There have been loads of posts here over the last couple of years about how the Ectofuntus is dead content because it’s totally overshadowed by every other Prayer method on either cost efficiency, training speed or both. The main issue is that the Varlamore bone shards totally eclipse the Ectofuntus’ measly 4x xp bonus with an effective minimum multiplier of 4x up to as much as 6x on some bones on top of its much faster process speed, so whether you’re after speed or cost efficiency the libation pool wins every time. Obviously the gilded altars have a niche for reduced processing time/chiller gameplay whilst Chaos Altar has the highest theoretical rate balanced with the risk of being pk’d, but the Ectofuntus is left with no such niche. The only niche use the Ectofuntus does have is that it’s the only way to get Ectotokens, but the problem is the tokens are almost useless - the best use for them is to charge a Bonecrusher, but even that consumes so few tokens its basically irrelevant. I do however think the solution to making the Ectofuntus relevant again does lie with providing more uses for Ectotokens though, and I like the idea that the Bonecrusher introduces whereby the tokens are effectively exchangeable for Prayer XP. Obviously the simplest fix would be to make it so you can directly buy Prayer XP with the tokens from an NPC like Necrovarius like you do with the tickets from the Brimhaven course, but I think that’s pretty boring. Instead, my suggestion is a Boat Facility like the Crystal Extractor, only for the as-yet un-navigable Eastern Ocean that allows (or will allow in future) boats to traverse Cursed Seas. This fits really nicely with the lore of the game, given that the ships docked in Port Phasmatys [literally have miniature Ectofuntuses aboard]( https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Ectofuntus/_(small) . One option would be to call the facility an Ectofuntus, or to avoid confusion it could be called something like an Ecto-extractor or Ectopropeller. As well as allowing boats to traverse Cursed Seas, the Ectopropeller could also be charged with Ectotokens allowing it to capture wind motes like the Crystal Extractor, only providing Prayer XP instead of Sailing XP when the motes are then used. For simplicity I’d probably have the Ectopropeller work at the same 250xp per 109 second cadence as the Crystal Extractor and in terms of charge consumption, my first thought would be to calibrate this around the value you get from a bonecrusher which averages to 55xp per token with the Elite Morytania diary and 27xp per token without. The Ectopropeller would probably therefore consume either 5 or 10 tokens per 250xp - maybe 10 with the Elite Diary halving to 5? Regardless, providing a flat, redeemable XP value to the tokens in this way gives the Ectofuntus a really interesting niche use: because the XP per token is fixed it actually provides a bigger relative benefit to lower tier bones and turns it into the king of cheap Prayer XP, which is incidentally exactly what it was originally intended to be (takes longer to train, but you get more XP per bone). This change would make normal bones somewhere between Baby Dragon bones and Wyvern bones at the gilded altar in terms of xp per bone, but obviously be a lot slower in terms of xp/hr in exchange. It also provides a link between the Prayer skill and the Sailing skill which I think is an interesting idea, as both skills current suffer quite badly in terms of being in their own silos without much connection to other skills. Obviously there’s some risk of destabilising bone prices in the short term, but in the long run I think this will even out for a few reasons: Firstly, the Ectofuntus will still be arduous and slow, so I don’t think many people will be buying large volumes of normal bones to use it as a main training method - rather it’ll see more people using the free grind service from Robin to charge their boat facilities and only grinding bones at low levels where they want maximum value for every gp spent. The main beneficiaries of this method would probably be Ironmen as they can now squeeze a lot of xp out of lower tier bones before they’re able to gather better ones, and as Ectotokens are untradeable it’s not even like people would be processing bones for profit, which keeps Prayer as a “buyable” skill rather than a profitable one. Secondly, the cadence of the facility itself acts as a cap on how many Ectotokens a player can actually redeem anyway - even if you generate 15k tokens you can only actually use 560/hr max. This is also why the Elite diary bonus isn’t overpowered: you may be using the tokens at half the rate, but the xp/hr remains the same. TL;DR We should be able to build a miniature Ectofuntus as a boat facility that consumes Ectotokens in exchange for Prayer XP at a rate comparable to the Crystal Extractor. What do you guys think? Is there anything I’ve missed? submitted by /u/SMURGwastaken
Originally posted by u/SMURGwastaken on r/2007scape