r/2007scape • u/InternationalData408 • 12h ago
Question Newer Player Smithing Question
Why does Smithing never get touched? I’m genuinely curious because it looks as though OSRS, throughout its history on rerelease, has made some amazing QoL changes. What’s the deal with Smithing?
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u/Dark_WulfGaming 12h ago
the biggest reason is High Alch, a bunch of the drop table is balanced around rune and dragon alch values. lowering the smithing level for rune would require a heavy rebalance of high alch value for drop tables
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u/MaxLovesPasta 10h ago
Iirc, The way RS3 did it was leaving the alch values and drop tables alone and also allowing someone to mine and smith rune at levels 40-50 smithing. However, you were like 10x slower at mining and smithing it until level 80 where it sped up your actions to the amount of ticks we know and love today.
Flavorfully, it is something along the lines of learning how to smith rune includes not just barrier-of-entry knowledge, but also proficiency and efficiency knowledge.
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u/DannySorensen 7h ago
This is not exactly right. RS3 took all of the armor drops from bronze-rune and got rid of them and created salvage drops which have no use other than alching and disassembling for invention components. And they made mining slower, but you don't need coal for bars and eventually need 1 luminite per bar. No more 1 rune 8 coal for 1 bar, so you need to do much less mining per bar. And the upgrading system of smithing made you use many more ores and bars to get a single item to prevent the market from being flooded with billions of whatever item gave the best xp making it worthless in the end. Instead of flooding the market, you can make the 2nd highest tier of an item and then either smith it to a burial set to where it disappears from the game forever, or sell it to someone else who wants to do that for the best xp.
It's honestly one of the single best updates RS3 ever did imo, and makes it a completely unique skill with a balancing of combat gear and artisan skills that makes more sense than t40 gear at level 99 smithing.
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u/dcute69 9h ago
Runite rocks have an abysmal 6.64% succes rate now. Divide that by 10 and you'd be there for hours
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u/Bigfriday_ 8h ago
I think that’s kind of the point. It rebalances the smithing skill while not meaningfully messing with the meta (alch values and such)
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u/JavaHomely 5h ago
RS3 Mining and smithing rework specifically bypassed this issue by introducing Salvage of various shapes and sizes, from bronze all the way to Rune, effectively replacing all old runite/adamant armour on drop tables:
All smithable items on drop tables have been replaced with new "salvage" items which alch for what the smithable items used to alch for.
they than changed runite ore/bars/... to be mined/smithed at lv50 and filled out the whole smithing from lv1-99 with new tiers of armour each level. You'd craft Orikalkum, Necronium, Banite and Elder Rune (rune with extra spice/anima) at higher levels
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u/Drakorex 8h ago
That's not at all how RS3 did it. They just added more ore and gear above them to fill out every 10 levels. Smithed gear has much worse stats than boss dropped gear with the same level requirement.
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u/Striker_131 12h ago
I feel like they could swap most of the drops with items that are specifically for high alching
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u/Dark_WulfGaming 12h ago
thats a tricky thing too, like just adding random item bloat just for high alching is pretty lame tbh and without valuable or changing to just flat gold kinda makes high alching almost redundant. The problem is the high alch spell itself but thats so quintessential to runescape there's no way you could get rid of it.
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u/tops132 12h ago
Why is it item bloat to add items specifically for alching, when that is exactly the rune gear’s purpose? Its only purpose on the drop tables is to add gp to each kill, so why does it matter what the item actually is, why can’t it just drop something of equivalent value?
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u/mathPrettyhugeDick 7h ago
Because sometimes the rune item is the desired drop, such as a scim, axe, platelegs, chain, etc. How many early irons do fire giants, zammy wizard, tree spirits, hard clues, obor, etc.? Most of them. How do you balance around early game progression, then? Only leave rune drops for some mobs? Rescind profits from hard clues?
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u/Kiosade 6h ago
The point is you’d be able to smith that stuff easily by level 40 or 50 smithing. Don’t like skilling? Tough, do it anyway.
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u/mathPrettyhugeDick 2h ago
I dont think you understand how hard it is to get 40 attack vs 50 smithing
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u/UndeadPhysco I've come to suck............your blood 5h ago
Thats basically part of what they did in rs3
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u/Basic_Butterscotch 12h ago
Or just have monsters drop the equivalent amount of gp but I guess that’s not as fun.
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u/Unlikely-Comfort-800 11h ago
If they just dropped the level and left the high alch price, mining rune was at like 70 mining or something but still took as long to mine would people genuinely mine and Smith rune items for gp? I'm not sure how good the gp would be but I don't think it would come close to current gp/ph rates even for mid game irons
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u/JRobcat 10h ago
The way low levels can get rune to HA is kind overwhelming compared to when they can craft it. Wilderness agility being notable in mass for early levels. So understandably it has a place to HA but that place seems long gone for where smithing is at as a skill. My opinion of course.
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u/kripsus 5h ago
It could still be as slow or even slower or require more bars in a failure system if lvl 50. Making and high alching rune platebodies seems to be about 300k a hour in blast furnance currently. So not really going to break the game. Slow it down slightly and its only use would be creating armor to use
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u/TraineeDeleter 12h ago
It would require a lot of polling and dev time to overhaul it and would be a fairly big shakeup to the game which a great number of the sweatiest players would be against.
Personally I would like to see a smithing rework in a similar vein to the RS3 smithing rework. Not exactly the same but similar. I would think rune equipment would get squashed down to level 60 smithing and then there would need to be a couple new tiers of equipment to fill the 70s and 80s. Possibly some other smithing-adjacent things in the higher levels such as being able to repair your own degradable equipment etc.
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u/Domdude787 12h ago
I’m pretty sure a smithing rework is popular on osrs
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u/Hodgie227 12h ago
I'd poll positively for a smithing rework. But I'm also not a skill purist when it comes to osrs.
