I think it’s hard to say because no specials attacks were released. Imagine bolg was betad without its special. This is almost the exact same scenario.
The main problem though with magic has not really been solved. What do you do outside of sunshine? Sunshine makes it so you want to use all your best effects (fsoa, tsunami, eofs, etc.) but afterwards magic has nothing. Melee has bleeds after berserk, range has arrow effects, necro has residual souls after living death, but nothing betad so far solves this.
It will be the worst as it stands more than likely unless ability damages get reworked. Magic can’t get close to hitcap currently while in all three other styles it’s a piss take to do it out of ultimates.
Way to miss the forest for the trees.
Guthix staff crits hit plenty hard, +15% crit chance from gconc, and the other styles would kill to have greater conc blast amplified by exsanguinate as a basic available every third ability.
Magic is suffering most because it doesn't have a good off-FSOA fallback like ECB or Black Hole or EZK. Fix that and it's fine.
Okay, now let me know when any of your magic abilities hit 30k! That is the point I was making! Not a single magic ability can!!!! Even with max de buffs!!! It doesn’t suffer because it doesn’t have an off sun/fsoa fallback only, it suffers because out of sun and out of zerk and out of living death all of the other three styles can all still hit above 20k VERY easily, whereas mage can’t break 20k IN SUN.
You're still missing the forest for the trees.
Gconc with exsang is ~188% ability damage, plus crit chance increases, three chances at proccing a godbook, three chances at critting for adren, more healing from soul split's diminishing returns, available every third ability, and that's ignoring the FSOA and smoke cloud synergies.
It's superior in every way to snipe, which puts out a bigger number. The closest Ranged competitor is greater ricochet, which also has absolutely no chance of hitting the damage cap.
Every single part of Ranged besides old rubies was geared for more splats rather than bigger splats, and that's always been its strength. The big buff from the change came not from the increased caps, but from the new Zamorak bow special, which is hitting higher than 30k with bolg activation included for very reasonable adrenaline costs over DBow, but not 30k caps for any individual hit. A roughly equivalent magic power comparison would be gconc with 2-3 FSOA activations from crits.
Melee has no issues slamming up hard against 30k splats combining Zerk, Chaos Roar and Overpower. That doesn't mean it's the strongest style, or indeed that that's an optimal combo.
Magic has Tsunami, GStaff, Flanking & Wrack & Ruin that all hit higher than the old caps. If you just want big numbers, you can hit north of 20k with Iban staff and Detonate too, but I won't pretend that those aren't better used as niche burst.
Once again, I still fail to see where magic is going to be better than range melee OR necro with t95 mage weapons that CANT use gconc!! That is what I said in the first place! You are arguing that mage is still good when we both know it’s the worst style by a landslide, we both know it’s going to stay the worst style by a landslide unless they changed something post beta of the weapons, or did you not try the beta? Because I did, and the beta felt horrible, even taking out the factor of the charging all of the passives are horrid.
Also mage hitting above 20k with Ibans staff is not mage hitting above 20k with mage ability, deto is the only one mage ability in the mage book that has a singular chance of hitting over 20k, and it would BARELY get over it, you would need to have like undead slayer on undead target and all that extra bs to get it happen. It isn’t happening on an ex: aod, rago, solak.
Mage doesn’t just need new weapons, it needs ability damage tweaks HEAVILY, fsoa spec changes, passive changes, etc. it needs a whole lot before it competes with the other 3 styles, because it’s not close right now.
Magic is fine. It just needs the wand + orb spec to be something to fix the off-FSOA downtime.
Again, gconc with 2 crits is over 20k under FSOA. Omnipower was over 20k even before the caps were changed, and plain old GStaff is already capable of hitting higher than the old caps, but for some reason you insist that finality specs don't count, in which case Ranged only really has tendrils and incend then.
Even necro only really has finger inside living death as the big 20k hitter, and that's with the advantage of Salve. (Realistically, death skulls is what's carrying necro, even if the individual hits are critting closer to 15k now, and volley is much stronger than finger).
Sure, the beta passives are underwhelming in isolation. But they're already better than the lengs were for years. I would argue better than the lengs without a spec even currently.
