Debunking EoC: The cost of maging.

Mage costed too much for general use.

This was a contributor towards the fact that Pre-EoC Runescape was biased in favor of melee. Meleeing was more or less free after you bought the melee weapon. Mage was a constant and very expensive cost.

Actually, reducing the cost of runes solved this perfectly. This alone would've changed combat in Runescape all over in PvM and PvP.

In Pre-EoC, you'd see a majority of players running into minigames, wilderness, etc, with melee.

If the EoC's rune cost reduction were applied to Pre-EoC, suddenly you'd see tons more of mages.

Soul Wars was 90% melee right? Melee was OP right? The few mages get specced out by claws?

Change that to 50% melee and 50% mage.

You'd have a ton of mages with an air staff that could cast Wind Surge for free. In Pre-EoC, that damage was on terms with a blitz spell or polypore staff.

That 50% melee would be blown out of the way. Only a minority of high level players would have claws or other good melee special attack weapons, all of the high level meleers would be getting defeated by multiple mages.

It'd balance out.

Of course the transition would not be instant, and you would need to release more armor options to accomodate the mages. The only mage armor I can think of that was craftable or make-able by any means was splitbark armor and skeletal armor. You couldn't make mystic.

EoC also did good in trying to release new items like Batwing mage armor to fill in some of the gaps of mages not having as much content compared to melee armor.

The EoC didn't need to happen. This could have been applied to RS2.

Do note that simply reducing the cost of runes isn't enough to make mage more dominant against melee like it should be, at least for the normal spell book.

In 1v1 Melee vs Mage, melee would still win against a mage in mystic unless the mage was smart enough to use entangle or similar. There's all sorts of ways mage could have been buffed to fix this scenario though. Freezing a meleer in place should not be a mage's only counter.

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More on this in the next blog post.