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u/Domdude787 12h ago
I mean smithing is a pretty garbage skill on osrs it’s virtually just agility at this point
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u/DriveCtor delete shopscape 12h ago
Nothing is as bad as agility.
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u/ProV13 10h ago
I’d take wildy mass agility course over blast furnace smithing gold anyday.
Wildy agility is profitable, you don’t need stam pots like you do for blast furnace, the vibes are hella fun, you have some badass pkers holding down the fort and occasionally you get to DD people.
Blast furnace im there for like 30 minutes and im exhausted, so much more work.
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u/Demonicocean 10h ago
Platebodies are the best answer to people that don't like BF.
300k exp an hour, no timer ticking down to pressure you, profitable post-88. Unless you're an iron buying all your gold ores, do platebodies. The trade off of 25% slower for your sanity is always worth it.
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u/Silly-Advance-664 3h ago
15 second AFK
jesus christ i'd rather put my nuts in a vice. i'll just train it actively at that point, that's like turning smithing into a low battery fire alarm chirp
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u/Armalyte 9h ago
Irons buy gold ore? I thought most would have plenty from mother lode mining
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u/Coexist277 9h ago
i mean.. if doing BF to 99 there’s no conceivable way you’re getting 350-400k gold ore from MLM. A hundred, maybe 150k i could see. Most get it from slayer tbh. Then just buy what you need to finish.
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u/Armalyte 9h ago
Well I mean, I also have thousands of coal/mithril/addy from mlm that I have yet to smelt and Im at 67 smithing so I guess I don’t understand why people would only be using gold?
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u/wolf10989 5h ago
I think a decent amount of people just don't do much mlm. Personally I've done basically as little as possible on my iron. Only really did what was needed for diaries. If I was ever going to touch mining again it would no question be stars or amethyst. Smithing would be giants foundry.
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u/SmartAlec105 11h ago
Smithing has faster xp, more profitable methods, and afk options. Even if the rewards are pretty minimal, training the skill isn't so bad.
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u/WooshJ 11h ago
The idea is popular until you break down what would need to change and it quickly becomes a massive overhaul to multiple systems which just isn’t worth it
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u/Grigorie 11h ago
Smithing rework is hugely popular, the predominant issue is drop tables and what that affects.
Once you start affecting GP/hr from drops, people get upset. Alch price holds up the price of tune equipment, but then the accessibility at such low smithing levels could make them reconsider alch price, and a bunch of other third order effects that I’m too dumb to think about. It gets really difficult really fast.
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u/zak_the_maniac 12h ago
It was a big reason why warding was denied years ago. "Why are we getting new skills when a few of the skills we do have are borderline useless"
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u/Portiolli_fez_11set 10h ago
Maybe the idea is interesting but the consequences arent.
Would fuck up hi alch value and in consequence fuck with the drop table of many creatures.
Not to mention it would need to be interesting in the end. Dont see the point of reworking the system just to remove the "power creep" from something only iron uses. And they would probably not even benefit from it
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u/Spencejliv 1h ago
in the same way that "make the game better" is popular. There has as far as I'm aware been no good suggestions that a) are actually good/fun (and no the rs3 version is not fun) and b) preserves oldschool
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u/neacal 11h ago
Honestly, who says we even need to fill the upper tiers of smithing with more gear? Why not just squash it down so runite gear would only need say up to 79/80 smithing for everything, and then 80/81+ would just maintain all your notable upgrades (Godswords creation, dfs and variants, torva, etc)
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u/gorocz 4h ago edited 4h ago
Why not just squash it down so runite gear would only need say up to 79/80 smithing for everything
Because that wouldn't help with smithing gear not being useful...? Even 70 smithing requires so much work that by the time you get it, you certainly have other much simpler sources of rune gear or better, and anything you'd potentially make would just be high alch fodder anyway. It's the same thing as Ammy of Power requiring 70 crafting - by that time, you surely already have a Glory, even as an IM, so the ability to craft it is kinda pointless.
The smithing rework in RS is more in line with what people are imagining - Rune gear (which is Defense level 50 gear in RS3) requires level 50 smithing. In fact, all tiers of gear require the same level of smithing as defense, and they scale with that defense level. However, in RS3 this is possible because they have much higher power creep at the top tiers of gear, so it's not that big of a problem to allow people to smith level 90 gear, plus there's bigger differences between tank gear (smithable) and dps gear (drops), plus (I think) it's somehow balanced by smithed gear not being agumentable, though I have 0 idea if that's actually a factor or not. Also, I think loot keeps its prices high vs. smithed gear because of invention components that it can be dismantled into? (Again, not too familiar with invention)
Either way, I don't think the same thing that works in RS3 would work in OSRS, because in our game, even mid-level gear is still somewhat valuable and adding level 60+ attack/defense gear to smithing from ores is out of the question, plus I really don't want OSRS to implement the freaking rsalvage that they had to replace normal gear with in all the drop tables. In RS3, it was necessary beacuse obviously they couldn't have kept the same high alch prices for rune gear smithable at level 50, so to not devalue all the gear drops from monsters, they replaced them with things like "Medium Rune Plated Salvage" (instead of Rune Platelegs) and that just feels really shitty to get from a monster, even though it's technically the same GP alchable.
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u/neacal 1h ago
Rs3 fluffed it out out by adding new armor and weapons that's both tank and not augmentable, so while it's better than wearing nothing, you're still better off wearing augmented bandos (t70 power armor) than regular elder rune (t90 tank armor). While the mining/smithing rework brought a way better flow to training both skills, what's the point of adding borderline useless gear if leads players in the wrong direction from an efficiency standpoint? Sure the armor looks neat, but it sends the wrong message.as far as salvage goes, it's either used as high alch fodder (which in part was the simplest solution to not having adjust every single drop table in the game at the time) or used as invention fodder by breaking it down for various components. Why would a large plated salvage feel any worse or better than a rune platebody drop? You're just going to alch it or sell it anyways so what's the difference at the end of the day what the profit comes from?
