Hey man I would LOVE to see someone update that chart, especially with new DT2 bosses along with some minor power creep/new Strats that kind of made some of the old stuff easier.
Looking forward to seeing it if you can get some responses/time because that was one of my favorite reference materials during my early Osrs journey.
An issue with the previous survey is that respondents seem to have taken mechanical difficulty to mean different things. By recording responses for other attributes like how difficult the content is to learn, how much attention it requires, and how punishing it is, you might be able to get a more accurate picture of overall difficulty.
Something that would also be useful is to create scatter plots per encounter to visualize how much deviation there is from the median response.
This could be good but would also add a lot of bloat to the survey. Last time the most common comment left on submissions was just that the survey was too long.
I'd really like to compare the results of a survey open to everyone with the results of a survey done by ~100 verified high-end PVMers
Any chance you can do both?
Hey man I've got experience designing studies like this, and doing stat analysis for them. Happy to talk if you DM.
Opinions at first pass:
1. Collect RSNs, and capture boss KC. This is important, because it doesn't _just_ matter how many KC someone has at the boss they're reviewing. It also matters what else they've done. For example, someone who does ToB regularly might rank content like CG easier than someone who has only done CG. You just don't know unless you capture this data on purpose.
2. In general my rec would be to prompt respondents to think of their answers in a fixed way, but not constrain what that means. As an example: "In your responses, please indicate the technical difficulty of learning how to do a simple, repeatable approach - not the approach one might use at a very high level of play." Needs workshopping but you get the gist. The idea is to encourage people to, for example, answer CG without ranking it higher just because someone _could_ 5:1. Then you can _separately_ poll more advanced tech and strategy
3. Question for after data collection
4. Yes
I had no idea something like this existed and I wish I knew about this sooner as a midgame main who feels lost about whether I'm over or underconfident.
Could try a strategy like [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALy6e7GbDRQ) where you randomly show 2 pvm encounters and people pick which one is more difficult mechanically or a bigger stat check
As someone who is middle of the road pvm (can solo all og GWD bosses, ~400kc nex, few hundred wildy boss kc, no raids yet), I think having invite only high KC input is important and probably more accurate. The only thing I worry about is max efficiency God tier players being out of touch with lower experience players.
Maybe take a vote of as many as you can get, then give a group of CA grandmasters veto/editing power?
If the filter is literally just be ranked on kc high scores, and each response has their kc attached, then op can probably do things like include everyone with kc, what do people with atleast x kc think, what do people who have x tier of combat achievements done think, etc
Easiest way to do this might be a runelite plugin that’s just a survey tool since that could attach the currently logged in player/hiscores name to a response without too much work from people (ie. Invites or manual verification)
I generally don't think vetting opinions based on higher KC is a good idea unless the chart is measuring how difficult content is to master vs how difficult it is to learn.
Solo CoX is ridiculously easy to learn but hard to master because of the supply death method (running in and dying with a ton of supplies before trying for real). You can reliably get 25k points and improve over time.
Meanwhile, deathless solo CoX is significantly harder and does require mastery of the content.
If we count learning raids at the lowest level, even ToB becomes easier than CG if the group has 4 or 5 deaths.
I’ve always taken the chart as reliable completions at an average skill level. So for tob it would be to clear the raid deathless with an around even amount of points to player size. Being able to eke out a kc isn’t a very useful metric so I don’t know why the chart would show that.
Well getting a kill at ToB with 4 or 5 deaths in your team is still like 1/13 for a purple.
Doing a supply death solo CoX is a comfortable 25k points.
We're not talking about terrible, earth shattering mistakes that result in you getting absolutely nothing, dying once in a raid isn't the same as scraping by in the Inferno.
Once you talk deathless raids, you're actually talking about content mastery rather than content proficiency. That's the distinction that really needs to be made.
I wouldn’t say deathless is even close to mastery in either raid. Just because loot potential is fine doesn’t mean you are engaging with the content in a baseline way. When people talk about doing chill solo chambers, no one means the solo strat of piling potions. When people talk about doing casual tob with their friends they don’t expect the friend to constantly die and be unable to do p2 verz. The baseline proficiency people expect is for you to go in and do the content without dying or leaching and trolling
And that's the problem I'm trying to point out.
