I love the osrs wiki; it’s a top contender for best wiki for any game of all time, up there with the Terraria wiki. But I feel like there’s a lot of things that aren’t supposed to be cryptic that the game doesn’t explain at all, and we inevitably turn to the wiki. For starters, a lot of items that have practical uses don’t explain themselves at all. Tormented synapses will give you a text box explaining that you need an iron bar and a battlestaff if you try to make a purging staff without all the ingredients, and tells you it needs to be done at an anvil if you try to just combine them in your inventory. However, it doesn’t tell you anything about how to make a scorching bow, and that you specifically need an unstrung magic longbow (something you can’t fletch until 11 levels after you can make a scorching bow). Nothing about the torva armor or the ancient furnace you repair it at make any reference to bandos components (if you even know you can break down bandos armor, which isn’t something you do with any non-gwd armor), and the nihil horn examine doesn’t even imply it’s supposed to be a weapon, much less that it’s an upgrade for the armadyl crossbow. Most of the time, combat mechanics are explained decently well (not including on-hit vs on-animation, which is something you’d learn from a youtube video instead of the wiki), assuming you have game chat open (I had chat closed during BMR, so it took me a while to figure out the venator screech). But I recently died to an Elder Aquanite because I hadn’t read the wiki page for it beforehand, didn’t bring food to a task I can camp a protection prayer for, and couldn’t figure out how its punish attack worked. The game chat only says “Your protection prayers have been disabled!” which is the same message Amoxliatl gives when she turns off your prayers before launching an on-hit projectile. I even tried turning off my prayer when the aquanite’s projectile was launched, thinking it behaved like Echo Hunlef’s prayer inversion attack, but that didn’t work. Nothing in game hinted at the fact that they hit you for 20-50 damage guaranteed if you’re camping protect magic, and I had to turn to the wiki to find that out. Even if I wanted to try and learn through trial and error, the fact that it’s a superior monster means I don’t really get a choice in whether I even get to. Jagex is usually good about this with bosses, since there are other examples where mechanics are pretty self-explanatory, and some items will offer more explanation. The broken zombie axe and Belle’s folly have an “inspect” option that tells you where to go to fix them (if you have the level to). Doom’s hyper beam is pretty obvious (bar fills up, you die), and the equipment slot you need to unequip for Sol’s grab attack is bolded, which hints at what you need to do to dodge it. I just think they need to be more consistent about providing in-game means of figuring these things out instead of just letting the wiki handle it. submitted by /u/SimbabTheSailor
Originally posted by u/SimbabTheSailor on r/2007scape