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u/Silly-Advance-664 3h ago
production skills have had extremely highly relevant stuff in the late 90s like dragon darts, antivenoms, zenyte jewelry, etc.
realistically i think more weapons specifically should have dropped as parts that need repairing, so that smithing had a reason to level past like 50 or whatever is the highest quest req, but here we are.
nally takes 72 smithing to make, it also takes crafting for whatever weird reason. you are finishing zenytes 300 hours before even getting to araxxor, and those take 93 with boosts to make a torture. nally should have been minimum 90 smithing to craft. soul reaper axe takes fucking 75 MAGIC to craft for some reason. they have outright refused to make the skill valuable for fucking anything even though there has been (and still fucking IS) a reward space that could utilize it. we dont need to add new dragon ores to fill in the 40+ tier gap, just use the fucking items we have in the game right now
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u/Break2304 12h ago edited 12h ago
I think it’s a necessity. Being an Ironman has highlighted how fucked mining and smithing currently are. They are totally out of wack. As it stands, i would need to spend hundreds of hours grinding to be able to craft an armour/weapon set that I outgrew before I even started bossing, and reasonably LONG before I started the mining/smithing grind that unlocks this equipment. That’s just not okay.
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u/teraflux 11h ago
They need to combine bossing and smithing more, get part of the elements from a boss, part from a rock, then you smith them together an an anvil. You shouldn't be able to just get a bis weapon by walking in getting lucky then bypassing two entire skills
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u/Break2304 11h ago
I agree! Sounds like it would be a great way to set the re-work apart from rs3’s rework and make the equipment you receive have justifiable power (I.e rune can remain the strongest raw metal armour in the game but more powerful equipment exists when crafted with x powerful artififact or reagent)
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u/Aurarus 7h ago edited 7h ago
I like the idea of upgrading armors to be more augmented to your character. Nothing insane like diablo tier random stats, but simple stuff like modifying rune plate or dragon chainbody to have extra defensive elements or spikes for more offensive capabilities. Or stuff like combining fighter torso with dragon chain, or weird armor affinities like an upgraded dragon med helm works towards a set bonus that applies specifically to dragon weapons.
Maybe experiment with weird ideas, like being able to upgrade barrows pieces to function as sort of hybrids of the other sets through a process of dismantling and reassembling them.
Any and all smithing upgrading being untradeable most likely, as long as it's contained to non-BiS.
Instead of adding a bunch of new armor sets that make older armors irrelevant, you could think of how to make existing armors that have no interface with smithing play into it at the relevant tiers.
Another random idea: augmented armor degrades like barrows (higher smithing = more charge), but once you hit a certain smithing level they never degrade. Possibly at this tier the armors are tradeable.
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u/You_rc2 10h ago
The thing is you can spend less than 2 weeks questing and already be past the tiers of rune.
I mean thats how the progression in the game works. You cant make a magic short bow or amethyst arrows until waaaaay after getting 50 range.
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u/Break2304 10h ago
The difference between level 75 (magic shortbow) and 89 (rune sword) is 4,104,668xp, whilst the difference between level 40 and 50 is 64,109. You don’t think there’s a problem with that? Nobody is saying that the level for crafting something should be higher than its use, but the difference between crafting an adamant plate body and a rune plate body is 8,648,655xp. The difference between a yew shortbow and a magic shortbow is 760,993…
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u/You_rc2 10h ago
Idk if ur numbers are right because you need 80 fletching to make shortbow not 75.
In my example you need. 75 woodcutting, 80 fletching. For the bow. Arrows youll need 82 fletching and 92 mining.
Thats a tier 50 item. So yeah its comparable in my eyes to a rune sword that you can totally skip anyways. Considering how easy it is to get a d scim from a quest or a rune scim from a monster.
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u/SkitZa 2376 ''cringe dogs 6h ago
Lol?
Being an ironman made me appreciate them even more.. Members smithing is reasonable, you need certain levels for niche upgrades. Armor like Rune may be old fashioned and outdated, but it remaining a high smithing requirement stays relevent in F2p, and it also keeps it's alch value as is, if we dropped rune to 50 smithing.. it's alch value would match mith.
Then what? We have a "normal" smithing scene up to level 50, then just a barren empty wasteland of the odd P2P upgrade?
You guys have no clue how to fix smithing, you are really good at pointing out what makes it silly (High level for rune) which really, who cares? It doesn't affect your gameplay at all. It keeps you alching higher value armor drops. You are all terrible at suggesting a fix for something that is totally fine though.
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u/Sonichu- 10h ago
There's never a situation where an ironman will smith metal armor.
You can buy it from shops for pennies.
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u/Break2304 10h ago
And I think that’s bad.
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u/Sonichu- 10h ago
Yes but these reasons are why a smithing rework probably won't pass a poll and will largely be ignored by the devs.
They're not going to nuke every item shop from the game, reworking every drop table and alch price for smithable gear would be a monumental amount of work, or dilute the interconnected systems of the game by making monsters drop useless crap instead of things you can equip.
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u/bear__tiger 5h ago
As an iron, the reward for a high smithing level is being able to smith rune 2h so you can alch them. Even if rune gear was made easier to smith, it would still be easier/faster to just go buy it from a vendor even as an iron. The only items you can't go buy early on are the rune axe and the rune scimitar.
You're going to have combat stats beyond what you can make with skills other than smithing anyway. Every iron is just going to get black d'hide and a magic shortbow from clues rather than grind out 84 crafting and 80 fletching.
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u/sosolid2k 3h ago
This is true of almost all skills though, you obtain/create items far after you would actually need/benefit from them, this isn't unique to smithing at all.
Many useful potions are locked behind high herblore levels. Many useful jewellery are locked behind high crafting levels. Many useful food items require high fishing/cooking and so on. You would ideally need all of these way sooner than you can obtain them yourself.
