Energy to Burn

With the Inventor skill hanging in the balance and with good possibility of not coming out at all, there is a potential resource surplus existing in Runescape. That resource is of course Divination’s harvest of divine energy. Many people have stockpiled energy as they have trained Div with hopes to put them forth and level up Inventor quickly, but now its usefulness is in question. Since the announcement the GE shows a common trend in falling prices on all energy. Thousands of players are sitting on millions of energy not knowing what to do with it. You have massive surplus of a resource that is rapidly sinking in value. So what’s a game developer to do? Mod Mark has already stated that he’d like to see energy be used in other skills to enhance their existing tables or to create all new products from skills. We have a form of this in Divination now, where we essentially transmute or make rare resources easily available for a short while, but more permanent and substantial enhancements are what I’m sure he has in mind. I’d like to do a little speculation and jog through some potential uses of our plentiful divine energies.

One thing to consider is that now would be a perfect time to implement a type of enchantment mechanic into the game. People have suggested this sort of thing for years but there hasn’t ever been a real way to do it without creating a new resource – and now we have that resource. Divine energies could be used to put certain buffs on armor and weapons, with the higher the tiered energy, the stronger or longer the buff could be. Think of the ability to add some prayer bonus to an armor piece. The higher level the energy used, the longer it lasts. You’d activate the buff my putting the armor on, and like auras once the timer starts it can’t be stopped or else it is lost. You could do the same to skilling outfits. Boost the bonus of the golden mining suit by 5% when you wear the whole set for a certain amount of time. There’s an unlimited amount of ways to add bonuses or increase existing bonuses that could burn through energy accumulations that wouldn’t be game breaking but still add a nice little bonus. Maybe you could even implement permanent enchantments for thousands of energy to really bring the amount of energy in game down.

If you look through the list of skills, almost every single one could benefit from some sort of integration with Divination. After all, isn’t that the real goal with skills – to have them rely and pair with each other to create a varied and non-monotonous experience? Even now, there are newer skills that really don’t integrate with other skills very well. Agility is a good example; apart from a shortcut here and there, what benefit does it give other skills? And don’t even get me started on Dungeoneering… Div would actually be the most logical skill to combine with others because its resource is so rudimentary. It’s energy – any action could be used with energy to speed up the process or do something previously impossible. It’s a blanket term that translates to other things so well. Energy is power, heat, pressure, momentum, propulsion, force. And it’s not just energy, it is divine energy. Spiritual, cosmic, and omniscient, meaning this energy isn’t like electricity in that it has no boundaries or real rules it needs to follow. We can do almost anything with it. Limitless energy in a medieval game doesn’t make us inventors; it makes us godlike at least in actions we can do.

What if we had a machine that we could attach three hatchets together, throw in divine energy, and use that to chop logs much faster? Mine more ore? Catch more fish? Yes, we are basically doing just as the inventor skill was wanting to do, but on a smaller scale and more to assist other skills rather than to train a different new one. Inventor was an odd concept when you think about it. How would you ‘grind’ Inventor? You aren’t going to make hundreds of these new hatchet saws because that doesn’t help the game because you just use up hatchets to create a new junk item. It would have had to function like summoning – where you gain exp from making an item like we do pouches, but in using them you only gain very little exp. That’s not how skills should function, especially not a finishing (or as they are called in RS ‘Artisan’) skill. Div should be a gathering skill, but also a support skill in helping us train other skills. It’s off to a good start with divine resource spots and the ability to transmute resources, but taking it to the next level in helping us train other skills better in traditional ways would make energy as a resource useful and desirable.

So there’s some thoughts on our energy crisis in Runescape. Who knows what route Jagex will decide to take to thin the stockpiles of energy created by Divination. It could be any combination of my ideas above or something completely different. What do you guys think? How would you finish off Divination and what use would you like to see divine energy play in RS?