Desert Treasure II – The Fallen Empire: Rewards Greenlight Blog – OSRS

Take a first peek at the rewards from Desert Treasure II – The Fallen Empire!

 

 

Initial Feedback & Clarifications

Last Updated	Feedback Shared	Our response
14:45 GMT – February 14th	We’ve seen players asking about whether Virtus would be stronger than Ancestral.	We’d like to reiterate that we’re aiming for rewards below Raid-level. In the case of Virtus, we imagine it would excel and likely out-perform Ancestral in places where Ancient Magicks have use.   In content where you’re using powered staves like Tumeken’s Shadow or the Trident of the Swamp, we’d expect Ancestral to remain on top. The goal is for Virtus to feel like a choice worth making in some situations, rather than an outright upgrade!
14:45 GMT – February 14th	Some players would like more clarity on exactly what’s meant by ‘Freeze Penetration’ and have concerns that being able to freeze NPCs more readily might trivialise parts of the game.	We understand these concerns and that the initial blog is perhaps a little vague. We’d like to give a quick example!   Let’s say you’re using a weapon sporting 20% Freeze Penetration and you’d like to try your hand at freezing an NPC like Akkha, who is currently immune to being frozen. First off, you’ll roll Magic accuracy entirely as normal (you still need to be able to hit your target to catch a freeze). Assuming you hit, you’ll be able to freeze Akkha, but the freeze will only last 20% of its full duration. In this case, a spell like Ice Barrage ordinarily freezes the target for 32 ticks. 20% of this would be 6.4 ticks, which Old School rounds down to 6. Meaning that you’d now be able to freeze Akkha, but for a duration of 6 ticks (3.6s). We hope this brief example clears up a little of the confusion about how a stat like this might work and if you have any further questions, make sure to let us know!

The sands of the Kharidian Desert are stirring once again. Strange happenings and even stranger visitors have appeared along the desert’s Eastern shore, near a recently uncovered Ancient Vault.

 

What exactly is this vault hiding anyway?
While some secrets lie buried deep, others have been scattered to the winds. Four remnants of a forgotten, fallen empire, untouched and undiscovered for lifetimes.

 

Duke Sucellus. Vardorvis. The Leviathan. The Whisperer.

Are you prepared to uncover the mysteries… of what these bosses are going to drop?

Well, we hope so, because that’s what this blog is all about! Today we’re asking you to give the greenlight to a handful of exciting new offerings that will drop from the four fearsome bosses of Desert Treasure II – The Fallen Empire.

Without giving too much away, it’s no secret that four repeatable bosses, each with their own unique drops, is a first for questing in Old School. While the designs aren’t finished yet, we expect the bosses to have a wide difficulty range – some sit at the level of accessibility you might expect from enemies like Vorkath, while others are shaping up to be the toughest post-quest encounters we’ve ever made.

This range of difficulty means we’re aiming for the rewards to sit just below Raid-level, while still packing a punch.

In accordance with our new polling process, if the top-level concepts below pass the poll, we’ll move to Community Consultation, before giving you the chance to get your hands on them in a beta and lock them in for good.

 

Virtus RobesWe already let the cat out of the bag on this one at the Winter Summit – and those of you with better memories might remember when we originally proposed these magical robes as a reward from Nex back in October 2021. It’s well past time to take these Ancient Magick-boosting robes off the shelf, and where better to obtain them than the sequel to the quest that granted you Ancient Magick in the first place?

 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For those of you who don’t remember, Virtus Robes are a powerful, high-level Magic armour set that boost the powers of the Ancient elements – Blood, Ice, Shadow and Smoke. Of course, it also comes with some hefty Magic Damage bonuses.

 

Here’s some concept art of what Virtus robes could look like, more in keeping with our Old School stylings!
At this stage we just want to know whether you agree that they’d make a great reward. We’re not proposing any specifics yet, although we do plan to make adjustments to the older proposal based on the feedback you send us.

 

With all that in mind, here’s our first poll question!

