The Good and Bad of Endgame (OSRS)


Date	2025-08-22
Type	news-opinion
Video	youtu.be/Glp4chf4yiA

Summary

Gnomonkey gives a long-form review of the Doom of Mokhaiotl ("Mocha") after hotfixes died down, praising its difficulty, accuracy-phase design and gear variety while criticising its loot system (not a real enrage boss), common pet, buggy mechanics, random acid, venge immunity, shield-phase milking and one-shot style damage. He still likes the boss overall and hopes lessons carry over to Raids 4.

Outline

0:00 Back from vacation, 31 deep delve, boss intro
0:41 Apex Gaming PCs sponsorship
2:01 Positives: fair completion time, difficulty, scrapped skip tokens, gear variety, Demon bane balance, grubs, orb clearing, car phase, gentle hotfixes
6:57 Shortcomings: Mocha advertised as an enrage boss but is not
8:25 Loot table issues: tiny common loot gap between cave 3 and cave 9
9:38 Endgame loot mechanics: nobody cashes out, rares versus common loot
11:03 Early cave loot, high scores full of bots and the too-common pet
13:21 Hotfixes and bugs: over 20 hotfixes, grubs, melee punish changes
14:54 Baffling mechanics: second shield phase and holy water
16:48 Weapon limitations: random acid, thralls and venge
18:57 Ludicrous damage: boulders versus Verzik and Toa one-shots
20:55 QA testing and development, release problems
22:56 Suggested changes, Raids 4 hopes and conclusion

Topics covered

Doom of Mokhaiotl

(0:02) At the time of the video Gnomonkey had personally done a 31 deep delve off-stream during his vacation.
(2:01) Gnomonkey says he likes the Doom of Mokhaiotl overall but that it has the Tombs of Amascut effect: it is on the cusp of being the best content in the game but held back by fixable flaws, or may be abandoned as development moves to other content like Raids 4.
(2:28) Gnomonkey says the time to complete Doom of Mokhaiotl is fair and its rares, while hard to get, are not an unreasonable grind like Nightmare or Corporeal Beast.
(3:00) Gnomonkey says Doom of Mokhaiotl is arguably tougher than the Colosseum and that Jagex did not pull punches post-launch, which he respects; he uses Yama as his dividing line for endgame and calls Yama as easy as endgame content gets.
(3:26) Jagex scrapped a planned tradable skip token reward that would have let players skip several early delves of Doom of Mokhaiotl; Gnomonkey is glad because getting back to the later caves after dying is part of the difficulty.
(3:58) Gnomonkey likes the gear variety at Doom of Mokhaiotl because the 100% accuracy phases and strength-based bonus melee damage mean top delvers bring SGS, AGS2, Eldritch staff and blowpipe specs and swap between Masori and Void.
(4:29) Gnomonkey says Doom of Mokhaiotl did not follow Yama in making Demon bane too strong: the Scorching bow is excellent but clearly worse than the Twisted bow by a decent margin, so weapon upgrades stay impactful.
(9:33) Gnomonkey praises Jagex's hotfix handling of rock block: instead of making the boss destroy any rock underneath her, Jagex made her destroy only the centre rock, so one shockwave remains and the mechanic is not completely cheesed.
(22:56) Gnomonkey says he does not think Doom of Mokhaiotl can be fixed to the point he would personally enjoy grinding it at a high level; it works well for delves 1 to 8, but he cannot see himself going for the furthest delve or speedruns.
(24:00) Gnomonkey says he is concerned about Combat Achievements for Doom of Mokhaiotl and does not see how they can be interesting given the boss design.

Opinion: Doom of Mokhaiotl is not a true enrage boss

(7:34) Gnomonkey says Doom of Mokhaiotl was advertised as an enrage boss but is not one; he points to Telos and Arch-Glacier from RuneScape 3 as true enrage bosses with scaling difficulty and killstreaks where loot is risked on death.
(7:34) Gnomonkey says Doom of Mokhaiotl does not get endlessly harder and its drop rate is capped at delve 9, making it an endurance fight, as seen with record delvers Jacko and Wide bringing Eldritch staff to upkeep prayer.
(8:03) Gnomonkey suggests the boss would be better if you could bank between fights while still risking compounding loot, making it about skill and consistency rather than supply conservation.
(9:38) Gnomonkey says an enrage-style boss implies a hard choice between claiming loot early or continuing, and Doom of Mokhaiotl has no such choice because you never cash out the base loot before a unique.
(10:03) Gnomonkey compares to the Colosseum (where shards or sunfire pieces can tempt you to cash out), Oathplate acquisition contracts risking about 90m per contract, and Revenants, saying Doom of Mokhaiotl misses the risk-reward mark compared to them.

