To cut straight to the point, is sailing combat even meaningfully different to normal combat? I would say, no not really. And it really should be. It somehow manages to miss the 25 prior years of combat development & design and has managed to make 300 different increasing levels of chickens to fight. If chickens had 200+ hp. And took 5 seconds to loot, every kill. The main cacophony concerning sailing combat’s balance has been around using your own weapons on the boat and cannons not being worthwhile, and I feel this is a symptom of how the design overall has been considered, rather than the actual overall problem. Why, exactly, is using our own weapons whilst manning a boat even a consideration for naval combat? To clarify better, why is it a viable option to be in range with a handheld weapon ever for sailing creatures? How much damage your cannon does wouldn’t matter if we had to actually use our boat in the boat skill. Cannons feel like thralls because that is what they are. You are just fighting on a boat, you are not fighting with one. I don’t mind the option to use your weapons personally (like why would you not be able to when given the chance), but it’s comedic how little your actual boat seems to matter when fighting things at sea, especially when there was the baffling decision to just let you have nigh infinite amounts of boat hp stored in your cargo hold. You do just tank and spank every single sailing creature, no exceptions. Why move when your range is so pathetically small (for some reason) that you just cannot fight? Why does my moving vehicle not actually work to avoid damage by moving? Ways to avoid damage are literally tutorialised in the game, in yknow, tutorial island. Shooting rats through a fence and all. Then you get to sailing and it just says that doesn’t matter, sorry! Spam food and stand still like its an rpg I would’ve made in scratch and immediately abandoned as a kid. You get afk rocks and janky wander radius safespots, and you’ll be happy. I’m not even factoring in krakens and their super-long-range-screw-you mage attacks into this, it is somehow difficult to kite a literal tern without getting hit. But, why would I even want to kite a tern? Even if your boat was magically and suddenly considered and you needed to avoid taking damage (as you should), why is a seabird taking up a considerable enough time frame to justify kiting it? Another, obvious piece of contention (and memery) is seabirds having as much health as a fight cave mager. Genuinely, why is this the case? If it is to make tasks less ‘annoying’ by killing hundreds of birds, why was it not considered first of all to, maybe, let your crewmates auto aggro, or better yet, make harvesting inherently less tedious? It has led to each sailing encounter being fundamentally identical hp sponges with no differences, besides visuals and the ever exotic 15 flat armour kraken rearing its head (and showing that magic ignores flat armour for some reason???) And that is the thing, there are no differences . At all. Your entire progression up to 99 does not change whatsoever. Take for comparison, slayer; you are given a variety of creatures that need a specific item equipped or used upon them to slay them during the early levels, mid levels introduce cannonable singles targets like trolls & bloodvelds, and later levels give the option of burstable and/or cannonable mobs like dust devils, nechyraels and smoke devils. At pretty much every point, your loot drops to the floor directly, and it is up to you to decide what to pick up. (Clarification: I am not saying slayer is *good , I am saying sailing combat is worse) Sailing combat? Whittle down a 200+ hp mob, click the corpse, wait 5 seconds, and get your loot. You do not know what your loot is beforehand, and you have to interact with the corpse or you get nothing. Drop the evidently horrendous loot. Rinse and repeat for 2000 kills. For each mob. You can make it even more tedious and roll for rng port tasks for… some coins! And worse xp than just doing trials and combat separately. It’s understandable why you have to net corpses thematically, but functionally it introduces so much sheer tedium that it constrains how the mobs were designed, leading to seagulls that do not have the hp of seagulls; because individually looting each seagull for feathers is not something a sane person would do if it was optional. And it still isn’t, but you have to roll the dead bird corpse lootbox for the 1/1000 maclunkey pearl drop! Sailing seems to take the tedium of early slayer, and combines it with the additional tedium of high level slayer mobs that didn’t get the memo of being fast kills & high xp like everything else cough drakes cough leading to an exhausting loop where you are better off just not touching the game and doing something else. There is no ‘chill’ option like goading pot slayer and nothing considerably depthful or challenging like… Corp? I’m intentionally lowballing here, Corp gets called the chicken boss yet has more depth than the entire breadth of sailing creatures that are literal chickens. Chickens have more mechanics! They lay eggs! I could probably compare any piece of content offensive to someone (toa) and pull out more positive points in comparison to grinding vampyre krakens. (also why are the vampire krakens of evidently vampiric nature not in the vampire region that is walled off with anti vampire water) Note that I haven’t even mentioned any explicit mechanics with the combat, because there aren’t any. No, krakens using mage attacks doesn’t change being a stat stick you spam repair kits on for every single situation. I don’t exactly know why this is how it ended up besides combat being rushed out the door for the sailing release (the sailing combat beta being virtually identical to the alpha was enough of a sign), but the literal same update introduced aquanites, gryphons & strykewyrms each with different ways to combat them (mainly gryphons (mainly shellbane), aquanites and strykewyrms are largely flavor). It cannot be such an insane stretch to have something like a big fish that you need to blind with a lantern or freeze to slow it down, or simple toxic cloud AoEs from a sea-zulrah to have you do literally anything except sit still. There isn’t even something as basic as the combat triangle present to bandaid the utterly brittle foundation because a boat cannot exactly pray. sailing combat is just out here, utterly naked and proud to what I’d hope is most people’s chagrin. And a quick final aside, it’s weird how safe the sea is, considering you can’t even lose much. You can’t exactly shove loot into your cargo hold, and you don’t die when capsizing. You aren’t even really attacked on your boat itself, besides very obviously labelled dangerous bottles conveniently ignored by ultimate ironmen. You’d have to manage to die whilst salvaging or trawling to ‘lose’ a meaningful amount of loot, which, again, you can hold so much boat health in your cargo. A mere 9000+. Something like, yknow, any actual depth should have been considered at launch , because this is Jagex and literally anything planned post-release just does not happen. It’s like serving eggs and flour to someone and expecting a cake to spontaneously bake itself; a) that doesn’t happen b) you forgot the milk where is my milk jagex I know full well the last quest wasn’t milk, and I’d like to have a cake before the eggs expire. There are more and worse flaws than just cannon damage, and for the love of god I hope they get fixed, because I can’t see a trajectory for the current content to expand in that leads to anything meaningfully engaging. submitted by /u/Sephesly
Originally posted by u/Sephesly on r/2007scape