One of the concerns the EoC tried to rebalance was scimitar dominance. Scimitars were considered better than all of the other "metal weapons" due to their speed and slash.
Jagex's solution to scimitars being better than maces, warhammers, longswords, daggers, shortswords, battleaxes, etc was to make them all the same. Make them all have the same DPS. Make the only difference between be whether or not it is stab or slash or crush based in terms of monster weakness.
At the same time, they removed the stab, slash, and crush stats from the items and replaced it with an attack rating.
That was entirely unnecessary.
In the Old School Runescape forums, I've seen two good threads about how to rebalance them for RS2's combat system.
One person suggests adding a sort of perk based on the lore of the items, like making maces get bonus damage based on your prayer points or making maces able to smite and remove 1 prayer. See: Rejuvenate Bad Weapons
Another person suggests making most of the weapons have the same attack speed, and then rebalancing their stats based on that. See: All Weapons at Scimitar Speed
After reading those and giving them feedback, I gave them my own suggestion, which I'll paste here.
First of all, Jagex needs to make monster's defensive stats transparent. I think EoC did that? Good on them for that, but they use the new lame mmo copy pasted stat system.
Design weapon stats like so:
Scimitar: 10 slash, 0 stab, 0 crush
Warhammer: 0 slash, 0 stab, 10 crush
Shortsword: 0 slash, 10 stab, 0 crush
The problem there is that a rune longsword has the same stab as a rune shortsword, even thought the shortsword is a faster speed.
Longsword: 8 slash, 7stab, 0 crush
Mace: 0 slash, 7 stab, 8 crush
Battleaxe: 8 slash, 0 stab, 7 crush
"Unique" weapons:
Dagger: 5 slash, 6 stab, 0 crush, 1.8 attack speed (as op suggested) or faster as a fun rapid attack weapon.
Spear: 7 slash, 7 stab, 7 crush, 5 def - The all rounder type of weapon with some defensive capability (as op suggested)
Halberd: 9 slash, 7 stab, 0 crush - Keep it at it's own special "longer reach" melee weapon status. However to make it less unused, maybe it could use a little speed bonus.
2 Handed Sword: 11 slash, 0 stab, 9 crush - Pretty much works as it is now
Now, some weapons may be worth equalizing the speeds of the weapons for the trade-off of making the weapon's strengths and weaknesses more prominent or important. But some should still have different attack speeds.
As the wiki mentions about longsword vs scimitar, scimmy is 25 hits/minute and longsword is 20 hits/minute. It adds up over time. Because Jagex isn't transparent about how accuracy and damage amounts work, we can only guess as to how the stats would have to change to get them equal or into a position of "having tradeoffs against using one or the other".
Anyway, the point of weighing stats like this, is to give people opinions like this:
Player A: Oh I like to use Scimmy + Mace to cover the 3 melee weaknesses cause I've been using scimmy for years.
Player B: I roll Scimmy + Warhammer + Shortsword because I'm l33t min/maxer. (I personally would be that kinda player).
Player C: Spear is nice for inventory space, plus I don't have to worry about a shield.
Player D: The new shortsword's awesome, it's like having a lower level CRapier, though I still bring a battle axe to cover the slash/crush enemies.
Player E: I like to main warhammer now that it's good... and longsword hits hard too!
Player F: Dude the new dagger is like melee throwing knives now it's so much fun
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In reality, the stat suggestions I just made, are already how the weapons are sort of designed in RS2.
I say Jagex should at least be transparent about monster's defensive stats, because it opens up Jagex to a load of suggestions on what their actual defenses should be or how to alter defense stats for things in order to make weapon choice more prominent.
Yes, this is what EoC tried to do. But they did it in an extremely lazy way, by giving all 3 points of the combat triangle 3-4 different types of attacks, where melee had stab/slash/crush, mages had air/water/earth/fire, and rangers had... bolts vs arrows or something.
Mage and range don't need that variety. Jagex trying to make mage elements useful or bullet type useful was merely the result of them trying to make the classes the same... that's bad game design. I have many ideas for making mage and range more unique like melee is and I have them on a blog too, I might post them later.
Anyway, making the 3 melee weaknesses more prominent is a good way to make weapon choice a little more important. But it really does call for editing stats of monsters (Assuming they really are slash biased or stab biased or whatever).
I only remember things like Rock Crabs mattering for crush weapons for example...
At the same time it was good that the casual player could just use 1 type of melee weapon everywhere and not be /forced/ to min/max in some way.
We want it to be an advantage, not an overwhelmingly better choice.
The EoC didn't need to happen. This could have been applied to RS2.
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