Today's update brings most of the features for which you voted in Content Poll 12. Along with some popular changes for player-owned houses, there are some important tweaks to last month's godswords and Staff of the Dead.

The special attack of the Staff of the Dead - blocking some of the melee damage you take - is now counted as a Magic attack. In places like the Duel Arena, if the combat rules would forbid Magic, you will equally be unable to use this special attack.

The Staff of the Dead can now autocast the 'Flames of Zamorak' spell.

The staff can therefore be used as an alternative to the Zamorak Staff for casting that spell.

When you are in your own player-owned house, you will now have a 'Kick' option for expelling unwanted guests.

The Accurate combat mode of godswords has been changed from 'Stab' to 'Crush', since godswords have no stab-attack bonus.

Godswords will now pop up a confirmation box when you try to dismantle them.

The smoke from an incense burner in a player-owned house is now green to make it more visible.

Monk robes are now counted as Saradomin items in the God Wars Dungeon.

This change was originally made to RuneScape to accompany a graphical update to those robes when the Perils of Ice Mountain quest was developed.

In other news

When you drop items on death, outside of PvP, the items now appear immediately on the ground, with your tradeable items visible to everybody. We have removed the recent update that delayed their appearance for 3 minutes. Leaving the God Wars Dungeon will now reset your kill-counts too.

If the problem with DDoS attacks becomes substantially worse again, we'll have to put those changes back in, but we're hoping that this won't become necessary. We'll post on the forums to keep you informed if we make more changes.

Antifire potions are now reset in the Duel Arena at the start of a 'no potions' duel.

One of the enchanted crossbow bolt special attacks is affected by this potion.

The teleport tablets from Nightmare Zone previously had no stat requirements or quest requirements for their use. Players had pointed out that this is inappropriate, since they could teleport you to POH portals that you would not have the Construction level to use. Similarly, they could teleport you to Trollheim without completing the Eadgar's Ruse quest that unlocks that spell. These checks have now been added.

If you choose to 'Revert' a teleport tablet that you no longer meet the requirements to use, you will get your minigame reward points back. The Scrolls of Redirection also have a new 'Refund' option.

quest that unlocks that spell. These checks have now been added. Various gem-crafting animations no longer interfere with your walk animation.

The Halloween 2006 event has come to an end and been removed from the game. The login screen has reverted to using the normal flame icons and music, and Death no longer turns up to collect players as they die.

We haven't released the rooftop Agility courses yet. They're a fairly big job: adjusting the maps, plugging in animations, running around with a stopwatch measuring XP rates, etc. Development will begin in the next day or so, and we hope to have them ready later this month.

Poll 12 also offered a POH option for making your house's doors be opened by default. That's not made it into the game yet; we expect to launch it next week.

Future Slayer updates

Next week we'll be putting together a blog about some Slayer updates to offer in the next poll. This would be a good time for you all to dig up your Slayer-related ideas again to share them with the community.

While we won't be offering to recreate the Smoking Kills quest in its entirety, we could undertake a lot of the updates that came alongside it, including higher-level versions of existing Slayer monsters, new dungeon areas, combined headgear, a new Slayer master, and maybe even a reward points system to unlock other improvements to the skill.

Head over to the forums to discuss the update and share your views on a Slayer expansion.

Mod Ash

Senior Content Developer