Nex Rewards - Updated (2024)

Feedback & Changes (November 12th)

Thank you for your feedback! The updated rewards have gone down a treat and it seems that there are just a couple of tweaks needed before we launch the poll next week.

Remember, we’ll be repeating this process with the Tombs of Amascut rewards shortly – so stay tuned!

For now though, here’s what's happening:

Torva Armour: Graphical Changes

The original image of the Male Torva Armour showed a rather lean look, so we’ve buffed up the legs to make it look more muscular – unfortunately we won’t be adding Protein Shakes to Nex’s loot table, so any further bodybuilding will be up to you.

Storability

A lot of you were curious whether Torva Armour can be stored in Player Owned Houses. This is especially important for Ultimate Ironmen because it is a brand new best-in-slot item. We've discussed this as a team and we have decided that Torva Armour will not be storable in Player Owned Housing. The previous best-in-slot item, Bandos Armour, is also not storable, so there’s no precedent for changing that now.

We are, however, open to reconsidering this decision in the future if there is significant demand.

Torva Full Helm

Some of you were wondering why the Torva Helmet gives a greater strength bonus than the Torva Chestplate. We'd like to clarify that this is intentional, and is in line with other items in the game, like Slayer Helmets, the Serpentine Visage and the Neitiznot Faceguard.

Torva Armour (in relation to the Justiciar and Inquisitor's Armour)

Some of you feel that the new Torva set is encroaching on existing items, particularly the Justiciar Faceguard and the Inquisitor's set. We recognise this, and regret that there is some overlap, but we don’t believe the solution is to buff existing items.

Justiciar Armour has a set effect which should make it useful in some niche situations, and the Inquisitor's set will still be useful in situations where monsters are weak to crush.

Should Torva Armour be added to the game, we will review suggestions concerning existing items and consider how we can make them more useful in the future. This could be through a buff or new content that makes these items more desirable.

Ancient Godsword

One clarification we would like to make about the Ancient Godsword's Special Attack is that it will not be dependent on where it's originally used. For example, if Player A were to use the Ancient Godsword's special attack on Player B, and Player B flees, the damage and healing will still trigger as long as Player A is chasing Player B. Many players were under the impression that the target would just need to move five tiles away from the original location, and this is not the case.

We're aware that many of you want to see this item better utilised in PvM situations. For now, the team is hesitant to make any more changes as we envision the Godsword having more of a PvP focus. Should it pass the poll, we'd like to give players the time to explore new playstyles and try it out before making any changes. Having said that, we’re always open to rebalancing items if we find players aren’t enjoying them.

Zaryte Bow

We're really pleased that so many of you had fun testing out the Zaryte Bow, and that you love the concept of a multi-target ranged special attack. We're aware that some of you are disappointed that the Zaryte Bow has been removed as a possible reward from Nex, but that doesn't mean we’ve scrapped it all together! We will keep this reward in mind for future opportunities!

Blood Essence

We’ve given the impression that Blood Essence is our answer to fixing the long standing problem of obtaining Blood Runes. We would like to clarify that the introduction of Blood Essence on its own is not the solution - either short term or long term.

Blood Essence is just the first step. The long-term strategy is the Guardians of Gielinor project – an ideation project first mentioned in the December 2020 Gielinor Gazette. It aims to be a more fun and interactive way of training RuneCraft that compliments existing methods, and we’re hoping to launch it next year.

We appreciate that Blood Essence feels a bit strange, mainly because it’s not clear yet where it fits long term. Unfortunately, we’re still not ready to share further details about Guardians of Gielinor – however, should Blood Essence fail to pass the poll, we’re happy to pitch it again down the line when we can better explain how it fits into the big picture.

Basically, just keep in mind that there might be other, faster ways to craft Blood Runes in future, and Blood Essence will come in handy then.

In the recent Rewards Blogs for Nex and Tombs of Amascut, we revealed the rewards on offer and gave you the chance to try them for yourselves in a special feedback Beta.

The feedback we received was largely positive, although a few changes appear to be required. We’ll be discussing the changes we’re making to the Tombs of Amascut rewards in a separate blog – today, we’re going to focus on Nex!

As always, we refer to the in-game timings as cycles. Each cycle is equal to 0.6 seconds and is also commonly referred to as a 'tick' by the wider community.

It’s become clear from your feedback that many of you feel it’s time for new items to claim the spotlight. Too many items have remained best-in-slot for ages, and players now expect rewards that will shake up this status quo.

To 'fess' up: we’ve been hesitant to introduce more best-in-slot items, as doing so inevitably creates powercreep. This can result in a number of issues, particularly the devaluation of older content. We want to avoid this at all costs: OSRS thrives because old content is kept as relevant as possible!

