August

Information

August is an ambitious project that’s been in the works for almost 2 years now, aiming to truly innovate, and shake up peoples’ expectations of what’s possible for custom servers in the RSPS scene.

Every single area accessible in August has a purpose. The home area is entirely custom built and looks to bring players together, instead of spreading them all out across the vast OSRS map that you’re familiar with.

The server brings new twists to how you play the game, challenging the status quo, so things might seem a little overwhelming to begin with, but trust me – as you step into the world and play around, things will feel very intuitive.
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Classes
In August, the first few choices you make in Tutorial Island will shape your gameplay experience moving forward.

August introduces “classes”, which look to augment certain areas of gameplay according to the “wants” of the player.

Players who consider themselves skillers and love to mine and smith, or chill out with some fishing, have a couple of classes which look to allow them to be their best selves:
The Gatherer game mode, which gives you stronger perks, such as a chance to automatically bank the resources you’re gathering, and a chance to double the resources.
Or alternatively, the Artisan game mode, which gives you higher chances to successfully craft items, and a higher chance to complete your entire queue of item production in one tick.

Those who shy away from skilling and fancy themselves more as PVMers also have a choice to pick a class that augments that experience: the “Slayer Master” class.
This class gives you perks such as a significant boosted chance to spawn superior monsters when on slayer tasks.

Perhaps you’re an all-rounder who wants the complete August experience, getting the best of both worlds. The Masochist class provides you with the most potent perks of them all, but also the slowest XP rate of them all.

Or for those who just want to level up quickly and experience the vast range of content available as fast as possible; the “Normal” game mode provides you the fastest XP rates, and the weakest perks.

You will find all of the information about these classes in the class selection interface that you can access on tutorial island, or in the August Discord under the “Guides” forum section.
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Combat Specialization
You may have thought the customisation ended there. August adds another dimension to your gameplay choices by allowing you to specialise in a particular combat style: Melee, Ranged, or Magic.

Each combat specialization brings you unique boosts pertaining to that particular style of combat. For example:
The melee combat spec is able to be extremely tanky, or a mix of tankiness and damage.
The perks:

• Double attack speed when using melee weapons
• A base of 20% damage reduction, boosted by another 30% damage reduction if you’re wearing a shield.
• If you choose to wear a defender in your off-hand slot, you will receive +20% additional accuracy and damage
• Depending on your attack style with melee weapons, you will periodically trigger secondary effects:
  • When using slash, there is a chance to hit your max hit directly.
  • When using stab, there is a chance to cause a bleed effect, causing your opponent to damage over time.
  • When using crush, there is a chance to stun the target, stopping it’s movement and combat for a few seconds.

The ranged combat spec brings high damage in long drawn-out fights, and the ability to leverage different types of ranged weapons to achieve different goals.
The perks:

• Double attack speed when using ranged weapons
• Retain a high percentage of ammo, stacking with Ava’s devices.
• Chance to deal double damage with headshots
• Receive double the amount of ammunition when fletching
• As you continue attacking while in combat, you build stacks of “momentum”, adding a damage multiplier to your ranged attacks, which disappears when you leave active combat.
• Different ranged weapons have different special effects, such as long bows dealing increased damage the further away you are from the target, ballistas penetrating armour and ignoring target defences, shortbows sometimes triggering a flurry of attacks, and much more.

The magic combat spec thrives in multi-combat situations, being able to leverage the ancient magics to swiftly bring death to groups of monsters, and take advantage of freezing and healing as a core part of their kit.
The perks:

• Double attack speed when using magic weapons
• Retain a high percentage of runes when casting spells
• Receive double the amount of runes when runecrafting

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Levelling up – Combat prestige
In August, your efforts in training your skills are valued. It isn’t the case that you just get level 99 in your skills, and that’s the end of it.

August, on release, has a “Combat Prestiging” mechanic, where you’re able to reset your combat skills, that’s Attack/Strength/Defence/Hitpoints/Prayer/Ranged/Magic, to upgrade your combat prestige rank.

This is something that players will have to think about a lot as they progress through the game, about when the right time is to rank up your combat prestige.

Different classes have a different “prestige cap”. The Normal class can’t prestige as many times as the Gatherer class, for example. And the Gatherer class can’t prestige as many times as the Masochist class can.

There are a range of perks which look to augment your ability to succeed in the game, ranging from additional hitpoints and prayer points, to more powerful perks like life and prayer leech that restore your stats as you do damage to your target.

As you rank up your combat prestige, you will gain access to a wider range of these perks, and the perks themselves will also become stronger.

When you complete tutorial island, you’ll actually find that you’re given a prestige token to kick-start your journey in August, granting you combat prestige rank 1 without needing to hit level 99 in all of your combat stats.
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Crafting items

August takes a different approach to how you get your hands on strong items. Items will rarely drop in their complete form. Rather, you will more often obtain the unique components that are required to craft them.

Clicking on an anvil, for example, you can see that all of the different metal tiers you know of already are there, from bronze up to rune. These can all be smithed, ranging from requiring level 1 smithing to level 40 smithing for rune.

You’ll also notice that under that, there’s two more tiers: “Granite” and “Dragon”. In August, these are simply the tier 50 and 60 gear you can smith like any other items. In that sense, you might say this is a bit more like RS3 after the mining and smithing rework.

However, things get more interesting the deeper you go into the higher level gear.

For example, Barrows gear is obtained via smithing where you repair the broken Barrows pieces you obtain from PVM. This requires a mix of components from PVM: the broken barrows piece and ethereal essence, as well as components from skilling: the oxi bars.

Further along in the progression is the God Wars tier.
You can see here that the crafting recipes are a bit more complex. For example the godsword blade requiring not only the godsword shards, but also a holy bar, luminite flux, and upgrade gems.
Or the Bandos chestplate which requires bandos components, holy bars, luminite flux, and upgrade gems.

The vision here is that PVMers and skillers together have a symbiotic relationship, where key components brought in through PVM drops are combined with the necessary equivalent skilling resources gathered through players’ hard work gathering and processing.

Another thing you might notice in this interface is where it mentions a “base rate” for the selected item. In August, certain items may have a chance to fail when crafting them. For example, the Bandos chestplate has a base success rate of 60%. My selected class is Gatherer which has a +10% boost to crafting success rate, so for me, there’s a 70% chance to succeed and receive the item, and a 30% chance to fail and lose the components in the process.

I’m sure you can imagine how valuable it is to have a Masochist friend with a high smithing level. Here you can see again how there’s a balance between having a lower XP rate, but being rewarded further in the gameplay.

This approach to crafting items will be seen everywhere throughout the game. With fletching, crafting, smithing and so-on.