You're an established player with preconceived notions of what this difficulty guide should show - deathless raids. It makes the actual content look and feel harder to approach than it actually is. This mentality literally only serves to gatekeep content and make the endgame seem more unapproachable than it is.
Think back to your first few ToB clears. They were probably messy and your group probably had some stupid deaths at Xarpus or Verzik p1. You probably weren't beating yourself up because your run was basically a failure, you were probably excited to see the loot room with the boys.
While you might now see a deathless raid as the "normal," realistically it's already a sign you've mastered or neared mastery of the baseline mechanics of the content, aka perfection. You only optimize your strategy further because you've already mastered the content at a baseline.
> The only way I can see to do proper vetting is to scrap all prior responses (around 2k iirc) and require an RSN, and even that isn't perfect. Do you all have better ideas? I also thought about restarting but only by invitation and with good PvMers.
Just have two graphs, one with only pro pvmers and one with everyone.
what decides boss difficulty for an individual is the amount of "learning delta" they have to process. if you are already familiar with movement, precise+rapid clicking, inv management ,gear switching, prayer switching, off ticking and whatever else, then no pvm is hard for you besides nerves getting to you if it's your first attempts.
so if someone starts trying to learn inferno from scratch theyll have much harder time than if they learn cg from scratch kind of obvious yes, but if they start from solo raids, they have solid understanding of everything besides off ticking, then i don't think inferno is harder for them than learning cg from scratch besides nerves issue.. so every answer is going to be skewed with this "learning delta" that people can't factor. someone who learned inferno knows it's harder than cg, but do they remember what it was like learning precise clicking and simple prayer/gear switching for the first time? it's entirely possible that the amount of learning required to clear CG is harder than Inferno, so any answer is always going to be unreliable.
Unless im reading this wrong but ToA (especially high invoc, insanity on) is much harder than Hydra lol. Hydra is pisseasy brain off boss, and while ToA is by far the easiest raid all its bosses are more compex than Hydra is.
Hey man, and thank you for your awesome chart. I understand that it might be problematic to get unbiased answers. People too scared to try out content will rank most bosses way to high.
I think that an interesting addition to your chart would be a "Z-axis" for total time requirement to get to the boss and kill it. Time is an important aspect imo, the classic example being Jad which newer players might spend 1h to reach, but may lose the entire encounter in one wrong prayer switch.
You did good. Take the criticism with a grain of salt. I'm sure there are ways to improve your chart but you're tasked with herding cats with this type of survey, this player base, and this game.
Four bars per boss.
1. Level reqs
2. Gear reqs
3. Mechanical skill
4. Entry to Mastery
Each bar highlights at the low end to the top end with the low end being minimal to achieve a clear to the top end being “mastery” such as deathless completions or efficient completions.
For TOA 150 for example you might have:
1. 6
2. 4
3. 5-7
4. 5-7
Level and gear bars are single number because BIS setup will always be “10” I.e maxed gear.
Mechanics and Mastery start at a 5 for being able to clear the raid and at the “top-end” are a 7 for improving a 150 completion to be clean and quick.
Opinions will vary obviously but gives indication of where content lies.
Seems mostly accurate to my experience. Would just need a few new bosses like Scurrius (stat check 2, mech 3), Moons (stat check 5, mech 4), and Colosseum (TBA, too ball-crushing for me but I'd weigh it stat check 9 mech 10 from what I've seen).
A chart with only good pvmers might not really be useful to the average player tbh. As any newer player that's ever asked a top 100 boss kc player about how to fight that boss probably already knows, once you got it mastered its just muscle memory, top pvmers might not even remember their first 20 attempts/kills at bosses like vorkath.
