15-Mar-2011 - Ring of Wealth, Shanties, Trolls and Dungeoneering

We’ve got a bumper pack of updates this week including making the ring of wealth more useful, shanties recounting your previous piratical adventures, new-look trolls roaming around their renovated home of Trollheim, and a raft of gameplay improvements for Dungeoneering.

Ring of Wealth

The ring of wealth has been a kind of lucky charm for RuneScape players for many years now – even though its effects were limited, and the wealth it brought was of dubious value, many still chose to wear it for good luck. We have now improved it so that it will better increase your chances of receiving rare items from drops or clue scrolls, occasionally improve some common drops, and give you bonus items in a few specific pieces of content. What’s more, the ring will now also let you know when it has made a difference to your drops, so you can better judge how useful wearing one is for how you play.

More specifically, wearing a ring of wealth will slightly increase the drop chances of many rare items obtained from Slayer monsters and various bosses, as well as all clue scrolls. The ring will also increase your chances of getting better rewards and more items from various activities, including looting the Barrows chest, Pyramid Plunder (including sceptres and new 'jewelled statuette' loot), taking out Bork (guaranteed improvement to his drops), catching kingly implings, and further improving your chances of receiving gems while mining (if also wearing a charged amulet of glory).

Additionally, we have added two teleport destinations to the ring: the Grand Exchange and, if you have finished the Throne of Miscellania quest, to Miscellania too. Rings of wealth can be recharged in the same ways as amulets of glory.

Mod Piesche
RuneScape QA

Dungeoneering Tweaks

For a while now, we’ve been collating a list of things that we wanted to do to Dungeoneering to make it a smoother and more enjoyable experience for all. Today, we’re releasing a big batch of those improvements!

The most noticeable change is to how the prestige system works. When an already 'checked off' floor is completed again, you no longer suffer a direct penalty. Instead, a different floor in the same theme will be ticked off, giving you an appropriate amount of Dungeoneering XP for your time invested. There’s no advantage to be gained from repeating ticked off floors, but this will make it much easier to find common floors to play when raiding Daemonheim with a group of other players. For specifics on this change, read this Dungeoneering FAQ about prestige.

Among the other improvements, we have added a timer to the end interface, cut charge times on the monolith, increased colour convergence within the overgrown garden and much, much more. For a full list, please read this update's patch notes.

Mod Trick
RuneScape Content Developer

Shanties

Your various pirate-based misadventures in RuneScape have involved a fair bit of head trauma, so what better way to both remember and reminisce upon your briny achievements than with some 'rum'-sozzled, poorly rhymed sea shanties? If that piques your interest, then you should head to either Port Sarim docks or the larger of the two pubs on Mos Le’Harmless and have a chat with Bard Roberts (and his critical chum, the cranky Stanky Morgan).

He’ll happily belt out a tune or five regaling you with the events of the Pirate’s Treasure, Rum Deal, Cabin Fever, Great Brain Robbery and Rocking Out quests (assuming you’ve completed them, of course). It’s the perfect way to remember the story so far while you wait for the next pirate quest – A Clockwork Syringe – which is due later this month.

Mod Liono
RuneScape Content Developer

Graphical Updates

We have all sorts of graphical updates for you this week, the main one of which is a rework of all trolls (in the style of those seen in the recent King of the Dwarves quest). It wouldn’t have been right to not also update their mountainous home, so you’ll see that Trollheim and the surrounding areas have been spruced up too. As well as trolls, RuneScape’s yaks have had their animations and sounds improved, plus Lumbridge Swamp has been made to look more gloomy and, indeed, swamp-like.

RuneScape Graphics



In other news...

Snow effects have been updated throughout the game to use effects similar to the Christmas 2010 event.

Summoning familiars can now run – look at them go! They should now do a better job of keeping up with you, which means you shouldn’t have to use the 'Call' button as much.

Those who have read or are interested in the first official RuneScape novel, Betrayal at Falador by T.S. Church, might like to take the time to have a quick chat with Doric, Reldo, King Roald and Sir Amik Varze. They have some stories of their own to tell, which may well reference parts of T.S. Church’s second book, Return to Canifis, which is due out later this month. To read an excerpt from the second book, visit this page on the Titan Books website.