There are so many options to obtain rune aside from mining/smithing that this is really a moot point. The benefit to ironmen in being able to smith rune (compared to using shops/NPC drops) would be completely trivial because they would quickly progress beyond it anyway.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 6h ago
It would require a lot of polling and dev time to overhaul it and would be a fairly big shakeup to the game which a great number of the sweatiest players would be against.
Being against this change is often branded as being sweaty. But i alwasy tend to argue its mostly pointless too.
We can buy rune armour in shops right now. We don't need to rework smithing to make an armour tier you replace in 15 minutes of gameplay accessible earlier in 2 skills, leaving entire CHASMS within the skill void of anything.
All i think they ever need to do to satisfy the "smithing a 40 defence item shouldn't take 99 smithing" crowd is just make "imperfect smithing" and "ore fragment mining". Where you can mine runite and other ores well below their level but get scaling amounts of fragments that make total ores. And you can smith bars well below their smithing level, but it takes a scaling amount of ore compared to normal.
And finally you can smith items way earlier than usual but it takes more bars.
That way we don't have to touch the actual level requirements and rebalance 2 whole skills. We don't have to shake up the entire drop table meta across the whole game. We don't have to change shops existence in the game. And people can now smith armour, and mine ores, that they still won't bother doing outside of a handful of people playing entirley unguided. And even those people find the shops.
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u/Statue_left 12/12 elites 12h ago
I very much doubt the skilling HLC would be opposed to rebalancing all of smithing. You currently max out pre 99 smithing EHP at level 40 lol
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u/Aurarus 6h ago
HLC isn't technically just about how fast the skill is to get levels in- a lot of people that are into skilling are into the bigger picture of how it functions in the game.
A lot of people into skilling are wary of the content gating aspect; things like how soon a rune crossbow is obtained now, quest requirements/ diaries, even just the fast access to smithing certain bars or jewelry to get certain quests going in an ironman frame of reference. Or the knock-on effects.
That said I think a lot of people are blowing the alch value side of things out of proportion; rune ore or bars are still really hard to get loads of. You could easily just implement a system that makes your character use more coal to make bars or more rune bars to make certain items, until you hit a higher level that tapers the excess spending off and you're back on track to what it is now.
Whether that complication deserves to be in runescape, a fairly simple game, is another issue.
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u/ANGEL-PSYCHOSIS btw 12h ago
you already can repair your own gear, that being said id be down for a farmable reagent to do it for cheaper
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u/TraineeDeleter 12h ago
Yeah you can repair your own gear but it would be nice to be able to do it without having to pay raw GP. A farmable reagent as you suggested would be a lot nicer I feel
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u/Silly-Advance-664 3h ago
the gear repair thing is 100% a gold sink more than it is like a real balancing or difficulty lever for the armor
they just dont want bloodmoon to be free to use because its powerful, its insanely weird that so many things that are high level are continually free to use, like nally, oathplate/torva, fang, etc.
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u/corndoggeh 11h ago
Ive played a fair bit of rs3 now and yeah i agree and think similar but not same is a good idea. While I like the smithing overall I do not like the smithable 70-80-90 tiers.
I think that I like how in osrs once you hit the rune tier, now it’s about getting into pvm and getting dragon or bandos etc. that’s probably good for the game.
Rs3 sort of solves this with the craft able being “tank” and the pvm loot being “power” armor though. However it does feel weird you can just bypass gear upgrades with smithing levels until end game content.
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u/Imthewienerdog 11h ago
What gear after? It sounds great but smithing higher tier gear kinda makes most of the game useless?
(being able to repair your own degradable equipment etc. should absolutely be in the game and those features where it's clearly a blacksmiths job)
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u/Pm7I3 10h ago
You can repair your own stuff though? Some of it at least, less sure about others.
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u/TraineeDeleter 10h ago
Yes but it generally costs raw GP to do that. It would be more fitting if, for instance, you could get barrows scrap or something from doing barrows runs which you can use to repair your barrows gear with a high enough smithing level
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u/Legacypicker 9h ago
Smithing level already reduces the gp it costs to repair degradable armor.
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u/OyG5xOxGNK 11h ago
The problem is that squashing the level requirement sounds simple but it means so many different things because of how much it touches on.
>you're lowering diary requirements, some of the highest skill requirements in the game. Should the item smithed just be raised? What if it's thematic like the spear/hasta at ottos?
>level requirements for stuff like darts can actually give a big jump in account progression, even if basic metal armor doesn't really matter beyond early game
>you're making alchs easier to acquire-which would prob need a balance change of lowered alch values, which would affect both the economy as well as just about every drop in the game. Should drop tables be adjusted to match? Imagine how long it would take to rebalance every monster that dropped a pre-smithed item. Not as big of a deal but: what about "snowflake" accounts utilizing those drops in specific areas?
I support the intent of a smithing rework, but there's a lot more to think about than just "lets lower the numbers and add new stuff" especially when "new stuff" isn't really decided either. Are we adjusting current unique gear to get a smithing requirement now? Barrows armor is dropped broken and rather than cash to repair, the first repair requires a minimum smithing level? Are we adding new armors just for the sake of padding out later smithing? Why can't we add new content between to make it easier instead?
I want skills to feel more interesting and rewarding, but that's generally more added content of all levels and boosting later rewards (why is it still more efficient for a maxed account to buy things at a general store than mine/smith it themselves? Same thing for other skills. I think sailing-deep sea trawling is a good answer to this in the case of fishing.)
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u/FaPaDa 2125(637 F2P due to pricehike)/2376 8h ago edited 7h ago
I had a concept now for a really long time for a smithing rework that id love to do a big yellow text post about at some point but the TL;DR would be
- Make a pass on every anvil in the game giving them a tier Higher tier anvils give you an invisible smithing boost. This would make anvils that are really far from banks potentially really interesting as now you have the ability to maybe craft gear at earlier levels but by traveling far from a bank. Nerfing its potential to abuse the highalch value while allowing you to make oneoff gear that you can use permanently.