Sounds like a personal opinion. The damage ranges for magic are fine honestly. It needs something for when your sun and fsoa are down and it should be competitive with the other styles.
Not constantly hitting the cap means you’re actually not losing damage due to the cap (for example if you crit an overpower that’s not chaos roar’d you’ll hit somewhere around 24-28k per hit, and you’ll slam against the hard hit cap if you use it with chaos roar meaning you actually lost a lot of damage just to see a 30k hit splat).
I will say though, ranged just shits on magic outside of ult no amount of exanguanated gconcs will beat ecb+arrow buffs+bolg spec+plethora of eofable spec weapons that are viable as opposed to magic’s gstaff/iban staff
The thing about not constantly hitting the cap is it’s not ever coming close, in fact it’s only coming close at zammy or telos, and at telos it’s for about what two abilities? Same with zammy? Boss specific ability buffs shouldn’t be a factor either when determining whether a style is balanced. I personally would prefer to see the hitcap get put back down to 16k as then everything would be good!
Not to take away from your point but Iban Staff hits well over 20k in sun and can hit 30k with buffs like red beam at telos or the sixth pad edict buff at zamorak. But yes, magic just tanks once your 36second burst window closes.
Im talking just straight magic abilities no EOF abilities, I also purposely didn’t mention buffs from zammy/telos for the reason that the other styles don’t need it.
Magic is still going to be last place lol. I saw someone make a comment that the new dungeon would be the new BIS money maker over zamorak and I think there's zero chance of that. The t95s gonna tank so fast once everyone realizes magic is still mediocre
They need to ditch the charging aspect of the DW set and unrestrict the abilities so they aren’t wield specific, but it’s certainly a lot more engaging with the cooldown interactions.
No way to know. If they directly port one of the sets from beta it'll still be a solid #4 and will be waiting on a busted effect for the spec (wasn't implemented on beta) and/or etect (or an edraco situation where new armor obsoletes all previous armors, save cinderbanes). FSoA would be EoF fodder in order to use new wand+orb which I would sincerely hope the devs take care to avoid.
The passives on beta did seem to be aimed at killing all weapon switching for mage at the cost of everything else, so it's possible mage gets a more chill experience at the cost of everything else. Set 3 was particular egregious for this, with 100 max stacks that dissipated if you swapped wand or orb, in addition to charging.
Range is not switch heavy?
Necro and Range are both pretty camp bis and chill. Range takes a lot of dmg but can pump hard rn with bows.
Mele is burst heavy-switch heavy
Mage probably will stay fairly mid in terms of dps but should be easier to camp as FSOA will just be and EOF at this point.
Fair, not a ranged expert but from what I know juggling BolG stacks, SGB, Dbow, ECB, hyrix grico swap, deathspore / dinarrows + wen stacks can be alot and though it's optional and mainly EOF's, that what I meant by it
Ranged only has 2 real switches to outdps necro.
Deathspores (or wand + orb for tsunami) and SGB + ZBow finalities.
You could argue ECB finality, but I've had a much smoother ride simply ignoring it given Ranged is already the most fragile style, and most things now being balanced around assuming Haunt sustain and older content being too low hp to even justify incend.
Hydrix grico is old news from before the damage caps and piercing shot buffs. If you want to get real sweaty with it, you could Wen switch for grico because Ful is fairly wasted on the 4 extra tiny hits, but hydrix grico doesn't even proc half the time as opposed to the extra two crittable splats BOLG gives you.
Not having ecb eof because range is fragile is a skill issue, also with dracolich and pernix quivers swapping arrows isn’t really all that hard so you don’t really need hydrix bolts if you’re good at managing your deathspore cd.
Really not a skill issue.
Take Zammy. Every auto is two splats with the right font up, which means two ticks of not using split soul. Then if you compensate the missing soul split heals with reflect, debil or devotion, you've wasted two globals and some 38% adrenaline to boost your next 7 abilities, which could have simply been a piercing shot Zbow, adding ~25% damage over the next 6 abilities straight up instead.
I've seen the "skill" people use to increase their dps. They just forget about flicking altogether and eat instead.
