#lower experience thoughts on prayer

175 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

bleak flare
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Hello, I write this because of the blogpost regarding potential combat changes and improvements for lower level players.
I see myself as a fairly inexperienced player, having a few accounts with around level 80 combat stats, those being ironmen. From your blog, I read that your intentions with combat and/or slayer changes were also aimed at the lower level, non-hardcore playerbase, so I thought my feedback might be appreciated.
What I think deserves the most critique (and maybe rework) regarding lower level pvm gameplay is the skill Prayer, or rather overhead prayers.
On one hand, overhead prayers can be extremely fun, as I just found out recently, fighting Sarachnis for the first time. Having to switch inbetween prayers while managing prayer points/potions and food was very enjoyable.
On the other hand, this is overshadowed by the negative points that these prayers bring.
First, they seem largely overpowered. You can try and fail fighting Bryophyta for example in the best f2p armour without the use of overhead prayers, or just fight him in monk robes using overhead prayers. This doesn't make much sense and makes the defensive stats of armour feel meaningless, at least from my experience fighting higher level enemies.
Second, I wouldn't criticise the Prayer skill as much if it was mostly just needed for bossfights. Having to purposefully gear up on prayer potions feels great aswell as debating whether a strength amulet or blessed amulet would be better for a bossfight. But it seems that most if not all medium to high level monsters require the use of overhead prayers to fight consistently, thus reducing much of the variety that one could potentially experience.
These two points also make a player feel like they are required to prayerflick, an extremely tedious mechanic that I find out of place with the rest of the game. Most players probably want to stay away from it. Safespotting is a logical consequence to this, but all of these methods just feel very cheesy.

severe comet
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prayer flicking is never necessary except for a few combat achievements

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and praying correctly is one of the few ways to express skill the game has in the end

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its just something you need to manage correctly

high heart
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Good post, OP.

Prayer is indeed in kind of a strange place. I wrote some about this topic elsewhere, but I think it can be well-summarized as "defensive equipment is not valuable enough for the majority of the game." In choosing between using better defensive equipment, better offensive equipment, or better Prayer equipment, defensive gear loses out nearly every time for the vast majority of the game because it's simply not worth using. Offensive gear increases your dps, gp/hr, xp/hr, and reduces time spent eating food or replenishing supplies (which is an indirect defensive bonus). And Prayer gear completely obviates the need for healing at all.

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I think defensive buffs/equipment definitely deserve a closer look. Maybe as part of Project Rebalance? There's plenty of design space for ways to make defensive items attractive.

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Hell, just look at potion mixes. Imagine if they were on the potion timer instead of the food timer. They could be a game-changer instead of completely dead content.

Modifying equipment en masse to introduce better defensive bonuses would be a pretty huge undertaking, but it would be a worthwhile one. I'd love to see it.

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Prayer itself would be in a much better place if the defensive leg of the decision-making triangle were shored up. There should be situations where you want Prayer and situations where you don't, or where it's preferable to simply tank with better, non-Prayer gear.

knotty tide
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Iirc one of the mid level bosses they spoke of adding soon was one where taking damage would very directly decrease your damage dealt, and the only way to prevent taking damage would be with higher def bonuses, encouraging people to bring barrows armor or justi instead of fighter/proselyte

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But yeah generally speaking, defense is not valuable enough. There's a handful of bosses where it's important, namely in gwd, but there's so much content where it literally doesn't matter at all

severe comet
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Its just rarely more valuable than offensive which is good and fine

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It would make the game significantly worse if tanking was a primary concern everywhere or even at most places

high heart
knotty tide
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Would be neat if there were more situations where one person was tanking a boss, like with bandos trios. It would encourage some more diversity in gear for group content

high heart
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osrs has dodged the "holy trinity" of dps/tank/healer seen in many other MMOs and while I wouldn't like to see it go that way, it would be nice to see some more choices for players
we've got those funny share/heal/buff spells on lunars and butterflies and that's kinda it for a healer role
then there's whatever your current tier of tank gear is, whatever you can afford

severe comet
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basically only tob, and barbarian assault if you want to count that

