23
votes
Sailing skill is live on Oldschool Runescape as of two weeks ago
Ive been playing nonstop for the past two weeks basically, took last week off work so I could play. Lvl 67 as of this morning and I’m a little behind my clan mates who are 80s pushing 90s
Thoughts in general? Thoughts on salvaging nerf this am?
Haven’t played in years and think it sounds neat? It is. Bond up and play, sailing is a meta skill so you can lvl up while you level up but watch out for random crates of alcohol in the sea cause while you get xp from sampling…. Sometimes they tele you to the abyss cause Jagex is pro troll
I was initially skeptical of the skill when it was proposed, as I thought it felt too disconnected and I worried there would be too stark a division between ocean stuff and the rest of the game, the way Dungeoneering was in RS3. But Ive been pleasantly surprised at how good it is.
Ive gotten to level 72 now and have a pretty well upgraded skiff on my Ironman. Ive been dabbling in all the different sailing activities.
Port tasks have been my main source of XP, I like it alot, its really the quintessential sailing experience I was hoping for. Especially once you unlock enough ports to have more complicated shipping routes and the ability to have a few crewmates.
Salvaging hasnt felt like its particularly good xp anyway, even outside the rate changes that have been such a controversy. But being able to get into a double shipwreck spot with crewmates manning the hooks is such a good AFK setup for when I want to put it in the background that I really dont care about the rates.
Barracuda trials suck though. Tempor Tantrum was good and I have no complaints, but its too low xp to keep doing after getting the Marlin rank. Jubbly was such a pain in the ass that I gave up on it after Shark, and from what I hear Gwenyth Glide is even worse. But I guess for the kind of people who are good at that precision clicking it might be fun.
Charting the seas is kinda nice when you randomly stumble upon stuff, but I feel like it would be really hard to complete naturally without a guide. Especially when considering the Mermaid clues, I have no idea what half of those riddles are supposed to be, even after looking up the answer.
I have a few compliants. My biggest one is that the cargo hold being positioned under the mast makes it a real pain to unload cargo on delivery tasks. I wish they would move that. I also think there are some quality of life UI changes they could make, like having the default dock option be to board your previous boat instead of bringing up the selection window.
I also hate that you can log out on your boat and be fine, but if you dock on a non-port island and log out you magically return to your last port but your boat is left behind and you need to recover it. I also dont like that you cant use the Summon Boat spell if you leave your boat out at sea.
Ship combat and fish trawling both feel undercooked, I think those need some work before I would consider doing much of it, it doesnt feel particularly rewarding and also its kinda slow.
On the whole though, Im not the kind of person who cares much about how fast the optimal playstyle is or any of the stuff the community is angry about. I just enjoy sailing around with my 2-3 crewmates and pretending I have friends. I also really like that now I can travel between continents without needing to use a fade-to-black travel method.
Good addition to the game overall, looking forward to how they build on it going forward.
With you on the position of the cargo. Ive just gotten used to it.
And yea I JUST beat shark jubbly last night, I was stoked. I’ll prob attempt marlin but I didnt do tempor marlin either so idk. Tile markers totally change the game, I didnt have tile markers on tempor, I may go back and finish that with them.
Theres a lot of ways to lose your boat… i just pay the recover fee lol its not too bad.
Upgrading to camphor hull and sails helped me a lot on Jubbly. That said there's still some weirdness going on with hitboxes, it took me a while to finally get in the groove of it. If you're on Runelite there's tile packs now too which help, as well as turning off 117hd and enabling GPU instead. Fixes a lot of the lagginess.
Overall I think your assessment is fair, but I would like to see more intertwining with the rest of the game moving forward. Right now it seems like you level sailing to... Just level sailing. There's minimal to no benefit outside the skill to the rest of the game. With that said, I get that it's hard to incorporate old content into something new. I'm sure as they release more new content they can likely get things intertwined. Feels like fire making at the moment where there's only very niche benefits to leveling up the skill, to which it can otherwise be mostly ignored.
Thats true. I think that this could be remedied by just making the islands better. Other than the Great Conch and the islands with unique trees I dont feel like any of the islands have much reason to visit more than once. But that could be a nice way to make sailing relevant to other skills if they put more useful resources there.
Same for me, I was going through it with teak and I didn't even think about it but I upgraded to camphor and immediately got shark on the first try. With teak I was consistently like 10 seconds short.
buying a gf
(To go sailing with)
I've got a near maxed character but hadn't played OSRS in a couple years.
I was/am in the camp that thinks sailing doesn't make sense as its own skill but I wasn't active at the time the skills were voted or for the duration of the sailing blogs, though I have always kept an eye on the general goings on of the game.
When the release date for sailing was announced I decided to re-up my membership and see if I could profit off the release.
In the first couple days after release I made keel parts until 99 smithing. It was something like 100k+ xp/hr and very profitable. For a bit, large steel keel parts were selling for around 50k-60k a pop but the cost of the bars to make them was <20k. I mostly made addy parts though since that was better xp even at less profit.
For a while, hull parts were also a profitable way to train construction but then someone posted about it to reddit and that ended.
Farming cotton has been pretty profitable but it's starting to decline too. For a while, the seeds were about 1k each. You use 3 seeds for each patch so a crop of cotton bolls had a cost of around 3k. A single cotton boll would sell for 4k - 4.2k and you could sometimes get upwards of 20 cotton bolls per harvest. It's down to around 2.8k per cotton boll now so still a tidy profit.
I haven't touched sailing since the quest to unlock it so far. I just don't have a ton of interest in it (and not a lot of time to actively play the game right now) but I'll get around to it eventually and maybe my mind will be changed. As of today, you can get sailing xp from Tears of Guthix so I jumped from level 5 (from the quest) to 16 without having set foot on a raft since the quest.
I know a ton of people who made bank just merching, crazy stuff!
I've never played RuneScape, in middle school into high school it was straight diablo 2 and age of empires for us, then WoW and CoD took over.
I could watch a video or 2 but to rouse up discussion, can you give a 5-mile-high overview of what the game is about? Is it basically collector simulator? Are there skill/passive trees for spells/attacks? What is your goal when you log in?
Runescape is a but different than other MMOs in that beyond conventional PvP and PvM combat, there is a very significant "skilling" aspect to the game of mechanics that dont need to intersect with combat at all.
Runescape has very high xp targets to reach max level, so its very grind intensive, and thus a lot of the game is a mix of low effort low xp rate training methods and high effort high xp rate methods. So some players really lock in and play intensively to train skills, while others do more AFK training that basically involves sitting around in one place for a long time, which makes it kind of like a background task that you can easily do while also watching TV or chatting with friends.
The typical goals are either to hunt for rare items that come as rare drops, or to try to maximize your various skill levels through training.
If you do engage in combat, there are few to no special abilities or skill trees. The combat is mostly determined by your stat levels and gear, but most of the playing skill has to do with managing your timing and positioning to avoid damage and keep yourself healed while maintaining damage output.
On top of this, there's no "seasons" and old content generally stays relevant far into the future. I've heard other MMOs tend to release new content that immediately makes old best in slot items obsolete. I'm glad OSRS doesn't work like that.
It has quests and skills and combat but its really sandboxy and a lot of the gameplay is completely different from most mmos which heavily rely on quests for game progression. You can get really far in runescape without quests at all if you wanted.