I love when I get to make crazy names 😀

The ISWSSL/LH update is actually three different updates: One about Smithing, one about a new D&D, and one about the Login screen.

Improved Smelting Chances

Remember Iron? Remember how you hated smelting iron? Remember why you hated smelting it? Well now it’s time to change those memories from hate, to..well not so much hate.

Iron ore used to have a set 50% chance of successfully refining it. Today’s update see’s the introduction of a progressive chance raise, meaning you’ll gain 1% success chance per level for the levels between 15 and 45 for a max of 80% success rate. It’s unknown currently whether the progression continues to level 65 which would give a 100% success rate. I doubt it works this way as this would make RoFs useless to players with 65+ smithing.

The best part about this update is that both members and Free-to-plays benefit from the increased chances if they have level 16+ smithing.

Shattered Heart

No, it’s not a sequel to the Romeo and Juliet quest, though it does sound like it.

The newest Distraction and Diversion, Shattered Hearts, isn’t like most D&Ds: instead of going somewhere specific to do something specific you can do this D&D by simply doing everyday tasks such as cooking, fishing, or evening training agility. Shattered Hearts can be worked on by doing any of the following skills:

Agility, Construction, Cooking, Crafting, Farming, Firemaking, Fishing, Fletching, Herblore, Hunter, Mining, Runecrafting, Smithing, Thieving, and Woodcutting.

While training these skills you’ll find Strange Rocks. Sometimes these will just spawn in your inventory and sometimes they’ll replace an item currently in your inventory(thereby stealing the item as you can’t retrieve the item). When in your POH you might find a rock near your entrance portal. Unfortunately only some activities for each skill have a chance of finding these rocks.

Eventually you’ll receive two rocks from training each of the skills. Once you have two rocks from one skill you can bring them to the Varrock Museum and talk to Barnabus Hurma(or any Archeologist there) to learn about them. Once you talk to one of them you can click on the plinth to add your stones.

You’ll get a small amount of experience each time you add a set of strange rocks. The amount you receive depends on what level you currently have of the skill the rocks came from. At level 99 you’ll receive 9,703 experience in the skill the rocks came from.

After spending hours training your skills and adding more rocks to the statue it will start to take shape.

Once completed you’ll receive 10 Kudos and will watch a cut scene where the statue seems to try to come alive but fails and explodes. The Archeologists will give you a statue plinth which can be put in your POH study and a statue piece replica, which doesn’t seem to be useful yet. It seems like once you’ve put enough work into it you’ll be able to rebuild the statue again. Perhaps eventually you’ll be able to free Dahmaroc…

Lobby and Login Changes

One of the things that seems to get updated annually is the login screen. Today see’s the change from a login/logout system to the new Lobby system. Probably the most surprising thing this new Lobby system adds is the very long logout timer. Now this new timer doesn’t keep you logged into the Runescape game engine any longer than the usual 5 minutes, but it does keep you logged into the lobby for about to an hour. This makes it easy to chat with friends or members of a clan chat without being in Runescape.

Because the lobby keeps you logged in, you can easily switch worlds without having to re-enter your user name and password. The bad thing about this long logout timer is that if you leave the computer without fully logging out someone could come along and log into your character without having to put in a password. To prevent this make sure to click the ‘X’ next to the Options tab before leaving your computer if you’re going to be away for awhile. Always make sure to fully logout before getting up from a computer at a public place such as a hotel or library.

On the first screen you will see the usual information: E-mail registration, Recovery questions, Messages from Jagex, Member credit (if any) left, and the tip of the week. You’ll also notice the large yellow ‘Click here to play’ button. Clicking this will throw you onto a random world. If you’re free-to-play it’ll put you on an F2P world. If you’re a member it’ll put you on a member world. Warning: This new random login has been known to put people on Bounty Hunter worlds even if they’ve never logged onto a BH world before. Thankfully it will still give the warning for a first time login to a Bounty Hunter world.

The second tab is the world select screen. This shows how many players are on each server like usual and the ping time. You can sort by World number, amount of players, Location/Activity, Type(Members/free), Whether it’s Lootshare or not, and the ping time (remember, lower is better). The nice thing about this new world select screen is that it updates how many players are on each world about every 10 seconds.

