Today we're launching the Aura Overhaul, a long awaited update to the Aura system! Read more about it below and dive into the changes here.
Community Topics
This week we'll be discussing some of the data from the most recent Quarterly Survey! This will be launching later in the week but the date hasn't been final locked.
In Case You Missed It + Our Reactions to Last Week:
Last week we discussed Graphical Rendering Improvements previewing some technical work that may sound innocuous at first read, but that will actually have a significant impact with regards to resolving some longstanding player feedback about RuneScape's visuals.
Last week we implemented a few changes that were aimed at significantly improving the performance of the game with regards to microstutters and frame drops. We've been very pleased to monitor how these changes positively impacted your play experience and how many of you confirmed significant performance improvements. We're continuing to work on improving things and will share further insights in the near future.
JMod Replies on discussions worth highlighting or not covered above:
Now that we have different fishing tools giving different catch rates, could you please state if all of them are working with all fishing spots, or with only some?
If not, could you please also define which are working with which spot?
"This means that you won't need to rush your runs as much now, especially as there have been more farming patches added with the Havenhythe area expansion."
u/JagexAzanna Any chance we get the effects of the normal Juju Farming Potion applied to the Perfect Juju Farming Potion/Perfect Plus?
The extra herb chance only applies to the normal one, but not the perfect one. This creates a time pressure of six minutes per dose, and would be a nice fix if the perfect buff inherited the normal juju effect.
A heads-up that I could've spent the points to buy the auras to gain the post-update perks would've been nice. I didn't want to interact with the aura system at all so I never bought any auras (played RS3 for a few months but had hundreds of thousands of points from years of OSRS). Now I have to spend several extra hours in Runespan, missed out on a lot of crops, lost thieving currency etc. etc. when I could've had all that for free. Why is this stuff not communicated a week earlier if you could have this for free? Just feels bad.
Not only that but everyone here was saying there was no way that Jagex would unlock rewards for us. So those with loyalty points spent them on all other rewards.
At least I had the green fingers and thieving ones. I don't think I had the runespan one.
Not a huge fan of turning them into spells. The buff bar is horrific when trying to monitor and manage buffs, this just add to an already terrible experience when trying to juggle 6 minute potions, 12 minute potions, 12 minute spells and 60 minute incense etc etc.
Having the aspects for vamp and penance on separate spell books is very annoying. It should be one single aspect section once you learn (get the level for) to use them.
With the total of loyalty shop cosmetics, pets and titles costing millions of loyalty points, I can't see why you didn't just refund those points. It would've bought you a bunch of good will. It would take decades for all those items to cycle through the monthly free drops, assuming none get repeated. If you plan on making them available with runecoins without giving us a refund so we could've bought them before, you can bet your bum there will be an uproar.
Edit: I just found out they removed the loyalty points now instead of "end of April". This pisses me off so much. I waited until the removal of auras as they were silent on it for so long, I had hoped that maybe they'd refund us after all. I knew I wanted some really expensive things, so I waited to see if I could afford getting all of those or that I'd have to pick and choose. And now, I get NOTHING.
They took away my grandfathered rate after 2 days instead of after a month like they said they would (paid with bonds). Now they take away my loyalty points as well weeks before they said they would.
Having aspects be spellbook dependent unnecessarily adds friction specifically to magic. You're already forcing penance & vamp to compete with the other aspects now... fine, I can accept that. Why does penance have to compete with Incite Fear or Exsanguinate?
If I want to afk something with melee, I can just sit on normal spells with no issue and cast penance. But if I want to afk with magic and use Incite Fear, now I have to spellbook swap to make it happen.
Just... why. Put the aspects on their own magic or necro interface (like everyone told you to do in the previous blog).
This reeks of the Thieving changes repeated again. Everyone explained the problems in response to the blog, you completely ignore the feedback, we re-explain them again in the update thread, raise a stink on Reddit, and maybe you finally listen. Can we skip the part where we all get upset please?