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but this is really more on content design than on the design of gear or the combat system imo

knotty tide
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it doesn't have the holy trinity but it still has its RPS gear triangle. But typically you just have every player equally bringing all applicable styles, instead of certain players specializing

high heart
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ya

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and everyone brings prayer too, leading back to OP's point - even in low-end content, outshining defense as a defense tool

summer mantle
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Prayers give players gear flexibility and long survivability, which means higher end content can be vastly more complex. You're not really supposed to rush overheads (although it is technically the meta) when you're just learning the game. You are intended to spend a fair deal of time killing low level creatures to get stronger. In this instance, defense is absolutely still valid. It's the primary means of making your enemies hit 0s in the early-mid game. Where things are still a little lacking is on the road from mid-late game, although they are rectifying this with content additions like Scurrius. The ideal and most frequent use of prayers in the mid-late game is avoiding damage from multiple sources, or multiple styles from the same source.

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An argument for the validity of defense alongside prayers: there is a lot of content in this game where the creature you are fighting will be attacking with multiple styles. Demonic gorillas are a very easy example of this. They do not telegraph which style they are going to attack with next, but they do telegraph when they are going to switch. There is a massive difference in your survivability with the appropriate gear considerations in situations like that.

severe comet
summer mantle
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Yes, you can absolutely steamroll the single style, low level encounters once you have overheads, but you're really not intended to linger at those encounters very far beyond that point.

oblique ocean
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Defence is definitely useful to have

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Switching prayers is not the same as prayer flicking

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When people describe prayer flicking its meaning turning the prayer off and on in the same game tick so you don't consume any prayer

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Switching prayers is a core game mechanic

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The issue is we lack early bosses that show this to players early on

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That's why the new rat boss is so good

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In regards to your question, prayer boosting gear is best when you want to afk, ie slayer with prayer, or something of that nature

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Damage boosting gear is better at every other time

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Since the faster you kill a bosses the less damage you take

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In general prayer is a great mechanic and defence definitely does matter as you'll be attacked by off styles often

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Even in sarrachnis, the little spiders can hit you off style

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Also defence gear can be amazing when wanting to conserve Prager potion resources

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In daganoth kings, when new players go for a berserker ring and kill just one of the 3 bosses

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You can't pray vs the little mobs

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So ranged defence becomes incredibly important

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Even in raids, defence can be useful to newer players when messing up switches, or overall reducing chip damage

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Prayer really should be left as is since it's so core to the gameplay

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But for a new player we definitely need more bosses that show this

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The new rat boss was an amazing step in the right direction

stoic wigeon
# bleak flare Hello, I write this because of the blogpost regarding potential combat changes a...

This doesn't make much sense and makes the defensive stats of armour feel meaningless, at least from my experience fighting higher level enemies.

this is fair , a lot of people have mentioned how defence doesn't really matter outside a few specific late game bosses that will damage you through prayer. However in the early game you can get by relying on defence as you will only be taking on things like fire giants, greater demons...etc. none of these things hit often once you make it to barrows tier armour. even early on things like full rune and fighter torso are enough defence to get 10-15 min trips

the new barrows boss is looking to focus on defence so they may have thought of a way to make defence more usefull

These two points also make a player feel like they are required to prayerflick,

almost nothing in this game requires prayer flicking , you just need to manage resources and be willing to spend money on potions

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out of interest , what content makes you feel like you need to flick? @bleak flare

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Last thing i will say is defence is hard to make important everywhere without making things frustrating late game. if you are going to make someone grind a boss 500+ times , the last thing they want to see is a boss with ridiculous amounts of unavoidable chip damage that forces you to use tank gear , lose dps and kill it even slower

oblique ocean
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It's a really easy to misunderstand term

stoic wigeon
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thats fair , i just want to know what they are killing at combat 80 to feel this way

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dont have a lot of conversations with people that level

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so im clueless as to what a low level casual player actually would do and how they do it

