With the EoC, Jagex removed them after claiming them as being overpowered.
To an extent, you could view it that way. You could turn off damage from one point of the combat triangle. You could devalue food. It over centralized prayer pots and similar.
Actually, they're kind of inconsistent with that. From the RSWiki:
- Protection/Deflection prayers only protect 50% (Except for TzTok-Jad and TokHaar-Jad; that's still 100% because the fight was originally designed for prayer-switching)
But anyway, the thing is, 100% protection is something that nobody ever complained about for 10 years. It's something Jagex only brought up.
Now, as a game developer, I know, it's a good thing to actually notice things like this and seek to change it.
Jagex's problem with it is that it limited what they could do with boss design in the future.
They would have to keep creating bosses that switch attack styles if you pray, or are an exception and can bypass it for no real raisin.
Technically, it's also a problem for dungeon design. It'd be silly if every dungeon were like those Locust Priest dungeons under Sophenam.
That's something I agree with having fixed. Even though players are used to it and are pretty much just fine with it.
However, it's also not entirely necessary to be fixed. OSRS has gotten new bosses and they're still as deadly and unique as ever with 100% protects.
So I've thought of a viable in-between.
You know how protect prayers only have 40% protection against other players?
Make protect prayers have 100% protection against weak/normal enemies and only 40% protection against bosses.
Weak/normal enemies could either be defined as any non-boss enemy, or it could be based on your combat level (since plenty of enemies are above max combat level anyway).
This gives Jagex the room they need for better boss design, but also keeps 100% protection prayers in a way that is a bit easier for people to get their feet wet with.
The good part is, this can be defended easier by making it part of the lore. Saradomin can offer protection for you, but it is limited against other players and very powerful enemies.
If a normal enemy is more powerful (higher level or perhaps multiple levels above) than you, your prayer is ineffective because you yourself are weak.
On top of that, we could say that extra powerful attacks flat-out ignore prayer, much easier with that backstory.
Jad is tricky though. It's true that he's based on 100% protection prayers. Protect prayers actually only affect the chance of the enemy hitting you, not how much damage they deal.
I think a neat solution to Jad would be to make the prayers reduce 40% of his damage, turning the 990 instant kill to at most a hit for 594.
Now you actually have to use some food/healing on him on top of the old fight. It's a bit of an inconvenience and makes him all the more scarier, but it encourages gearing up against him instead of fighting him with red flowers.
In RS2, who or what could hit through protection prayers was pretty inconsistently defined. This would help with that.
Whether or not protect prayers would 'always' reduce damage in PvM, I dunno. They could do that I suppose. I'd be against it myself. I mean, it could also be an "only Jad" thing, in which case it may be considerable to make it 100% only on Jad too.
Making one exception in game design like this is perfectly okay if the players enjoy it and prefer it that way.
Jad could be defended through lore by giving him a backstory where Jad creatures aren't in tune with your human prayers or something, who knows. Maybe it could relate to Elder Gods.
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The next part of this is to consider the impact of keeping 100% protect prayers everywhere else.
Before EoC, I was able to use protect melee for something like slayer, even if I were prayer flashing, for a limited time before I had to go back to eating sharks.
So in reality, it was a useful tool for prolonguing trips and after it ran out, I still had to use my food.
I was at around 119 combat before the EoC, and I hear higher level players could do slayer trips in one go with maybe a prayer pot or two.
That too, is a good thing, for higher level players to be having a more convenient time doing some things.
In many cases, prayer pots were always more expensive than food, so it was best to use prayer while it's free and then eat until you're almost dead. At least around my level. In some cases at lower levels, you might've considered going full prayer.
Prayer only really devalued food in situations where you really want to camp an area for hours or something. But I don't think that's such a terrible notion.
In many situations, sometimes good armor already made you tanky enough to replace prayer on normal enemies, which was a good thing because at some point you should be taking minimal damage from stuff way weaker than you.
In which case having 100% protect isn't much of a problem, as you could almost 100% tank it anyway. It becomes a convenience.
In some situations, you could Soul Split and end up with more health than you lost. Generally it was only if you were already tanky enough on your own. But in those situations, Soul Split would be considered more "overpowered" than 100% protection. While preventing damage keeps you at the same health, it cannot result in more health like Soul Split could.
Though, aside from combining Soul Split with AoE spells, I thought the 20% heal was very well balanced. And I've already posted about Ancients + Soul Split and how it could've been balanced.
All in all, it would've been nice to see it done this way instead of arbitrarily lowering it to 50% in all PvM situations.
Plus, this way, Jagex could've easily gotten away with 40% vs bosses instead of 50%, giving them a little more room to utilize other defensive concepts.
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I might add, that Jagex having thrown 50% onto the protect prayers just seemed lazy. They only did it to nerf prayer but didn't put much thought behind it besides trying to figure out if it should be 25% or 50% or 75%.
From a game design perspective it just feels like they're ignoring lore and slapping on numbers without much foresight.
When I try to balance weapons on my Versus Saxton Hale server, to the best of my ability, I try to make buffs/nerfs actually relate to the original stats of the weapon or what the weapon looks like or is mean to do, or related it to the class at least.
I choose 40% for powerful enemies because it makes sense as something a lot of people are already used to in PvP, and it achieves the design goals that Jagex wants, and it doesn't completely get rid of 100% protect like players wanted.
It's an essentially more "outside of the box" way of "meeting in the middle" compared to just setting it to 50% for everything.
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Another question about Protection Prayer balance is the fact that by level 43 (fairly low) you get 100% protection prayers.
Well, that kind of thing is why I suggested combat level related balancing, where enemies with higher combat levels hit through it.
However, we also have to consider how much that effects other things, like higher level content. For Fight Caves, how would you fight those level 256 or so giant mage enemies?
They're quite accurate and hit constant 400's. And you fight waves of them.
For that reason, I'd rather allow a level 40 to run around with protect melee in monk robes. It's honestly kinda badass where you can decide to use prayer armor + protect prayer to fight enemies. It adds to the lore and feel of the game. Even those 1def monk robe pures do.
Plus when dungeons come along where you have to use protection prayer to survive... you're already negating one form of combat yet the area is still so dangerous?!
What sounds like poor game design on paper, can be worked around, and is actually very compelling towards the lore of the game. How would that one Zanik quest go if Sigmund couldn't use protection prayers against you?
But if we're unsatisfied with level 43 protection prayers, some other commonly suggested ideas are:
Level 43 prot prayers give you 50% protection, but increase up to 100% by level 99.
Make 3 different sets of protection prayers that protect 20%, 40%, and 100%, unlocked at level 25-43-65 or so. Do note that I'm just typing random numbers as I go, I didn't go look at a prayer book.
Make protection prayer stronger if you get attacked my multiple enemies at once, but stay weak in 1v1 or something. Someone posted this on the RS forums and it sounded a bit more poetic there.
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