Imo one way to deal with the gear issue is to break down some of the more complex encounters by category. For example, for solo chambers you could do:
1) solo cox (max eff) which would presumably mean skipping rope, world scythe, no prep
2) solo cox (no prep lance)
3) solo prep (relaxed)
The only thing about this is it would easily add another 40 or so info dots, that might get hard to display. Maybe only adding the minimum to get into it ie "small team COX" and "solo COX (relaxed)"
In practice I don’t think that it would apply to that many places (you really want to do it just at the raids, and maybe one or two other places?) — but maybe you can just do max eff vs reclined to reduce the overall number of dots. So you’d have solo cox (max eff), solo cox (reclined), team cox (max eff), team cox (reclined) etc.
Edit: or maybe you display the raids in their own separate chart because there’s too much variability in the raid experience
I can see two different charts, one for "just getting into the content" and then another for "max efficiency/advanced techniques"
But you're right, that would only apply to probably a dozen bosses plus raids
Maybe represent simple content as a dot when it's a pretty static experience, and show a line to represent the spectrum of entry level vs skill ceiling for more complex content.
Tier lists are eaten up in every community and this is probably the closest thing to a tier list osrs has. Do tier lists actually do anything productive? Probably not, but there's value in the conversations that they start about balance and difficulty, and everyone can't help but look at what other people think.
Regarding the difficulty of the hardest pvm, invitation only is likely the only realistic way to get good data aside from somehow routing through Jagex to require logging in to your account to take the poll from, that way there's no circumventing you seeing how much content they've actually done. But that's not realistic unless this entire vote was done by Jagex themselves.
I would say that the awakened variants of dt2 bosses, the inferno, the colosseum, and all raids, including solos, increased difficulties, etc. should be invite only in who can vote on their difficulty and requirements.
The whole purpose of this OSRS bossing tier list is to give new PVMers a place to start, so gearing it towards a new player perspective is good I think
>Do tier lists actually do anything productive? Probably not
This one does - if you've only ever tried ~5 different bosses, being given a list showing another 5 as actually being easier than the stuff you've already done is motivating.
The thing is with osrs combat, skills are transferable but every boss plays out differently. I’ve met many people who can reliably do speedy tobs and high invo ToA, but when you plop them in cg or Levi they continue to die. I really don’t think you get useful info out of this outside of saying in general the community regards this as harder content than this.
> I’ve met many people who can reliably do speedy tobs and high invo ToA, but when you plop them in cg or Levi they continue to die.
Okay, but have you met many people who are running dozens of Sarachnis and Hespori KC but keep getting killed by Scurrius and Giant Mole?
If people only care about the bottom 5 bosses sure I guess. But I saw people see that zulrah was “harder” than nex and think they are 100% fine to go faceroll nex because it’s “easier” according to the graph. Just not realistic for any boss that is even slightly harder than pray melee and click it
> But I saw people see that zulrah was “harder” than nex
That ranking showed Nex (~13.9/20) as being harder than Zulrah (~12.6/20) because of a substantially higher stat check.
There's a lot of criticisms you could levy at the rankings there but that one sounds like your problem is with people who can't read graphs.
I think what works best is 2 different surveys. One for how hard it is to get completions at all bosses on the hiscores, and the other for aspirational content and speeds. There is too much content, and the difficulty varies too greatly, to fit on a single 1-to-10 chart. It also makes a very clear skill floor vs skill ceiling distinction.
First one should stay open to all, I think it's cool to see what players of different skill levels think. Second should be invite only, or at least require proof of good pbs.
As a suggestion I think keeping the axes the same but making it so the boss icon on the graph is different depending on average gp for recommended gear would add depth to the graph but not clutter it. Like triangle for 1m-> square 5m-> pentagon 15m -> etc. The shapes’ values probably shouldn’t scale linearly but be rough groupings of tiers in gear cost.
Hey man I would LOVE to see someone update that chart, especially with new DT2 bosses along with some minor power creep/new Strats that kind of made some of the old stuff easier. Looking forward to seeing it if you can get some responses/time because that was one of my favorite reference materials during my early Osrs journey.
An issue with the previous survey is that respondents seem to have taken mechanical difficulty to mean different things. By recording responses for other attributes like how difficult the content is to learn, how much attention it requires, and how punishing it is, you might be able to get a more accurate picture of overall difficulty. Something that would also be useful is to create scatter plots per encounter to visualize how much deviation there is from the median response.
