Debunking EoC: Ice Barrage + Soul Split

Ice Burst/Barrage + Soul Split was overpowered tank/healing.

One of the problems Jagex tried to address with EoC was the powerful healing from Soul Split.

In 2011, it was common to see at least one "mage tank" using Ice Barrage and Soul Split in Soul Wars, being nearly unkillable and stopping lots of players in their track at spawn at the same time.

Soul Split has been changed a few times since the release of EoC. Actually, in 2011 I came up for a viable solution and it looks like they managed to reach the same conclusion two years later. As the Runescape wiki says:

• When Soul Split was first released, it would heal a user by 20% of all hits.

• When the EoC was released, a healing cap of 250 was introduced. In pre-EoC terms, this would be a healing cap of 25/990 hp.

• In 2013, the healing was reduced to 10%, and reduced even more if you dealt more than 2000 damage (comparatively, 200 damage in pre-EoC), but the healing cap was removed.

• Later in 2013, targets hit indirectly via AoE only healed for 5% instead of 10%.

I'm going to to point out that back in 2011, I made some .txt files to organize information for threads I was posting back in the EoC combat beta. This is math I did 5 years ago.

Polypore was a good step in making mage more common in combat, making it more affordable.

To follow up on polypore, if you apply the rune cost reduction EoC got to pre-EoC, suddenly everything about the normal spell book is fixed in terms of being biased against in combat due to costs. It makes the "F2P" spellbook more attractive, but it also makes the ancient spellbook even more attractive.

In fact, making ancient spells that much more common, may seem a bit OP, merely because of ice spells.

We'll discuss rebalancing the mechanics of ice spells later, let's discuss my idea for rebalancing Ice Barrage with Soul Split.

Solution?

For every multi-target cast, Soul Split's healing is divided.

Let's say you hit nine people for 200/990 damage. Pre-EoC Soul Split would have healed 20% of each hit.

200 x 0.2 = 40 x 9 = 360 per cast, or ~36% of 990 LP. That was OP, and you could cast it again and again for huge amounts of continuous healing.

But if you divide the healing by all nine targets, 360 / 9 = 40. Suddenly the healing isn't terribly overpowered, infact, it's just as strong as single target healing was. You just fixed Soul Wars mage tanking, and many other similar scenarios.

Blood barrage + Soul Split would then see the following numbers, with the above nerf applied.

Hitting 200 on nine targets = 40 LP from Soul Split + 50 LP from Blood Barrage per target.

50 x 9 = 450 - The total life healed from blood barrage alone. Add the healing from Soul Split...

 +40 = 490 HP

In this scenario, Blood Barrage is working as intended, and the Soul Split healing isn't too crazy compared to the healing from the spell itself.

But your targets can move. More effort is needed to spawn camp. Your overpowered healing is halved by needing to freeze people every other cast. People can run away easier. Etc.

Of course, maybe Blood Barrage would still be able to be overpowered that way. If Blood Barrage on its own would still be OP, it could always be nerfed separately.

I personally didn't think it needed to be nerfed at all. I don't think people were hitting 200 against 9 targets every single time they casted, it was definitely more stratified than that.

Anyway, this is what I came up with in 2011. Does that 2013 change sound familiar? I kinda like my version better. The math is very smooth.

Nerfing Soul Splits overall healing rate in all scenarios was unnecessary. Soul Split in 1v1 was never really OP.

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