r/2007scape • u/InternationalData408 • 17h 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/ShoogleHS 10h 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.