Doom of Mokhaiotl

(2:22) Gnomonkey says the Ralos at the Colosseum requires almost 70 clears on average and sucks to the point no one bothers on an iron.
(7:01) Gnomonkey praises the common loot table's iron-friendly items such as dragon darts, cannonballs, seeds, alkahest, splinters and aether catalysts.
(8:09) Gnomonkey compares common loot pool values: delve 3 is about 44k and delve 9 is about 57k, which he calls a laughable 13k increase for one of the hardest encounters; he says Grotesque Guardians pays about 11k more per kill than that.
(9:00) Gnomonkey cites a screenshot of Jacko's loot at delve 134 worth about 13 million gp for about 3.5 hours at the highest level, while three and a half hours of Vorkath has an expected value of 14.3 million gp.
(9:00) Gnomonkey says Doom of Mokhaiotl was the best money-maker in the game but was getting close to Theatre of Blood as the value of the boots dropped, and says delve 9 rare loot value is about 800k, about 15 times the common loot.
(10:03) Gnomonkey says by delve 125 you have a 50% chance at a rare drop, so only world-record delvers ever risk their rares.
(11:03) Gnomonkey says 85% of all Doom of Mokhaiotl clears are delve 6 and lower and about 40% are delves 1 and 2, and that the high scores only include delve 8 plus clears, which he says are full of bots.
(11:41) Gnomonkey argues best-in-slot items should not drop from delves 2 to 4, which are similar in difficulty to slayer bosses, and says delve 6 would make more sense as a loot baseline since all mechanics are present by then.
(12:01) Gnomonkey says the Doom of Mokhaiotl pet is twice as common as each rare drop, so you expect two pets before about three rare drops, and he sees it as a trash drop that pushes pet hunters aside; he has four pets personally.
(12:59) Gnomonkey says the pet roll potentially replaces rare loot, and as far as he knows nobody has got a pet and an item in the same roll.

Bugs and hotfixes (Doom of Mokhaiotl)

(12:59) Gnomonkey says Doom of Mokhaiotl was the most prime example of lack of QA in an endgame boss he has seen, with over 20 hotfixes in the first few days and weeks, each introducing new issues, to the point he quit the boss and would not farm low waves on his hardcore.
(13:33) Hotfixes repeatedly made grubs stall or not stall so they went in even as a killing shot was sent, and big grubs also initially did not stall.
(14:01) Jagex made it so the melee punish can be done regardless of attack cooldown but if you use that to your advantage you take guaranteed damage, which Jagex said is intended; the prayers were later made to stack with the correct style after pushback.
(20:55) Gnomonkey lists release problems at Doom of Mokhaiotl: the delve 1 to 8 world record on the board was wrong and wiped, the next floor entrance did not appear on day one, the orb did not protect from acid and had no leeway, and boulder damage continued after the boss died.
(21:21) Gnomonkey says the boss healing to full after a melee punish laser was confirmed to be a bug, and that Doom of Mokhaiotl still instant-melees you with no wind-up out of shield and orb phase.
(21:58) Gnomonkey says Jagex struggles to test content at its hardest difficulty, citing deep-delve issues and Yama contracts where two were impossible, and that the player base is forced to walk on eggshells while QA testing.
(22:18) Gnomonkey says the Twisted bow can be sped up to three-tick shots by throwing knives at grubs; J mods first told him not to use it, but it was later confirmed not patched and fine to use.
(22:18) Gnomonkey says the early rock-block tech (car block) skipped the whole car phase with almost no setup before being soft patched, creating a divide between players who used the cheese and those who did not.

Doom of Mokhaiotl: shield phase

(14:54) Gnomonkey criticises the second shield phase after the orb phase at Doom of Mokhaiotl as slowing the pace and, because it is a free chance to use support specs, making things easier for record delvers; he compares it to Muspah's second smite phase.
(18:10) Gnomonkey says there is a bonus hitsplat after shield phase of around 20 to 30 damage that grows the longer the shield phase took; Gnomonkey made a shield phase last about 15 minutes to one-shot Doom of Mokhaiotl before Jagex capped it at 50, reached after roughly 90 seconds.
(18:29) Gnomonkey says the shield phase bonus hitsplat rewards doing the phase worse (less damage, worse weapons) and should instead reward snappy play such as hitting grubs near the boss's centre.
(23:00) Gnomonkey would change the shield phase to reward clearing grubs quickly instead of milking, and would remove the second shield phase so the boss simply repeats its normal attack pattern until dead.

Doom of Mokhaiotl: holy water

(15:03) Holy water, which drops when a melee punish finishes the Doom of Mokhaiotl and heals you, restores prayer and clears acid, was found to be bugged and not proc on delve 9 plus, and Jagex kept that because it would make later delves too easy; Gnomonkey agrees, noting people reach almost delve 200 without it.
(15:31) After players found that not attacking the boss after the orb phase avoided shield phase and allowed holy water on delves 6 to 8, Jagex made the boss start shield phase after about three attacks regardless, so holy water only works if a melee punish comes within them.
(15:57) Gnomonkey calls holy water baffling, a mechanic Jagex added and then nerfed when people used it, which he says felt like a last-minute untested addition.
(15:57) The holy water mechanic was bugged so that if the first hitsplat of your attack did not kill the boss (Scythe swing, Chally spec, or a godsword with an echo hit finishing) no holy water would proc.

