Original Reddit post

The first combat situation in the quest is Mudfoot trying to attack a ranger with a hammer and doing 0 damage. He’s confused since he knows rangers are weak to melee, but the combat tutor tells him that even though that’s true, ranged armor is weak to stab, not crush. The lesson is that even if you’re following the combat triangle correctly, it’s important to use the right attack type too. If you’re a new player, this is confusing right off the bat. First off, the implication that using the wrong attack type is no more effective than using the wrong combat style is almost never true in the early game. Second, saying “melee is good against ranged” and then immediately following that up by saying “but actually, you need to use stab against rangers” begs the question of what exactly slash and crush are for- a question which the quest never answers. This would’ve been a good opportunity to build intuition. If the quest explained the general rules for using each attack type (Stab is good against thick hides and scales. Slash is good against flesh. Crush is good against physically tough foes, like skeletons and golems), that would be something new players could apply elsewhere. Instead, it just gives you a factoid and expects you to memorize it: stab is good against ranger armor. This is very difficult to generalize to other armors and enemy types. That’s all bad, but the biggest problem is that the quest doesn’t cover magic and ranged attack types. The combat triangle is basic Runescape knowledge which people might be aware of even before they start playing. Elemental weaknesses and ranged types, on the other hand, were only added to OSRS in 2024. There are longterm players who still don’t fully understand light/standard/heavy ranged attacks. This quest would’ve been the perfect place to introduce these concepts, but they aren’t even a footnote. So melee is shown as having several different attack types, but magic and ranged aren’t. The natural conclusion here for any new player would be that there’s just “magic” and “ranged” damage, with no differentiation inside of that. They might at least be able to figure out this is wrong for magic, since it’s obvious that there are different elements. On the other hand, maybe they’ll watch one of the millions of youtube videos from before the changes and think that elements are still just a way to scale damage, with fire being objectively the best. They’d probably have no chance of figuring out ranged attack types by themselves. Those are barely even acknowledged in game. And in any case, they’ll see two of the three melee attack types as useless, or at the very least not obviously useful. This quest was clearly designed to reduce dependence on the wiki, but at best it’ll just raise more questions, and at worst it’ll give people a false understanding of how combat works. In its current state, I think it’s arguably a net negative for the game and should get major changes. submitted by /u/KnobelKnight

Originally posted by u/KnobelKnight on r/2007scape