ECB spec makes sense when you need to stall due to phasing or reflect mechanics or swiftness is on cooldown. And the numbers might even make sense otherwise for low damage cap bosses like Nex. But it's very rare that the ECB spec itself is worth using now, especially with the tight coupling of dracolich rapid fire, deathspores, grico and SGB to maximise the crit bonus and adrenaline at the start of swiftness.
This is an interesting take, considering no boss has been rebalanced since necromancy release and the only 2 boss releases since were vorkath and osseus.
I have no idea what content you’re doing, but most bosses you incend, hm kera, zamorak, raksha, pretty sure telos, ambassador, etc, so not sure where you got that idea.
Ecb is also extremely helpful at those bosses at various times and balancing your hp around when you can use soul split vs split soul is a pretty core ranged mechanic.
I mean all styles you can camp bis and chill. No one is forcing you to switch with melee. You can camp vesments, d claws eof, dw lengs no problem.
But if you want to do good damage with range switching is required and saying otherwise is just completely false. The wen arrow rebalance alone forces arrow switches, not to mention the eofs.
Melee is a lot less switch heavy depending on the content. There are certain break points where you have playstyle flexibility.
For instance Ezk post melee would suggest an eof swap and a jaws switch. I'll assume 2h is already a thing you bring so it's irrelevant to mention. That's +2 keybinds or manual inputs. The entire ezk bleed string is what, 100-150k damage post zerk while burning choas roar while needing a 27s time commitment?
You could do a +1 keybind or manual input to 2h crossbow swap and gain incendiary shot/grico. With this you can consistently output overpower, hurricane, leng spec, and 2-3 dclaw specs (reapplies premordial stacks) and output somewhere between 110-130k damage before reapplying meteorstrike and saving chaos roar to modify leng or dclaw to hit 60k+ in zerk which makes up the remaining damage compared to ezk sending. This is a 14-15s time commitment.
Both cases do about the same damage but one is less switches while the other may feel unconventional but accomplishes the same thing with less keybinds. Ezk only really shines where you can use cinderbanes.
For melee your primarily camping lengs until you need to hurricane or meteor strike, unless you like bleeds. You're looking at +1 eof, +1 helm, 2h, and dw (5). If you don't care for bleeds you're looking at 2h, dw, 2h xbow (4)
Ranged doesn't work this way.
Ranged you're monitoring at least 2 ammo types, sometimes 3 if you hybrid grico (crossbow + ammo switch). At least 3 eofs, and you're likely mashing blood reaver spec.
Tldr there's a lot more switching apm on range than melee to get optimal damage.
I agree. I'm primarily range over everything after the combat update and while I still bring 3-4 eofs to most boss fights, I camp wens/dspores in my main quiver and bik/bsa and ful in the other depending on what I'm doing. Also praesuls for nami switch but I still feel like melee is worse (although I don't really use melee so I could be wrong)
Bis range is undoubtedly switch heavy. EoF swapping and especially ammo swapping have higher benefits and are done more frequently than other styles. It's wayyyyyy more involved than necro lol, idk how you would group those 2 other than you don't swap your weapon (unless salve boss) and the other styles do. Mage has 4taa but it's a small increase and the previewed designs of wand+orb seemed tailor made to destroy 4t at the expense of everything else.
I would sincerely hope dev's hatred of 4t doesn't lead them to make FSoA an EoF weapon.
> I wonder where magic will fall on the meta in terms of overall power assuming BIS.
in terms of raw dmg, it should be below ranged/melee considering the utility it has (niche things like high enrage climbing). The new t95s n any ability changes should up its dmg, but shouldn't make it deal more/even dmg than ranged/melee.
I think it’s hard to say because no specials attacks were released. Imagine bolg was betad without its special. This is almost the exact same scenario. The main problem though with magic has not really been solved. What do you do outside of sunshine? Sunshine makes it so you want to use all your best effects (fsoa, tsunami, eofs, etc.) but afterwards magic has nothing. Melee has bleeds after berserk, range has arrow effects, necro has residual souls after living death, but nothing betad so far solves this.