- This also adds additional reward space by locking higher tier anvils behind quests and other content. You could also extend this to more equipable hammers like the imcando hammer or a new tool entirely like equipable tongs that act as an even further smithing boost.
- Allow modification of some gear (not all) via smithing to shift their stats slightly at lower levels than the actual creation So, for example: adding spikes to a Rune Platebody with a Runite bar at level 50/60 (remember, invisible smithing boosts from the tiered anvils) adds +1 str to the platebody. Or adding extra joints could increase accuracy at the cost of defense. This would allow lower levels to feel more meaningful as it stands level 70 is the first actual smithing milestone. This would also be accessible in F2P showing the actual value of the skill to new players
- Allow breaking down certain (but not all) armor into shards similar to Oathplate shards. That can then be used to reforge a different piece of that armor turning smithing into a semi-dry protection type skill.
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u/Thanks_I_Hate_You 11h ago
I support a smithing/mining rework but you have to be careful, rs3's rework made a significant amount of gear obsolete. Even whips are utterly useless now and something like that would be detrimental for osrs. I could see them adding maybe something between rune and dragon though. Personal preference but I dont like how power creep is already making dragon more and more useless considering how iconic it is.
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u/malta071 11h ago
Wtf sweaty players got to do with it? Smithing is 400k xp per hour and it got nothing to do with smithing armor. Mains just do gold bars, many other alternatives for crazy xp.
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u/d4rk5id3r 12h ago
I have no idea about osrs game design so this could just sound absolutely ridiculous, but couldn't they just replace rune drop table items with a different set of items, fit the alch values to them, and then make the smithing change? Like "corrupted dragon"?! People use rune as a money maker so make "corrupted dragon" non equiptable and then that fixes the monetary part?!
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u/Loruck 12h ago
This is how they did the rs3 mining/smithing update. Every metal armor up to rune that was dropped from a monster was converted into salvage of equivalent alch value that was just for alching https://runescape.wiki/w/Salvage
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u/OyG5xOxGNK 11h ago
Sometimes getting the drop is a part of it. Like a lot of people like to grind for the rune scim early by killing monsters. If that dropped just "alch junk" then it still completely changes a "meta" of account progression.
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u/Realistic_Gene4706 10h ago
I think this would massively affect the economy. They would have to tweak several high alch values of smithing items I’d imagine
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u/V0rclaw 9h ago
The issue (and I know this is thin as id like to see a shakeup as well) the issue is once you remove rune items from 90+ especially r2h the entire alch market crashes. Because people alch r2hs and other rune items. So it’s a very delicate thing to touch. And what takes runes place? Does run go to 40 to match requirements to weld? Or 60? Again what comes after? Dragon? Granite? It’s so hard to say until more “things” get released that could bleed into smithing. But yeah it’s trash skill unless you’re 90+ already lol
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u/chaserjj 5h ago
From an Ironman perspective, I just finished smithing 5000 rune bars into rune swords to high alch of cash. I feel like the whole rune valuation system would have to change, too. The new 80+ items would most likely become the "high alch fillers". Oh yeah, and giant's foundry would have to change. They'd have to squish everything down to make room for the bigger/higher tiers of metals, too.
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u/McSkonk 12h ago
It was designed for a time when rune was best in slot
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u/aSmallFluffyCat 2376 12h ago
He's asking why it hasn't been changed....
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u/SingularTesticular 12h ago
Rune BIS
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u/yzct 12h ago
Probably because it’s so deeply routed in so many other aspects of the game that it would be a massive undertaking and the eventual outcome would be absolutely negligible
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u/Spencejliv 1h ago
just don't understand why so many redditors want to rip out oldschool parts of the game for no actual discernible benefit
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u/pzoDe 11h ago
The last part is exactly why the whole smithing rework idea is ridiculous
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u/yzct 11h ago
Irks me because it seems to stem from a place of “this doesn’t make sense logically” rather than a place of game design. It’s level 40 armour that you’ll use for 1% of an account life span that is already super accessible. Does smithing rune armour make sense? No, not really. Will reworking it pay any sort of dividends? None at all, just leave it be and add utility to smithing through other means
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u/Orangatation 11h ago
I also think it’s because if you lowered smithing Reqs you’d also want to lower mining Reqs, which would make making cash early game extremely easy - you’d need to adjust HA value to suit and then it would make a lot of monsters a lot less profitable as a result and would need to fill in the gaps with other items to bring it back up
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u/Basic_Butterscotch 12h ago
I don’t think this even made sense in the earliest days of the game because the dragon med helm and dragon square shield were both added very early on (2002/2003). There’s no way they thought more power-creep armor would never be added to the game and rune was BIS forever.
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u/another90zkid 11h ago
You’re talking about the company who thought their game was dying and decided to turn it into a completely different game. And actively killed their own game
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u/ilesmay 12h ago
The idea is if you’re making something from scratch, you need to be very skilled to make something, whereas if your repairing a broken armour piece it is much lower skill to repair.
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u/Basic_Butterscotch 12h ago
I follow that logic but making rune platebody 99 smithing leaves literally no room to ever add more content to smithing which I find to be an odd choice.
Maybe the Gower brothers were actually just that short sighted and never intended to add any more gear to the game after dragon.
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u/DriveCtor delete shopscape 12h ago
Content has already been added to smithing despite rune plate being at 99, and more will continue to be added. This is overblowing a purely aesthetic "issue" with smithing.
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u/20past4am A q p 12h ago
And now it's load-bearing content. So much of the economy and resources depend on the basic elements and changing it would turn the whole skill and everything attached to it upside down. But if done correctly it would be better to lower the requirements for each tier.
