When I started playing RuneScape, I avoided the Slayer skill at first. The reason was that I didn’t like the idea of some game NPC telling me what to fight. I wanted to kill what I wanted to kill, not some “Slayer master”.
I eventually started to train Slayer because I realized that I would want, later on, to have access to some monsters that required particular Slayer levels. At first I kinda hated it, but after some time, I started to appreciate Slayer for its own merits. I liked the variety, and being essentially “forced” to fight monsters that I normally wouldn’t meant that I got to learn a lot more about what was in the game.
I also appreciated the variety in the monsters, and learning what made them tick. Some required special armor or equipment to be worn. Some had unique tricks you had to use in order to make them attackable or to kill them.
This variety—in tasks, gear, monster killing methods—is what made Slayer interesting to me. Unfortunately, it is all being systematically dismantled. The skill that once had so much breadth and diversity is being reduced to an ice cream shoppe that serves only vanilla.
The ability to “Burthorpe” tasks wasn’t a bad in and of itself. While “forcing” players to go outside the box and fight monsters they don’t really like is good, it’s nice to have an option to get out of tasks that one truly despises (for a cost in time and hassle). This was a good “get out of jail free card” that still allowed Slayer to mostly retain its essential character.
And then came Sumona.
She brought with her Slayer points, and the ability to cancel tasks using those points, and even to block entire categories of monsters entirely. This was the first step down the slippery slope to Slayer oblivion. What exactly is the point of a skill where the entire concept is that you must do what your master assigns, and you just say “no thanks, I don’t want to” with essentially no consequences?
With a large number of quest points, you can now entirely block five monsters. And using Kuradal as one’s Slayer master, you now get so many Slayer points that you can essentially skip 50% of the assignments for the non-blocked monsters with no penalty. Does this even remotely resemble what Slayer is supposed to be about?
While the variety in tasks was decreasing, at least the skill maintained an interesting diversity in the techniques needed to kill various monsters, but that’s now also being ruined. Sure, lots of players didn’t like killing warped terrorbirds and tortoises because of the need to chime them. So what?! That is what made those monsters unique! Both have had significant drop upgrades and were entirely worth fighting before the auto-chime was added. Now that it has been, what is interesting about these? You need to waste one inventory slot? They are now just another monster.
Same thing goes for gargoyles and rock slugs and the other monsters that require “finishing blows”. Finish a few tasks and then spend your ubiquitous Slayer points to turn these flavorful monsters into yet another serving of vanilla. Boring.
Look, I am not the sort of player who rails against improvement for its own sake. I do not think that progress is bad, nor am I one of those “I had it tough when I was lower level so you should too” luddites. But these changes don’t just make Slayer easier, they make it dull. What we are being left with no longer resembles the unique, diverse skill we used to have, but rather just a way for players to rack up XP in another skill while doing pretty much whatever they want combat-wise.
Two points I’d like to make here.
First, these are all options that have been given to you – options, not skill-changing features. You can still click your rock hammer and click the Gargoyle instead of using the right-click option, though I have no idea why you’d want to. With everything involved, there is a tradeoff. You lose approximately 93k worth of runes (bought with slayer points) for every task you skip. Kuradal assigns 29 different Slayer creatures, so blocking five tasks will still leave you with plenty of monsters to kill. The same rationale you used to justify Burthorpe can be used to justify task blocking. If you try to argue the efficiency of the tradeoffs for blocking and canceling tasks, you lose the entire nostalgic, aesthetic argument about the uniqueness Slayer imposes on players.
Secondly, recent updates have tried to reintroduce some of these same features and have been struck down – even by you, Qeltar. Kuradal assigns more tasks than Duradel (Lapalok) does, evening out the additional blocked task. Kuradal’s dungeon allows you to slay each monster in true Slayer form with less competition (no cannons or multicombat familiars available at some of the other places you can kill these monsters), adding a bit of flavor back. Icewyrms were given a new burrow attack and were put in remote/hostile environments, and the Ice Strykewyrm introduced an item requirement – the fire cape. By this argument, the uniqueness of such a requirement should add flavor, no? It was derailed by many (including Qeltar) for being an unrelated item which required fast and accurate clicking to get. But why then should you then lament the fact that fast and accurate clicking is no longer necessary to kill Gargoyles or Warped creatures? I know the two are not exactly comparable, but hear me out: you say here that you want variety but complain about a monster that is too hard – because of its uniqueness – for you to kill.
Jagex completely reversed its policy with the Ice Strykewyrm and went from making the fire cape a requirement to making it a miniscule advantage (if the prayer bonus from the Soul Wars cape doesn’t beat out the small damage boost anyway). They could have allowed the Firemaking skillcape to work as well, another cape requirement that makes thematic sense and allows players like you to grind instead of taking on a difficult challenge. But this complete reversal is exactly the same type of “vanillafying” you contend that the Slayer skill is going under anyway.
I’m trying to piece together a picture of your viewpoint, Qeltar, but it is a scrambled and interwoven mess. You seem to be extremely passionate about alternative training methods and uniqueness, but only up to the point that you benefit from it. You expect all players, a variety of different gamer types, to enjoy new content, but you have no problem with high-level updates and level requirements in general, because heck, you can use them yourself! (I am a high level as well, so do not assume anything based on this particular piece of my argument.) Basically, get some consistency going. I understand that these are soapbox articles and are written mainly from a passionate viewpoint, but you seem to switch from one opinion to another – something I would not expect from the same person who experiments endlessly with efficiency.