 

Ancient Sceptre UpgradesAh, the Ancient Sceptre. It feels like only a couple of weeks ago we were paying Eblis a visit after securing our 1 in 50 Ancient Icon drop from the grumbler Phantom Muspah.

 

And if it weren’t for you meddling data miners, we’d have really surprised you all with the announcement that we actually have more plans for this iconic weapon, and we want to share them with you today!

In keeping with the ‘Desert Treasure’ theme, we’d like each of the bosses to drop an untradeable gem (likely as a ‘pity drop’ in the style of Vorkath’s Head) corresponding with their respective Ancient elements. These gems could be combined with the Ancient Sceptre to buff the chosen element.

 

You’ve already found some models, we might as well show off the concept… 🙁
But this goes beyond ‘freeze more good’ – we’ve got some really creative ways to buff these elements in a way that’ll really shake up the meta. In particular, we want to focus on Ice and Smoke.

 

A whole bunch of monsters are immune to poison and freezing. We want to propose Freeze and Poison Penetration as new offensive stat options. This would let us offer buffs for these gems – and other items – that will let you freeze and poison enemies you’ve never been able to before, opening up new room for experimentation in combat. Sounds good? Then smash that ‘yes’ button!

 

New RingsAlright, enough spooky Ancient stuff – let’s see some bling! Next on the docket are four rings to rule them all…

 

The Fremennik rings have been best-in-slot for their respective niches since 2005, although the Berserker Ring is the standout. It’s time to level up on the jewellery front, and while we’re not dead-set on the fine details, we’d like to explore a set of rings that will take the Fremennik rings’ crown.

To clarify, these rings would target the following niches:

• Best-in-slot Melee Strength
• Ranged Accuracy and Ranged Strength
• Magic Accuracy and Magic Damage
• Slash Bonus and Melee Strength

And the best news? These new rings are going to be super-powerful right out of the box, so you won’t need to spend extra time in Nightmare Zone, Soul Wars, or the PvP Arena to imbue them.

We want to know whether you’re happy with our plan to give these rings simple stat boosts that will elevate them to best-in-slot, or whether you’d like them to have more niche applications. The choice is yours, so make it wisely!

 

The Ruinous PowersThis one’s a doozy – Old School’s first ever set of new Prayers. The ability to wield some of the power that put the Fallen Empire on the map – like, the whole map – will soon be yours.

 

You’ve already given these phenomenal abilities the greenlight, but we haven’t said a whole lot about them since. We think this is the perfect time to move onto the Community Consultation phase and take a look at some of your ideas. We’ve seen a handful of fantastic suggestions for one-off Prayers and even entire Prayer Books, but we want more!

Go ahead and share your ideas for Prayers – or, again, entire Prayer Books – that fit the ‘Ruinous Powers’ theme on social media, and we’ll keep an eye out for our favourites.

You can feel free to go wild here, but here’s what we’re especially keen to hear your thoughts on.

First up, we want to reiterate that we’re not aiming for a carbon copy of RuneScape’s Ancient Curses, which were added in the Temple of Senntisten quest in 2009. Of course we’ll be taking a little inspiration from our forebears, but we want the Ruinous Powers to stand on their own. Most importantly, we want them to feel like a trade-off rather than an upgrade. So, if you’re about to suggest a new Prayer, take some time to think about what the player might have to give up to reap their rewards.

One of the most obvious trade-offs we could make is the power of defensive Prayers like Protect from Melee, Ranged, and Magic. What if they reduced damage by 90%, instead of 100%, but granted additional offensive power or some other utility? The possibilities are limitless!

In the spirit of trade-offs, we also want to propose that players should not be able to ‘1-tick flick’ the Ruinous Powers to sustain them indefinitely. You’d still be able to ‘lazy flick’ to conserve your Prayer points, and flick between overhead Prayers if needed, exactly as many of you are used to doing already.

