Daily Discussion of DailyScape #4: Guthixian Caches

Previous discussions:

[1 - Shooting Stars and Evil Trees] (https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/s/u1NtmBATTF)

[2 - Shop Runs] (/r/runescape/comments/1qk6s2u/daily_discussion_of_dailyscape_2_shop_runs/)

[3 - Achievement Diary Items] (https://old.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1ql5v6t/daily_discussion_of_dailyscape_3_achievement/)

What is it? Divination-related D&D. Provides large amounts of experience and the Divination skill xp-increasing outfit, as well as some temporary boosts to Divination. The gameplay features grabbing Guthix's memories off the wall and chucking them into a rift, while dodging hostile automatons who are there to keep you from messing with Guthix's stuff. Players can also temporarily take a form capable of suppressing the automatons, gaining points from them instead of memories, allowing others to run memories freely.

How frequent is it? 1 hour / 4 hours for boost-giving cache.

How good is the XP? Very good. Scales heavily with level and you will be able to complete the Cache faster and more efficiently at higher Div levels. At level 99, 200 points (the daily cap) turns out around 146k XP.

How good are the other rewards? Good. The Diviner's outfit provides 6% more xp when training, which is always useful. The cache boost lasts for at most 20 minutes, and provides some minor buffs to getting extra resources from divine locations or saving porter charges, which are nice benefits but fairly negligible. The main benefit of the buff is the 10% chance to instantly convert all held Divination memories at once, dramatically speeding up one half of the Divination process. Before the Divine Conversion relic or the Memory Dowser, this was the ideal way to gather energy. It's still good, but is only really relevant to people who haven't unlocked either of the other two aforementioned upgrades. Notably, an unlock from the Memorial to Guthix will allow you to store and use this buff at your convenience, rather than having to use it or lose it immediately.

How much pressure is there to not miss out? Depends if you are actively seeking Divination XP or not. This is by far the fastest and easiest XP for Divination; you can finish quite quickly with the highest level automatons and memories available to you. If you do not need xp and have the superior divine energy-gathering unlocks, there is no need whatsoever to keep doing Caches. If you're actively training Div, you should keep doing Caches every day, as they are excellent XP.

What kind of interactivity is there with other players? Other players are both helpful and unhelpful, leaning more towards negative interaction. Memories on the wall are first-come, first-serve, and your pathing might come to a sudden halt if another player yoinks the memory you were moving towards and it doesn't immediately respawn. Other players subduing Automatons is useful to you when you're running memories, as it makes your life easy. But if you are also hunting automatons, then you are in direct competition for these points with others. It can be quite frustrating to pop your temporary double points modifier and move to chain between a bunch of valuable automatons, only for another player to shut down every single one on the field. Also, automatons are aggressive and will follows players a fair distance, meaning you could suffer interference from the pathing of other players, intentional or not. I generally found it preferable to work on an empty Cache by myself without having to compete for memories and automatons.

How could it improve? Removing competition with other players and emphasizing co-operation would be a great improvement. I also don't see any particular reason why the 'boost giving' cache needs to be restricted to every 4 hours, considering it has been rendered obsolete by modern upgrades.

How could this be changed away from a daily activity? The daily limit could simply be increased or removed. XP would certainly have to be adjusted as it would be the best training method in the game by a mile.

Do you think it SHOULD be changed away from a daily activity? Yes. Ask yourself why people use Caches so much. It's because the XP is great, obviously, but it's also because conventional Divination around a rift sucks for XP. Caches were a bandaid fix for how awful Divination was to train. Hall of Memories and the Gate of Elidinis, two of the only other viable training methods are much higher xp than standard colony wisps. I think a method of positive change could be making a Cache a reward rather than a chore. Something similar to OSRS's forestry events for woodcutting could be a good fit. If you aren't familiar, forestry events can randomly spawn while woodcutting in the wild (not at grown patches). These events trigger for everyone at the same time and provide tokens amount of xp in other skills, while providing some resource and experience rewards if completed.

There's a couple key points:

1. There is no competition for the resources to begin with, so there's no reason to avoid other players. On top of that, players benefit slightly from each other working on the same resource spot, encouraging coming together on common worlds and hotspots for mutual benefit.

2. Anyone can spawn an event, but having lots of players in proximity will increase the odds. Solo skilling spawns fewer events but is still feasible.

3. There's no competition during the event itself. Players can even be helpful to each other (such as calling out the correct combination of fertilizer or flowers in some forestry events).

We already have a sort of Divination event via the enriched memory wisp (I'm aware that it is not random). What I'm imagining is something similar to what we already have on the Deep Sea Fishing Platform, but capable of happening around any Divination crater where players are actively training. Imagine mini-events for everyone to benefit like:

1. Enriched wisp spawns that gives 100% rate of enriched memories (already exists)

2. Wisp energy surge, lots of wisps spawn that deplete rapidly but give boosted energy rates

3. Memory leak - everyone gets a temporary boost to chronicle spawn rates

4. Unstable wisp - an unstable wisp spawns that players must sacrifice some energy towards in order to neutralize it, giving everyone who contributed a significant XP reward

5. A Guthixian Cache spawns and becomes active in one minute. Completion always rewards the Cache boost and it lasts longer.

I think an approach like this could work very well, making Caches an incentive rather than a necessary chore. What are your thoughts?