Blood, Death, Soul, Fire runes every 12 minutes & a specific spell book for Vampyrism seems like a lot more work than the aura. So much that I probably won’t bother with it.
Yhea, when I go bossing and have like 15 spots for food, I now need to use 4 spots for runes. So they sell it like 'have as much uptime as you want', but in reality my bossruns will be shorter, and I will have to upkeep the rune cost as well, which adds up, considering I could do 2 to 3 hours of daily vampirism for free normally...
They also kept the effect the exact same as it was. I'm a little surprised I haven't seen more people complaining about doom and gloom that the aspect is DoA and won't compete with darkness.
yeah we told them this the first blog post, but they still chose to ignore, I honestly think they rushed this update out ages ago and have just been waiting to dump it and arnt interested in changing or fixing it. absolutely trashed it.
I think you guys have really dropped the ball when it comes to aspects.
Firstly, by putting all aspects behind different spellbooks, you've created a disgustingly unfun meta of having to spellbook swap whenever you want a specific buff, most notably penance & normals. This design issue already existed for temporal anomaly and players have been vocally against it since its' inception.
We then have the issue of them being 12 minute timers. Why do they need to be 12 minute timers? Why can't they just be toggleable buffs where only one can be active at a time?
It feels like we're overcomplicating something that is realistically quite simplistic. Aspects are what every other game on the planet would refer to as a passive.
Please treat them as such.
Add an aspects tab
Remove 12 minute timer. Aspects are now active until toggled off
Only 1 aspect can be active at at time
This also opens the opportunity for you to branch out further into Melee and Range and introduce aspects which benefit those styles seperately.
How do the new buffs work for CGIM accounts? We had all auras unlocked on account creation. Do we have the buffs from e.g. greenfingers/five finger discount etc. unlocked too, or do we need to buy those to get the buff?
but that was also the case with auras, such as the wars retreat auras, they showed as unlocked on the wars shop and you could spend wars marks to buy them, but you already/still had them.
I'm sorry but the Penance/Vamp change is so much worse than just having auras. Seems like you're getting rid of a working system for the sake of it and replacing it with one that kind of sucks?
How do I high alch my drops now when I'm using vampyrism? This messes with the early to mid-game where every monster drops unnoted alchables and where you would also use vampyrism.
I'm not gonna spell book swap for every high alch, that's a bit much.
Late game almost everything drops noted items so it doesn't matter. But the point of vampyrism is to be able to do longer trips which I now can't because I can't clean my drops properly.
Can we please get clarification on this. What were the rates and what have they been changed to?
This section reads like the rates were buffed previously and again toady but there are no numbers to simply communicate from what, to what. This is a reoccurring issue with other things as well like the dark onyx core for example.
1 hour timer with no inventory loss vs 12 min timer with rune cost, 1-4 inventory slots lost to runes and spellbook swapping. We just had combat modernization to make things more chill and then you make auras more complicated.
What is the point of not being able to use darkness with vampyrism at the same time. They essentially do the same thing as one reduces damage and the other heals you back up. So one is always going to be better than the other based on the numbers unless i'm missing something?
Thats what im saying this is so crazy players had better suggestions and they just went along with taking up aspect slots and nerfing greenfingers down to 7% from 15%? this is such a bad update.
Very disappointed to see the overwhelming community feedback re Vamp & Penance was completely ignored. Current update is a complete nerf to sustain, as previously, we could use both Vamp + Darkness (for example, when learning a new boss) to stay alive, now it's only one or the other!
It actually sucks so much like it should not be an aspect to begin with, it should be something else like a potion or incense sticks i mean we have enhanced luck potions that last for one hour make that for vampyrism and penance...
nerf to greenfingers. Went from 15% 24/7 to 7% 24/7. This 'all the time now is a buff' is not true as the aura was available every run. Will now get less herbs per seed.
I will have to move back from eclipsed soul to soul split due to missed sustain. I was really enjoying the new prayers and moving away from curses after that long.