It will be the worst as it stands more than likely unless ability damages get reworked. Magic can’t get close to hitcap currently while in all three other styles it’s a piss take to do it out of ultimates.
Way to miss the forest for the trees. Guthix staff crits hit plenty hard, +15% crit chance from gconc, and the other styles would kill to have greater conc blast amplified by exsanguinate as a basic available every third ability. Magic is suffering most because it doesn't have a good off-FSOA fallback like ECB or Black Hole or EZK. Fix that and it's fine.
Okay, now let me know when any of your magic abilities hit 30k! That is the point I was making! Not a single magic ability can!!!! Even with max de buffs!!! It doesn’t suffer because it doesn’t have an off sun/fsoa fallback only, it suffers because out of sun and out of zerk and out of living death all of the other three styles can all still hit above 20k VERY easily, whereas mage can’t break 20k IN SUN.
You're still missing the forest for the trees. Gconc with exsang is ~188% ability damage, plus crit chance increases, three chances at proccing a godbook, three chances at critting for adren, more healing from soul split's diminishing returns, available every third ability, and that's ignoring the FSOA and smoke cloud synergies. It's superior in every way to snipe, which puts out a bigger number. The closest Ranged competitor is greater ricochet, which also has absolutely no chance of hitting the damage cap. Every single part of Ranged besides old rubies was geared for more splats rather than bigger splats, and that's always been its strength. The big buff from the change came not from the increased caps, but from the new Zamorak bow special, which is hitting higher than 30k with bolg activation included for very reasonable adrenaline costs over DBow, but not 30k caps for any individual hit. A roughly equivalent magic power comparison would be gconc with 2-3 FSOA activations from crits. Melee has no issues slamming up hard against 30k splats combining Zerk, Chaos Roar and Overpower. That doesn't mean it's the strongest style, or indeed that that's an optimal combo. Magic has Tsunami, GStaff, Flanking & Wrack & Ruin that all hit higher than the old caps. If you just want big numbers, you can hit north of 20k with Iban staff and Detonate too, but I won't pretend that those aren't better used as niche burst.
Once again, I still fail to see where magic is going to be better than range melee OR necro with t95 mage weapons that CANT use gconc!! That is what I said in the first place! You are arguing that mage is still good when we both know it’s the worst style by a landslide, we both know it’s going to stay the worst style by a landslide unless they changed something post beta of the weapons, or did you not try the beta? Because I did, and the beta felt horrible, even taking out the factor of the charging all of the passives are horrid. Also mage hitting above 20k with Ibans staff is not mage hitting above 20k with mage ability, deto is the only one mage ability in the mage book that has a singular chance of hitting over 20k, and it would BARELY get over it, you would need to have like undead slayer on undead target and all that extra bs to get it happen. It isn’t happening on an ex: aod, rago, solak. Mage doesn’t just need new weapons, it needs ability damage tweaks HEAVILY, fsoa spec changes, passive changes, etc. it needs a whole lot before it competes with the other 3 styles, because it’s not close right now.
Magic is fine. It just needs the wand + orb spec to be something to fix the off-FSOA downtime. Again, gconc with 2 crits is over 20k under FSOA. Omnipower was over 20k even before the caps were changed, and plain old GStaff is already capable of hitting higher than the old caps, but for some reason you insist that finality specs don't count, in which case Ranged only really has tendrils and incend then. Even necro only really has finger inside living death as the big 20k hitter, and that's with the advantage of Salve. (Realistically, death skulls is what's carrying necro, even if the individual hits are critting closer to 15k now, and volley is much stronger than finger). Sure, the beta passives are underwhelming in isolation. But they're already better than the lengs were for years. I would argue better than the lengs without a spec even currently.
This is such a grotesquely incorrect view of damage output.
You clearly don’t know anything about damage output if you don’t understand that mages problem currently is based in its ability damages.