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in my head level 80 isnt doing anything that requires flicking or switching

severe comet
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One thing that they should probably change is that damage that ignores prayer usually ignores defense as well

bleak flare
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No, I did mean actual prayer flicking, not switching inbetween overheads. For your question as to what I used this method against, mostly during slayer, while farming Infernal mages and Bloodvelds aswell as other more difficult slayer assignments that I didn't want to safespot. I also get how prayerflicking is seen as a feature with a high skill ceiling, but thats a little besides the point. To me it seems that both prayerflicking and safespotting result from the fact that people obvioulsy felt the need to do so and it is now seen as a fundamental. (A fundamental that I am not strictly going against, rather I am interested in an alternative to this that doesn't need constant tick perfect precision, as this is something that for me doesn't really allign with the rest of the more laid back vibe.)
My initial point was that overhead prayers seem extremely strong compared to what any other source of defence is available at mid level gameplay, thus making it feel meaningless.

You said: "Last thing i will say is defence is hard to make important everywhere without making things frustrating late game. if you are going to make someone grind a boss 500+ times , the last thing they want to see is a boss with ridiculous amounts of unavoidable chip damage that forces you to use tank gear , lose dps and kill it even slower."
Well this exactly my point and what you said also applies to mid level gameplay. That a level 43 prayer is better than late-game tank gear seems a bit weird (of course with exceptions). What I am saying is that all that is really needed is some freedom in choosing to either use prayer or choosing not to while then having a viable alternative, and still have prayerflicking as a very viable option for those who do want to do it. @stoic wigeon

severe comet
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i mean for slayer you do have the alternative

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even in midgame

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wear barrows armor and bring food

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no prayer necessary

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so i dont really see the problem

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i don't want to offend but this just sounds like you don't want to spend money on ppots

oblique ocean
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also, 43 prayer is NOT better than tank gear depending on what you are doing because the upkeep cost is 0

severe comet
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yeah its not even that prayer precludes gear progression because there's a bunch of prayer gear you can equip if you want to upkeep prayer

oblique ocean
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IE bandos (I will call "tank gear")

severe comet
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arguably they should add some more/better prayer gear

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but hey

oblique ocean
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its not even remotly accurate to claim you need to one tick flick for slayer

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I think thats a min/max atittude that discord and some other forums may pass on

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but you really dont need to do that as a new player

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espically if you dont enjoy it

bleak flare
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I never claimed needing to one tick flick for slayer,(which you are right, was largely a minmax attitude of mine). However it did feel like having to use prayer (without flicking) even while using my best gear at the time or get shredded by chipdamage. What I mean is that, at least at my current level, prayer > defensive gear, what I would like to see is prayer = defensive gear, especially when fighting someone stronger than your level

severe comet
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Why should it be though?

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Prayer costs ppots, defensive gear is free

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Especially when prayer being the same as defensive gear against accurate opponents means that prayer becomes worthless against anything else as defensive gear will massive outperform it there

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Which it kind of already does

high heart
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I love it when a low level player shows up to talk about his experience with a mechanic and gets "errrmm ackshually"-'d into oblivion by people coming in to say he's doing it wrong, changing the subject or even just raw making things up ("defensive gear is free")

severe comet
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lmao

oblique ocean
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Realistically you shouldn't be able to equip of level 40 armour and tank level 100 mobs

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A rune set will be incredibly tanky vs things like hill giants

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And a set like justicer is tanky vs high level monsters

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Is it optimal? Probably not, but you definitely can play how you want

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If you enjoy that kind of gameplay, save up for justicer armour and try it out. It's definitely not optimal, but you'll DEFINITELY feel the defensive bonus

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So to respond to your point, I don't think low level defensive gear should be able to tank high level monsters

knotty tide
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I really don't understand the comparison here between barrows gear and protection prayers as it applies to lower level accs. Defence is typically the last combat stat to be leveled up, and you need 70 to use barrows armor, but only 43 prayer for protection. Not to mention 43 prayer is extremely quick being a buyable skill. For low level (below 50), defense absolutely matters, because just going from steel up to adamant armor is huge for something like hill giants. However, there are many slayer mobs like bloodvelds, black demons, and aberrant spectres where you realistically just need to be praying because even with high defence bonuses you'll still get hit a lot. Even if it's just about extending trips a bit, you probably will be fighting those mobs long before you unlock barrows armor

severe comet
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70 is not a high defense level sorry to say. and if a task is too hard you can skip it.