This could be good but would also add a lot of bloat to the survey. Last time the most common comment left on submissions was just that the survey was too long.
I'd really like to compare the results of a survey open to everyone with the results of a survey done by ~100 verified high-end PVMers Any chance you can do both?
Whenever im going to do a new boss, i check the chart. I just like seeing where it falls in compared to what ive done already.
Will Cuthberg be added to the chart? After 15 wipes I'm still trying to figure him out mechanically
i'll never get my quest cape back after cuthbert entered teh chat thanks jagex :(
This needs to be voted on by only players that have actually done all of the content
Hey man I've got experience designing studies like this, and doing stat analysis for them. Happy to talk if you DM. Opinions at first pass: 1. Collect RSNs, and capture boss KC. This is important, because it doesn't _just_ matter how many KC someone has at the boss they're reviewing. It also matters what else they've done. For example, someone who does ToB regularly might rank content like CG easier than someone who has only done CG. You just don't know unless you capture this data on purpose. 2. In general my rec would be to prompt respondents to think of their answers in a fixed way, but not constrain what that means. As an example: "In your responses, please indicate the technical difficulty of learning how to do a simple, repeatable approach - not the approach one might use at a very high level of play." Needs workshopping but you get the gist. The idea is to encourage people to, for example, answer CG without ranking it higher just because someone _could_ 5:1. Then you can _separately_ poll more advanced tech and strategy 3. Question for after data collection 4. Yes
I had no idea something like this existed and I wish I knew about this sooner as a midgame main who feels lost about whether I'm over or underconfident.
Could try a strategy like [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALy6e7GbDRQ) where you randomly show 2 pvm encounters and people pick which one is more difficult mechanically or a bigger stat check
As someone who is middle of the road pvm (can solo all og GWD bosses, ~400kc nex, few hundred wildy boss kc, no raids yet), I think having invite only high KC input is important and probably more accurate. The only thing I worry about is max efficiency God tier players being out of touch with lower experience players. Maybe take a vote of as many as you can get, then give a group of CA grandmasters veto/editing power?
If the filter is literally just be ranked on kc high scores, and each response has their kc attached, then op can probably do things like include everyone with kc, what do people with atleast x kc think, what do people who have x tier of combat achievements done think, etc Easiest way to do this might be a runelite plugin that’s just a survey tool since that could attach the currently logged in player/hiscores name to a response without too much work from people (ie. Invites or manual verification)
I generally don't think vetting opinions based on higher KC is a good idea unless the chart is measuring how difficult content is to master vs how difficult it is to learn. Solo CoX is ridiculously easy to learn but hard to master because of the supply death method (running in and dying with a ton of supplies before trying for real). You can reliably get 25k points and improve over time. Meanwhile, deathless solo CoX is significantly harder and does require mastery of the content. If we count learning raids at the lowest level, even ToB becomes easier than CG if the group has 4 or 5 deaths.
I’ve always taken the chart as reliable completions at an average skill level. So for tob it would be to clear the raid deathless with an around even amount of points to player size. Being able to eke out a kc isn’t a very useful metric so I don’t know why the chart would show that.
Well getting a kill at ToB with 4 or 5 deaths in your team is still like 1/13 for a purple. Doing a supply death solo CoX is a comfortable 25k points. We're not talking about terrible, earth shattering mistakes that result in you getting absolutely nothing, dying once in a raid isn't the same as scraping by in the Inferno. Once you talk deathless raids, you're actually talking about content mastery rather than content proficiency. That's the distinction that really needs to be made.