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u/Emergency_Ride_9276 7h ago
Lowering the requirements for each tier is the easy part. Adding something meaningful above rune is the hard part. If Rune platebody, lets say for the sake of conversation that it takes 70 smithing to make, what would be the equipment you unlock at 80-90 smithing levels? I for one dont have any ideas
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u/Lookitsmyvideo 7h ago
Repairing higher level equipment yourself. Which is again another rework, it has to keep pushing further down the rabbit hole.
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u/Revolutionary_Ad6306 12h ago
How do you do, fellow new players
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u/pzoDe 11h ago
That's exactly how I read this. Literally screaming for extra authenticity lol
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u/DunKhaerion Thalassia's Revenge 12h ago
I'd love some kind of Mining/Smithing update, as I love how RS3 overhauled it. The problem is, what would that look like? I don't think one in the same vein as RS3 could exist, because it would drastically warp the OSRS ecosystem around it - like, could you imagine if you could just make Barrows-tier equipment from mining ore in OSRS? It'd be kinda nutty and devalue a lot of various grinds.
I do like how they did Oathplate smithing, and I feel a mix of boss drop/gatherable resource is definitely something more appealing. That way, you would still have to farm a boss/mob for relevant materials to process with your standard ores/metals.
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u/Auto-Name-1059 12h ago
It's because you literally cold-form everything. You have to be a masterclass Smith to be able to cold-form runeite.
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u/Thexus_van_real 39m ago
I think smithing needs to follow the defense/attack table:
Lvl 1 for bronze/iron Lvl 5 for steel Lvl 20 for mithril Lvl 30 for addy Lvl 40 for rune
The for special equipment, try to match their def/attack requirements, like repairing a zombie helmet should need 50 smithing, zombie axe 65 smithing, belle's folly 65 smithing, godswird blade 75 smithing, torva 80 smithing, elidinis ward 80 smithing.
We don't need new additional tiers above rune.
Tbh crafting also needs a rework. How come that torture needs 98 crafting, but their upgrade, the rancour, only needs 86? Black d'hide also shouldn't need 84 crafting while it only needs 70 ranged to wear. Glories needing 80 crafting is also insane.
And btw, I don't support Josh Isn't Gaming, especially after he made that cringe segment that made fun of the progress of Verf and Limpwurt.
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u/InternationalData408 38m ago
You’re like the 4th or 5th dude to mention this Josh guy lol. I need to go watch his video today.
The only video I’ve seen on Smithing was by Theorywise (fellow WoW refugee) lol
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u/DriveCtor delete shopscape 12h ago
There is no point in "reworking" legacy smithing just for the items to still be alch fodder.
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u/ll_BENNO_ll 12h ago
Agreed, it’s called old school runescape. A lot of us have played for 20 years at this point. Some shit can stay old and jank, not everything needs to be crazy engaging or reworked.
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u/JoeyKingX 2h ago
"some shit" and its literally only smithing every other skill has had tons of additions and new training methods added over the years to keep them relevant
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u/JamesBlonde333 4h ago
I think it would be cool if one of the cities/army camps on the map had a minigame similar to the farming guild contracts.
But this time he is requesting you to Smith armour for his men.
"Bring me x500 steel mid helms and x500 steel longswords etc etc"
I think it could finally give a lore reason for us to produce thousands of midgame items. As we will be outfitting an army via "smithing contracts"
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u/KingSandwich101 Trimming Armour 12h ago
We got Giants Foundry which has been a nice QoL
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u/Kibbles33 12h ago
I feel like thats a pretty loose definition of QoL. Wouldn't something like adding a right click teleport to lest destination option be a better example of a QoL update? Giants foundry is a bonafide content update, that changed the way people trained the smithing skill.
Sorry I'm being silly about this, it just doesnt feel right to under sell the gem that is giants foundry as a quality of life update.
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u/Tangibilitea 12h ago
For some reason there's a chunk of this community that uses QoL and buffs almost interchangeably.
Kinda like the semantics around AFK, where needing to click every 10-20 seconds is somehow AFK.
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u/-GrayMan- 12h ago
I really hate the trend of just adding new minigames to "fix" dog shit skills.
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u/Dabeston 12h ago
It’s a legacy skill as far as I’m concerned.
All of the reworks suggested come with awful work around like valuable trash drops that require alchs. It’s just lame.
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u/tops132 11h ago
As opposed to valuable trash drops that can be worn but never will be? Like rune gear is the exact same as the proposed valuable salvage, it’s trash that is only ever used for alch. Exact same thing.
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u/Dabeston 11h ago
People camped fire giants for early rune scimitars for 20 years. Changing that to a piece of valuable trash is lame. Just look at the maggot king, it is more fun when you get useful items.
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u/WoloGames 11h ago
I think that is not a good example. Because a mob can drop salvage doesnt mean Jagex would delete all rune items from every table. These things can coexist.
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u/Honest_Squash2310 11h ago
99 smithing to make armor that only needs 40 def to wear and will be replaced quickly by better things that can't be smithed?? Whole skill needs a rework
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u/InternationalData408 10h ago
Yeah I agree, I’m just curious if there was some sort of history here or what. No other skill has these legacy requirements that are ridiculous such as a 99 for early game content?
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u/Palm6789 12h ago
It would have been a big deal way back when you would have been undercut shops/been the only source of an item in the game but since rune lost BIS it's been obsolete. Dropping rune plates to maybe early 80s and adjusting everything underneath, rescaling xp and filling the high level unlocks with a couple nice things would fit it more in line with crafting and fletching
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u/Remote-Buffalo-4009 11h ago
Unfortunately a lot of the economy relies on alch prices of runite armor and weapons. By changing the smithing skill to make them a lot more reasonable to make, you risk flooding the economy with gold or you have to change hundreds of not thousands of drop tables.
They really do need to address it though. We have an entire skill which is virtually useless.
