Debunking EoC: Mage vs Melee combat

Mage on its own was weak against melee's stronger weapons.

Unless you had the expensive ancients or Storm of Armadyl, your normal spells and glassy armor were very underwhelming even against melee, which mages should be able to dominate against.

Continuing from the discussion about reducing the cost of runes...

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.

And even using entangle sometimes would take multiple tries, letting the meleer get hits against your lack of armor or even a special attack.

Miasmic spells were a very good example of that ingenuity, but extremely costly. It needed to not be PvP item only in some way, in my opinion. Though, miasmic spells bring up an interesting scenario: The lack of mages needing special attacks.

Mages don't really need special attacks. It's much more interesting for us to have more unique spells and spell mechanics. However, a special attack or two isn't a bad idea.

Something that could've been done to the normal spell book, imo, are leech spells, and stronger stat reducing spells that are anti-melee. Imagine a spell that inflicts disease on your opponent. Jagex could've used diseases in more areas of the game.

The Pre-EoC god spells used to be like that, but their effects were kind of negligible if I remember correctly. And EoC just removed them.

During Pre-EoC, mage's advantage over melee was farcasting and the fact that melee armor was weak to mage. Mage armor glass cannon type, being weak against melee and ranged, and normal against mages.

A ranger's advantage over mage was that mages had no armor and mages couldn't farcast rangers, while they also splashed them a lot. Range armor was generally well balanced against all styles of combat, but at the same time not especially tanky.

A melee's advantage over range was that melee ripped apart range armor, and rangers had no way to stop a melee player's approach like mages could. Melee armor was the best against melee and ranged, and virtually useless against ranged.

EoC attempted to enforce the combat triangle by making the classes the same, and making the armor/weapons more of hard counters to each other.

A much more compelling way of balancing this would've been to fix the triangle's weak link: Mage.

In reality, Pre-EoC's combat triangle had the foundation to be already be quite well balanced.

Melee had a few quirks due to having more weapons and having stronger weapons that didn't have a cost for repeated use.

Range wasn't terribly costly, but overall it lacked content. Range had few special attack weapons and they weren't all that great. Some of the good range options were just too expensive.

But mage was the weakest link. It was the most costly, and mages were still at a disadvantage against melee if they didn't use Ice spells.

Mage didn't really need a change in how armor worked, like with the release of Ganodermic. Ganodermic is okay as being kind of different, but if Jagex wanted to balance mage that way, they would need to release more things like Ganodermic, Skeletal, and Splitbark armor across the board for all levels of mages.

There would have to be more than just Ganodermic, which was very expensive and only useful to high level rich players.

Of course, EoC tried to do this by releasing new armors for mages. But the problem with that was how they homogenized the combat triangle and all the items players used, as well as introducing "Tierscape".

A better way to do this, would be to have improved the mechanics of mages. Give mages more ways to block out melee damage. Give mages more mobility to improve their strong point: farcasting.

Let's look at some of the things the Wise Old Man was capable of.in the Draynor Bank Robbery. I can't find a cutscene of it, but there was one quest in which the Wise Old Man made use of short range teleportation to confuse enemies. He even explained to the Adventurer how he used the teleportation matrix to do it.

Here are some examples of spells or items I would suggest to make mage better against melee, for the normal spell book:

Teleportal: Req. Lv75 mage. This pretty much allows you to place a magic node to be used by other spells.

Teleport: Req. Lv75 mage. Basically, this spell would allow you to teleport to a nearby location. Something that's a few squares away. Just like the Wise Old Man.

It may be very tricky to implement this in such a way that you teleport to a random nearby location, a location in X direction, or otherwise.

So the most viable solution, is to make it a two part spell. The first cast places an arcane sigil or arcane portal of sorts at the location you are standing. The second cast teleports you to it. In otherwords, this is used with the Teleportal spell.

The teleportal would have two restrictions. The first being that it would time out after 30 seconds or so, needing to be replaced. The second restriction would be that there must be nothing blocking the way - just like how Ava's Accumulator won't pick up arrows that are shot over a fence.