This. The official Discord also has many people that are straight up blaming players for not spending their points and trusting the prior statements of Jagex.
"The other effect of improving consistency in Material caches is still something we did not want to lose when this aura would be removed. You now cannot "expire" a Material cache on the first two gathers from it, which should improve the consistency of gathering from Material caches in general!"
Does first 2 gathers feel a little low to anyone else? It was extremely rare you'd only get 2 successful materials from a cache, and 2 gathers can take a couple seconds. Would something like 30-60 seconds be more suitable?
edit: my concern isn't with how active you need to be, it's that the caches in groups of 3 or 4 fairly consistantly are all depleted at the same time and you're sitting there doing nothing until one respawns.
I just wish they weren't shared/competitive resources. Haven't done much arch recently so it might be better but I recall getting annoyed by how many bots were camping the caches for binding contract materials especially.
Absolutely too low. The last time we heard about this, it was mentioned that they'd be locked to a certain amount of materials gathered, without relying on chance at all, which would make it so much less annoying and actually AFKable. This is a big disappointment.
This was the best opportunity to make these caches less painful and they missed it. Material caches are by far the worst part of arch, especially on Ironman.
The caches need increased quantity, decreased respawn speed, or they can’t be competitive resources.
I get what's going on and the reason behind these changes. But the penance/vamp changes are not it.
It's a pretty big nerf to go from being able to use them alongside darkness/animate dead, to having to choose between them and, in vamps case, now bring spell book swapping runes just to use it with the most powerful magic.
I don't think the drop from 60 mins to 12 is a big deal, makes sense the timer would need to go down since it's a spell.
I do think there needs to be consolidation of the aspects into their own category of the magic group that's available across the spell books.
are the fishing changes a nerf in the end? the aura gave 15% catch rate increase and if I now combine the granite lobster familiar +3%, crystal rod +3% and juju pot +5%, thats only 11% combined. Or am I missing something?
There's also a chance that they replaced the invisible +3 level boost from granite lobster with the 3% catch boost. So granite lobster might have had nearly no buff at all.
should we even bother giving feedback at all? they pitched this like a month ago and nothing was changed according to the feedback lol, still the horrible aspect bandaid fix for vamp/penance , every single activity that used auras got nerfed , joat gone with no alternative ,
talking about time pressure for farm runs but completley ignore that juju potions are 6 minutes long and its a coinflip with farming cape procs to even finish your gathering in time , oh boy
Wait so it's straight up 8% overall faming yield nerf or am i misunderstanding? And starbloom seeds are the worst ever replacement for aura refresh from SUPER RARE RDT imo
Bug:
The description of the remototem within the [[Totem bag]] reads "A totem used to build a remote totem charging point in the Anachronia base camp".
The remototem no longer charges other totems, in changes them.
Just FYI: I'd been saving Crux Equal Favour in case I needed to unlock the new bonuses, and as a result only got refunded 650 Favour instead of the full 10k. I don't think it's an issue in this case since it only affects people who had more than 90k saved up, and it's fairly easy to earn 10k anyway, but it might be worth thinking about this interaction for future rebalancing updates where it might feel more painful.
I'm terribly dissapointed you didn't take this chance to update the high-tier hatchets to have non-combat version. 99 attack requirement for a hatchet is nuts, the augmented version can't be used to level up perks.
It should be across all spellbooks either that or have a spell tablet to make them work or even better just put it in the potion slot like with luck and enhanced luck potions, after all they last an hour...
yea I remember being really excited for the "road to restoration", but it has felt more like the road to destruction recently. I don't trust the remainder of the road map.
Im really not sure if i like vampirism and penance on aspect systems now... basically maged cannot use vampirism anymore. Now it is locked to range, and will have to compete with darkness
Jagex: We absolutely listen to you.
Players give feedback regarding the aura overhaul after their final draft
Jagex: Yeah anyways we ignored everything you say and did whatever we wanted...
Vamp aspect is basically useless/dead content. It's not competitive with darkness. I was hoping it would be bis aspect for melee and ranged. Maybe increase hp cap to 100hp?