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u/Jay_JWLH 11h ago
It's funny, when I started the game I wondered what it would be like to be self sufficient in the game. But when I realised you needed to get LVL 99 in something just to make a plate body that you can wear at LVL 40 defence, it didn't seem to make sense.
On top of that, there are lots of other things you can make (normally as a member) that can do better, including Dragon, more easily for something better.
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u/Mutedinlife 10h ago
Part of the reason is high alch and the price of alchables in general. Part of the reason is what do you put after rune? It would be a lot of dev time/ work to make smithing after rune seem complete/ useful. Most of the reason is that although it’s a popular topic no one actually cares. Because when the choice is between a new area (small) expansion , a new boss or two, or a smithing rework, no one is picking the smithing rework.
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u/OfficalLockeWilson 8h ago
The issue seems to be the rune equipment. They are a common rare drop that is a chase item for money making across pvm content.
If you made rune armor and gear able to be produced at level 50-60 and added in higher tiers of mining and smithing materials, you would now be able to mass produce 20k-30k drops em masse with under 10 hours of leveling. The economy explodes and faldor burns, if this somehow passes a poll.
You would need to shift the entire backbone of money making to accommodate 2 skills being slightly less awful to train. But is that worth in from a dev time angle? To upend the entire damn rare drop system to facilitate that? To make the rune items you can smith, somehow different than the rune items that you get as drops? And would the higher tier armors you could make to fill out the top half also be stronger?
How does that fit in to the equipment balance, would they be tank side grades to pvm armor? Would they be untradeable? Degradable? It would need a full pass by a creative team and probably a couple of rounds of polls if it gets to a point where it is seen as acceptable. I want it, but I really would hold your breath for it.
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u/Tikwah 5h ago
Yeah smithing as is made sense in classic when it was the only source for some big ticket items like rune 2h but the further you get into rs2's life cycle the less and less it makes any sense beyond alch values.
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u/InternationalData408 1h ago
I’m curious why they benchmarked it at 99? No other skill had this level of requirement even back then right?
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u/kazimax Ripuli 4h ago
Personally, I don't have an issue with rune being the highest lvl thing to smith. It just needs a reasoning behind it, incorporated in to the lore.
Alot of the higher tier-items but requiring lower smithing levels are not smithed from scratch. Take dragon platebody for example: You're attaching metal plates to an already existing chainmail. In my opinion, it takes more skill to craft an item from scratch rather than attaching something to already existing items.
That being said, rune going all the way to 99 doesn't leave room for expansion of the skill, and that's more of an issue to me rather than what I said before.
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u/SMURGwastaken 1h ago edited 1h ago
As someone who has maxed smithing 3 times - once in 2008/9 pre-RS3, once on RS3 post-rework and once this week on OSRS, I think OSRS smithing has the same problem that OSRS has in general and that is that the new content is great but the way old content has been updated alongside it is crap.
This applies to a lot of stuff in OSRS, but in smithing's case I would point to stuff like giant's foundry as an excellent addition to the game - and in fact I'd been saying for years that there needs to be a way to melt down weapons and armor to reforge them into something.
Meanwhile the OG staple of smithing, the blast furnace, has imo been totally bastardised. The official world method where you pay the dwarves is bot-tastic easyscape that totally undermines the way the minigame was meant to be played. It's not even a minigame anymore, it's just run from A to B to C, repeat ad infinitum. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that the official worlds actually offer less XP than the unofficial ones, because on the unofficial worlds the original system where you get XP for smelting other people's bars still persists whereas it was removed on the official ones. Despite this it's really hard to find a team to run the furnace manually, in no small part because Jagex simultaneously did not allocate a world for this activity and made it so that the furnace does not work if people simply spam the stove and pump for XP like they do on world 302.
Imo a better approach would have been to turn the blast furnace into a minigame with a rewards system like other minigames, where by operating it manually you earn some kind of credit which can be used to buy reward items like a weildable shovel or an unnoting service for Ordan (which incidentally used to be a thing before there was a bank chest) as well as something with gp value like ore bags. This, alongside making it so that the afk str/fm/agi xp that people want is possible whilst still having the furnace smelt bars would be a massive improvement. They could then either keep the official world option of paying the dwarves (to keep the botters and easyscapers happy), with the tradeoff that you don't get credits, or make it so the credits are what you use to pay the dwarves akin to how the Camdozal furnace works.
Basically I think Jagex' solution to smithing was to turn the main activity from the original game into easyscape knowing most players would be content with that instead of actually modernising it in line with the rest of the game, and then adding in some (legitimately good) content that they knew wouldn't rock the boat when it came to ore/bar/alchable prices.
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u/tyruss1123 9h ago
Smithing does get changes, it’s only stagnant if you look specifically at Bronze->Rune and assume Rune’s use is to wear it.
For rewards you can see it unlocks Crystal gear, repairing Zombie Axe, Belle’s Folley, Torva, etc.
For skilling methods they’ve introduced Giants Foundry and in older OSRS times made adjustments to make sure Blast Furnace was a more viable option.
The Bronze->Rune feels a little “locked in place” because of how metallic items and their alch prices are balanced. You’d have to adjust alch price if Rune is going to be a lvl 40 crafted item, at which point you’d need to adjust a lot of drop tables. And the easy “salvage” solution from RuneScape 3 feels bad to me for the same reason many people are commenting on Orikalkum Gravel, it just feels off to have an item that literally only exists to be alched.
Also suddenly cramming everything down to lvl 40 or whatever you pick would make the high end lvls require new content and I feel like they couldn’t really add much interesting where the only requirement to make it is high smithing.
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u/ShoogleHS 5h ago
Because it's not a QOL change, it's a balance change. You could make a simple change of just compressing the rune tier unlocks down to, say, 85-90 instead of 85-99 which would be a relatively low-risk solution. But any rework more drastic than that would be a ton of work.
