Weight ratio

There is not a clear-cut description of how small an impling is, so let me put a guesstimate out here of six inches in height and twelve ounces in weight.. This is key because it bring up the point of weight ratio.

Most of the found items implings carry are believable, such as seeds, jewelry and noted ores. They're light things that can be easily nicked from an unsuspecting adventurer. It doesn't twig anything to loot these rewards from such tiny creatures. Weaponry and armor, on the other hand, sets off the alarm. A dragon impling can manage the six kilograms and bulk of rune chainmail. Perhaps it quaffs a super strength potion or uses a miniature, dwarven pulley system hidden under its jacket to best lift the heavy stuff.

We are the champions

One of the rarest items in RuneScape is a champions' challenge scroll. There are 13 lower champions, for which you need a scroll, 2 champions of champion, which require the defeat of a certain number of lower champions, and an informal champion, who only requires entry into the Champions' guild to fight him.

The most difficult part of this is actually getting a challenge scroll. You can camp for days/weeks/months, killing thousands upon thousands of zombies and receive nothing more than experience for your effort, or gain a scroll. You can be escorting the adventurer from the Temple Salve to Burgh de Rott and gain a scroll from killing an undead lumberjack. There is no set method to receive a scroll; no helpful item to increase the odds of earning this drop. 

I am actively killing ghouls for such a scroll. I've been told numerous times to not do this, that I'd be better off going about my daily routine than spending hours outside Canifis. Considering my daily routine doesn't include regular combat and, on the off chance I take a slayer task, that Kuradal would assign me aberrant spectres (the only monster she offers that could drop a champions challenge), how am I to boost my chances of finding this rare drop?

The five second rule

Have you ever been killing monsters, health is low and you're praying for the next drop to be the wine or pizza or bread just to keep yourself sustained without being forced to trudge back to a bank?

Drops aren't usually questioned. We assume the monster has eaten their share of adventurers and, thusly, the armor, weapons, gems and various knickknacks are stored in its belly until we come along to slay it. Our rewards are whatever happens to fall out of our foe. Thinking about how the treasures we take for granted get recirculated back into the economy is not always the best direction of our thoughts. 

Food strikes as out of place. Of course, edibles can be believed as scooped up by monsters, but one must ask why the food wouldn't be consumed during a fight between us and the enemy. Do these various creatures have some sort of honor code or are they not intelligent enough to eat their health back? Perhaps bloodvelds are hording those meat pizzas until they can get to a bank or a shop to sell them for profit. Lesser demons could be toddling home from the tavern, sloshing about a full jug of wine and singing loudly.

Q & A

Most of the time, I don't care two farts about anyone asking for help or a question. Recently, I'm turning into a person who's prepared to be hated by telling the asker to search around the fansites. There is nothing wrong with asking questions. You may actually find someone willing to give you a truthful answer. However, it boggles my mind to know so many people are ignorant of the searching capability of the Internet.

Quest help is bandied about, from asking what to wear to the method of performing a certain puzzle. It's taken for granted that a wearer of the quest cape will know and recall every detail of every quest and when this person can't do those things, the help asker tends to get upset. For some, it's not a deliberate forgetting of details; it comes down to time passed between doing the quest and now that blurs the memory. Others will point the questioner in the direction of fansites, suggesting that visuals may be of more help than plain text. Other the other end, the player asking may also want the person to "show me" how to get to a specific location or do a section of a quest. This isn't always possible as some quests now hold cut scenes where only the quester can do anything. The fighting of Delrith in Demon Slayer is more difficult because the quester can't rely on players distracting the dark wizards so he can focus on Delrith.

Now there are more mundane questions, such as "what should I train" or "wut do i do nao". From recent experience, it doesn't matter what answer is given, the asker will always poo-poo it as "boring" or "don't have that lvl yet". This really urks me since it puts the answerer at fault if anything goes wrong. Is it really that much of a hassle for someone to look over their own skills and decide? 

The people that get on my nerves are the ones who ask a question, receive an answer and keep asking the same question. Honestly, are they waiting for a specific person to reply? Do they only believe the jmod, pmod, cape wearer and/or chat channel owner? Trusting warily is valid, but how many people giving identical answers does it take? Not everyone can be lying or in collusion against you.

Haters gonna hate

The ides of March proved fruitful for free to play (F2P): a new permanent quest in nearly eight years. With it are three new combat items, a mask, a new dungeon and, for those with 300 quest points, a helm. Though a few of us are excited over this, many denigrated it by claiming the rewards "are useless".