Therefore, we’d like to slow the process of powercreep where possible, but we’re aware that we also need to provide powerful incentives to play difficult content. We’ve set a precedent for ‘big ticket’ items, and we want you to feel truly rewarded for taking down the toughest foes!

For this reason, we’re making a number of changes to strike a better balance and better reward you for the risks you’ll take in fighting Nex. Let’s have a look at what’s changing!

We’re taking things to the Nex level – well, an old level, technically – with the return of Nex! This fearsome boss was originally released in January 2011, and 10 years later we’re bringing you a new encounter with this ancient adversary of the Second Age.

Dwelling in the Ancient Prison beneath the God Wars Dungeon, Nex can only be accessed once you complete the Desert Treasure quest (and a small miniquest to open the Frozen Door). Once inside the Prison, players must crush through a formidable army before reaching Nex herself.

You can take on the boss in groups of up to 80 players, and defeating her gives you all a chance to obtain some highly valuable rewards – including an iconic armour set!

So, what’s this Nex business all about then? Let’s refresh our collective memory...

Lore

In the Second Age, Nex was one of the closest followers of an ancient god. Following the defeat of this ancient god and the dawn of the God Wars, Nex was among many imprisoned by the forces of Saradomin.

Years later, a mysterious individual fooled a group of Saradominists into freeing Nex and her allies. Thankfully, the armies of Saradomin, Zamorak, Aramdyl and Bandos joined forces to successfully drive them back into their prison, but the magical protections that contained them were damaged in the process.

As such, Nex’s prison is somewhat… vulnerable. And while officially the followers of her old master are all but gone from Gielinor, there are still a few nefarious types out there who would be happy to see Nex freed once more.

Behind The Frozen Door

To reach Nex, players must first gain access to the Ancient Prison by unlocking the Frozen Door in the God Wars Dungeon. This iced-up access point has actually existed since the Dungeon was launched, but has remained sealed – until now!

To open the door, players will need to complete a miniquest which begins after completing the Desert Treasure quest. A messenger will approach with a letter from a mysterious individual...

Note: the messenger will spawn shortly after Desert Treasure is completed. If you’ve already finished that quest, they’ll appear shortly after you log-in.

The Ancient Prison

Once inside the Prison, you’ll be met by Ashuelot Reis, a follower of Guthix who has dedicated herself to the unenviable task of keeping Nex contained. She'll give your group a brief overview of the Prison complex before asking you all to join her outside Nex's chamber.

Within the Prison, you’ll can take on four new foes from Nex’s army: Spiritual Warriors, Spiritual Rangers, Spiritual Mages and Blood Reavers. As with the rest of the God Wars Dungeon, defeating these nasties adds to your Ancient Essence count (with some yielding more Essence than others). Players need an Essence count of 40 to finally enter the boss's chamber.

However, this being God Wars Dungeon, you can bypass this requirement with an Ecumenical Key. Plus, the required Essence count is lowered by completing Combat Achievement tiers.

Your Essence count is shown on the Kill Count interface, but it’s hidden until the player has unlocked the Frozen Door. Once you’ve reached (or bypassed) the required Essence, the door opens, and you’re into the outer room of Nex's chamber. We don’t want to reveal too much about the encounter, but let’s just say it’s going to test you!

For those of you already familiar with the encounter in RuneScape, Nex in Old School is largely based on the 2011 boss fight with some modifications and balancing tweaks to fit Old School.

Players who have completed the Hard tier of Combat Achievements can purchase a private instance, but it’s unlikely you’ll want to take on Nex solo – she’s quite the formidable foe. The cost of this instance starts at 150,000 coins, and goes down as you complete higher Combat Achievement tiers.

Defeating Nex equals juicy rewards! These are shared across all players who contribute enough, with higher performing players bagging more loot. The MVP of the kill will also rake in a little extra swag.

All contributing players have a chance of obtaining a unique item. This chance scales based on individual contribution, with a bonus chance for the MVP.

A player’s individual contribution is wiped when they leave the area, but this doesn't impact the contribution of other players. For example, if two players have both made 50% contribution and one of them leaves, the other player remains on 50%.

Nex’s uniques are all new rewards, and they will all be added to the Collection Log. In addition, the usual pet drop will also be added.

