Hello Adventurers - with the release of 0.12.0, we're changing how Food and Drink work. Here's what's changing:
Wardstones and Wardshield is being removed.
In their place, you will instead increase your total HP by finding Constitution shrines around the world.
Food will now instantly restore HP, as well as provide other perks.
Healing potions will be removed (stat pots are staying).
Let's get into why.
Wardshield
Damage will now go directly to your health. The core issue with Wardshield as a mechanic was that it placed too much weight on the armour you were wearing. As we added new content and higher level enemies, we reached a point where the Wardshield bar became the only viable source of survivability. Once it was gone, even a single hit from a stronger enemy could kill you outright. It offered an additional layer of protection that scales with your armour, making each material upgrade feel more powerful than the last, but you have to actively engage with that system to benefit from it, otherwise it's empty health that we're balancing around but not giving you outright.
We looked at two options - leaning into Wardshield, outscaling the base health bar and rendering HP largely irrelevant, or move towards a system where your single HP pool scales over time. We chose the latter, because it's easier to balance and tune around. Being able to steadily increase your health outside of armour means you have a clearer path to get stronger even when you're struggling.
This ALSO, as an important note, moves us closer to your expectations of what you'd get in RuneScape, where HP is just HP, and you grow that pool of HP as you progress. Speaking of health progression...
Max HP
Players (that's you!) will now be able to increase their maximum HP beyond 100. Your health will reflect your growth throughout your journey, getting stronger all the time - so how do you get more HP? Introducing... the Constitution Shrine. These shrines are situated across Ashenfall, by someone or something. These are rewards for exploring, and key progression milestones. If you're finding shrines, you're doing something right. Stack those shrines up and your journey to become a Dragon Slayer legend will be a lot easier.
I tick eat those
We're shifting the focus away from healing potions. They feel a lot less RuneScapey than the combination of "Stat Pots" and cooked food in your inventory, so we're turning our attention towards our latest skill - Fishing. Food will now serve as a key driver in healing a significant chunk of your HP, quickly. Fish, following RuneScape, will be best in class at healing - in terms of sheer HP Value - other foods types have buffs. This also has the desired outcome of making sure that fishing has a fundamental place in the core gameplay loop, like farming does, and makes satiety and thirst less of a "meter to fill" and more a system that should organically be topped up by your play. Please remember to drink water, adventurers, I can't stress it enough.
Your existing potions will still exist but will be disassembled on use, rather than consumed. You'll get your components back, and won't have to disassemble them one by one!
I don't know what's going on with adventurers on mainland Gielinor, but those folks can stomach a truly horrifying amount of Karambwan without taking a break. We've not got Karambwans on Ashenfall, but we are removing the existing animation that comes with consuming food, drinks and potions in-game, to remove the friction with currently trying to heal during combat. There will be a brief cooldown between consumptions to prevent you stuffing even the slightest of wounds with a whole meat pie (do not try this, please), but you will no longer be prevented from eating when you fill up your sustenance bar. Instead of healing at the end of an existing 2 second animation, you'll receive the healing immediately and then have a short cooldown before your next snack.
You will be able to continue eating and healing even if your sustenance is at 100.
We're exploring this change as a way to deepen our connection to our RuneScape roots, offer more player power through natural gameplay progression, and make Fishing an even more integral part of your experience. Balancing and values on this are not final so we're eager to take on feedback and make adjustments with future updates.
As always, we're all ears, so let us know thoughts and discuss more in our official Discord and Reddit. We've got support for French, German and LATAM Communities with dedicated spaces within our Discord, so come and say Hallo or Bonjour while you're at it.
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