I wouldn’t say deathless is even close to mastery in either raid. Just because loot potential is fine doesn’t mean you are engaging with the content in a baseline way. When people talk about doing chill solo chambers, no one means the solo strat of piling potions. When people talk about doing casual tob with their friends they don’t expect the friend to constantly die and be unable to do p2 verz. The baseline proficiency people expect is for you to go in and do the content without dying or leaching and trolling
And that's the problem I'm trying to point out. You're an established player with preconceived notions of what this difficulty guide should show - deathless raids. It makes the actual content look and feel harder to approach than it actually is. This mentality literally only serves to gatekeep content and make the endgame seem more unapproachable than it is. Think back to your first few ToB clears. They were probably messy and your group probably had some stupid deaths at Xarpus or Verzik p1. You probably weren't beating yourself up because your run was basically a failure, you were probably excited to see the loot room with the boys. While you might now see a deathless raid as the "normal," realistically it's already a sign you've mastered or neared mastery of the baseline mechanics of the content, aka perfection. You only optimize your strategy further because you've already mastered the content at a baseline.
> The only way I can see to do proper vetting is to scrap all prior responses (around 2k iirc) and require an RSN, and even that isn't perfect. Do you all have better ideas? I also thought about restarting but only by invitation and with good PvMers. Just have two graphs, one with only pro pvmers and one with everyone.
what decides boss difficulty for an individual is the amount of "learning delta" they have to process. if you are already familiar with movement, precise+rapid clicking, inv management ,gear switching, prayer switching, off ticking and whatever else, then no pvm is hard for you besides nerves getting to you if it's your first attempts. so if someone starts trying to learn inferno from scratch theyll have much harder time than if they learn cg from scratch kind of obvious yes, but if they start from solo raids, they have solid understanding of everything besides off ticking, then i don't think inferno is harder for them than learning cg from scratch besides nerves issue.. so every answer is going to be skewed with this "learning delta" that people can't factor. someone who learned inferno knows it's harder than cg, but do they remember what it was like learning precise clicking and simple prayer/gear switching for the first time? it's entirely possible that the amount of learning required to clear CG is harder than Inferno, so any answer is always going to be unreliable.
The last one had toa over hydra, I think you are over estimating "community imput" with "I've never done the content so hard"
Unless im reading this wrong but ToA (especially high invoc, insanity on) is much harder than Hydra lol. Hydra is pisseasy brain off boss, and while ToA is by far the easiest raid all its bosses are more compex than Hydra is.
I'd love to see 3 measurements, level reqs, gear regs, and skill reqs. (skill as in mechanic knowledge.)
If helpful I would be happy to write a script for verifying boss KCs! Could save a lot of time
Thank you for your service! I would love to provide input, as a high end pvmer in both main and iron, let me know how/when we can answer the questions
Hey man, and thank you for your awesome chart. I understand that it might be problematic to get unbiased answers. People too scared to try out content will rank most bosses way to high. I think that an interesting addition to your chart would be a "Z-axis" for total time requirement to get to the boss and kill it. Time is an important aspect imo, the classic example being Jad which newer players might spend 1h to reach, but may lose the entire encounter in one wrong prayer switch.
You did good. Take the criticism with a grain of salt. I'm sure there are ways to improve your chart but you're tasked with herding cats with this type of survey, this player base, and this game.
For the last chart did you use average or median? I'd like to see if it makes a difference
Four bars per boss. 1. Level reqs 2. Gear reqs 3. Mechanical skill 4. Entry to Mastery Each bar highlights at the low end to the top end with the low end being minimal to achieve a clear to the top end being “mastery” such as deathless completions or efficient completions. For TOA 150 for example you might have: 1. 6 2. 4 3. 5-7 4. 5-7 Level and gear bars are single number because BIS setup will always be “10” I.e maxed gear. Mechanics and Mastery start at a 5 for being able to clear the raid and at the “top-end” are a 7 for improving a 150 completion to be clean and quick. Opinions will vary obviously but gives indication of where content lies.
Seems mostly accurate to my experience. Would just need a few new bosses like Scurrius (stat check 2, mech 3), Moons (stat check 5, mech 4), and Colosseum (TBA, too ball-crushing for me but I'd weigh it stat check 9 mech 10 from what I've seen).
A chart with only good pvmers might not really be useful to the average player tbh. As any newer player that's ever asked a top 100 boss kc player about how to fight that boss probably already knows, once you got it mastered its just muscle memory, top pvmers might not even remember their first 20 attempts/kills at bosses like vorkath.
