All you need to know about the changes to The Secrets of the North and the Phantom Muspah.
The Secrets of the North quest was released on January 10th when loads and loads of players rushed to complete the quest so that they get to be one of the first to defeat the repeatable boss you can only access after the quest. A good reason for the rush is that, generally, new content could be more balanced, and therefore you might be lucky and get a lot of OSRS GP relatively quickly before the first round of fixes and balance.
While this can sometimes be a frustrating experience, other times, it can be highly lucrative. Besides the new content not being fully balanced, you’ll have a chance to be one of the first to receive some unique drops, which can have a huge OSRS gold value due to scarcity when new content is released.
Hotfixed
Soon enough, after the release of the quest and boss, Jagex proceeded to adjust the drop table of the Phantom Muspah, as the quantities of these drops could affect their OSRS GP value on the GE since a larger quantity than needed was entering the game. For example, the Phantom Muspah initially dropped more good OSRS gold value, such as 3 Yew seeds, which Jagex readjusted to 2, 3 Palm seeds adjusted to just 2, or 6 Torstol seeds cut down to 5.
A few other seed drops also received a Nerf: 4 Rannar seeds reduced to 3 and 12 Rannar seeds reduced to 10. Besides this, Jagex has also adjusted the quantity of grimy snapdragon you could drop from Phantom Muspah from 38 to 31, reducing the overall GP you could get from particularly these drops. This slightly reduced the hourly profits to keep these items relevant long term and keep a balanced economy for the game.
Jagex has also hotfixed a few of the mechanics of the boss, but most importantly, they have reduced the boss’s resistance to ice spells when it’s not already frozen so that you can freeze it more often. Another critical hotfix comes for the players who die during the boss fight within the quest, as they can now retrieve their items safely since the grave location has been moved to a safe area.
QoL Changes
A week after that, Jagex returned to Secrets of the north and Phantom Muspah and delivered another set of changes based on the initial feedback from the players.
A great quality of life change makes the saturated heart a tradeable item, which made perfect sense since its components are tradeable already. Still, the quality of life improvements doesn’t stop here.
Because of the players’ feedback, Jagex has decided to give the Phantom Muspah its rightful place amongst spectral monsters since he is a phantom. As such, you can successfully use the Ectoplasmator, the Soul wars minigame unique, when killing him to gain a good chunk of passive Prayer XP. And if you’re on a killing spree, it might add up quite a bit since you’ll receive 20 percent of Muspah’s hp back as Prayer XP, roughly 170 Prayer XP per kill.
The Monster examine spell from the Lunar spellbook has also been updated to display relevant details about the boss, such as its defensive stats. However, you might still want to bring the Ancient spellbook to freeze the boss in place to have an easier time killing him.
Also, based on the community’s feedback, Jagex has decided to return to the original unintended stepback mechanic of the boss, where if moving, you’d always take 0 damage upon getting hit for the first time by his melee attack before having to move again to take 0 damage from the next hit as well. This mechanic made kiting the boss easier and the overall fight more enjoyable. While Jagex has decided to bring back this mechanic, which they removed when making the boss more vulnerable to ice spells, they have reverted this change and removed the 10 percent accuracy bonus to ice spells when the boss is not frozen already.
More or Less GP?
Because of his uniques, the Phantom Muspah will still bring you loads of OSRS gold. Hence, you should not be worried that you’re receiving less from his drops because these changes will help stabilize the prices on the market and hopefully bring back some of the value to the individual items and OSRS accounts for sale. This means that once the market stabilizes, you will more or less make a similar amount of OSRS GP per hour from the boss because even though you are receiving less, the value of these items will be slightly higher than I t currently is.