We’re raising this now because the ability to indefinitely sustain these new Prayers locks us out of some really interesting proposals – we want the freedom to create powerful Prayers safe in the knowledge that there’s a resource cost for using them. Bear this in mind when tinkering with your ideas!

While we imagine most of you hear ‘The Ruinous Powers’ and think ‘aha, that’s a Combat thing!’, we’d also love to hear suggestions for more skilling-focussed Prayers. They might offer some quality of life, buff your skills, or interact with them in new and exciting ways, for the low-low cost of Prayer Points.

This is something we know might be a bit out of the box, so just to test the waters, here’s an advisory poll:

We’ll be making use of this question, your suggestions, and our own ideas (what? We can’t let you have all the fun!) to put together a set of Ruinous Powers that you can really get excited about.

In the near future, you can expect a blog from us that details a fully-fleshed out design, and a beta for you to try out these Prayers for yourself. If you’re happy with what we’ve offered, we’ll lock ‘em in with a poll, alongside the other boss rewards outlined in this blog!

Fine clothes, rare gems, beautiful jewellery, even a good book – they’re all lovely gifts to be sure. Although, we can’t help but think that nothing makes a better Valentine’s Day present than a brand-new item designed by YOU, the Old School RuneScape community…

 

Community-designed RewardWe want to give you the chance to let your creativity run wild and come up with a reward befitting the sequel to an iconic quest.

 

Come up with a design, share it on social, and we’ll round up our favourites! It’s that simple!

There are very few rules here, so let the creative juices flow! The one rule we have is that we want you to make something interesting. For example, if you’re designing a weapon, don’t get bogged down in stats, level requirements, ammo types, and all that – tell us why your proposal is the coolest! What does it do? What does it look like? What design space does it fill?

For obvious reasons, we’re also keeping a close eye out for rewards that can easily be split into four parts and then combined – but don’t let that put you off creating whatever your heart desires!

If you’re still stuck for inspiration, check out this example of a top-level overview we dug out of the archives:

Example: Bleed Polearm

• Long-range melee weapon, with the +1 range that Halberds offer.
• Relatively strong tier-75 with a 4-tick Attack Speed.
• Each successful NPC hit rolls a 1 in 20 chance to cause the NPC to bleed.
• Bleed added as a debuff (similar to poison) that can be applied to NPCs.

There you have a weapon in a nutshell – and if you want to dive into specifics a bit more, it might look like this:

• Bleed deals 20% of the initial damage, every 3 ticks, for 5 iterations.
  • For example, hit a 30, NPC starts to bleed, bleed effect deals 6 damage every 3 ticks, for 5 iterations, resulting in a total of 30 bleed damage over 15 ticks.
• Some NPCs will be immune to bleed in cases where it doesn’t make sense.
  • For example, Chaos Elemental cannot bleed, because the Chaos Elemental is basically just a big cloud.
• Add a ‘Bleed Resistance’ value to NPCs, with most defaulting to 0% resistance.
  • This could be adjusted case-by-case or kept in mind for future NPCs.
• If an NPC moves while bleeding, bonus damage is dealt equal to the current bleed damage.

This is more than enough for us to understand the core of a proposal so we can weigh up whether it’s something that excites players. Don’t worry if you’re not able to put together a 20-slide presentation with custom artwork and visuals – or even if you can’t find the right font. We love seeing our community share their brilliant ideas with one another, so ultimately, we just want to see you create something that’ll blow our socks off.

If you’re wondering where some of the best places to share your designs are, we’d recommend using either the 2007Scape subreddit or using the hashtag #DT2CommunityDesign on Twitter!

There you have it – a first look at the post-quest rewards for Desert Treasure II – The Fallen Empire. We’re looking forward to your feedback, and we’re especially excited to see your suggestions for the Community-Designed Reward and the Ruinous Powers.

Let us know what you think and remember: don’t eat ancient sand…

 

You can also discuss this update on our official forums, on the 2007Scape subreddit, the Steam forums, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel. For more info on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.

 

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