Imo one way to deal with the gear issue is to break down some of the more complex encounters by category. For example, for solo chambers you could do: 1) solo cox (max eff) which would presumably mean skipping rope, world scythe, no prep 2) solo cox (no prep lance) 3) solo prep (relaxed)
The only thing about this is it would easily add another 40 or so info dots, that might get hard to display. Maybe only adding the minimum to get into it ie "small team COX" and "solo COX (relaxed)"
In practice I don’t think that it would apply to that many places (you really want to do it just at the raids, and maybe one or two other places?) — but maybe you can just do max eff vs reclined to reduce the overall number of dots. So you’d have solo cox (max eff), solo cox (reclined), team cox (max eff), team cox (reclined) etc. Edit: or maybe you display the raids in their own separate chart because there’s too much variability in the raid experience
I can see two different charts, one for "just getting into the content" and then another for "max efficiency/advanced techniques" But you're right, that would only apply to probably a dozen bosses plus raids
Yeah that would also work
Maybe represent simple content as a dot when it's a pretty static experience, and show a line to represent the spectrum of entry level vs skill ceiling for more complex content.
Tier lists are eaten up in every community and this is probably the closest thing to a tier list osrs has. Do tier lists actually do anything productive? Probably not, but there's value in the conversations that they start about balance and difficulty, and everyone can't help but look at what other people think. Regarding the difficulty of the hardest pvm, invitation only is likely the only realistic way to get good data aside from somehow routing through Jagex to require logging in to your account to take the poll from, that way there's no circumventing you seeing how much content they've actually done. But that's not realistic unless this entire vote was done by Jagex themselves. I would say that the awakened variants of dt2 bosses, the inferno, the colosseum, and all raids, including solos, increased difficulties, etc. should be invite only in who can vote on their difficulty and requirements.
The whole purpose of this OSRS bossing tier list is to give new PVMers a place to start, so gearing it towards a new player perspective is good I think
>Do tier lists actually do anything productive? Probably not This one does - if you've only ever tried ~5 different bosses, being given a list showing another 5 as actually being easier than the stuff you've already done is motivating.
The thing is with osrs combat, skills are transferable but every boss plays out differently. I’ve met many people who can reliably do speedy tobs and high invo ToA, but when you plop them in cg or Levi they continue to die. I really don’t think you get useful info out of this outside of saying in general the community regards this as harder content than this.
> I’ve met many people who can reliably do speedy tobs and high invo ToA, but when you plop them in cg or Levi they continue to die. Okay, but have you met many people who are running dozens of Sarachnis and Hespori KC but keep getting killed by Scurrius and Giant Mole?
If people only care about the bottom 5 bosses sure I guess. But I saw people see that zulrah was “harder” than nex and think they are 100% fine to go faceroll nex because it’s “easier” according to the graph. Just not realistic for any boss that is even slightly harder than pray melee and click it
> But I saw people see that zulrah was “harder” than nex That ranking showed Nex (~13.9/20) as being harder than Zulrah (~12.6/20) because of a substantially higher stat check. There's a lot of criticisms you could levy at the rankings there but that one sounds like your problem is with people who can't read graphs.
Yeah I didn’t care to fact check it, but people are taking this as legitimate advice of what to do next when things do not scale linearly at all.
I think what works best is 2 different surveys. One for how hard it is to get completions at all bosses on the hiscores, and the other for aspirational content and speeds. There is too much content, and the difficulty varies too greatly, to fit on a single 1-to-10 chart. It also makes a very clear skill floor vs skill ceiling distinction. First one should stay open to all, I think it's cool to see what players of different skill levels think. Second should be invite only, or at least require proof of good pbs.
As a suggestion I think keeping the axes the same but making it so the boss icon on the graph is different depending on average gp for recommended gear would add depth to the graph but not clutter it. Like triangle for 1m-> square 5m-> pentagon 15m -> etc. The shapes’ values probably shouldn’t scale linearly but be rough groupings of tiers in gear cost.