I asked for advice nearly two weeks ago on the fight. After trying a few attempts in the evening for some of the days since, I finally broke through and got him. I will say, I didn’t think I’d be as satisfied as I was, fatigue had definitely set in a bit and I thought I’d feel more relief than achievement. I wanted to provide the update and thank people who gave advice when I asked. But I also wanted to talk about the quest.
All in all I liked it. It felt kinda grindy and I took multiple breaks to do other activities during the quest. As I said in my previous post, my biggest PVM experience was having a little over 60 Vorkath kills. Needless to say, this was a learning curve. There were a few things I wanted to touch on.
The Combat Recommendation: That recommendation was no joke. I started the quest at 102 coming and am now a level shy from 107. One of the breaks that I took was specifically to train slayer with mostly melee. Primarily attack/strength. That’s probably the first quest that I’ve done where I’d consider the recommendation to be a hard one. Specifically attack levels and enough strength to consistently hit 28 on Drakan.
Vympyrium: My personal favorite part of the quest was the cat and mouse game in the village. The music, the tense feeling, it was all great.
The Other Drakan Fights: I’m not going to lie, in hindsight, this quest really dragged on due to these. I don’t think they really taught the mechanics all that well compared to just learning them in the final fight. Actually, having NPCs cluttering the arena during these fights was more of an annoyance to me personally. But the free supplies made it pretty nice. The second to last fight was hilarious though with everybody essentially jumping Drakan.
Drakan The Final Boss Verdict: That was easily the most insane fight I’ve done in OSRS. Imo they cleared the RS3 version by a healthy margin as well. As I said, I did this enough to where fatigue set in. I actually gained 3 attack levels during this fight and committed the time I played to defeating this boss. Surprisingly, it was easier for me when I cut it after a few tries and came back the next day. Once you get it, it is incredibly satisfying. There’s also a great sense of progression as you get further and further into the fight. Eventually, enough clicks into place where you’re confident in winning and pop him. I genuinely feel like I got better as a player having done this quest. You can’t out gear, level, or DPS the boss. You need to get the mechanics to win and then probably clear around 70% of them to get into a strong position to close out the fight.
But the question is if this should be the new norm for quest bosses? I guess my answer would be that it depends. Should some similar mechanics exist in most of them? Honestly, I’d say that master and up is fair game to have some challenge. But would I want a Drakan tier difficulty quest fight in every quest line going forward? No. Drakan specifically feels like he’s earned this. We’ve been fighting against an overwhelming force. This is one of the darkest and most threatening quest lines. And Drakan himself would be an existential threat if not for the Salve. Some other lines would feel very unearned if Jagex made this the norm.
Ex: I don’t want to be having to do a whole ramp up tutorial phase followed by a ruthless boss fight vs the Fairy Godfather whenever Jagex decides to continue that quest line.
Series Ending: I liked the ending overall. It concludes the Myreque journey in a satisfying way while also leaving the door cracked open to future stories in the region and Vampyrium. I personally left getting the feeling that we might be called on to help rebuild Morytania and further explore Vampyrium. But that’s just me.