Reported Post by TeamTofu

Amei · Aug 17, 2015

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Title change to: My story of competitive Barbarian Assault

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Post: Some BA related achievements
Forum: RuneScape 3 Pictures, Videos and Progress Logs
Assigned Moderators: Travis, Time To Buy

Posted by: TeamTofu
Original Content:

Edit: Bringing this thread back with all my achievements in. Since the account that these achievements was recovered away from me I should be fine to post these up without any account risk. I've always stayed away from RWT on Sythe anyway so I should be able to share my story freely.

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Before I started BA

Back in 2007 I played Barbarian Assault for the first time. I really enjoyed it, but since I could only get online once a fortnight to play RuneScape I didn't stick around there for long. I vaguely remember when the BA Addicts clan formed I was invited to join by someone, but I declined as I was already in a clan called Ancient Kings.

I left there and went to play Stealing Creation when it came out. I made a lot of good friends but left after a couple of years because the community was turning toxic and instead of having friendly clan vs clan fights people just flamed each other. I then turned to private servers where I made a really close friend who gave me the account that all of the following stuff took place on. I returned to playing RS actively in 2012, around spring/summer.

The beginning

Around summer 2012 one of my friends from the early days of Stealing Creation (Wiseguy) started talking to me about BA and someone mentioned a leeching chat to me (I'm sure some of you know of it). I needed to make money to pay for membership which I was funding through membership pin traders here on Sythe at the time so tried to get myself noticed by them and eventually got vouched by one of their ranks, giving me a rank of my own. Back then I believe I went by the name of "Team Bagel", a twilight joke with a friend who had a matching name.

Back then I wasn't very good at BA. I had no idea how to defend efficiently, my healing was pretty decent (I followed l Sar l's guide) but not the fastest and my solo attacking was average - I had a general grasp of the vine whip technique but it wasn't as refined as others like Sd1011 who was well known for his ability. To clarify to those of you who weren't active in barbarian assault back then, this involved using the vine whip special attack on the penance rangers spawn location and standing on the tentacle so they would hit all the rangers and fighters at once. Since you gained an extra 5 (50) damage per attack from the attacker role your dps was extremely high.

I was once invited to collect on a record attempt team (Fastest 1 to 10) but I declined as I had no idea of how to do the role at that level. A few weeks later the EoC happened.

Evolution of Combat and BA

The Evolution of Combat on release broke BA in many, many ways. Fighters and rangers didn't have their hitpoints changed so you could kill them in one hit without using abilities, even as a level 3 and the penance healers were significantly changed. The poison damage from food only dealt low damage a few times rather than the original 20 times and their hitpoints were unchanged.

In December the healers were 'fixed' and their hitpoints were significantly reduced. It took only 3 food to kill a healer on wave 1, and 5 on wave 9. At first I really didn't like this change but it grew on me over time. I did my first speed runs on a leech team in late March 2013, a video of which can be seen below. The video is from the defender's point of view, but I am the one healing. There is an unlisted version where the video isn't sped up.

Oldschool RuneScape & BA

I wasn't really interested in Oldschool that much until BA was released. I played it on the day of its release but I was only level 4 at the time so I couldn't do much. I quickly trained into a defence tank so that I could play for real and then I suggested to a few friends that we give speed rounds a try and see how fast we can get. The result was always a bit above 16 minutes, ending up at 16:01.

Back then there was a pathing bug where if you used food on a healer quickly and it moved your character would do nothing and you'd get a message which said "I can't reach that!". Following an update which fixed that it became much easier to kill the healers and you could perform healing methods much more reliably. The fastest time until the next update was 15:36.

The 'quiet' months

On the 16th (or a couple of days before) of January 2014 there was an update that being attacked would no longer close the cannon interface in BA. I'm sure some of you are familiar with the old 'one egg trick' where you could spam click the omega option to kill the queen with just one egg. This update alone allowed us to cut the record time down from 15:36 to 14:09 in three days - A fairly impressive time that caused us to lose interest because of how difficult it would be to beat. The video below is from my point of view.

In this time I focused more of my attention on Rs3 and finished my max and completionist cape goals. I maxed on the 19th of February 2014 and got my completionist cape on the 1st of April in the same year. Doing so left me open to new goals, where I settled on three main goals: Record times, leveling my account on Oldschool and climbing the Hi-scores (I focused on the healer role as I enjoyed that the most on Rs3).