Many of you will remember that back in 2011, Nex came with two additional armour sets as well as the Virtus set. We're not opposed to re-introducing these (we feel that Torva could be a particularly good addition to the game), and people have suggested maintaining the price of existing God Wars Dungeon items by combining them with loot from Nex. However, we don't want too many armour sets arriving in a single piece of content, and the Virtus set doesn't exactly have God Wars Dungeon items that would be relevant for combining. Instead, we'd like to offer more armour rewards later in 2022 alongside content themed around a certain ancient god... We hope to update you on some item sink ideas we're exploring in a blog later this year.

So, what are you getting for your blood, sweat and tears? Let’s take a look…

Introducing... Torva Armour!

We received some great feedback about the Virtus Armour, but it’s clear that it didn't excite you as much as the prospect of a new best-in-slot melee set.

In light of this, we’ll be swapping the Virtus Armour set from Nex for the highly requested Torva Armour! Torva was a powerful warrior who once directly served Nex. She still holds on to his powerful armour, and may drop it to those lucky enough.

This doesn't mean we have no plans for Virtus in the future, and there are more details on these plans below.

This is a melee armour set, consisting of a Full Helm, Platebody and Platelegs. It offers better offensive and defensive capabilities than Bandos, with slightly worse defensive capabilities and Prayer bonus than Justiciar. Therefore, we think this makes Torva a very appealing offensive armour set upgrade over Bandos, whilst still leaving Justiciar in a solid place for its purpose.

As we mentioned above about power creep, we don't want Bandos armour to devalue as that could make General Graardor less worth doing, and we want it to still have a purpose in the game. We think that a good way to keep it within the ecosystem of the game is to use it as a component to upgrade Torva Armour.

Pieces of the Torva set are going to drop as broken and unequippable, and must be revitalised using components salvaged from the Bandos set. You’ll be able to break down your Bandos pieces in a furnace found within the Ancient Prison and receive tradeable Bandosian Components in return. Combine these with the broken Torva pieces, and you’ll assemble the set!

There are no skilling requirements to break down the Bandos pieces, but you’ll need level 90 Smithing to attach the Bandosian Components to broken Torva pieces.

Here’s how many components you’ll get per armour piece:

• Chestplate: 3 Components
• Tassets: 2 Components

And here’s how many Components you’ll need to repair the Torva pieces:

• Helm: 1 Component
• Chest: 2 Components
• Platelegs: 2 Components

The broken Torva, Bandosian Components and repaired Torva are all tradeable. They have an 80 Defence requirement to wear. We did consider Bandos Boots providing components, however this takes away from the potential Bandos Chestplate/Tassets item sink, and those are the items we really want to keep a decent value.

As detailed above, since the Virtus Armour got generally good feedback, we aren’t scrapping it completely. We’d still like to introduce it as a reward a little later down the line, and with a few tweaks based on your feedback. You might remember that our original plans were to release Torva later down the line alongside a different update themed around a certain ancient god. With the changes in this blog, we now think Virtus would be a suitable reward for that update instead.

The inevitable question is: why not both sets, right now? Well, other content of the same difficulty level has the same number of rewards, and we don't feel like she needs any more right now. What you get is pretty awesome.

As always, please do share your feedback on this decision – but first, let’s take a look at the other changes we’ve made.

Zaryte Vambraces

Nex is the only survivor of a mysterious race known as nihil. The nihil were deemed a failure by Nex's master, but some of their remains were repurposed to be used as armour by Nex's army.

We’re very happy to see that so many of you are excited about the Zaryte Vambraces!

However, we’ve noticed that the 50 Defence requirements locks certain restricted accounts out of using this awesome equipment, so we thought we’d change that so it's more accessible for ‘zerk builds looking to try the Vambraces out. The Defence stats are close to this threshold already, so it makes sense.

We’ll be lowering the Defence requirement for the Zaryte Vambraces to level 45.

Zaryte (Cross)Bow

The Zaryte Bow got a lot of great feedback, but we noticed that many of you were hoping for a new crossbow instead - especially following the introduction of the Bow of Faerdhinen. So, we’d like to introduce the Zaryte Crossbow! Like with Zaryte vambraces, Zaryte crossbows were crafted from the remains of long dead nihil, taking full advantage of the magical abilities of this ancient race.

This item is best-in-slot Tier 80 Crossbow, and that’s especially exciting because Nex just happens to be vulnerable to Crossbows!

The Zaryte Crossbow requires 80 Ranged. It comes with a neat passive effect that makes bolt effects 10% stronger – for example, Ruby Bolts would hit 22% of the target’s current HP, instead of 20%, with the cap also being raised by 10%, from 100 to 110. It also has a special attack which guarantees that your bolt effect if you succeed at hitting the target/passing accuracy at the cost of 75% of your energy.

