Hello everybody!

Today's a bad day for monsters. Most enemies have received a weakness against specific damage types. We're re-introducing stab, slash and crush as well as arrow, bolt and thrown damage types. There have also been changes to the pathfinding system for combat and various engine parts have been optimized. Such as the option to change your anti-aliasing quality or to scale down the game's internal resolution for increased performance.

Weakness System
Due to recent discussions on OSRS I've decided to also implement a weakness system for Emps-World. Different damage types for melee and ranged are being reintroduced. Depending on your attack style and weapon you can now deal stab, slash or crush damage with melee weapons. For ranged weapons you can deal arrow, bolt or thrown damage. These don't affect your maxhit. Your damage type is shown in your equipment screen. Weapons with a dedicated damage type remain unchanged. That includes broad weapons, elemental weaponry, spells, etc. A weakness means that your accuracy is increased when dealing damage with a matching damage type. This bonus is multiplied with your base accuracy similarly to the slayer helm. If you wish to check a monster's weakness for yourself you can use the monster examine spell from the Lunar spell book. Alternatively you can find out a monster's weakness by examining them. I also expect the weakness system to be listed on the Wiki in the near future.



Following monsters have a weakness:

• Wildy wyrm: water & slash
• Ice strykewyrm: fire & crush
• Glacor: fire & crush
• Skeletal Wyvern: fire & crush
• Tormented demon: water & stab
• Frost dragon: fire & stab
• Metal dagons: earth & crush
• Dragons: water & stab
• Fire giant: water & bolt
• Ice giant: fire & bolt
• Gulega: stab
• Dark and light beast: slash
• Turoths: crush
• Aquanite: earth
• Magmanite: water
• Aviansies: air & stab
• Bloodveld: slash
• Jelly: crush
• Cockatrice: stab
• Smoke & dust devil: air
• Gargoyle: crush
• Nechryaels: earth & stab
• Tzhaar excluding hardmode fight caves: water & crush
• Vampires: silver & fire
• Undeads: air & thrown
• Demons & hellhounds: water
• Spiders: fire & crush
• Kal'Ger: water
• Yk'Lagor: arrow
• Har'Lakk: slash
• Nex: bolt
• Vanstrom Klause, Ranis & Vanescula: silver and fire
• Lucien van Rot & followers: crush
• K'ril Tsutsaroth: water & arrow
• Kree'Arra: air & stab
• General Graardor: fire & thrown
• Commander Zilyana: earth & crush
• Giant mole: slash & fire
• King black dragon: water & stab
• Corporeal beast 1st form: stab & slash
• Corporeal beast 2nd form: air & thrown
• Kalphite queen 1st form: stab & crush
• Kalphite queen 2nd form: fire & thrown
• Smoke demon champion: water & arrow
• Chaos elemental: earth & bolt
• Kolodion: crush & fire
• Dagannoth supreme: stab
• Dagannoth prime: arrow
• Dagannoth rex: fire
• Barrow brothers: air & thrown

These changes will bring more weapon variety to the game and give me more freedom for future content. Instead of having the best weapon or spell you now have the best weapon or spell per damage type.

Human Verification on Homepage
We've added a human verification process called Turnstile to various pages. This aims at resolving an issue with spam landing on the forums. If you are having troubles logging in please don't hesitate to post in the Helpdesk. There shouldn't be any issues with the mechanism in modern browsers. Afterall almost the entire web uses such a verification mechanism.

Game fixes / changes:

• The combat skill advancements interface has been cleaned up. Additional categories Hitpoints & Other have been added and the Special & Milestones categories were removed. Requirements for Defenders and Culinaromancer's gloves (barrow gloves, dragon gloves, etc.) have been fixed. The other category now also includes items such as the fire cape, completionist cape, etc.
• It is no longer possible to hit a 0 when passing the hit chance roll. Your lowest hit will be 1 and your maxhit remains unchanged.
• The prayer drain rate for lower level prayers has been reduced by roughtly 30%. It should be possible to keep the beginner prayers active for quite some time before running out of prayer points. Their impact isn't too big and prayer points on lower levels aren't high either.
• The internal calculations for pathfinding have been updated. It applies to PvP and some PvM content. Nex for example uses pathfinding to walk towards her target. The code has been optimized to quicker find a path towards the target. This improves situations where you are too slow when following an enemy during PvP.
• Nex has received fixed attack patterns: 2 distant attacks, phase special attack, 2 distant attacks, melee attack, 2 distant attacks, phase special attack, etc. If a phase has no special attack it is replaced by a melee attack. If she is unable to do a melee attack she'll attack with the phase special attack or a distant attack. Phase changes reset the attack pattern and she'll begin with 2 distant attacks. The HP of her followers were reduced by a small amount and their attack speed was lowered. Moreover, there's a delay of 5 seconds before a follower starts attacking, giving you time to taunt or kill quickly.
• An issue was fixed where Kal'Ger wouldn't spawn meteors anymore after a person left the boss instance.
• Future double drop chance events will now also work for Barrows and Clue scrolls.
• The accuracy bonus of promethium daggers and spears has been lowered. This brings them more in line with other promethium items in terms of dps.
• The Ranged strength bonus of bolts has been increased by 10%. They were lacking in damage and accuracy in comparison with longbows. That gives the demon crossbow slightly more dps than the demon longbow but with less accuracy.
• Various old npcs have had their bonuses and levels updated. The current system, which the majority of npcs already use, calculates npc combat power through their combat level. Boss monsters are excluded from these calculations and have not been changed.
• Dragons now belong to the neutral combat class. Their defence bonuses are the same against every combat style.
• Barbarian villagers have received additional dialogue to help newcomers.

Engine fixes / changes:

• The visuals of doors, ores, trees, etc. while the map is loading has been improved. You can now interact with these objects while the map is still loading instead of having to wait. This is a big improvement for game settings with large render distances or on slower machines.
• Obsidian caves visuals have been improved. This also includes Obsidian dragons and Tzhaar spawns. It's now also possible to shoot over the lava to use safespots.
• The loot beam for rare item drops has been updated. It now has a lighting effect and displays longer making sure you definitely realize when a valuable item was dropped.
• You can now change the anti-aliasing quality to get even smoother edges.
• The high and very high shadow settings now also work with large rendering distances. They give the entire map shadows instead of fading out at some point. The quality of closer shadows remain unchanged.
• The game render resolution can now be changed. This improves performance a lot on slower machines. I could get 35-40% fps boost on my laptop using this technique. You'll find this especially useful on large screens with high pixel densities. It reduces the internal resolution at which the game is rendered and scales it up before sending it to your monitor.
• The resolution at which water reflections are rendered has been changed. Lower water qualities now require significantly less GPU power to render reflections. This change is an overall improvement for water reflection performance with little to no loss in quality.
• More progress has been made towards the first person mode. You can toggle the camera mode by typing ::firstperson. The camera now shakes with your character's movement and animations. Is this mode something you'd like to see fully released in the future?
• Healthbars now fade out during a death animation.
• The height calculation for overhead prayers and healthbars has been improved. The healthbar now tries to better follow an entity's head position.

Here's what my Yk'Lagor looked like in first person:


I hope you're liking these changes. Please give feedback on the weakness system. It might still require some finetuning for special cases. I am still working on the Karamja expansion. I think a quest would be nice and possibly the introduction of Ape Atoll where you can find a new solo dungeon.

All the best,
Thomy