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The Mad Angel and Ironman mode

The Mad Angel charging her Lightning Smite in the cathedral nave, with the player mid scythe swing
The Mad Angel charging her Lightning Smite in the cathedral nave, with the player mid scythe swing

The Mad Angel is in the game: a solo instanced boss fought in the Ardeaglais cathedral, with three specials that each pay you back for reading them correctly. Accounts can now be made Ironman from a new account type window, Tekton opens as the second room of the Chambers of Xeric, and the sixteen non-combat skills finally have things worth training for.

Highlights

  • The Mad Angel - a new solo boss in her own instanced cathedral, with three specials, an enrage at 45 percent, and a drop table paying the Hallowfell greatsword and the pet Aggy.
  • Ironman mode - a new account type you pick once, on your first login or with ::gamemode. No trading, no exchange, no staking, no other player's loot, and a crown beside your name.
  • Tekton - the second room of the Chambers of Xeric is open, so a raid now runs Entrance, Tekton, then the Great Olm.
  • Skilling has a point now - blood trees and blood shoals join the blood rocks, Agility exists at last with eight rooftop courses, and every 99 can be worn as a cape.
  • Untradeables break rather than drop - fire capes, defenders, Void and the rest now break when you die, and Perdu will put them back together for a price.

New content

  • The Mad Angel - she sleeps on her throne until you click Wake, then fights across the cathedral nave at 755 hitpoints and a max hit of 31. Reach her from the Bosses tab of ::teles or with ::madangel; crush is her weakest defence by a clear margin.
  • Reading her specials pays - flicking Protect from Magic on as her Lightning Smite lands negates it and guarantees your next hit maxes, and stepping sideways out of a Sword Cleave gives your next attack full accuracy and a floor of half your max hit. Her Exploding Light homes in on you, and standing on it punts it back into her for real damage, so running from it was never the dodge.
  • Hallowfell and Aggy - the greatsword drops at 1 in 128 and swings its own stance, and it is the first weapon here that cleaves more than one target at once. The pet Aggy drops at 1 in 1000.
  • Tekton in the Chambers of Xeric - the second chamber is live, with his anvil, his lava ring and the west wall passage out to the corridor. The three rooms after him stay closed until they have had the same pass.
  • Ironman accounts - the account type window opens once when you leave the design screen, and ::gamemode reopens it while the choice is still yours. An ironman still spawns items and still uses presets; what they lose is trading, the Grand Exchange, staking, other players' loot and any free loadout the server hands out.
  • Blood trees and blood shoals - Woodcutting and Fishing now have the reward shape Mining had, each with three sites on a risk ladder that pays far more the deeper into the Wilderness you go, a four-piece outfit worth up to double, and a master at home who ferries you to their own sites.
  • Agility - was never implemented and now is: eight rooftop courses covering levels 10 to 90, marks of grace on the roofs, and the full Graceful set in a shop that takes them.
  • Skill capes and the max cape - Mac stands at home selling all 23 capes, their hoods, the trimmed versions and the Max cape for coins. He checks the 99 is real, so a boost will not buy one, and no cape gives combat stats.
  • Pickaxes and axes have a source - the prospector and the lumberjack keep coins-priced tool counters. Neither tier was spawnable or sold anywhere before, which meant neither skill could be started at all.
  • Anglerfish and super combat potions are earnable - anglerfish at 82 Fishing and 84 Cooking, super combats at 90 Herblore. Both stay out of the spawn tab and stay in the blood money shop.
Tekton mid-fight in his lava-ringed chamber, stepped off his anvil towards the player
Tekton mid-fight in his lava-ringed chamber, stepped off his anvil towards the player

Combat and balance

  • Herbs drop now - no monster in the game dropped a single herb before this, so Herblore could not be trained. Noted grimy herbs are graded across 71 boss tables, and every herb stays drop-only.
  • Item breaking and repair - eleven untradeables break instead of dropping when you die. Perdu at the Edgeville ditch repairs a whole inventory or a whole bank in the currency you would buy the piece with, and whoever killed you is dropped 65 percent of that repair bill as salvage.
  • Blood node payouts cut - the first pass at gathering rates paid roughly 24,000 blood money an hour on safe ground, against a mid boss paying 32 a kill. The bands are five times lower and the rate is now measured by a test that prints the whole table.
  • Safe nodes pay no token - gathering north of the ditch is where the reward is, so a safe site pays experience and resources only. Skillers stay content for player killers.

Interface and quality of life

  • Teleport search, favourites and drop tables - each tab of the teleport window has a search field, every row leads with a star that pins it to the top of its tab, and a Drops button beside Teleport opens the Bestiary on the boss you have selected. The pinned Home plate is gone; Home is a spellbook teleport and the Portal Nexus stands on its tile.
  • Skilling achievements - the Achievements window has Combat and Skilling tabs. Skilling is 16 skills at five rungs each, and progress reads off your levels, so an existing account backfills its own on the first open. ::sa opens it.
  • Music that keeps playing - the client now tells the server when a track ends, so Auto shuffles onward instead of repeating one song for ever and Loop is a real loop. Muting the music and unmuting it later resumes the track rather than leaving you in silence.
  • The server tour - the new-player tour covers eight home landmarks now, and every stop looks down a fixed diagonal so the subject is actually in shot rather than behind the camera.

Client and performance

  • Update your client - this release changes the wire protocol in two places, so an old client against the new server will not show crowns correctly and will stop its music after one song. The launcher picks the new build up on its own.
  • The Mad Angel's sounds are in her animations - her swings, her specials and her death play sounds carried in the animation frames themselves, so they land on the right frame rather than on a server timer.

Fixes

  • Perdu never worked - talking to him crashed on every attempt, and repair prices for anything the blood money shop does not stock came out at zero, so a broken Infernal cape was permanently unrepairable. Both are fixed and every price is now written down rather than derived.
  • Four skill cape emotes were wrong - the Hitpoints cape pointed at an animation that does not exist and played nothing at all, the Slayer cape borrowed another creature's graphic, Farming had none, and every hooded cape was an unwearable placeholder.
  • Long dialogue lines crashed the chat box - a line of NPC dialogue that wrapped onto five rows threw out of the dialogue instead of printing, which could leave you stuck on "Please wait...". Lines now wrap into the four slots the chat box actually has.
  • The blood shoals were on dry land - all three fishing sites were standing on the bank rather than in the water. They have been moved onto real water tiles.
  • Tekton's chamber - the way out is the baked passage in the west wall, and Tekton could get stuck inside his own movement block while planted at the anvil. Both are sorted.

Behind the scenes

  • Animations can be re-numbered on import - a boss whose animations collide with ids this revision already uses can now be brought in at fresh ids, which is the only reason the Mad Angel's core set works at all.
  • Rates are measured, not guessed - gathering payouts, drop rates and repair payouts all have tests that compute the real numbers against the live shop and drop tables and fail the build when one drifts.