The Blood Pact (spoiler link) is fairly simple even for a new player and teaches the basic form of the combat triangle (melee>range; range>magic; magic>melee). At the start, a new player might bring some food and a melee weapon to deal with the first enemy, but you can take the items of the remaining opponents and use them throughout the rest of the quest. The final rewards are the equipment of your defeated foes (which all look quite nifty imo), a good supply of arrows and runes and enough melee combat experience to get you to level two in all of them. You'll receive access to the dungeons where you can practice your newfound fighting skills on relatively easy foes (definitely not more difficult than a cow) though the dungeon boss may give you pause. Throughout the dungeon, monsters will drop mask pieces which you can put together to make the Mask of Dragith Nurn (+1 attack and defense bonuses across the board). For people who have 300 quest points, you'll get a special Helm of Trials, while having no bonuses, looks very good (especially with the quest cape).

Not every person will be happy with a quest's rewards. They can be too much, too little and/or not quite what they should be. This is the first time I have seen so much bile spewed over a simple mask and helm. The haters are claiming these items are useless and should have better stats or be able to be combined with other helms. Of course, I should mention these haters are typically combat-oriented types rather than the skillers or new players. All I can say is: if you do the quest, just drop the mask/helm and stop bickering over it. I got caught up in an arguement with one such hater, trying my best to get across the notion that not all items have a point to them. 

I am happy over this quest and its rewards. I feel this is something worth having as a beginner in RuneScape.

Aftermath

It's been a full day since the bonus experience event began. I'm pretty sure most people are down to the minimum 1.1 bonus by now. Everyone has their opinion and here is mine in question format.

Was the bonus weekend a good idea?

For the most part, yes. Since this was the first time for this type of event in RuneScape, glitches and mistakes were expected.

Should Jagex do this again?

Yes. I think it benefits more than detracts, though having it as an annual event is best option.

What was up with all the randoms?

From what I understand, randoms are triggered by getting insane amounts of experience in a short period of time (which is usually suggests a player is botting). This doesn't explain why some players were kidnapped by NPCs moments after logging in. A solution might be to lock the bonus experience timer when a player enters into a random event so he/she isn't losing that precious bonus while attempting to convince Miles he's looking at a spade.

Does this devalue certain skills?

No, not anymore than Pest Control, Soul Wars and penguin points have done.

Spoon feeding

From Wikipedia: spoon feeding "often means to present something to a person or group so thoroughly or wholeheartedly as to preclude the need of independent thought, initiative or self-reliance on the part of the recipient; or to present information in a slanted version, with the intent to preclude questioning or revision. Someone who accepts passively what has been offered in this way is said to have been spoon-fed."

When a player asks another how to train woodcutting, he will get what can be termed a spoon fed answer of chopping willows. It doesn't seem to matter the circumstances, only that the fastest and popular method is the correct one. To take this analogy a step further, the original player could clarify by providing more information about his woodcutting, such as "should I bank maples as I cut or drop them", but would likely receive the same answer to cut willows. Even narrowing the choice of trees to "maples or teak" will get the reply to cut willows.

Each player plays differently from every other player. Training methods vary from person to person, yet these pat answers have remained the default for years. Here is a listing of the most common for each skill:

Attack and Defense - use whip

Strength - use d scim/ss

Range - cannon

Magic - high alch

Prayer - gilded altar

Cooking - lobbies to 94, shark to 99 with gauntlets

Woodcutting - willows at Draynor/Barbarian Assault

Fletching - willow longs (u), yew longs

Fishing - fly fish at Shilo/barbarian fish

Firemaking - maples/willows

Crafting - green dhide bodies

Smithing - gold bars with gauntlets

Mining - iron/granite

Herblore - prayer/super restore pots

Agility - Ape Atoll

Thieving - Pyramid Plunder

Farming - willow and pineapple trees

Runecrafting - nats

Hunter - red chins

Construction - oak larders/dungeon doors with butler

Only a small percentage of people bother to find out if these regurgitated responses are right for them. Some like to train a skill to make money and at a method they like rather than what's the most efficient way. If you can't stand fighting for room to set box traps to catch red chinchompas, is it really an efficient manner to train hunter?

A friendly game

Congratulations to Full of Pie on 99 agility. :)

I can't even write up an object post about griefing in mini games activities. So pretend I wrote something original and hilarious and we'll call it a day.

Here's to your health

The main update in my eyes was the new life points system. I was ready to crawl inside Nomad's tent and give him a good kicking when the long awaited system update timer appeared. I groaned, knowing I'd be champing at the bit for at least 30 minutes to get back online and try my hand at this epic battle.