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and you know most people would say that its generally good that you cant just full tank monsters which are supposed to be accurate in rune armor

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like whats the proposed solution here, bloodvelds are in fact supposed to be highly accurate.

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Early slayer does suck but thats an entirely different problem imo

knotty tide
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Ok but people are introduced to mobs where defence is irrelevant pretty early into the game. Fire giants are in a similarly difficult position because the amount of defence you need to have to feel comfortable against them is actually what you'd get from barrows armor and a dfs, but you're realistically gonna be fighting fire giants even when you're still like base 40-50 combat stats

severe comet
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You cant be assigned fire giants until 65 combat, and base 50 stats puts you just under that

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So I dont think thats really the expectation

knotty tide
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Something people haven't really mentioned but I think a big part of the problem here is that the prayer to boost defence has the same consumption as a protection prayer. If it were closer to like 1/3 or 1/4, then lower level players could very reasonable use it against some of the mobs like fire giants or greater demons. But as of right now, like OP said, you just protection pray or safespot

severe comet
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Defense boosting prayers are really not a solution here

high heart
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Oh man don't get me started on the non-protection prayers lmao

severe comet
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The best defense boosting prayer gives 15%

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That means if you are level 50 defense, its as if youre level 57

knotty tide
high heart
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yea, good

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i hope they do

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cus they are so wack

severe comet
knotty tide
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yeah but i'm just saying, if the cost was appropriate to its effect then it would help in this low level situation where you need defense but don't have nearly enough for the sorts of tasks you might be assigned

severe comet
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But anyway I dont think its a problem that you cant defense tank every monster. Slayer masters, especially early slayer masters, assign plenty of monsters that you can tank

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If you're doing early slayer anyway, which is usually a waste of time. And defense issues is far down the list of reasons for that

knotty tide
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and honestly there's a lot of enemies that people pray against that they don't need to because praying is just a universal solution in slayer

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like you can very feasibly get like 80+ kc trips against gargoyles with no prayer

severe comet
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Well yeah, prayer potions are much more compact than food and more afk

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Accordingly it costs more

knotty tide
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nah but people using prayer even against stuff that doesn't need it because they literally don't know that they don't need it

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because they'll just pray

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they never even find out anything about how hard a mob hits because its not a part of the game they ever interact with

severe comet
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Nah thats just wrong plenty of bosses force you to interact with it

high heart
knotty tide
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i'm not talking about bosses bro

severe comet
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Bosses are part of the game

high heart
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prayer is just generally in a really weird place, i'd go so far as to call it an "advanced" skill - it's not readily apparent how to train it unless you go talk to the prayer trainer guy and its effects are pretty unnoticeable until level 37 at least, but once you get 37-43 it becomes insanely powerful
compare to other combat skills that are very straightforward to level and have very noticeable levelup advantages

severe comet
knotty tide
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I think if you were playing without actively looking up how to train skills, you'd assume prayer is the slowest in the game after burying goblin bones one time

high heart
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ya lmao

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assuming you even bothered to bury the bones in the first place

severe comet
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but yeah prayer isnt "insanely powerful" its just a core part of the game

high heart
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when i was a kid i had 1 pray for eons but i kept spamming thick skin against stuff in the vain hope that it would work

severe comet
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magic is also "insanely powerful" compared to all other combat styles if you only consider content from 2005 when everything had level 1 magic

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tier 1 prayers should probably just be replaced by a fixed level boost though

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because they make 0 sense as it stands now

high heart
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oh crab has decided to stop trolling for a change

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nice

severe comet
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replace tier 1 prayers with a fixed +5, remove tier 2 prayers.