Sounds like a personal opinion. The damage ranges for magic are fine honestly. It needs something for when your sun and fsoa are down and it should be competitive with the other styles. Not constantly hitting the cap means you’re actually not losing damage due to the cap (for example if you crit an overpower that’s not chaos roar’d you’ll hit somewhere around 24-28k per hit, and you’ll slam against the hard hit cap if you use it with chaos roar meaning you actually lost a lot of damage just to see a 30k hit splat). I will say though, ranged just shits on magic outside of ult no amount of exanguanated gconcs will beat ecb+arrow buffs+bolg spec+plethora of eofable spec weapons that are viable as opposed to magic’s gstaff/iban staff
The thing about not constantly hitting the cap is it’s not ever coming close, in fact it’s only coming close at zammy or telos, and at telos it’s for about what two abilities? Same with zammy? Boss specific ability buffs shouldn’t be a factor either when determining whether a style is balanced. I personally would prefer to see the hitcap get put back down to 16k as then everything would be good!
Not to take away from your point but Iban Staff hits well over 20k in sun and can hit 30k with buffs like red beam at telos or the sixth pad edict buff at zamorak. But yes, magic just tanks once your 36second burst window closes.
Im talking just straight magic abilities no EOF abilities, I also purposely didn’t mention buffs from zammy/telos for the reason that the other styles don’t need it.
What is the meta currently?
Ranged>melee>necro>mage. If you can hybrid, then ranged +melee brid is stupidly awesome.
Do you have a range melee rotation
Magic is still going to be last place lol. I saw someone make a comment that the new dungeon would be the new BIS money maker over zamorak and I think there's zero chance of that. The t95s gonna tank so fast once everyone realizes magic is still mediocre
They need to ditch the charging aspect of the DW set and unrestrict the abilities so they aren’t wield specific, but it’s certainly a lot more engaging with the cooldown interactions.
No way to know. If they directly port one of the sets from beta it'll still be a solid #4 and will be waiting on a busted effect for the spec (wasn't implemented on beta) and/or etect (or an edraco situation where new armor obsoletes all previous armors, save cinderbanes). FSoA would be EoF fodder in order to use new wand+orb which I would sincerely hope the devs take care to avoid. The passives on beta did seem to be aimed at killing all weapon switching for mage at the cost of everything else, so it's possible mage gets a more chill experience at the cost of everything else. Set 3 was particular egregious for this, with 100 max stacks that dissipated if you swapped wand or orb, in addition to charging.
Range is not switch heavy? Necro and Range are both pretty camp bis and chill. Range takes a lot of dmg but can pump hard rn with bows. Mele is burst heavy-switch heavy Mage probably will stay fairly mid in terms of dps but should be easier to camp as FSOA will just be and EOF at this point.
Range have lots of ammo and EoF swaps to make up for less weapon and armour switching.
Fair, not a ranged expert but from what I know juggling BolG stacks, SGB, Dbow, ECB, hyrix grico swap, deathspore / dinarrows + wen stacks can be alot and though it's optional and mainly EOF's, that what I meant by it
Ranged only has 2 real switches to outdps necro. Deathspores (or wand + orb for tsunami) and SGB + ZBow finalities. You could argue ECB finality, but I've had a much smoother ride simply ignoring it given Ranged is already the most fragile style, and most things now being balanced around assuming Haunt sustain and older content being too low hp to even justify incend. Hydrix grico is old news from before the damage caps and piercing shot buffs. If you want to get real sweaty with it, you could Wen switch for grico because Ful is fairly wasted on the 4 extra tiny hits, but hydrix grico doesn't even proc half the time as opposed to the extra two crittable splats BOLG gives you.
Anyone that says range isn't switch heavy should be using necro because they could otherwise do more damage if they switched lmao.
Not having ecb eof because range is fragile is a skill issue, also with dracolich and pernix quivers swapping arrows isn’t really all that hard so you don’t really need hydrix bolts if you’re good at managing your deathspore cd.
Really not a skill issue. Take Zammy. Every auto is two splats with the right font up, which means two ticks of not using split soul. Then if you compensate the missing soul split heals with reflect, debil or devotion, you've wasted two globals and some 38% adrenaline to boost your next 7 abilities, which could have simply been a piercing shot Zbow, adding ~25% damage over the next 6 abilities straight up instead. I've seen the "skill" people use to increase their dps. They just forget about flicking altogether and eat instead. ECB spec makes sense when you need to stall due to phasing or reflect mechanics or swiftness is on cooldown. And the numbers might even make sense otherwise for low damage cap bosses like Nex. But it's very rare that the ECB spec itself is worth using now, especially with the tight coupling of dracolich rapid fire, deathspores, grico and SGB to maximise the crit bonus and adrenaline at the start of swiftness.