Funnily enough the record for the fastest wave 1 to 10 on Oldschool was broken just a couple of days after I got my completionist cape by a group of players who had practiced together for a few months, so me and my friends introduced using chinchompas to Oldschool - You'd attack with them solo and deal AoE damage similar to the vine whip before the EoC, giving you the ability to have two healers to speed up the slowest role. It wasn't really a new tactic as it was used before the EoC by those with low slayer levels, but most people at that time had no idea it was even possible and it seemed to pique the interest of some players at the time.

The record quickly dropped from 14:09 to 13:11 over the course of two months and it remained there for a long time. I didn't appear in many of the records at this time as there were way more people actively taking part and I simply never had the luck to break the best time whenever I played. On the bright side it did give some other people some time in the spotlight. ^_^

Back to Rs3, seasonals and the climb for rank 1

Some of this time overlaps with what I said before as I did my first seasonal hiscore between my max and completionist cape. I was the first person to win the Piggy title (Most lifepoints healed in a week - http://services.runescape.com/m=temp-hiscores/ranking?id=1393241082612&filter=-1&page=1) and then the fourth person to win the Scion of Viggora title (Most slayer tower monsters killed in two weeks - http://services.runescape.com/m=temp-hiscores/ranking?id=1399244400007&filter=-1&page=1). Since then I haven't taken part in seasonal hiscores outside of helping others start stealing creation games / heist games but I may return to them in the near future.

There weren't many speed runs on Rs3 at this point because there wasn't much room for improvement in the meta - It was a simple game with little to no exploits and so long as you performed well it relied solely on RNG. The leech record was held by TheFatShroom, an individual who I once taught to play BA and then ended up focusing on speeds and breaking my personal best times. Below was his best time of 13:30, which was probably not the fastest 2 leech round ever, but it was the fastest where the time was recorded.

For 5 player teams I was part of the fastest time of 10:32. This sadly wasn't recorded on video as none of us could record without lagging enough to slow down the round. I did record a round with a time of 10:45 following the release of legacy mode (which actually made it harder but oh well). Once again leaving a video down below.

The rest of my time was spent trying to pass RoteRosen on the healer Hi-scores and becoming rank 1 in the role. Sadly I never finished this - I was on track to finish it but a number of players from the community started using 'boosting' methods where you abused certain game mechanics to gain much higher points per hour than playing the game normally. This was commonly used in leech teams (though having only 4 active players made it significantly slower) but having people use it purely for the Hi-scores was off-putting. I tried it for a couple of days but really didn't enjoy it and stopped climbing the Hi-scores until the rework. Although I was once rank 5, the account currently sits in rank 6 at around 516,000 points. I still plan to pursue this goal on a different account where I will be starting over from almost 0 points.

Barbarian Assault rework & My return to records

The rework to Barbarian Assault changed a lot of things and we had to develop a completely new meta. For a while I held the leech record pre-chinchompa update (they made the effect of chinchompas work with abilities) as an attacker but I later decided not to focus on that and others hold very impressive times in it. Instead of that I decided to focus on 5 player teams and see where we could get that to. Through developing better tactics we beat the previous record of 20:29 and cut it down to 17:49, 15:48 and then 14:59 where it currently still stands. We plan to get that record under 14 minutes in the near future.

These hard mode rounds only involve waves 1 to 9 as wave 10 is on a timer, which makes including wave 10 rather pointless.

I also returned to Oldschool records which had dropped to under 13 minutes. For a long time we didn't have much luck but about a month ago me and a team of friends managed to cut a few seconds off of a record of 12:48 to 12:46, a record which had stood for 7 months. This record still stands today but can certainly be improved on. The video is from the defender's point of view again as in my role I couldn't afford even the slightest bit of lag - missing one tick here and there adds up to a lot of time over a full round.

Currently the records of 12:46 on Oldschool and 14:59 on RuneScape 3 that I was involved in still stand, though I have all the intention to beat both of those times.

Hopefully this insight into what I've done over the past few years is interesting to someone. The competitive aspect of Barbarian Assault isn't very well known outside of the minigames community but it is no less active than the competitive community of Castle Wars and Stealing Creation (Which died with the EoC).

If you have any questions feel free to ask and if you recognise me feel free to send me a PM on Sythe saying hello.
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