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Hello everyone, I’m back this month with another article that is going to be talking about the recent combat beta that Jagex is hoping changes up RuneScape and gets them more people to play their game, subscribe and ultimately give them money. So before I start, just a really brief intro to the Combat Beta for anyone who hasn’t gotten a chance to play around with it.

End of June, the Combat Beta was released to a select few (myself included). Before the release of the, some videos were released by Jagex showing off some of the new things that they were going to be adding into the combat beta to try to spice up Jagex’s point and attack. The only thing that went through my mind was “Are Jagex really going to come to copying World of Warcraft to try to get their players back?” The more I saw the videos the more I realized just how far they would go to try to get more people to play RuneScape after losing so many to the Bot Nuke. I personally like just how simple RuneScapes combat is. One of the many thing I don’t like about World of Warcraft is just how much moving you need to kill some of the bosses. Looking at it now, this is just what Jagex is doing with RuneScape recently; most notable was the Queen Black Dragon update where you need to move to dodge the wall of fire. This is what I expect RuneScape combat to be (image from Reddit.com). With the new combat, it’s just about the same but now you can blink away, then powershot down the enemy, then blink back in and finish him off with an ultimate ability (DotA 2 reference anyone? 😉 ) and make it look all cool with their particle effects flying all over the place. They have done this to make it so that the current audience (which I guess to be around 10-13 years old) is attracted to the amazing looking graphics and the good quests. Now that I have explained the Combat Beta (I hope), it’s now time to talk about the actual update, which has been out for a couple of weeks at the time of this article.

So far during this combat beta I have not really been impressed, and I want to see how you guys feel about it if you’ve gotten a chance to mess around with it. The abilities arevery messy, very unorganized and really hard to understand (at least that how I felt when I was trying see what I could use with my abyssal whip and dragonfire shield on suqah to see if this new combat style changed the way I would kill things for something like Slayer or the odd Boss Takedown I partake in. It took me a little bit to figure out I had to drag and drop the ability (which I still couldn’t understand once I got them onto my quick-cast bar what they did when they were used) and what the normal ability did to that new bar that appears above my characters head in game and the bar that appeared above the quick-cast bar. Looking at the ultimate bar, when I went through the list of spells, there wasn’t a way that I saw to single out what were the ultimate abilities so I could just pick that one, get my ultimate-bar-thing to max and then use to see what would happen to my enemy and myself when I used it.

I’m not sure if they had a spot on the website explaining everything about the new Combat Beta but if they did, they didn’t really put any flashing lights around it to help people find it so they could learn all of the new keybinds so that they can quickly try things out, which is what everyone who has played RuneScape for a while played the Combat Beta as soon as it got released. They wanted to see if the new combat was going to change up RuneScape combat. And before I go, I remember in a video that they said you could sheath and unsheathe your weapons with a key on your keyboard, anyone know what key that is?

I’ll see you all next time!

Tim Out!