The basics of life points is just add a 0 to your hit life points and all the damage you do in combat. It looks amazing to whack something for 300 damage, though you'll about have a heart attack when you get hit for that much. The bit to factor in is under the old hit points system, the fractional damage got truncated (ie: I hit for 24.5 but the .5 is dropped off). With the life points system, that extra bit gets added back on (ie: I hit for 245) because the decimal point is moved to the right one place. An interesting part of this is Nomad's max hit used to be your max hit points minus one (ie: I would get hit for 98), now his max hit is the same formula but moved one decimal place (ie: he hits me for 989).

Changing the name alone is causing problems. How do you shorten constitution and construction without confusing both skills?  I don't even want to think about the ranting, raging and quitting on the RSOF. From what others have told me, players are ranting that this is making RuneScape too much like WoW and they can't tell when to eat in combat (specifically PvP).

ION, Shattered Heart has been released. This is a mini game distraction activity where you get stones while performing non-combat skills (except construction where you just sit/stand inside your house near the portal). Once you get a stone or stones, take them to Varrock museum and talk to one of the archaeologists to learn about this guy, Dahmaroc, who fought for the limited supply of runes during the Second Age. Carry your stones over to the plinth west of the main doors and use them on it. You'll get a chunk of experience based on that skill level. Upon completing the statue, you get a cut scene and watch the statue explode into pieces. Now you can put the plinth in your house's study and try to assemble the statue again.

I haven't seen anyone finishing the house statue yet, so no idea on the reward from that. I wonder if we keep building the statue, only to watch it explode over and over every time we place 30 rocks on the plinth, or will the second statue remain whole for some other purpose.

So far, I don't mind getting the stones, even actively working to get them. The downsides of this are training up skills just to get a pair of stones for a statue that I don't know what it does and the limited choices of how to train in order to get said stones.

Great expectations

I was spending time in the cyclops room of the Warriors' guild, whipping those giants to gain a defender. Another person is there. He's wearing proselyte with a dds and a skull hovering over his head. I keep an eye on him, watching as hit health gets down to half and wondering if I should bless his grave or not. I decided not to because this person can easily run out the door to safety. He died, due to lack of food and I gazed as his little wooden signpost crumbled into nothing.

Blessing graves now seems to be obligatory for anyone with 70+ prayer visibly displayed, such as wearing the prayer CoA, the Falador 3 shield or an enhanced spirit shield.

Personally, I look at the situation and player as to whether I'll give a blessing or not. I'd certainly bless a friend's grave. While training slayer or just wholesale slaughtering, you meet and talk to other players. If someone is being a douchebag and they die, they better be fast getting back. If someone is amicable, either friendly chatter or quietly killing away from you, they'll get that hour should they buy the farm. I've been in both situations, the latter case on both ends. Firstly, I'd been slaying waterfiends with someone who kept nattering at me over my wrong choice of gear, protection prayer, bunyip and loot gathering. When he died due to getting to close to a brutal green dragon, I ignored the angel of death that dropped in and kept slaying. In the other case, I was under Taverly killing baby blues for slayer and a guy was ranging from the stalagmite corner. This guy kept getting nommed by a stray baby whenever he left the safespot, eventually dying. I blessed the grave and listened to his grateful thanks when he returned via the agility shortcut. On another account, I'd been killing turoth for slayer and not doing very well. They kept nomming me for more than I could heal and I'd stupidly been looking at another tab for a second too long. When I tabbed back, I had 4 hitpoints and frantically spammed my monkfish until I turned up in Falador. I did my best to get back to Rellekka via the fairy rings (no slayer ring at the time and lyres were all empty), debating whether to rest or keep walking when the time flipped over to 59 minutes. I saw a message that someone had blessed my grave. I wasn't too far away by then - at pyrefiends - and gushed a thank you to the person who was hovering around the gravestone.

Funny situations are finding blessed graves at Falador bank with the recently deceased respawning 30 feet away or being told to not bless a grave because the person isn't carrying anything worth coming back to loot. When they first came out, I bought the angel of death gravestone and died to the wolves near Sinclair mansion just to read what it said. 

I check graves for names and look at the players nearby, usually happens at Draynor market where people die pickpocketing and just run back from Falador. It happens in Falador, too, though they're mugging the guards. I suppose it's easier than using food to heal.

A tip that I want to pass on is if you do die and manage to get your stuff back, please PLEASE demolish your gravestone so random people won't waste their prayer points blessing it. I've done it without thinking, only to see Jimbimmily42 fletching yew longs next to his grave.