The Fractured Archive – First Rewards Proposal – OSRS

A quick disclaimer before we start! While we know this blog is going to spark a lot of discussion (and we’ll be reading all of it), we won’t be back with a blog update within the week (or likely even next week) due to a number of key team members jetting off to Chicago for the Deadman: All Stars Season 3 finale (which you can tune into live over on our Twitch channel at 18:00 BST on Saturday, June 20th! Additionally, we’re still mulling over CoX-related conversations following our most recent Summer Sweep-Up blog – it’s likely to take a conservative approach with a small buff for now and a revisit in the future, but we’ll confirm our position on these in the future. For now we’d like the focus to stay on an entirely different raid’s rewards, so why don’t we get stuck in?!

In March, we shared a ‘Rewards Primer’ blog detailing our thoughts on what a set of Raid rewards ‘should’ look like and diving into some of the unique challenges we’re facing with putting together a proposal for Old School’s fourth raid: The Fractured Archive.

As intended, that blog kicked up a bunch of conversation and spawned a whole host of suggestions covering a wide range of potential avenues to explore. We’ve tried our best to parse everything that we’ve seen so far and have put together an initial reward proposal which we hope will serve as a strong ‘jumping off point’ which we can build off of and iterate on.

There’s loads more that we could say about rationale and reasoning, but we know that you read the word ‘proposal’ in the title and are likely already scrolling to get to the good stuff, so let’s get straight into the detail!

Keep an eye out throughout for infographics showing off the proposed rewards, made by the fabulous community artist: Hunt!

Fed up of running out of Guthixian Temple Teleport Scrolls? Why not get your hands on an ancient convenience item to provide unlimited teleports back to the Fractured Archive, similar to the Ancient Tablet used to upgrade Xeric’s Talisman for easy access to the Chambers of Xeric. Archivists used these to get back in a pinch, and since there don’t seem to be any Archivists around any more it would be a real shame to see this handy pickup go to waste.

While these aren’t the most game-changing account unlocks you’ll ever obtain, you’ll absolutely want to get your hands on these Elemental motes, since consuming one for each of the elements will increase the max hit of all of that element’s spell by 2. Similar to the Jewels for your Keris Partisan inside Tombs of Amascut, we expect these to be pretty common with some ‘pity RNG’ mechanics at play to make sure you can check them off your to-do list in a reasonable timeframe.

Consume a tear that Guthix shed in remembrance of an element so that you can use that element to better exploit enemies’ weaknesses and dish out more damage – we’re sure that it’s probably what Guthix would have wanted…

Now that untradeables are out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff!

In our primer blog, we spoke about leaning towards an Elemental Weakness-focused armour set. This didn’t seem to take flight among the community, but we did see a lot of conversation around armour sets that serve multiple combat styles, so set out to explore what a so-called ‘Hybrid’ set might look like coming from a raid.

Naturally, a set that’s aiming to serve two Combat styles can’t be best-in-slot in either of them, but needs to be a compelling enough option that even players with max gear might opt for the increased inventory space that comes with solving two styles with one set, while players not yet sporting absolute max will be pleased to obtain a piece. The set that we’re proposing is a Melee/Magic hybrid set, effectively mitigating the biggest downside of style-specific sets for Melee or Magic. There are no set effects or fancy passives, just solid numbers, so let’s take a look at the stats and then contextualise them for those of you who haven’t memorised every stat bonus in the game.

To give some context to those numbers, here are the highlights:

• Melee accuracy bonuses. More than Bandos (which sports none) but less than style-specific options like Oathplate or Inquisitor. Notably, this is the first armour set sporting a Stab accuracy bonus of any kind.
• Additionally, Magic accuracy bonuses. These are a smidge below Ancestral Robes, so should remain very competitive at most content where you’re using Magic.
• No negative Defence bonuses. Defensively the set is slightly worse than Bandos against Melee & Ranged, but boasts +28 Magic Defence. This Magic Defence is lower than that of Ancestral Robes, but the other defences here more than make up for it.
• A whopping +16 Prayer bonus, barely shy of Proselyte’s +18. This is noticeably lower than the +24 Prayer bonus offered by the Sunfire Fanatic armour, but in conjunction with the other stats here it’s definitely nice to have!
• More Melee Strength than Bandos and Oathplate, but the full set is 5 Melee Strength less than Torva’s, meaning you’d always gain a max hit with Melee in Torva, maybe even two max hits in some setups.
• Magic Damage in line with Virtus, but less than Ancestral. This means that if your max hit with no armour on is 34 or above, you’d always gain an additional max hit with the Ancestral set over this set.