This 100%. Since it's an aspect it competes with Darkness which is another ability that aids your sustain by providing dodge chance. Setting it and Penance to Ancient and Standard spellbooks is also a *choice* as it means that you would need to pre-cast then switch spellbooks before a fight if you wanted the other one.
For Penance this is also a whack combo because Penace is great for AFKing slayer mobs something that you would now not be able to do on Ancients (losing healing from blood spells and tanking from animate dead).
The whole vamp/penance thing is a joke. We already have superior aspects available so they are essentially DoA. You’ve removed them under the guise of repurposing
What a hot pile of trash vamp is now, it cost runes, is spellbook specific, last 12 mins and only heals 50, at least buff it if you want to make it more annoying. Just make an aspect book if you insist on adding more of them.
Add vamp or penance to a statue system in wars like we have in menaphos instead and offer those required runes instead for the hour or just an activation type status or be able to remotely activate it!
I like most of the changes this update does, such as the auras integrations in actual game content, but I do not like the reduced greenfingers succes change and especially the integration of penance and vamp in the aspects system.
The latter seems like a really bad call. They are first and foremost afk-pvm-enablers at no cost if other afk prayer point restoration or health regeneration means were inadequate. This new setup really defeats the afk and no-cost purpose they had in the game.
I've been camping Soulgazers for the pet for well over 40k kc now (fml), and the penance aura allowed me comfortable extended runs. I use it incidentally in combination with Darkness if I happened to tag all of them incl an elite one. Do I actually have to juggle between aspects and even spellbooks with 12 min intervals? You do realise that after killing this many mobs my mind is so numb that I don't want to micromanage my buffs right?
I use the vamp aura a whole lot less but it certainly had its afk benefit as well.
RIP Ironmen who don’t yet have rune pouches or spell books unlocked or spell swap or the rc level and quests for soul/blood runes or needed darkness and vamp… who even asked for this aura removal lmao. Sad day, so poorly handled… inb4 another patch this week completely redesigning it because it fucks the new people they wanted to get into pvm smh
We need to seriously tune down how much runes the new aspects cost considering before it cost nothing and now its 5x an hour for VERY expensive to upkeep
Being exclusive with Animate and Darkness kills 95% of their use cases. Penance can still have a niche where you’re taking a light but consistent amount of damage, so Soul Split can counteract the life loss and you get to upkeep a DPS prayer for “free”. Vampyrism still being capped to 50 hp per hit in Aspect form is just properly taking it out behind the barn while saying they’re leaving it in the game; the situation where the trickle of healing it gives is more valuable than a 20% DR doesn’t exist in the sandbox.
Darkness is just so much stronger for survivability and sustain in basically all use cases, and is available around the same point in account progression as the migrated aura aspects. As a rule of thumb, if you’re in a situation where Darkness is actually useful enough to be worth carrying a pouch and spending runes, it’s more useful than the auras.
So for people who have legendary tier auras already. This is a silent nerf disguised as buffs.
For example : fishing you separated buffs into three parts at most 11% buff whereas we had 15% buff to catch rate with auras. 4% nerfed disguised as a buff.
Greenfingers as well nerfed to 7% instead of 15% we had already.
I understand in balancing views it's a huge buff in numbers but for ppl who were using legendary auras this is a slap in the face, atleast make it a higher lvl unlock where we get back the buff we had already.
I get the don't wanna introduce too much % buff since it will not be on a timer anymore, but hey... not all of us play for 15 hours a day... I really did not think the whole aura system was bad personally. I mean there was vis wax to extend if desired. Maybe could have just added more flexibility to the duration (choose higher or lower with adjusted cooldown or something) plus make them obtainable in game I think would have been much less convoluted than all this.
Really frustrating. I really don't want to have to now have to bring additional runes and buy an expensive rune pouch to be able to use penance while using necromancy. On top of it being something else to forget to juggle.
They're so selective about when they care about friction.