Some areas for PvM might need to have the usage of the spell completely blocked.

Teleforce: Req 90 mage. Another high level mage spell that forces an enemy to be teleported away, just like in the Draynor Mage Robbery. Well sort of, it would just teleport the victim to your active Teleportal.

Telematrix: Req 95 mage. Let's say we come up with a viable way to allow short range teleportation without Teleportal. We could put it under this spell. Further suggestion is needed. Otherwise, we may as well rename Teleport as Telematrix, because it's cooler.

Update: It looks like Jagex actually did this in RS3 with the Prism of Salvation. Some of those Seren spells seem neat, albeit being part of Ancient Magicks. I wouldn't mind them in RS2 combat.

Air/Water/Earth/Fire Bombard/Storm: Aka, Elemental Bombard. Something I recently suggested on OSRS for no reason, a set of AoE spells for the normal spell book.

These spells would be centered on the caster, not the target. There would be no traveling projectile involved. It would be like the Retribution and Wrath prayers, hitting a 3x3 or 5x5 square where the caster is standing.

For the 5x5 square, one may or may not consider making it hit less to enemies 2 squares away.

The spells will have to be ineffective if you aren't using mage stuff.

And if you aren't using mage stuff, you might be hybridding or trybridding, in which case, we have to consider how strong this spell is if you're casting it from a melee or ranged weapon.

Also, the spells may need a different way to "splash".

I figure it wouldn't be like vengeance, which can be used by any point of the triangle really.

It wouldn't be cool if there was a chance to cast it and just have it splash on your own player.

So I guess what we can do is add a different type of splash for people who resist the damage of this AoE, one that also indicates that any of its special effects were negated as well.

Basically instead of a splash appearing on an enemy that the spell didn't effect, maybe we see some white sparkles (same color as splash) indicating a miss. Or just the old blue 0 hitsplat.

Or we could make it splash anyway, kind of depends on how the spell is animated on its own.

Elemental Bombard: Basically the set of 3x3 square spells.

Elemental Storm: The set of 5x5 square spells.

Air Bombard: An air AoE that pushes everyone affected away by 1 square in the appropriate direction. Sort of the "Dragon Spear" for mages, but with more range if you use Air Storm. Does not fully stun.

Water Bombard: A water AoE that has a "flood" effect on nearby tiles where casting it multiple times in the same spot makes it more effective. Can't think of much else to make water unique. I hope to find a better suggestion.

Earth Bombard: An earth AoE that can stun, like what Dragon Spear does. Could be combo'd with Air Bombard.

Fire bombard: A fire AoE for DPS.

If we go with push away air AoE and earth with stuns, I suppose it depends on the effectiveness of using them back to back.

For air+earth to really do anything in PvP against melee, the air would have to have its own inherent stun that's long enough for the earth AoE to hit.

But then the earth AoE has to not be so cheap that you can just lock out melee forever, I'd say. Same goes for that particular combo altogether.

Of course these skills would have recasting times.

For the mechanical air/earth ones, they might actually need longer recast than normal. Or not, depending on how it's made.

The fire DPS one could probably be normal. Water... probably needs to come up with a different idea for its AoE, or make it another DPS AoE.

Elemental Flurry: Pretty much, spells that behave like the rune thrownaxe special attack, capable of hitting multiple targets. Just something to add flavor to mages.

Tornado, Tsunami, Earthquake, Eruption: A set of super spells that are stronger than Surge spells. Fire surge currently requires level 95 magic. The required levels for spells could use some rebalance, or these spells could replace surges, or these could even be level 99 spells.

All 4 of these spells would have entirely unique animations. Actually, Tornado is kind of taken by Storm of Armadyl, so these spells could always be implemented in an entirely different way.

I came up with this idea years before 2011 actually. The idea was to make them require an elemental staff to even be able to use them. Unlike Storm of Armadyl which you can cast with or without the staff, these would require it a matching Air/Water/Earth/Fire staff. And not just any elemental staff, but a special one.

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