Combat

Invention was released at the end of January and despite my best efforts it was extremely difficult to cover upon release. Changes to the skill were happening nearly every day the first week of the release, culminating in the biggest xp buff I’ve ever seen, and happening literally as I was signing off my January article. Now in March we are seeing more improvements to Invention. Last week skilling methods have been released to train your Invention skill. I want to take a closer look at these new ways to train Invention and also look at where Invention is now and where it can go in the future.

Fishing and Woodcutting have now been added to the ways you can train your Invention skill. To start you’ll need to unlock the tool augmenter, tool gizmo shell, and fishing rod-o-matic via blueprints in the Invention guild. Once this is done you can augment either a dragon hatchet or crystal hatchet. If the item you want to augment is on your tool belt – don’t worry, just talk to Doc while you have a tool augmenter in your inventory and he’ll do it for you. Fishing gives you two choices as well. You can make a fishing rod-o-matic or augment a crystal fishing pole. That’s pretty much the nuts and bolts of it, but now lets take a closer look at the best ways to utilize these new training methods.

For starters skilling is obviously slower Invention xp than combat. This is to be expected and considering the afk nature of both of these skills it’s perfectly adequate in my estimation. It’ll take roughly two and a half hours of waterfall fishing at the highest level spot to reach level 10 on your fishing rod. Woodcutting is slightly slower, however at the moment, a popular method of of training Invention via Woodcutting is to crystallize teak trees. The perks released are decent but not especially helpful or o.p. Charitable is a perk that gives you a 1% chance per rank to add a resource to other nearby players. The other nice perk I recommend is furnace, it gives you a 5% chance per rank to consume the resource for an extra 100% xp. Of course there were negative perks released as well, but honestly at this point you really shouldn’t be getting negative perks. The gizmos stay with you after you dismantle an item so take the time to get it right.

This is a good update – it rounds out the Invention skill and gives players more choices about how they train Invention. Its especially helpful for two kinds of players. Players who have not reached level 99 in fishing or woodcutting can now train Invention along the way. The other group is skillers. I know its hard to believe that skillers still exist in combat-centric RuneScape nowadays but some still do. It’s great for them and unfortunate they had to wait an additional two months before they could start training the skill. Now lets take a look at the Invention skill overall and examine where it is and where it can still go.

The last time I wrote about Invention it was very much in a state of flux. Since then the skill has stabilized some what. The 1800% buff that was instituted on combat Invention xp stood until this week. This week level 70 gear received a 15% nerf to dismantling and siphoning, while level 90 gear received a 15% buff on dismantling and siphoning. I don’t really think these changes were necessary but with that said its not as dramatic as the previous swings, so I’ll take it. Last month a lot of perks were buffed and made better. This was a welcomed change that actually gave players a reason to add gizmos to their equipment. Of course there was the addition of augmentable tools I just spoke of. That is where we are at with Invention, its becoming stable and much more than just slayer 2.0, but where can it go from here – is it done?

More gathering skills should be added to Invention in the future. Two that come to mind are Construction and Mining. They are very similar to what was released with Woodcutting and Fishing. Construction has crystal hammers just like crystal fishing rods and mining has dragon pickaxes just like woodcutting has dragon hatchets. Honestly I’m a little surprised they didn’t come out with this batch but I think we will see them in the future. I would also like to see something like the rod-o-matic for agility, perhaps a pair of boots you could make and use to gain Invention xp while training agility. In short Invention has the potential to work its way through most of the skills in RuneScape and that’s the direction I see the skill going. That covers skilling, however are we truly done with the combat side of Invention?

The short answer is no. This week we also received the all important and much requested augmenter dissolver. Now you don’t have to get a friend to kill you in the wild to get your gear unaugmented anymore. The direction I would like to see Invention go for combat is simple – make it more situational. Now I know that this isn’t great for just trying to train Invention for 99 but hear me out. Invention was billed in the beginning as a skill that could help in certain situations. I know we have certain perks that deal additional damage to undead, dragons, etc. but this could be expanded more. One reason our ability to use Invention to be more situational is the gizmo mechanics themselves. Weapons and armor t70 or above isn’t exactly cheap and for t90 its down right expensive. The way it is today is that you augment a weapon or armor and attach a gizmo. That gizmo is there for good until either the item is dismantled or you use a gizmo dissolver on it. The problem lies with the dissolving gizmos. If you want to change a given weapon’s perks, the only way to do it is to dissolve the gizmo and start over. Some perks are expensive and time consuming to get and its a real deterrent to changing gizmos on a weapon. I think the solution would be to allow perks to be changeable from weapon to weapon without having to dissolve them completely and losing all the time and effort that went in to making them. Essentially you would be able to take gizmo off and put a different on, thus making Invention more geared to specificity then general use, which is what I thought the developers intended.

Invention has come a long way in a short time and the addition of tools really helps round out the skill. I think its finally on the right path and still shows great potential to enhance the game. I look forward to seeing where it goes from here and watching the process unfold has given me more confidence in Jagex that they can correct a mistake much faster than they have done in the past. So until next time, Happy RuneScaping.