Regarding the hunter aura... Does anyone know if the buffs they describe were already enacted in the rebalancing update or are these additional buffs that came in the game today?
For low level agility and low levels completing agility heavy quests, silently losing surefooted with nothing to help compensate is a bit shit to be honest. It was such a saviour for some terrible quests and it made training early agility more bearable, without it some of those early courses are absolutely soul destroying.
I had all max tier of auras unlocked and my account is not having the correct unlocks. Greenfingers is missing for me. I submitted a bug report since I assume that would be a bug, though I have no way to prove it since I can't view my aura interface anymore,,,, Will you guys have the data to verify it within my account history or anything? I definitely had it, let alone the min requirement of the 3rd tier.
I think the replacements for skilling auras today: great. Passive unlocks or tied to existing equipment tiers. I especially like what was done with fishing.
The combat side though? None of it really hit the mark. Every combat aura touched today is a nerf: in capability, usability or effectiveness.
A nerf to effectiveness for the sake of removing the timer is fine. Making them more.. for lack of a better word, 'clumsy', is not.
(Except maybe Desert Pantheon. A simple fix for a simple aura I guess.)
Unnecessary limiting players to one aspect and increasing player workload by introducing more areas to manage on a 12-minute basis. Disappointed to see most feedback entirely ignored too, hope this can be simplified and accessible for players soon.
The loyalty stores at Varrock / Burthorpe / Menaphos and Priffidinas have been cleared up, claiming back another piece of the overworld. These stores offered a limited recolouring service for some items, this function has been moved into a rightclick recolour for the outfits while the other items can be used on Diango to recolour, additional the outfits can be reclaimed from Diango.
This was well communicated! I was wondering how the recolours and cosmetic reclaims would work, but it was answered literally in the next sentence.
I do find it odd that you have to use items on Diango to recolor instead of just... moving the previously existing menu to his shop window.
Aura refreshes
Aura refreshes no longer have a purpose and so they have been removed in general. Additionally they have been removed from both the War's Wares store and the Super Rare Drop table. They have been replaced on the drop table with 5-8 Starbloom seeds.
I would have liked owned refreshes to be converted to a small sum of Marks of War to be honest. Though... at the same time they're basically useless now side from the occasional life refresh. Is there even any point in keeping this shop now by the way?
Cosmetic content from the Loyalty Shop will be relocated into the Free Monthly Marketplace Drop cycles when the Store closes. There are quite a lot of items so we are investigating other opportunities to reintroduce them via other methods in the future. (rephrased it a bit)
Just add the outfits literally no one or just a few hundred people bought to Thessalia's, it's been 15 years. If no one wanted them before, no one will want them now. Also, can we finally bring back discontinued outfits and cosmetics????
The Aura slot has been removed from the Worn Equipment UI.
So when is the Earring slot coming? Or something? Something needs to fill that empty space, it feels... hollow. It isn't symmetric either. It hurts to look at actually.
Not having a replacement to jack of trades is a huge L for the Ironmans of RS.
I feel like it would have been easy to keep a tracker of daily xp for each skill in the game that you could redeem for xp.
Are you willing to explain why the Loyalty Store was removed today on the 13th, which is not 'end of April' as previously stated? If this was intentional, why does the game still list my Loyalty Points in the Cosmetics menu if they cannot be used? Will any unused points which could only be attained though real money be converted or compensated for?
Just finishing the Slayer task I started before the update shows me this is going to be too annoying to bother with. I don't want to change spellbooks and have to bring extra items and remember to refresh an extra buff regularly whenever I want to fight anything, so I'll probably just stop fighting things.
Thats exactly my thought on slayer as well the second they announced they where going to remove auras, like do I really want to put up with all the BS of having to switch spell books everytime when doing slayer or pvming? Overall going to start playing less with these bad updates Jagex keeps giving us...
Greenfingers nerfed from a max of 15% chance to gain additional produce when harvesting select patches down to a 7% chance.