Doom of Mokhaiotl: acid

(4:09) Gnomonkey says orb clearing of acid is a perfect compromise to overbearing acid, because you must survive the orb phase to clear a small amount of acid, and clearing the melee range of the boss with one orb feels rewarding.
(16:26) Gnomonkey says acid at Doom of Mokhaiotl is totally random because the boss picks one direction and blasts acid that way every time it is hit for the whole cave, and he suggests copying the Zuk healers system or letting players influence direction.
(16:54) Any multi-hitsplat weapon generates multiple acid bursts at Doom of Mokhaiotl, so the Scythe generates triple the acid of a Twisted bow, and faster weapons like blowpipe or Scorching bow generate more than slower ones; thralls also generate acid with every attack.

Vengeance

(16:57) Gnomonkey says with thralls useless at Doom of Mokhaiotl you should bring Vengeance, but the only attacks you can venge there are direct melee attacks and missed boulder prayers, not regular auto attacks.
(17:24) Gnomonkey says most deep delvers skip Vengeance at Doom of Mokhaiotl because it wastes a slot, but still bring Lunar spells for cure me and spellbook swap for just Death Charge.
(17:24) Gnomonkey asks why Jagex hates Vengeance, saying many bosses are pointlessly immune to recoil, citing Nex and the Doom of Mokhaiotl giant death laser that hits 99 but gives no recoil damage.

Opinion: One-shot mechanics and damage in endgame bosses

(18:57) Gnomonkey dislikes Doom of Mokhaiotl's ludicrous damage as a way to add difficulty, saying Awakened Leviathan in Rage has less DPS than the delve 8 boulders.
(18:57) Gnomonkey says Doom of Mokhaiotl's flurry attacks can hit as high as 65 whereas Verzik's main attack in phase 3 is 63 and can be blocked with defence; the boulder prayer attacks ignore defence and guarantee damage on any off prayer.
(19:51) Gnomonkey says one-shot mechanics in endgame content are an artificial, less interesting way to add difficulty, because food becomes useless when you die instantly, and he misses the death-by-a-thousand-cuts feel of a solo Theatre of Blood Nylo room.
(19:51) Gnomonkey says the Doom of Mokhaiotl delve 8 boulders can rip your health from 121 to zero in two game ticks.
(20:24) Gnomonkey cites Tombs of Amascut one-shots as examples: Baba boulder toss at high level is 110 damage, Akkha DPS check is 80 and Arcane Scarabs blast off prayer is 140, while Verzik's autos are 33 and her melee hits for 63.
(20:53) Gnomonkey says one-shots remove complexity rather than add it, and that he fears this is how hard content will be designed in future; he says Jagex relies on one-shots and DPS checks instead of mechanical depth, as in high-level Tombs of Amascut, Yama contracts and deep delve Mocha.

Yama

(3:00) Gnomonkey says Yama is a solid boss mechanically but is the easiest endgame content, with only the end of the fight providing much challenge, a step above Vardorvis but not a massive leap.
(4:29) Gnomonkey says Yama made Demon bane too strong: Emberlight and the Purging staff rival or outcompete their mega-rare counterparts, and bots mage camp Yama with a staff of the dead costing about 8m gp.
(4:45) Gnomonkey says he spotted several bots with over 100 million magic XP from Yama alone, and calls the 120% Demon bane strength a progression-breaking decision.
(12:01) Gnomonkey says Yama's pet was made a 1 in 100 per contract completion even if you did not risk the contract, and you get the contract back each kill, making the pet feel less special.

Doom of Mokhaiotl: car attack

(5:57) Gnomonkey says the car phase is one of the best mechanics of any boss, praising its mechanical depth, risk and reward, prep in the earlier phase, and 100% accuracy that lets unique weapons and specs shine.
(11:41) Gnomonkey notes the car phase is introduced on delve 5 with no shockwaves and only two dashes, so it is not yet the full boss fight.

Orb phase (Doom of Mokhaiotl)

(23:00) Gnomonkey would drastically rework the Doom of Mokhaiotl orb phase because it does not feel good, suggesting the orb spawn instantly on the second shot and the boss's shockwaves have a longer wind-up.
(23:00) Gnomonkey would not throw two rocks at players on delve 8, saying one feels fair enough.

Raids 4

(24:19) Gnomonkey hopes for more creativity at Raids 4 with community feedback before release, and says he has no doubt it will be amazing.
(24:53) Gnomonkey says he believes Old School RuneScape is in its golden age and likes seeing Yama and Doom of Mokhaiotl released close together, hoping for more consistent high-level bosses.

Gnomonkey

(24:19) Gnomonkey says he was offered a playtest of Doom of Mokhaiotl but declined because Jagex bars playtesters from streaming the content until someone clears it, which would be a big income hit; he enjoys chasing world firsts.
(24:19) Gnomonkey says he appreciates the Jagex mods who join chats to collect feedback and work weekends, and that problems with the boss are not any individual mod's fault; he has personally given suggestions to many of them.
(24:19) Gnomonkey credits Widega_rs, JackooH and Muffyn_ for making Doom of Mokhaiotl fun and building a community around solving the tech.