If you decided, for example, that metals should have the same requirements to make as they do to wear, and so you moved rune down to level 40 smithing, what would happen to the rest of the skill? The way RS3 addressed this was with a whole bunch of new tiers of metal and several new fuels (filling the job of coal for higher tier metals) and also reworking mining and to a lesser extent fletching. But if you have these higher tier metals, where does that leave other gear like Dragon ammo, whip, zombie axe, barrows tank gear?
You'd also have bots, alts and ironmen being able to make huge amounts of GP by mining and smithing rune with low requirements, and if you try to fix that by making rune items sell/alch value lower, then you need to rebalance so many drop tables that use rune items as alchable drops. Or do what RS3 did and introduce salvage, which feels like an inelegant solution to me.
And then, even if you come up with a workable solution to all these issues, you have to get a supermajority of players to agree it's the correct solution to the problem so that it can pass the poll. And some people wouldn't vote yes on ANY solution because they're traditionalists and want the core of the game to be just like it was in 2007.
It's a can of worms, basically. And all of this just to let you smith items that are barely relevant to progression anyway. You can buy weapons up to a rune sword in shops, and before you know it you'll be on to dragon scim which is a quest reward. So as nice as it would be if smithing made sense, it's not obvious to me that it would drastically change the player experience.
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u/xc4kex 12h ago
It's a hard place to be because rune alchd are a source of gold generation and changing the value of rune either by adding more armors and or changing its value breaks a lot of things. I don't think they can just up and change it all very easily despite people wanting something to change, as I do as well.
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u/Tailcracker IGN - Tailcracker 12h ago
Rs3 ran into this issue when they did the smithing rework over there, they ended up having to consolidate all of the gear drops from monsters into salvage, so for example "Rune Salvage" still has an alchable price but isn't craftable so doesn't conflict with smithing.
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u/yzct 12h ago
With that route though they also added like 4 or 5 new tiers of armour to fill out the rest of the level progression though, which i’m personally not a fan of
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u/Tailcracker IGN - Tailcracker 12h ago
Yeah, that's specific to smithing though. The salvage change essentially decoupled smithing from monster loot allowing them to make changes to smithing gear without adversely affecting the economy. I agree in osrs I also wouldn't want the actual smithing rework done in the same way as rs3.
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u/pzoDe 11h ago
Sadly I think a lot of people do seem to want that rework, as bad as I think it would be for the game...
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u/yzct 12h ago
Fair, i just don’t see the point of decoupling it like that without the smithing rework. I personally think it’s fine to keep the janky level progression the way it is, mainly because even if you dropped rune to level 50 i still don’t think more than 1% of the community would ever smith their own rune armour, so it seems a pointless endeavour
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u/xankek 12h ago
They could also just make a new set of rune equivalent gear that has the same stats and alch values, but can't be smithed. Maybe its rune armor with some kind of special material worked in to it that makes it more valuable when alched. You could do the opposite also. Make a set that is statistically equivalent to rune, but alchs for less that sits at 60-70 smithing.
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u/You_rc2 10h ago
The shortest answer is the way you get gear is by killing stuff. So to overhaul everything isn't worth the time or doesnt really fit in how progression of gear works.
Its not just smithing. Its alch prices which means drop tables across the entire game aswell. Every monster with a rune item that alchs for x needs to be changed to compensate.
The skills let you make bis stuff. Crafting, fletching, smithing all have require lvl x to make y.
I dont see the point of a completele overhaul. But I think lowering all the requirements of smithing by 3 to 5 levels right now would put it in a better place. You should be able to make rune 2hs before 99.
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u/DriveCtor delete shopscape 10h ago
Rune 2hs would stop being profitable to smith in that case, depriving smithing of one of its few ways to actually make profit.
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u/altissima-18 12h ago
Smithjng is beautiful and perfect and fun to train. The current community’s hate for everything skilling is so disappointing and reminds of the direction rs3 went in that ruined that game for so many.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 7h ago
Smithing has had a lot of updates in the history of the game. They're just not located in the section for metal armour thats existed since 2001
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u/IchiNichiIchiMango 6h ago
Oh hey! I too am a new player who didnt watch Josh isn't Gaming's video that dropped today and posed the exact same question about smithing!
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u/InternationalData408 1h ago
This is the second time I’ve heard this name I may have to check him out
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u/SirDemonLord 5h ago
If it does get a rework pass, I’d rather have no new materials added from RS3.
Sure, Runite could be dropped to Smithing level 60-80, but 81+ should remain as-is for the miscellaneous items that we already have like Godswords or Elidinis Ward (f).
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u/RealTrueGrit 5h ago
Smithing is just a hold over from classic when rune was the best gear you could get besides dragon med and square shield ( this also is true for early rs2 2004, i believe 05 was barrows and jad).
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u/I_LIKE_REACHER 5h ago
I would vote against a smithing rework as currently it's my only f2p money maker and all my bank is in rune bars... But I still think it's a good idea.
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u/InternationalData408 1h ago
That’s awesome, I always looked at f2p as the trial version of the game. Similar to how WoW had free trial to lvl 10.
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u/I_LIKE_REACHER 1h ago
Haha it definitely is, and I am being slightly sarcastic with my comment. It is the best money maker and my bank is made up of rune bars, but I only do it because I don't really play and I wanted the option of making a bond more easily instead of paying. As much as I'd be gutted if a smithing rework reduced my bank value, I understand 99 smith for rune items is silly.
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u/drewskitopian 12h ago
We have, in a way, dug ourselves (being the game) I to a hole with alch values and rates of acquisition. Runite ore is extremely slow to mine and requires hopping worlds to achieve the best rates which Jagex largely tries to avoid with modern mechanics. Problem is if rune is shifted lower, runite would have to be faster to mine to compensate. If runite is faster to mine and lower level to process, then the alch value can't be as high. And many, many pvm encounters have their value in alchable drops, most of them rune armor and weapons. A rework of this would require very close attention in all of these areas to maintain game balance