For those of you already sporting best-in-slot gear for both styles, this set might not be the most valuable pickup of all times, but the Stab bonuses coupled with Prayer bonus and positive Magic defence might give it use-cases beyond other Melee sets in some instances. For players looking for a solid all-rounder set (excluding Ranged) and getting to grips with raiding in general, we think this could be a really desirable unlock and well worth the space in the bank – no more bringing Void to learn the Theatre of Blood and wondering why all you’ve done is slam Saradomin Brews!

This set’s obviously unlike anything else we’ve made so we’re really keen to hear what you make of it – sets like this could open up space for hybrid weaponry that benefit from multiple bonuses, or give us more options to flesh out other hybrid offerings like Magic/Ranged and Ranged/Melee sets, so it would be wonderful to work these into something that matches your expectations.

Keeping on the ‘unlike anything else we’ve made’ track, we’ve got a brand new shield.

We saw loads of you asking for useable shields or interesting off-hands, since it’s something we rarely see these days past your initial Defender unlocks. The difficult thing about making shields cool is that in Old School, offence tends to be the best defence – our damage formula means that you’re still likely to get hit extremely frequently in endgame content, and the easiest way to stop getting hit is to simply kill the thing that’s hitting you. We don’t think any single gear upgrade is likely to change this paradigm, but we did set out to see whether or not we could make a shield that had clear use-cases and felt cool to use, here’s what we’ve cooked up:

Let’s break it down!

• +2 Flat armour. This comes into effect after you’ve attacked while the Rondache is equipped (to prevent tedious shield-swapping methods), and reduces all incoming Melee/Ranged damage by 2. In essence, this is perfect for mitigating chip damage and pesky, unavoidable small instances of damage that stack up to become a real nuisance, which might make it a nice pickup for various Combat Achievements, The Great Olm, Melee Inferno, Araxxor, and loads of other places.
• On top of that, the damage mitigated by the flat armour charges the Rondache, up to 20. This means 20 damage mitigated by flat armour nets you a fully charged Rondache.
• This charge can be expended as a special attack to perform a Shield Bash. Shield Bash fires off instantly, similar to a Granite Maul Special Attack, and deals more damage based on the number of charges consumed.
  • As an example, 16 charges would give Shield Bash 16 +16% damage, totalling 18 (since Old School always rounds down). 20 charges would deal 20 + 20% damage, totalling 24. The percentage here serves as an incentive to stack charges up to full, or hold them until you can finish off your target.
• After Shield Bash is used, there’s a short cooldown before you can gain more charges, but the Flat Armour will still be in effect. This aims to prevent weird use-cases built around spamming Shield Bash rather than having it supplement your chosen style.
• In terms of raw defensive stats, it’s not the most impressive off-hand. There’s a little anti-synergy between wanting to mitigate damage for Shield Bash versus not getting hit at all, but the Rondache offers better defensive stats than an Avernic Defender, including a lot of Ranged Defence.
• Offensively, the Rondache’s Strength bonus equals the Avernic Defender, with some slight negative bonuses for Ranged and Magic. This means it’s still pretty useable with any Combat style, but is best suited for Melee.

This one’s really exciting to us, a strong anti-chip damage option with a rapid-fire in-built Special Attack sounds like a superb starting point for a shield that makes sense in Old School in 2026, so let us know what you think.

What’s better than one crossbow? Two crossbows. One crossbow in each hand, firing off bolts every two ticks – the ultimate run and gun playstyle for anybody who longs for a return to Diablo 3’s Demon Hunter fantasy.

Naturally, the thought of blasting enchanted ruby bolts into your foes at twice the usual speed is a scary one, so these rapidfire crossbows do come with some caveats.

