God Wars Dungeon - The Ancient Prison

This article is covering the RuneScape update released by Jagex on 10/01/11. For the main God Wars Dungeon article, click here.

Here we have it then. Almost everyone was waiting impatiently for this. The King of the Dwarves has this to blame for its unpopularity - people didn't want some silly dwarf quest, they wanted the long-awaited update to one of the main 'high level' areas in the game.

The Ancient Prison has three main selling points. These were...

• The new God Wars Dungeon boss, Nex.
• The new armour (which initially was a vague 'Torva') which now has the names Torva, Pernix and Virtus, for meleers, rangers and magers respectively.
• The new bow, named the Zaryte Bow, which requires no ammunition and rivals the Chaotic Crossbow for power.

  

  The other bosses' reaction to Nex

The idea

Being Jagex, they didn't fancy having the path to the God Wars Dungeon boss involve simply killing 40 Zarosian minions then kicking new boss arse. Luckily they didn't opt for killing 40 Bandos/Armadyl/Zamorak/Saradomin minions either. The idea is, you have to go to the individual strongholds of each of the existing 4 gods, and kill minions in hope for a part of a key. Once you have all four, you can make it into a proper key which opens the frozen door. However, the key has charges, which drain each time you open the frozen door. Spend all the charges and it breaks, forcing you to go back to slapping Aviansies again. However, you can repair it as though it was Barrows armour, for 50k each charge restored. What may have been a decent idea ended up as a half-arsed moneysink attempt.

In case you didn't know, due to having to go to all 4 strongholds, there is an artificial skill requirement to accessing the Ancient Prison - 70 Strength, Ranged, Hitpoints and Agility.

Typical player reaction (view full size)

Nex - the boss itself.

What Jagex have created is the least convincing super-powered-new-hardest-boss-in-the-game. It looks more fitting as the main antagonist for the new series of Teen Titans than an almighty world breaker which took the might of all four gods to imprison. Not to mention its completely out of place. Zamorak has a giant demon boss, Bandos a massive ogre, Armadyl a immense eagle and Saradomin a divine angel. Zaros's general seems to have attempted to be modeled after some vampiress, but he got confused, used the wrong coloured crayon and just scrawled a badly drawn fallen angel instead.

Information is still limited regarding Nex, although it has a combat level of 1001 and 30,000 HP. Jagex have not learned from Game Freak - jump too far forward and you risk dead-ending the game. Besides the flagship drops her drop table is strange - Ancient Platebody, noted Mithril Full Helms, 5 noted Dragon Boots and a Rune Kiteshield.

The new armour and bow.

Managing to miss the point completely regarding new high level items, Jagex went and made the entire lot of them tradable. Referencing the famous line from England's 1966 World Cup victory, they think its all over(priced) - it is now!

• Virtus Mage Mask - 100M.
• Torva Platebody - 200M.
• Pernix Chaps - 150M.
• Realisation that Jagex have made the armour unavailable to 99.8% of RuneScape's playerbase - priceless.

  

  World 2 after 27 seconds

This new hp-boosting armour has a 10-hour degradation clock, after that it becomes broken, similar to its initial price tag. The bow is priced at 60M, although thats expected to double then fall into a quarter of that eventually. Similar to Nex the Unconvincing, not much is known, apart from the fact that World 2 is in hysterics.

Four months after

After a long absurd period of the items constantly rising, people (or maybe just the SMS'ers) finally lost interest in them and let them crash. Virtus Mask never reached 140M before crashing down to 80M, Zaryte Bow managed to reach over 200M before the sheer amount of people rubbishing made it become the new Armadyl Godsword, Pernix body managed to get up to 900M before dropping and people are finally starting to CoinShare most of the items. Just a shame all this took so long to iron out - if the 90 Defence stuff is similar to this its going to be a disaster.

The aftermath

The update was irrelevant for 99.8% of RuneScape's playerbase. Only those with a good high level clan or a ton of rares/cash benefited from this. Those high enough level could actually fight Nex with any sort of practicality, and the merchants, who arguably don't even play RuneScape in favour of a sort of stock market MMO could directly buy the armour with their wealth. Even a large amount of elite level players have no benefits from this - those without Turmoil/Overloads are left out of this.

While most may argue how its the highest level update the game has ever had, its actually glaringly obvious its a hugely misguided piece of content only a very few people can actually enjoy. Many can only hope more accessible content comes out in future, either in the form of solo-only bosses or untradable rewards.

Misc. Notes

• The Zarosian followers you have to kill for access to the boss are low in variety. They include Zarosian variants of the Spiritual Warrior/Ranger/Mage (without the Slayer level requirements) and a more vicious Bloodveld (also with no Slayer requirement).
• Outside the boss room there is a bank. (Yes, a bank. Seriously.) Not only does this defeat the purpose of killcount, its also downright stupid. Leaving the boss room is limited to teleportation or death - similar to the previous GWD boss rooms.
• The other God Wars Dungeon bosses are now voiced. Whether these are done by people whose voices are actually relevant to the monster are unknown. Hopefully K'ril Tsutsaroth doesn't sound like a Geordie, General Graardor doesn't sound like a toff, Commander Zilyana doesn't sound like a anime character (she does) and Kree'Arra doesn't sound like a horse. Because that would be crap, strange, annoying and silly respectively.
• PvP is ruined Or maybe not! The new armour and weapons are so expensive that no one will use them in PvP..
• Turned out the new armors had a major bug.If you get hit by it once,it degrades,and its untradable,even if recharged.Way to go jagex! *Thumbs up!*