The Boss That Ruined RuneScape Forever (OSRS)

old school RuneScape has 15 non- combat skills and one boss made training most of them worthless this boss was so overpowered it's been nerfed seven times since its creation and that's not even counting Nerfs to the items that drops this is the story of the solo snake boss Zora so in 2014 the game was now about a year and a half into development it was clear it had a future and the team felt it was time to step out of the shadow of its Big Brother new locations and activities were being introduced that weren't just reskins of already existing content or backports from RS3 they were cool and a welcome addition but nothing really provided a challenge at the time old school was a pretty passive game if that makes sense the hardest content anyone had access to was God Wars dungeon and after your first trip you you figured out pretty quickly that it didn't take much brain power to complete especially with those respawn timers G the bulk of the game was Skilling related content all of which again didn't take much Focus or ironically skill by now many players were starting to reach the late game and struggled to find a reason to keep going they already had the best gear and stats but nothing to use them on with that in mind the old school team ran a priority poll to deter DET what they should work on next and unsurprisingly a new highlevel solo boss placed second so ma John C along with the help of reach and Ash dreamed up the idea of a snake boss or as it was referred to in the team's weekly Q&A the super Secret Snake boss but out of all the creatures they could have picked why a snake well I'm not even kidding when I say this it's a reference to skill specs and his snake-like behavior although unfortunately the stream explaining this has been lost to time this clip from another stream makes it pretty obvious um all it's going to be a snake idea of doing as a big snake might come from yes although I might change it to a rat jagex if you're still looking for a rat boss my vote is definitely for the crippled little rat over the next few months the super Secret Snake boss would become less of a secret as mod ghost the team's only artist and newest member began sharing in concept art on Twitter and even creating some on stream now if you haven't guessed already this super Secret Snake boss would later be known as Zora but for now it had the name damala or as I like to say it Dam Bala I mean they call Zora the money snake for a reason despite complaints that damala looked like he'd fit right in with an 80s hair metal band the community was getting pretty hyped but we still didn't really know anything about him or her I don't know the wiki just says it well a month later jagx put out the first blog actually explaining the boss they also scrapped the name damala in favor of just calling it the solo snake boss for now to keep it simple it'd be a big snake in the toxic swamps south of the elf City the boss would use all three combat styles could inflict a new type of poison called Venom that would increasingly damage you over time and you'd need to use at least two combat styles to defeat it this thing was not going to be easy but it'd be worth it for the rewards all of which would need to get charged up every so often using a drop from the boss called scales so first up we have the toxic blowpipe which looked like this honestly I think this design looks pretty damn balla it'd be a two-handed weapon that shot darts albeit one takes slower than darts had a one in4 chance to Venom your opponent and had a special attack that would hit 50% % higher than normal and would also heal you they didn't know it yet but the team would seriously regret adding this item but that's for later next up we had the venomous Fang which could be attached to the staff of the dead or Trident of the Seas on both it would increase their magic attack by plus 25 and have a 1 in4 chance to Venom your opponent then we had the serpentine Helm the new best helmet in the game for melee you'd be immune to all poison and Venom while wearing it and who would have guessed if someone attacked you while you were wearing it it would have a one in six chance to Venom them lastly we had the venomous Spike which was more or less a dragon Defender but degradable seeing as how the dragon Defender didn't exist in game yet had been asked about for months and the team quickly realized this wasn't what players wanted at all it was removed from the blog a few days later that last Point aside players were loving the snake boss it' be an actually challenging boss with actually useful rewards when it was pulled 2 days later everything passed with flying colors but it was all pulled as one question so it's either the snake boss and everything that comes with it or nothing at all now obviously it couldn't just be called The Snake boss forever so they decided to run a competition send in what you think is the best name to this email and we'll pull our favorite six and even give you your own NPC in game so a th000 plus submissions later they pull all six and well most of them just kind of suck personally I think they should have named it something cool like Goran or Greg well out of the six as you already know zoraa was the winner that's why we have this guy broken hands that names Creator on the island where you can spectate other players doing zoraa there's almost no reason to visit this island though and you can't get here without using fairy rings so unlike other player inspired NPCs like big red Japan and runite minor broken hands sort of gets forgotten about but it also