I know what you’re thinking: “But SpuckMcDuck, they didn’t give the SRA a nerf, the other change was also a buff to the stacking mechanic!” And you could be forgiven for thinking that, since it does appear that way at face value. I suspect even Jagex themselves think these stack changes are a buff, and I haven’t seen anyone else talking about why that isn’t the case, which is why I felt the need to write this post. But without an accompanying change to the stack degrade timer to allow staying at max stacks between kills, the stack changes are actually a nerf on every kill other than your first one of a trip, because now when you lose a stack between kills, you are losing a bigger chunk of your buff while gaining no benefit from the reduced max stacks. Let’s use Vard as an example, since he’s one of the main use cases for the SRA: On your first kill, you attack 3 times to hit the max strength boost. Cool, this is an improvement from the 5 attacks it would’ve taken before. On this first kill , you got to max damage faster and lost less HP doing it. Great. Now, for your second kill and every subsequent kill of the trip , you wait ~10 seconds for Vard to respawn and you are forced to lose one stack during that time - maybe even two if you needed to do some inventory management or something before starting your next kill. But since each stack is now 10% of the buff instead of the previous 6%, you are now losing that 10% on your first attack of every kill rather than the previous 6%. And since you aren’t starting from 0 stacks, you aren’t benefiting at all from the lower max stacks: you would need an attack or two - and the accompanying HP loss - to hit max stacks regardless of whether that’s going from 2->3 stacks or 4->5 stacks. In either case, you still have to attack once and lose 8 HP to get back to the max, but now your first attack is taking you from 20%->30% instead of 24%->30%. So the bottom line is, the stack changes are a buff to your very first kill when you’re starting from 0 stacks, but a nerf to every kill of a trip after that until you go bank and start from 0 again for the reduced max stacks to be relevant . Is this a big nerf? No. The +4 base strength buff is almost certainly going to outweigh this in all cases such that it’s still a net buff in all cases. But my point is, why did there need to be a nerf alongside the buff at all? Giving us only the +4 strength boost with no changes to the stack mechanic would’ve been better than this and still very much an acceptably conservative buff. But even better than that would be giving us the +4 strength boost and the stack mechanic changes including a longer stack degrade time that would enable these stack changes to be an actual buff, since it would eliminate the issue outlined above . Again, I’m not even sure Jagex meant for this to be a nerf, but it is, so I really hope they see this and reconsider. Now, the one counterpoint to this is that the stack changes are a buff if you’re using the SRA somewhere with a long respawn timer such that you’re starting every kill at 0 no matter what, since then you would actually benefit from the lower max stacks on every kill. But the thing is…the SRA is still not going to be a desirable pick at those places, even with this “buff.” The HP loss and delayed damage ramp-up is really undesirable to deal with on every kill, and that will remain the case even with these changes. If the goal was to make the SRA desirable at long-respawn bosses, they really just need to remove stacks altogether, or at least the HP drain aspect. TL;DR: while the strength increase does make the net effect a buff, the stack changes themselves are a nerf to every kill past the first one of a trip since all further kills are going to start already at a stack or two from the cap and thus don’t benefit from a reduced cap, while losing a greater percentage of the damage buff from the one or two stacks they’re missing. In order of best to worst solutions: keep the proposed changes and also give an extension to the stack degradation timer to make the stack changes actually a buff > give only the +4 strength buff and don’t touch stacks at all > do what is currently being proposed and give +4 strength while nerfing stacks. submitted by /u/SpuckMcDuck
Originally posted by u/SpuckMcDuck on r/2007scape