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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Laboratory - RuneScape Gameplay Testing and Myth Busting

The RuneScoop Laboratory - RuneScape Gameplay Testing and Myth Busting The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #2 - Sara and Zammy Have a Water Fight

Note: See RuneScoop Lab report #10 for a follow-up test conducted after the change from Hitpoints to Constitution / Life Points.

Published: January 27, 2010
Last Revised: February 7, 2010

Last week, Jagex released an overhaul of the Barbarian Assault minigame. As part of this update, the +4 strength bonus was removed from the fighter torso, a piece of armor that can be obtained using points earned in the game. This led to a hue and cry typical of what happens whenever a certain class of player is denied a strength bonus for whatever reason.

I can understand why some players were unhappy—some got the fighter torso solely for this +4 strength boost, and it wasn’t really fair for Jagex to just take it away. But the reaction to its removal seemed to me to be way out of proportion. This started me thinking more generally about strength boosts, and how many RuneScape players seem to have an almost religious approach to maximizing their strength bonus. This has led not only to the preoccupation with items like the fighter torso, but also to insane prices for other gear that provides even small strength boosts.

My own personal experience, based on literally hundreds of hours of playtesting, has been to notice very little real-world benefit to adding or removing a few strength bonus points. I had never done any objective, scientific testing of the matter, though. This recent event spurred me to try to answer, once and for all, the question of how important strength bonuses really are.

I don’t own a fighter torso, but I have another piece of gear that I thought would be perfect for this sort of test: a berserker ring. This ring provides a +4 strength boost (along with a +4 crush defence boost, which isn’t of relevance here), and is extremely expensive: as I write this, it is worth from 3 to over 10 times as much as the other Fremennik rings. So I set out to test how effective I would be at combat both with and without this ring.

I quickly realized, though, that comparing combat with and without a ring was really an incomplete test. I wanted to know not only how much of a benefit a berserker ring provided, but how much of an advantage it provided compared to alternatives that could be worn in the same slot. A natural choice was the warrior ring, a much cheaper Fremennik ring that gives a +4 slash attack bonus instead of strength. It also costs less than 1/10th of what a bersker ring goes for. How would it match up?

Next, I had to decide what to fight. Most players care about strength bonuses most when fighting against tough NPCs and other players. There wasn’t any reliable way to do PvP testing in a scientific way, so I focused on timed tests against a selection of high-level monsters, some of which were chosen to simulate fighting tough players. All of the monsters selected had large numbers of life points, to ensure accuracy, but the had some subtle but important differences in other areas. The four monsters I selected were:

• Abyssal Demons: The archetype of a high-level monster, these have mid-to-high defence and 1500 LP.
  
  
• Black Dragons: Chosen because of their high defence and high life points totals; I felt these better represented fighting against other players wearing heavy armor.
  
  
• Living Rock Strikers: These monsters were specifically selected for their low defence, which I felt would give an advantage to the berserker ring.
  
  
• Giant Rock Crabs: These little fellas were added at the end as a bit of a “torture test”: they have such high defence that most players recommend against meleeing them at all, so they represent the toughest opponents.

All of the tests were done under identical conditions in all cases, with the same equipment except for the presence or absence of the appropriate ring. My normal equipment setup was a helm of Neitiznot, Soul Wars cape, amulet of fury, abyssal whip, granite platebody, rune defender, Barrows gloves and dragon boots. For the black dragons I switched to prayer gear instead and used Deflect Melee. The whip was of course set to slash mode.

No boosting potions were used, to avoid introducing errors or biases related to the timing at which the bonuses wore off. I used a stopwatch, which I started at the beginning of combat with each monster, and stopped when it died. I then checked to see how many experience points I gained during combat, and normalized the results to equivalents for a full hour of combat.

I tested abyssal demons for about 45 minutes for each equipment setup, black dragons and living rock strikers for around 20 minutes each, and giant rock crabs for about 30 to 35 minutes. This is just time in combat, not including travel time, time to pick up drops or whatever. Total test time was just under six hours in combat.

Table 1 summarizes the results obtained during my tests; these figures are also shown graphically in Figure 1.

Note that the average is weighted based on how much time was spent fighting each monster.

These results show clearly that a +4 strength bonus does have some benefit—it was pretty consistent at providing faster XP compared to not using one. The only exception was with the giant rock crabs, and I think that was just random chance (since there’s no sensible reason why the ring would reduce combat speed). But even if you toss out that result as bad, there’s not a huge improvement: it’s about 3.5%.

The real surprise was the warrior ring, which outperformed the berserker ring on every test. I had expected it to better on the tougher foes—the black dragons and giant rock crabs—because in those situations I thought having a higher chance of a hit would be more useful than a slightly higher damage per hit. Not only did it outperform the berserker ring on those (in some cases substantially), it even did better on the monsters with lesser defence.

RuneScape’s random number generator will always make head to head testing of this sort difficult. It is possible that I just got more lucky with my hits using the warrior than the berserker ring. To really be confident, it would be nice to have more hours of testing under my belt, but I think the numbers even in this test are consistent enough to be trustworthy.

The inescapable bottom line conclusion from this test is that strength boosting gear is strongly overrated. The hype and hysteria over getting or losing +4 strength bonus is way out of proportion to how much of a difference it really makes. And in many situations you are better off getting more hits with slightly less strength than fewer hits with a slightly higher maximum damage.

In fact, based on my results, it’s not the owners of the fighter torso who should have been up in arms, but the owners of the fighter hat! This armor item used to provide +5 attack bonuses for melee, which were removed during the Barbarian Assault update. And unlike the fighter torso, this change has (thus far) not been reverted. (Update: Jagex has now restored the attack bonuses to the penance melee hat.)

The other conclusion I draw from this test is that the warrior ring is underrated, especially considering its low cost. Certainly, I see nothing here to justify the berserker ring being worth over ten times as much. The only caveat with the warrior ring is that it only helps with slash attacks, but since most combat is done with slashing weapons anyway, it may well be a better overall choice.

The RuneScoop Laboratory - RuneScape Gameplay Testing and Myth Busting The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #2 - Sara and Zammy Have a Water Fight