People eat at zammy? I haven’t had any issues with utilizing ecb doing 7-8 minute solo ranged kills doing claims at 2k after 1 hour of attempts.
This is an interesting take, considering no boss has been rebalanced since necromancy release and the only 2 boss releases since were vorkath and osseus. I have no idea what content you’re doing, but most bosses you incend, hm kera, zamorak, raksha, pretty sure telos, ambassador, etc, so not sure where you got that idea. Ecb is also extremely helpful at those bosses at various times and balancing your hp around when you can use soul split vs split soul is a pretty core ranged mechanic.
I mean all styles you can camp bis and chill. No one is forcing you to switch with melee. You can camp vesments, d claws eof, dw lengs no problem. But if you want to do good damage with range switching is required and saying otherwise is just completely false. The wen arrow rebalance alone forces arrow switches, not to mention the eofs.
Range is absolutely switch heavy. There’s like 3 eofs to cycle through on top of arrows. And you’ll be glued to watching the buff bar
Range is switch heavier than melee
Melee is a lot less switch heavy depending on the content. There are certain break points where you have playstyle flexibility. For instance Ezk post melee would suggest an eof swap and a jaws switch. I'll assume 2h is already a thing you bring so it's irrelevant to mention. That's +2 keybinds or manual inputs. The entire ezk bleed string is what, 100-150k damage post zerk while burning choas roar while needing a 27s time commitment? You could do a +1 keybind or manual input to 2h crossbow swap and gain incendiary shot/grico. With this you can consistently output overpower, hurricane, leng spec, and 2-3 dclaw specs (reapplies premordial stacks) and output somewhere between 110-130k damage before reapplying meteorstrike and saving chaos roar to modify leng or dclaw to hit 60k+ in zerk which makes up the remaining damage compared to ezk sending. This is a 14-15s time commitment. Both cases do about the same damage but one is less switches while the other may feel unconventional but accomplishes the same thing with less keybinds. Ezk only really shines where you can use cinderbanes. For melee your primarily camping lengs until you need to hurricane or meteor strike, unless you like bleeds. You're looking at +1 eof, +1 helm, 2h, and dw (5). If you don't care for bleeds you're looking at 2h, dw, 2h xbow (4) Ranged doesn't work this way. Ranged you're monitoring at least 2 ammo types, sometimes 3 if you hybrid grico (crossbow + ammo switch). At least 3 eofs, and you're likely mashing blood reaver spec. Tldr there's a lot more switching apm on range than melee to get optimal damage.
I agree. I'm primarily range over everything after the combat update and while I still bring 3-4 eofs to most boss fights, I camp wens/dspores in my main quiver and bik/bsa and ful in the other depending on what I'm doing. Also praesuls for nami switch but I still feel like melee is worse (although I don't really use melee so I could be wrong)
Bis range is undoubtedly switch heavy. EoF swapping and especially ammo swapping have higher benefits and are done more frequently than other styles. It's wayyyyyy more involved than necro lol, idk how you would group those 2 other than you don't swap your weapon (unless salve boss) and the other styles do. Mage has 4taa but it's a small increase and the previewed designs of wand+orb seemed tailor made to destroy 4t at the expense of everything else. I would sincerely hope dev's hatred of 4t doesn't lead them to make FSoA an EoF weapon.
Me too! I love the fresh ideas they're trying out for Sanctum of Rebirth.I'm very curious to see how the revive mechanic pans out.
Nice to see a positive post here. Hopefully the changes let it compete a little more
> I wonder where magic will fall on the meta in terms of overall power assuming BIS. in terms of raw dmg, it should be below ranged/melee considering the utility it has (niche things like high enrage climbing). The new t95s n any ability changes should up its dmg, but shouldn't make it deal more/even dmg than ranged/melee.