The third tab is basically a friends list. It shows your friends and ignore lists and who’s online and offline currently. You can change your private chat preferences to control who see’s you online. You can also message, add, or remove friends. One nice aspect about this new lobby friends list is that you can right click a friend’s name and click ‘Join’. This will log you into their world.

The fourth tab is a Clan Chat tab. From here you can join any clan chat like normal and can perform internal actions such as chatting and kicking.

The fifth and last tab is the options tab. This works just like the in-game options menu and the old options screen.

You can click both the big yellow play button and the two favorite world play buttons(which are now in the bottom right corner of the lobby) on the first four screens. There’s also a report abuse button on the Friends List and Clan chat

With Jagex being very focused around player security, this new long-time login lobby seems odd since Jagex has always said to never leave your account logged in.

Other small changes

These three main updates came with a few minor one’s also:

The members’ skill-total world requirement has been increased from 1000+ to 1500+. The free players’ skill-total world requirement remains at 1000+.
This is good because 1,000 skill total for a member really isn’t very much. 1,500 Is much more reasonable and should keep some of the cluttered areas of Runescape a little less claustrophobic.

TzTok-Jad now has a second animation played on him when he’s being healed. This will be shown at the same time as his usual animations, so won’t interfere with the fight.
I don’t know how useful this is as I haven’t fought him after this update yet.

When infusing granite lobster pouches (level 74 Summoning), you can now use any size of granite, not just 500g blocks. Equally, when infusing praying mantis pouches (level 75 Summoning), you can now use any colour of ‘flower’ (whether grown from mithril seeds or bought), not just red flowers.
Versatility, Nice. Might I suggest continuing to use 500g blocks though. The reason being they are A) Lighter and B) you can turn a 5kg block into ten 500g blocks, thus stretching each load to the quarry.

When buying poison chalices from Stankers at the Coal Trucks, or climbing boots from Tenzig in Burthorpe, you’ll now see a shop interface instead of having to click through chat.
I don’t much see that this makes a difference in usage.

We’ve added five microtutorials to the advisor system for Agility, Hunter, Slayer and Thieving, and more information has been added about a number of members’ items and locations.
I don’t use the advisor or tutorial system but this is good for those who do.

RuneScape’s minigames have been renamed to ‘Activities’ and all references to ‘minigames’ have changed in accordance (predominantly on the Knowledge Base, but also a few in-game references). Some of this content has been reclassified as Distractions & Diversions, skill-based tasks or areas (on the KB); the content itself has not changed.
I’d like to know why they did this. Not that it really matters since everyone will keep calling them mini-games, but it just doesn’t make sense to me to rename something for no apparent reason.

Strykewyrm and other Slayer changes:
* You can purchase the ability to be assigned ice strykewyrms from Slayer masters (using Slayer points after completing Smoking Kills).
Previously you had to own a Fire cape to be assigned them.
* You need to be wearing a TzHaar fire cape to cause 2x damage to ice strykewyrms with fire spells (without it, fire spells inflict 1.5x damage).
Previously any fire spell could hit almost double, regardless of whether a cape was worn or not.
* The TzHaar fire cape adds +40 damage (see other news about changes to the Hitpoints skill) to all attack types when worn to fight ice strykewyrms.
Previously the cape didn’t add any damage, it was required to deal damage period.
* Ice strykewyrms may cause you extra damage if you’re not wearing a TzHaar fire cape.
I don’t think they did any extra damage before if you didn’t have the cape.
* Strykewyrms should no longer lose focus on the player they were attacking.
They’re drinking more grape juice so their memory is better.
* You can now block a 5th task if you have more than 250 Quest Points.
Woot! Who doesn’t like blocking another annoying slayer task?
* You can purchase the ability to be assigned aquanites by Kuradal.
Aquanites weren’t on her task list before, but they can now be added to her list for a small fee of Slayer points.
* You can now purchase the ability to deal killing blows faster to those Slayer creatures that require them.
This feature kills creatures which require special items (such as salt or a rock hammer) without needing to use the item on the creature. You still must have the item in your inventory though.
* The crystal chime now has an auto chime feature, which should help when fighting warped terrorbirds and warped tortoises.
Never fought these but I’ve seen it done and saw how annoying this was to do. This auto chime feature probably works the same way.