GlassesBro

What are the odds this could be considered/revisited nowadays? Just curious u/Mod_West

It needs a lot of reworking as the design is quite dated (and some of the concepts are quite OP) but the plan has always been to pair it with a later Kourend quest. We mentioned briefly at RuneFest a quest called ‘A Kingdom Divided’, which is the quest that will tie the 5 house quests together. The new spells would work quite well as a reward while also giving us a chance to condense the ensouled head spells.

Hopefully soonish, but development is still unlikely to start until later in the year, providing plans don’t change. Hoping for time to rework some of the cities too as there are still major issues with the layout of some areas of Kourend.

Wiggers_in_Paris

i just wanna summon some skeletons like Diablo 2

Same. Think we’ll need to make a prototype and let players have a play with it on a tournament world though. Even then, it’s so alien to OSRS that I fear it won’t pass :/

0zzyb0y

Not just alien, but a struggle to make useful without completely changing the meta for some contemt

For sure, the balance will be super important and we wouldn’t want a repeat of summoning.

BioMasterZap

I can't recall if he ever posted it, but I know GentleTractor was working on a concept for Necromancy. I believe the gist of it was you conjure the undead, then you cast a spell to make it attack; so it is attacking in place of you rather than being a minion like with Summoning. At that point, it is just flavor on casting new spells with some added mechanics of perhaps the undead being stationary and needing to recast or inventory management of needing to bring supplies to recast when it runs out.

Not sure how well that would go over, but if instead of new Bane spells you attacked for undead that acted like Bane spells and you have to create them a bit like setting up a cannon (placing down a stationary entity with a spell and components from your inventory, not the "hits everything in the room" aspect, though perhaps one could be a magic cannon...) it would be an interesting mechanic at least. Like I could see going to Dragons and trying to set up your dragonbane undead in the right spot so it can easily hit the dragons or such.

There are a few ways I suppose to avoid the summoning-esque feel to raising the dead to fight for you. Having them as timed persistent followers would certainly be a no due to the prevalence of pets and the potential of making it a meta for most situations. If they acted more as a physical representation of a damage over time effect (equivalent of a magical version of poison) with the cure being a set time (a minute or so) or running out of HP. That might work. Also, tying them to a specific item that needs to stay equipped which could have fairly high negatives to melee/ranged to encourage them to be paired mostly with magic. I recall reading the ideas GT put forward back when the original Spellbook rework was shared. They were great solutions to avoiding the summoning lite features that may not go down well with the more ‘anti-change’ players.

Just spitballing really :P there’s plenty of ways it can be done to be as unobtrusive to the standard combat systems that everyone is use to. I still feel there’ll be heavy pushback, especially from the HLC who can sway the vote fairly effectively. Based on my time at jagex Ive noticed that players tend to refuse to read info first hand if they think they already have the gist of it even if they’re misinformed or things have changed.