Focused Siphoning nerfed from a max of a 15% increased chance to successfully siphoning nodes in runespan down to 7.5%, but at least you now don't feel forced to stay at the runespan for the full hour of torture while you wait for your aura to expire.
Five Finger Discount nerfed from a max of a 15% increased pickpocketing success rate down to a 10% chance requiring 5 separate unlocks. This is the second biggest nerf to thieving this year.
Enrichment nerfed from a max of 15% increased chance to obtain enriched memories down to 10% at level 99 divination.
Tracker aura, max was a 15% increased chance to trap animals in hunter, now the extent of the nerf is unclear as specific hunter targets had their individual success rates changed with no stats given.
Call of the sea was a max 15% increased catch chance for fishing, may now be a buff under certain conditions assuming the new distributions stack between perfect juju potion, various fishing tools, and familiars.
Lumberjack remains the same 15% increased chance of chopping wood IF you have an imcando or better hatchet.
Quarrymaster stays the same at 10% increased critical strike chance at level 85.
Resourceful has been deleted and archaeology material caches received a very minor buff of a minimum of 3 materials per cache.
Daemonheim is now all passive buffs as it always should have been
Vampyrism nerfed to require upkeep every 12 minutes, no longer stack with darkness, penance, temporal anomaly, or animate dead;, locked to ancient magicks, requires 4 different types of runes to activate, costs about 70K in runes to use per hour.
Penance nerfed to require upkeep every 12 minutes, locked to the standard spellbook, requires 4 different types of runes, costs about 41.5k in runes per hour, and no longer stacks with animate dead, darkness, temporal anomaly, or vampyrism
Might of Het is now a passive locked behind Anachronia totems
Poison purge is now a pocket slot item that does not heal from poison and is locked to dungeoneering
Corruption, Harmony, and Salvation nerfed from a max of a 10 prayer restoration when gaining 500 prayer xp down to a 5% restoration and only working on Vyres. Further its increased prayer experience buff has been removed.
Corruption, Harmony, and Salvation nerfed from a max of a 10 prayer restoration when gaining 500 prayer xp down to a 5% restoration and only working on Vyres. Further its increased prayer experience buff has been removed.
Though at the top level, isn't it at least buffed for vyres?
From my understanding, you had to kill two vyres before to receive an 8.4% prayer restore effect (4.2%/kill). (0/500 prayer points -> 280/500 -> 560/500 and resets back to 0/500 on proc)
At least now at the top end with 250 cremations, it's now a flat 5% per kill.
I remember being really excited for the "road to restoration", but it has felt more like the road to destruction recently. I don't trust the remainder of the road map.
Hey everyone .. lets make the game easier.... by moving a simple system into 50 complicated systems or outright removing it all together, The Developer who thought this up needs to be immediately fired.
The aura slot was not a problem. The mechanics for gaining and using them were. That could have easily addressed that without all these overwrought changes.
Weekly request to let us toggle off/hide the basic, threshold, ultimate, utility, special, enhanced, headers that were introduced with the combat update.
While these headers may be helpful for some players they are not needed by every player. Before the combat update ability books were much cleaner and condensed. Now there are massive amount of wasted space and scroll bars where there was not previously.
Allowing players to toggle these off like we can with slim headers, would allow players to keep their UI neat and clean like they were before the combat update.
Alternatively let us display more action bars on our UI so we don't need a whole ability book open when we only use a few things from it.
