40/40 League Randomizer COMPELTED with NO resets, sporting this d.o.double-dogshit build with all said and done. Powered staff augment ended up being the only saving grace of the board, which in the context of a league I find to be quite problematic
Small compilation of thoughts regarding Demonic Pacts League:
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Definitively my least favorite League to date - not because I thought it was bad, just the least personally captivating version of what I reliably find to be a very enjoyable mode; due to a number of development decisions I think similar levels of interest were also fairly well-reflected in public sentiment and player count as weeks went on.
Regions: Needless to say the Trailblazer format is fairly well played out by this point. It is still a good template, as it lends a certain uniqueness to an end-game character, and we saw in Leagues III that true open world can be intimidating and cause analysis paralysis in a large subset of players (and the game is a whole lot bigger than it was even then.)
That said... region locks did not jive well in the grand scheme of this mode. Build constructs, echo weapon selections, and what constituted BIS in many ways did not depend on regions or the otherwise end game content within them. This resulted in many staple endeavors, like raids, becoming a point-centric aside as opposed to a focal point in achieving BIS power. My main build, for example, did not complete one ToB in achieving Dragon Trophy with Morytania unlocked. There was simply no reason to branch out to certain pieces of content, as the items were not of any contribution to the gear set, and the points were redundant and more difficult to obtain than available alternatives.
Relics: Best to date, in my opinion, but with caveats. One could pick just about any relic in any tier and have it be good, or at least not bad enough to have it mar their character. For the post-Dragoners of the mode though, this was not the case, and they would be remiss not to have selected a very specific meta build AND zones in endeavoring for that. In part, the decision to chase cap is theirs to make, but I'd like to see the discrepancy in "good" vs "bad" relic/zone selections be reflected in days rather than weeks of effort to the finish line.
Pacts & Echo Items: A terrific evolution of the combat mastery system, but poorly executed and made worse by rigidity and the general regression of Echo Items. Pact board gave the illusion of choice, but in reality there were only 3 or 4 builds that had one feeling like a proper League character instead of a moderately-enhanced main game character. Pact board unashamedly corralled players down specific capstones in support of implied Echo Items that the player would also have in their service, only for them to find that the resulting build just wasn't that good. This meant that only about 20-30 Pact points were necessary for some of the best builds and that creeping anywhere other than additional accuracy/penetration nodes past that point was entirely useless. Pacts also needed to be selected very carefully at the beginning of a character, else many players, especially more inexperienced ones, found themselves incapable of carrying on with what they had available to them were it not for the rescuing winch of the several resets we were gifted. In the past, the combat masteries system gave us much more of a running start and smoothened the progression more desirably than did the Pact system.
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Much more I could say of increasingly less significance, so I'll leave it at that. All in all: good League, well-balanced relics, very promising new format but with more-than-acceptable number of implementation hiccups and QA overlooks.
My recommendation to Jagex would be to strongly consider contracting 2 or 3 individuals well in advance of future releases to provide thorough feedback, design direction, and QA, as much of what I've highlighted above would have been upturned almost immediately by the right minds in such a process - this means more than just a few people coming out for a day or two and seeing a semi-finalized product. If Leagues are going to continue to be large projects used to drive subscription numbers and dial up player sentiment as often as they have been, they must be given a bit more polish. Not to do so will inevitably cause a larger subset of players to willingly give future iterations a miss, which would be a critical failure when a non-negligible number of people already return to the game only for temp modes. This in turn would reflect in the books, and it would be a harder sell for the company to allot more resources and developers/QA to the project(s).
WHY ARE PEOPLE PLAYING RUNESCAPE? asks the BBC
They spoke to a couple of J-Mods, @MeganTTV_, and @TheRSguyy to learn more about why
It's a good article, give it a read!