seems like he's forgotten to log into RuneScape for a while fast forwarding a bit it's January 5th 2015 3 days before zoraa is set to go live the team puts out a short trailer showing off the surrounding area Z's Arena and a bit of the boss itself funnily enough they put the player in the trailer in all melee Gear with a zamac and spear so of course people were like oh my God you got to use melee on the boss I got to go buy all the best melee gear little did they know you can't hit Zora with melee at all meanwhile mod ghost begins posting teaser images for its rare drops before I show them to you let's just say ghost had a very very busy next 3 days first up this is what the serpentine Helm looked like yeah that's right every player in RuneScape who wanted the best gear in the game would now be Rock in this head crab looking thing because it looked so out of place compared to pretty much every other piece of armor in the game Ghost reworked it to instead look like this a bit better but uh this I don't like this I'm going to put my nut saat on your drum most other players didn't like it either and ghost then made the version we have today as for the blowpipe I've already shown you the first version which honestly I like a lot it's literally meant to look like one of Zora's fangs but it seems others disagreed as it was reworked to instead look like this cool but a bit oddl looking so ghost reworked it to the version we have today before I move on I got to give some real props to ghost though regardless of what someone said to him good or bad he always responded really politely and let's be real here some of you are okay Jokes Aside day of release arrives and we get some final numbers on what Zora's rewards were actually going to be like like the blowpipe had been buffed to be as fast as darts meaning it was now tied for fastest weapon in the game the serpentine Helm had been slightly nerfed to be less useful when using magic and ranged other than that everything remained the same but players were still unsure of what they were going to go up against virtually every boss mechanic was kept Under Wraps sorry those of you who bought melee gear so what they got was a bit of a let down Zora was actually much easier than antici IP ated so Zora has three forms green blue and orange Each of which is weak to different attack Styles every few hits it would duck underwater come out on a different side of the platform and change colors so you'd have to change gear to defeat it well it turns out something went wrong in the balancing process you could feasibly defeat Zora using range the whole time no style switching like the blog originally said now Zora doesn't switch forms at Rand random it has a set pattern that it follows so the more you fought it the more you'd memorize the rotations well it turns out Zora only had two rotations so you'd realistically learn both pretty quickly but let's say you're new to pvm and are struggling to learn still well if you died there was no consequences the Priestess on the docks outside of Zora's Arena would hold your stuff for you and return it to you for free now on its own this might not be so bad the new boss was a bit of a let down so what well Zora also just so happened to be the new best Money Maker in the game and it wasn't just because the boss was brand new Zora's drops are still incredibly desirable even today its drop table was ridiculously strong but in all the wrong ways even if you took every single unique item off of Zora's drop table it was still the best Money Maker in the game Zora accomplished this by dropping a r ridiculous amount of raw resources items you would typically only get from Skilling or in very small quantities from other bosses this was a problem that began when old school started previously in RuneScape 2 most bosses were designed to be hunted for their uniques along the way you can get a rare valuable drop or two like a magic seed but otherwise most of the in between was pretty lackluster Kraken and the Wilderness bosses bosses exclusive to old school also dropped a lot of raw resources but they weren't nearly as flagrant as Zora I think the closest comparison would be the wyvern droptable rework when jagex also pumped a ton of raw resources into it but Zora was still so much worse it was so bad most of the items it dropped crashed harder than RuneScape servers last week torsal seeds palm tree seeds and coconuts had their value cut by 60 to 70% items like sharks Crystal keys and and amulets of Glory began declining and items like snakes skin pure Essence and flax were on their way to near worthless pretty much every item on Zora's table was rapidly decreasing in value to give you a good example of how strong the drop table was you'd get more sharks per hour killing zoraa than actually catching sharks this same effect occurred all over the game mining pure Essence and collecting flax two of The Game's most iconic low-level money makers were killed off entirely I remember 10-year-old me spent hours upon hours in the flax Fields along with tons of other kids doing the same thing trying to make my first million GP You could argue that this change was a good thing because it killed off bot Farms who collected flax because it was super easy to do so but realistically the farm owner will just find something else to bot such as spinning the now very cheap flax into bow strings the cherry on top of all this was Zandra teleport Scrolls they were an item you'd received from zoraa that could instantly teleport you to the docks outside its layer these Scrolls were pretty common and would drop in quantities of 