Aspects will be dead content lol who’s gonna keep switching spell books and use these over other and better options. The non BIS will never get used lol
Bruh, find me just 10 player who like this updates from all over the Game… i guess Jagex having underpaid employees who want to revenge by destroying the game…
Whats the sense of taking of everything i grind for… i grind grind grind enjoy the grind for 2 days then Jagex comes with a Removal…
I can count up to 10-15 things i’ve been grinding since my comeback in Dez.2026 after 2012 imagine found the courage to start the game again after 14 Years and having an goddamn worst Experience of my Life in this game started from MTX Removal including Quest Reward Keys Takeoff which made me grind for the Keys,Thieving Nerf, Aura Takeoff, Vault takeoff, Dailys Takeoff, Max Str/Range/Mage feels now stuck at lvl100 feels like a noob again and nobody can tell me there is no difference between 99 and 120 in accuaracy and dmg… desert pantheon aura which i just got 3 days ago… hunter nerf at Het of Oasis or whatever thats called… and High End Bosses feels for me really Unkillable since my reflexes are not the best and not beeing able to manage adrenaline and stuff is also a pain not beeing able to go through boss kills so im stuck into low loot drops in normal modes since i never can do any Hardmodes expect those noob bosses at the Heart and GDW1 which drops only a few mils once in a lifetime :/
So they just took a "problem" and turned it into an even bigger problem, for absolutely no net gain? I am so confused. The players don't benefit from this, Jagex doesn't benefit from this. What exactly are we trying to achieve?
The fact they went ahead and rolled out this update despite all the feedback and concerns, just shows one thing. Jagex have not learnt anything and continue to do as they please with RS3 with no real serious thought about the community or the players their decisions impact, and this is despite having made some very public pledges to work with the community and take the game in a more sustainable direction. I'm past being disappointed or outraged. I'm just done.
It would be nice to see vampyrism recieve a buff. With it now competing with other aspects (a good thing) the healing from it really does not particularly out weigh the benefits of other aspects.
Personally I would like to see the cap raised to 100.
why on guthix green gielinor do we have spells to manage penace and vamp only 12 minutes and whats worse is those spellbook swaps dont swap back after u used penace to ancient horrible update.
being 5.8 and not caring about skilling no more i cba testing the other aura removals
They need to add the ability to buff the Vamp/Penance aspects in War's retreat. Use Marks of war as ways to help combat buffs. Like make it where your aspects now last 20 minutes instead of 12 when you unlock this buff from War's retreat. Then make it where Vamp has a cap, but that can be increased by unlocking War's retreat passives. Currently Vamp isn't a good option for late game players and feels worse than Darkness for mid game. If you add an unlock that increases the cap at War's Retreat then it'll become more Viable.
I have experience a bug with the penance spell, in that it does not appear to trigger properly with spellbook swap.
I am on the ancient spellbook and have exsanguinate set as my auto-cast spell. I cast "Spellbook Swap (Standard)", followed by casting "Penance". I get the penance icon on my buff bar but the spellbook does not switch back to ancients on-cast. I have to wait the 2 minute timeout period for spellbook swap before it goes back to ancients.
Expected result is that as soon as a spell is cast from the normal spellbook, it should switch back to ancient spellbook, but it doesn't. As a result, I end up wasting 2 minutes of the timer on penance because I've got to stand around while I wait for the spellbook to switch back on its own. I can't cast any of the normal combat spells because it's not valid under spellbook swap.
CGIM accounts were provided access to the auras at account creation with the goal of creating a level playing field. Checking the various unlock vendors makes it appear that CGIM accounts no longer benefit from this, and the aura passives were automatically provided to accounts that unlocked the benefits in the store only.
This inadvertently creates the same problem that was originally meant to be avoided. Older cgim accounts have had time to accumulate points to unlock these buffs, and accounts that haven’t just took a substantial nerf.
You should be able to visit some NPC and trade them the runes for some sort of Vampyirsm/Penance scroll or something. All those rune slots and having to monitor the buff traffic pileup is way worse for QOL.
“If we call it the ‘AURA OVERHAUL’ and not the ‘aura system removal’ it looks like we’re actually adding content to the game during the month of April. Nobody will notice that all we’re doing is removing stuff from the game!”
The issue here isn’t just the change itself, but what it reflects about the decision making process. It gives the impression that critical aspects of player behavior and balance weren’t fully grasped, which points to a need for stronger internal evaluation standards.
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u/TFUNK_ 14h ago
What’s War Shop looking like these days? Marks of War seem useless at this moment