CAUTION - Long read ahead. Tried to break it up to make it more coherent. :)
TL;DR - Reduce the degrade costs of Elite Sirenic and Tectonic without making them dirt cheap. Explore potential niche set bonuses to carefully increase their power without killing future reward space.
#Degrade System
The elephant in the room is the degrade system. I believe this can be rectified without heavily intruding on future reward space (i.e. no custom fitting.)
Overview:
Elite armour is too expensive to use in literally any situation outside of Elite dungeons.
This thread discusses problems players face with the Jagex Authenticator and Phishing E-Mails.
Authenticator
The Jagex Authenticator offers a reasonable amount of added protection, but because it isn't true two-factor authentication (2FA) its power is crippled.
For something to be 2FA it must utilise:
Something you know (your password/other login information)
Something you have (a code from your Smartphone Authentication app, or a USB security key)
The Jagex Authenticator can be removed via E-Mail without the "something you have" part, thus provides no protection if the victim has their E-Mail account compromised.
TL;DR - You could probably skip to the Cursed energy part without reading the theory part if you wanted to, I appreciate this is very long. I basically explain in detail why the design of the Wilderness has failed and how to improve it without making drastic changes. I use Cursed energy as an example of how to implement the improvements.
#Contents
1 - Introduction
2 - Why the Wilderness Sucks
3 - Improving the odds for Non-Skulled Players
4 - A New Addition to the Skull System: Minimum Risk Penalty
5 - The Affect these Changes have on the Food Chain
6 - Cursed Energy (an example of how to apply these changes)