Now, you might be wondering – if there’s a new Crossbow in town, what happens to everyone’s favourite noisemaker, the Armadyl Crossbow? We’ve decided to take a similar approach to the Torva Armour; the Zaryte Crossbow will drop as a broken item that comes from Nex herself, which must then be combined with an Armadyl Crossbow and 250 Nihil Shards to make it usable.

We heard your suggestions that crossbows haven't had enough love lately, introducing this new T80 crossbow should make them a stronger and more appealing option. We look forward to seeing how this will shake things up!

Lastly, some of you might be wondering if the Zaryte Bow will ever see its way into the game. After all, a lot of you had fun testing its niche use cases. We would like to clarify that we are very open to adding the Zaryte Bow as a reward for future content, provided that it fits thematically and there is still a desire for it. We will keep your feedback in mind and let you know when we are ready to present it as a reward for a suitable piece of content in future.

Ancient Godsword

When Nex escaped her icy prison, she found herself in the middle of the battle over the Godsword. Realising the potential of this weapon, Nex arranged for a fifth hilt to be made. However, the four armies joined forces to imprison Nex once more, meaning her hilt never saw use.

It seems that players weren’t quite sure how the Ancient Godsword’s special attack would stack up against the others, especially in PvM situations.

We want the Ancient Godsword to excel in its own way. It’s not our intention to replace the existing Godswords or make this newest one better than the others. For this reason, we focussed on its PvP abilities – but that doesn’t mean we won’t create interesting PvM encounters that might benefit from this type of weapon in the future.

Basically, we’re deciding to keep changes to this item modest. Now that you’ve seen the changes to Nex’s loot table as a whole, we hope you’ll all be more comfortable with the Godsword remaining in its own cosy niche.

However, to give it a little more oomph, we’re increasing the damage and healing on the Ancient Godswords special attack from 20 to 25.

If the special attack hits, it deals a normal hit with 10% extra damage. In addition, an eight-cycle (4.8 seconds) timer starts. If the target doesn’t move more than five tiles away before the timer ends, they’ll be hit for 25 damage, and the attacker will be healed for the same amount.

During the recent Beta, we also noticed that in PvP situations, Praying Mage would completely negate the Ancient Godsword's special attack. This was unintentional, and we would like to clarify that this effect would not be present in the live game if the Ancient Godsword were to pass poll.

Further Clarifications: Blood Essence

Before we go, we’d also like to explain a bit more about Blood Essence, since we previously kept those details pretty sparse. Blood Essence is a semi-rare item dropped by Nex and various other monsters in the Ancient Prison. It is both tradeable and stackable.

A player can activate a Blood Essence to toggle it to its ‘active’ state. If they then craft Blood Runes with the active Blood Essence, they’ll have a 50% chance to create extra runes. Each blood essence has 1000 charges (or can craft 1000 runes per essence).

A player can only have one active Blood Essence at a time. An activated Blood Essence will become untradable.

This is intended to promote skilling moreso and alleviate the complaints about blood rune generations via skilling somewhat, we're aware that shops are still the most efficient way to get blood runes, and hope to introduce stronger ways to craft runes in the future.

Nihil Shards

These have remained unchanged. Nihil Shards are consumables dropped by all foes in the Ancient Prison – including Nex. They can be crushed to make Nihil dust, which is a secondary ingredient in new Ancient Brew potions.

An Ancient Brew is a combination of Nihil dust and a Dwarf Weed potion, and requires 85 Herblore to make, giving 190 Herblore XP. When drunk, this primordial concoction boosts Magic by 5% +2 and restores Prayer by 10% +2 with the ability to boost up to 5% over the player’s base Prayer level. However, it also drains Attack, Strength and Defence by 10% +2, so think before you drink.

Ecumenical Key Shards

For those that missed it you can gather 50 of these for one Ecumenical Key. Please note that you can't convert the Shards to a Key if you already have the cap on Keys.

And There's More...

That’s not all – every foe in the prison apart from Nex herself has a chance of dropping a piece of the iconic Ancient Ceremonial Robes set! This set consists of a mask, top, legs, gloves and boots. They have the same stats as Monk Robes and will be added to the Collection Log. If you're familiar with Nex from old, note that wearing them no longer allows players to bypass the Essence Count required to take on Nex herself.

Remember to keep your eyes peeled for a second rewards feedback blog, focusing on the loot from Tombs of Amascut.

That's everything for this blog. Remember and we'd love to hear your feedback so please do...

• Let us know what you think via our Official Forums.
• Join the Official Old School RuneScape Discord server and head to the #nex channel in the Blog Discussions area.
• Use the #Nex hashtag on Twitter.
• Reply to this Reddit thread or make your own threads with '(Nex)' in the title.

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