knotty tide
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defence is important from like level 1-30 maybe but after that it's used almost entirely for equipping offensive gear upgrades, cuz you'll just pray instead

high heart
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players who aren't hooked up on an IV drip to the metagame will probably seek out actual defense upgrades (and get soft punished for it)
which is exactly the problem, they end up playing a much slower and worse-feeling game because the intuitive choice is weak

severe comet
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its really just not true to say its not important

knotty tide
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reduces the damage you take in realistically very few situations

severe comet
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like, getting fortified masori or fortified ward is a significant upgrade

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because the base versions of those items have fuckall defense

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if you only do slayer it doesn't matter sure but slayer is such a tiny part of the game lol

knotty tide
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there's literally nothing attacking me in toa that i'm not praying against

severe comet
knotty tide
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I'm including the monkey room in that statement

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and ranged/mage monkeys will hit you hard anyway, even if your defensive stats are high

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like maybe the baboons in ba-ba's boss room, but those share the same problem i just mentioned

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i'll agree that defence matters a bit when you're still learning, but that's largely because you'd be learning on a 150 or below. By the time you bump it up past 250, enemies don't care about your defence anymore

severe comet
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also yknow most people dont always play perfectly so defense gives leeway

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theres a reason justi is standard for learning inferno

high heart
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lower experience thoughts on prayer
inferno

knotty tide
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there's also a reason that justi is by far the cheapest armor from raids

frank swallow
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all monsters in the game have insane accury

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but the damage hitsplat doesnt roll anything in pvm

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but in pvp, hitsplat and accury rolls

high heart
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no, defense is the same in pvp/pvm. the only difference is in magic defense and that players have combat styles while monsters are always considered to be on Controlled (i.e. +1 atk/str/def)

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to be honest, I'm not really sure what it is you're saying. I can't understand some of your messages. But the generic forms of the accuracy and damage calcs are 100% identical between pvp/pvm (the only exceptions are edge cases like damage overflow to prevent tick eating in pvp, boosts from slayer helm/salve, etc).

oblique ocean
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I can agree prayer should be more clear on how to level it

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I don't agree that defence is meaningless as it matters In raids, many bosses, as well as in prayer less afk slayer

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Heck it even matters for things like nmz depending how afk you want it to be

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Some skills are better than others, Ie prayer is better than defence, and construction is better than fletching

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But defence definitely has uses. Reworking protection prayers would be chaning the core gameplay of osrs past early game

cursive path
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gear switching

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like crab said ur not really required to prayerflick at a high lvl for most content

stoic wigeon
# bleak flare No, I did mean actual prayer flicking, not switching inbetween overheads. For yo...

Your not wrong , prayer overtakes defence at an early point and becomes the key mechanic. Defence does still matter on most tasks low level (hill giants , daganoths and other things low level).

what I mean is that for defence to matter more at the mid-higher end you would need to make things that can't be 100% protected by prayer a more common thing and have npc damage be high enough that investing In armour feels worth it. anything form of damage that can be avoided would lead to defence not being important , especially if there are no offensive stats provided by the gear (obby legs > justi legs for example). That's not a system you want when doing 30-100 hour grinds to get to late game.

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The answer to not feeling like you need to prayer flick is just using prayer armour + prayer potions so overheads last for 6+ mins

stoic wigeon
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Not really much that can change unless jagex want to change all armour sets to work like justi / Ely and actually reduce max hits 🤷🏿‍♂️

high heart
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Armor + shield combos reducing damage has merit. Not that I'm biased.

oblique ocean
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I think that's the only way shields will have a use over defenders

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But even then, theyre still not useful

open shoal
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OSRS fits into such a nice category of gaming. It is built off of a 20 year old system that has plenty of issues that are too integrated into the meta of the game to change. I agree that prayer flicking feels like cheesing. If this was discovered in 2005 we'd call it bug abuse and it'd get patched but that ship sailed. There's a real balance the devs need to walk in order to keep the game up to date with the times but also respect the old foundation of the game's code to provide that needed nostalgia.

oblique ocean
cursive path
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lot of ppl that are great at fps or fight games but cant play osrs for their life

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takes times and patience nearly everyone that starts playing osrs is bad. not many skillset from other games u can apply to osrs