50 at a time meaning you'd never run out you'd get more Scrolls than you could ever use so Zora was incredibly easy to farm repeatedly plus if you somehow did run out you could buy him from other players for dirt cheap so this underwhelmingly easy snake boss was now the best money-making method in the game and wreaking havoc all over the economy but we're not done yet the blowpipe was a teeny bit stronger than everyone expected by teeny bit I mean it dominated pretty much every other weapon at every piece of content in the game including PVP just take a look at the clips I'm playing on screen now it was virtually impossible to go up against a blowpipe without spending the whole time eating combine that with Venom and there's no escaping to top the this all off RuneScape players were doing what they do best rioting in the streets of fador but not really for the reasons I just listed you see at the time old school had a group of players that all refer to as purists these were people that were firmly against the game changing in any way they believed that the game needed to stay exactly the same forever to preserve the pureness of old school any update was seen almost like an attack on the game they love so you saw players shouting things like 07 is dead Jag X the end is near and actually even one nice guy was offering free rim jobs what a good guy of course there was some valid criticism in the crowd mainly the points I've been going over the past few minutes so it was obvious jagex needed to make some changes first up the blowpipe was made one tick slower in PvP which pretty much instantly fixed that issue pvm neres wouldn't come till much later some might say a little too late so next should be the drop table right well no this is what the original Zora pet and its Snak Lings looked like if you got lucky and got the pet rather than getting a mini Zora you'd get this slithery little noodle which honestly I kind of prefer to today's pet jagex disagreed so a week after launch they were changed to the version we have today jagex didn't make any changes to the loot table and until another week later but when they did it wasn't really much a few items were replaced like sharks with manta rays some were reduced like coconuts some had their Rarity increased and the Zandra teleport scroll was reduced from 50 to 20 even with these changes the boss was still the best Money Maker in the game and by the way you'd still never run out of Zandra teleport Scrolls however despite being extremely rewarding the team made it a a bit harder to earn those rewards zor's green form was given an increased range defense and decreased magic defense making it so you had to swap to Mage to realistically do damage on that phase plus since Zora only had two rotations the team added more this instantly made Zorra so much harder learning the rotations was half the battle and could now take hundreds of kills instead of dozens Zora was considered good enough and and the team moved on to newer projects but the same droptable philosophy unfortunately followed and dominated massive amounts of noted raw resources on Boss tables what this has done is over time make Skilling less and less worthwhile just looking at the wiki money-making guide list pvm outnumbers Skilling significantly again you could say good that means there's less Bots out there getting easy resources well unfortunately B OT makers just adapted for a while there it seemed like Z robots outnumbered real players fighting the boss so in my eyes this boss droptable design philosophy has turned players away from Skilling as a means of making money whereas in the past it lived side by side with bossing for example bosses like Bandos you're there chasing unique drops and what you get in between isn't great but it's enough to pay for your supplies once you get the big ticket item it all pays off it may not be as consistent money as Zora is but it's both profitable and fun without devaluing the rest of the game this was something the old school team forgot even after they considered zoraa and its drops good enough back in early 2015 these are all the Nerfs from the years that followed yeah it's a huge list but the changes would never fix the Skilling related money-making methods it had already killed off and the boss design philosophy that that was devaluing more every time a new boss released but this story doesn't have the sad ending you might expect in recent times jagex has actually rediscovered balancing boss's drops like they used to back in the day bosses like the Nightmare and NEX are only chased for their uniques what you get in between might keep you going for another few kills pay for your supplies or just be junk although nightmare could maybe use a little less junk I think this is much healthier for the game long term and gives players a reason to train skills other than just doing it to watch the number go up at the same time jagx has introduced so many fun new ways to skill that actually earn you some half decent profit although even the most intense Ones Still Trail far behind pvm it doesn't matter as much when they're so fun but I'll never forgive Jag X for what they took from 10-year-old me just like the game will never forget the monkey nuts economic crisis of 2017 it's real and I made a video about it on the right

Channel: Colonello

Views: 418,338

Keywords: OSRS, Old School RuneScape, Zulrah, OSRS History, Gaming History, osrs pking, osrs highlights, osrs money making, OSRS Economy, RuneScape Flipping, 2007Scape, Jagex, Jmod, Old RuneScape

Id: x2o13bl7UzU

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022