The irony is that while players loathed the'closing' armor revealed earlier this year, they loved the prototypes shown when the raid was announced. Initially, the Justicar armor was part of a trio of armor sets, West tells me, but as the Theatre of Blood moved from obscure idea to real content, the armor changed with it. Participants said there RuneScape gold was sufficient DPS gear but insufficient tank gear, so it was narrowed down to only one armor set. And if they were only going to use one group, Jagex guessed they might as well create a new one based on the armor worn with the raid's big poor.
"We thought changing it a little made sense," West says,"but players were not quite on board with all the first proposal we shared on stream. And , well, Reddit went crazy."
The memes came out hard and quick. Others thought the new armor didn't look tanky enough and generously provided some alternatives, with some calling for a more extreme redesign.
It got so bad that some players started to seriously believe that a meme the updated armor was by a different artist, which the artist who left the prototypes had abandoned Jagex. But something amazing occurred. Even as memes blotted out sunlight, gradually but certainly severe suggestions started to shine through. It began with crude Photoshop tasks, but shortly proper illustrations and fan art started to crop up. Players rallied around the idea of a milder, blessed armor set motivated by the Runescape god Saradomin, so that they went back to buy RS gold West's prototype designs and made some changes.
And after that, a hero emerged: legend_arts, a talented and well-known Runescape fan artist. Inspired by the memes and motivated by elements of West's designs and other players' suggestions, legend_arts created a hybrid armor design so good it not only silenced the memes, it got the attention of West himself.