 

In essence, while we think this approach to crossbows is cool beyond compare, we’ve spent so much time crunching numbers only to conclude that these cannot be balanced around existing bolts and their respective effects. Instead, the Ascension Crossbows will only be able to fire Ascension Bolts, which will be readily obtainable by chiselling down Ascension Shards from The Fractured Archive.

You’ll notice that for the time being, we’re keeping the number of enchanted Ascension Bolt variants limited. This makes it considerably easier for us and you to understand the power of the Ascension Crossbows and actually calculate their damage, while also allowing us the time to observe them out in the wild before talking through additions like Ruby-tipped Ascension Bolts. Onyx-tipped bolts are obviously a luxury but we thought they’d be a fun inclusion and are already relatively balanced around their scarcity, while Diamond-tipped bolts are an absolute staple and will see the Ascension Crossbows doing serious damage to tanky targets.

We expect these to be a raid-tier replacement to the Toxic Blowpipe (especially versus tankier targets or targets who are weak to Heavy Ranged), with plenty of room to grow and develop over time if we opt to add new variants of the Ascension Bolts.

The Ascension Crossbows are bound to be spicy, so we’ll leave them with you for now and move on to the final piece of our proposal, the one you’ve been waiting for.

Our earlier blog heavily suggested we were leaning towards a Crush-focused megarare which you seemed to be expecting and on-board with, though a good number of you felt it was a little ‘safe’ or predictable. We do agree that it’s a fairly ‘safe’ option but also think that it makes sense and is easy to add enticing use-cases with new content additions, similar to the Scythe of Vitur gaining a litany of use-cases over the last couple of years!

Shortly afterwards, talented community artist HuntOSRS dropped a suggestion that really seemed to resonate, so there’s a great chance you’ve seen this concept on Hunt’s X/Twitter post or Reddit post. Historically, suggestions or concepts that go down well across multiple platforms tend to prove pretty popular, so we’re opting to adapt this wonderful suggestion and see if it’s something you can get behind. Introducing the TzHaar-Ket Breaker: a powerful Crush weapon imbued with magicks beyond your comprehension, but was it made to serve or to break the TzHaar…?

That looks like an awful lot, so let’s try to put things as simply as possible.

• Hits big targets harder (similar to the Scythe of Vitur), since its chain extends an additional two tiles.
• Is especially potent on targets who are weakest to Crush, since it will roll damage several times and pick the highest hit.
• Alternatively, the extending chain can hit several small targets in a line.
• Against small targets, you can opt for the ‘Smash’ style to lose the benefits above but gain a hard-hitting, 3-tick weapon, which will sport some niche additional use-cases – we’re looking at you, Nylocas…

For those of you curious on the specifics, here’s what we’re currently working with:

• Hitting the same target multiple times will mean hits deal 25% more damage per additional tile hit. This means hitting a 3×3 target will result in a hit that rolls up to 150% damage, a 2×2 up to 125% damage, and a 1×1 up to 100% damage.
• Similar to the Scythe of Vitur, the TzHaar-Ket Breaker can hit up to 3 targets in a single attack. Whether these targets are in a line or stacked on the same tile is up to you!
• Damage is rolled multiple times. Effectively, the breaker rolls a damage ‘dice’ for every Defence (Stab, Slash, Light Ranged, Standard Ranged, Heavy Ranged, Magic) higher than Crush on an NPC. This means that an NPC who is weakest to Crush, you’ll be rolling damage seven times and picking the highest result.

A lot of the most popular suggestions that we saw for Melee weaponry centered around AoE or multiple tiles coming into play, so we’re hopeful that this is a great starting point for a megarare that fills that Crush space but is a little more exciting than just ‘big bonk’.

Just like our other Melee megarare, the Scythe of Vitur, you’ll need to charge the TzHaar-Ket Breaker using some kind of resource (we’re not decided on which one yet, so just panic buy random things if you’re looking to invest) and Ascension Shards, which you’ll be able to obtain from the raid itself, much like Vials of Blood.

There’s not a whole lot more for us to say, so we’ll leave you with all of the important details and sign off. We’re not expecting our first outing with these rewards to be an absolute bullseye (though it would be a nice surprise!) but we think you should have plenty to go off of and discuss to help us all work to put together the best proposal possible, so let us know what you make of everything that we’ve shared today!

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

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