few drops
a better way to check the value of the new gear compared to the old gear is take a snapshot of the price of maxed everything around 1 year ago and take the price of maxed everything in a few months and compare. if the prices are within 500m for all bis everything then the new gear has fit into the game just fine if its over 1b+ change in the price of maxed bis everything then its more of a problem.
AM I HEARIN RISK OF RAIN 2 MUSIC? 9:30 POGGERS THAT'S MY HUMAN POWERED OPINION PROVIDER !
I genuinely despise increasing health and defense as a method to balance drops…. also, having too few uniques is part of the reason why the uniques are priced how they are… should have had an armor set
looks at 0 purps cries
30 minutes after this video, rondache doubled in price.
Streamers always pulling hella purps then want nerf for the regular player
hey gnome. thanks for merching these items saying they are so good and the price jumps 50% overnight. well played
part of the problem with rondache is that it's tradable whereas the avernic is untradable once you decide to use it.
I have a different take. Purp rates here are god awful. I know many folks in my clan and friends who are over 100 deathless duos/trios dry. I have one purp in 100 raids. No other raid have I gone that dry ever.
I just wanna point out, even something like axing 1 portal off a phase is a bigger change to a raid than most other games do for their raids post release, and that's a good thing.
I think (and hope) prices will go up as soon as more people start doing other content than TFA. The amount of completions since release is kind of wild.
Duos and solos should only be challenge runs. Loot should not be considered good with them. This is group content. The larger the group the loot scale should go up. This keeps people raiding with friends and teaching others. As well as encouraging splits. Its a RAID not a duo boss
ive seen only 3 purples in ~300 completions
how about fixing that instead?
I love the rondoche people don’t give it enough credit
Thank you Gnome for my opinion in advance
19 wipes to ocellus 0 clears and the devs have already nerfed rates 😂😂😂😂😂😂 feels really good seeing the devs, once again, prove that they care more about the economy than fun
rond-trash..
I was wondering when I'd form an opinion on this
How is the profitability ever changing from the rates? If you reduce the rates the items get more expensive but you get them less often by the same measure, so the profit of the raid stays the same.
If you want the raid to be more profitable the only thing you can do is make it harder or make it less fun: So that less people can/will do it. Or otherwise make the items better.
the rondache was doomed to be the lightbearer. 1/3 of all purples are rondaches, it could be an offhand tbow and would eventually be alch value. One of the funny things about the "we dont want a bad item as a reward" philosophy that led to less purples is that you cant solve that problem without devaluing the true bis items. Also good to see its gonna be impossible to talk my buddy back into runescape with the idea of a duo raid now.