Unfinished EoC Revamp thread

[Introduction]
The point of this thread is to address a number flaws and poor gameplay styles that were introduced in the EoC, as well as several forgotten issues, that still have not been addressed.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Filler Abilities (Basic Spamming)

II. Thresholds (Ultimates Are Useless)

III.Strength (What’s Its Purpose?)

IV. Combat Triangle (It Promotes Conformity)

V. Talent Trees (Defining Roles Better Than Your Gear)

VI. PvP Minigames (Graphics Doesn’t Fix Mechanics)

VII.   Wilderness PvP  ( RS’s Neglected Child)

VIII. Beta Servers ( Use Them; Your Updates Aren’t Perfect)

IX. Feedback ( Give You Mine If You Give Me Yours)

X. Conclusion






I will be quoting Greg Street, the lead systems designer for WoW, a few times
 




~ Filler Abilities ~(Basic Spamming)

When EoC Haters think about basic spamming, they think that it’s just the act of pressing a button several times.  EoC Supporters say that sort of basic spamming loses fights.  I am not addressing that form of basic spamming.  I am addressing the fact that we have several Basics that all have the same purpose: to deal some damage and give us Adrenaline.

Filler Abilities are the abilities that have no purpose other than to make sure you aren’t losing DPS while waiting for one of your good abilities to come off cooldown.  Slice, Punish, Piercing Shot, and Wrack fall under this, as does many other Basics.

A majority of other games have one or two Filler Abilities.  Greg Street says ‘’A rotation with say 4-5 core buttons and 1-2 cooldowns is ideal. It's the situational buttons that complicate things.’’  Out of those 4-5 core buttons, 1-2 are fillers.

A majority of the abilities are situational, but they’re not used sparingly because of the Adrenaline race.

I’m going to suggest this:

1) Auto-attacks generates 3% Adrenaline for Fastest, 5% for Fast, and 10% for Average.  Auto-attacks are also no longer reset after each ability.
a)  Wearing a Shield causes you to generate 3% Adrenaline when hit.

2) Introduce 3 new abilities that’s sole purpose is to deal some damage and generate Adrenaline.
(These will be the only abilities that generate Adrenaline)

a) Snipe (Ranged) deals 100% ability damage and generates 15% Adrenaline.  3 second cast-time and no cooldown.  If you move, the shot becomes instant, generates 10% Adrenaline and incurs a 3 second cooldown. Resets Auto Attack timer. [change the old one]

b) Fireball (Magic) deals 100% ability damage and generates 15% Adrenaline.  2.4 second cast-time and no cooldown.  Refreshes the timer on Combustion.  Resets Auto Attack timer.

c) Fury (Melee) deals 100% ability damage and generates 15% Adrenaline.  Instant.  3 second cooldown.  [change the old one]
 



~ Thresholds ~(Ultimates Are Useless)

This is a continuation of the last post, but talks about Thresholds and Ultimates.  Currently, Ultimates are useless since they deal less damage than a Threshold.  

The flaw with this isn’t that Thresholds deal too much damage, the reason is because Ultimates drain too much Adrenaline (all of it).

This is what I suggest:

1) Remove the whole ‘’Basic/Threshold/Ultimate’’ labels and just call them abilities.

2) Adrenaline Drain:

a)(Total) Damage Dealing Abilities:

100% Damage = -5% Adrenaline
125% Damage = -10% Adrenaline
157% Damage = -15% Adrenaline
Stuns                 = -20% Adrenaline
188% Damage = -30% Adrenaline
219% Damage = -35% Adrenaline
300% Damage = -50% Adrenaline
400% Damage = -60% Adrenaline
700% Damage = -70% Adrenaline

b)  AoE (Area-of-Effect) Abilities

i) Ricochet, Chain, and Cleave will deal 100% Damage, have no cooldown, and drain 20% Adrenaline.
ii) Bombardment, Tsunami, and Hurricane will deal 157% Damage, have a 6 second cooldown, and drain 30%.
iii) Detonate (now Instant), Incendiary Shot  (now an AoE), and Quake will deal 219%, have a 15 second cooldown, and drain 40% Adrenaline.

c) Non-Damage Abilities

i) Buffs like Berserk and Metamorphosis would drain 70% Adrenaline.
ii) Freedom, Anticipation, and Prepartion drain 0% Adrenaline.
iii) Immortality, Barricade, Rejuvenate, Natural Instinct, and Guthix’s Blessing drains 80%.  Barricade halves your damage.
iv) All other Defensive abilities would drain 20% (Reflect drains 30%).

Conclusion:

With this, pressing 1-5 in rapid succession would be lowered to pressing 1 every few seconds.  All abilities are ranked by damage and usability, so anything that seems ‘’overpowered’’ would drain a lot of Adrenaline.  A majority of abilities would become situational, and managing Adrenaline will mean everything.




~ Strength ~(What’s Its Purpose?)

I’m not saying Strength is useless; it provides a pretty good damage boost for those who likes to maximize their DPS (+310 damage at max strength with Overloads and a 2H/DW).  What I’m saying is that the skill itself has lost meaning since Melee requires two skills to train and Ranged/Magic requires one.

There are a few ways to go about ‘’fixing’’ this issue:

1) Remove Strength, rename ‘’Attack’’ and ‘’Melee’’, and give each player a Melee XP lamp that contains all their previous Strength XP.  (The max XP in Melee can be 400M just to please the perfectionists).

2) In the XP options, you’ll only see ‘’Melee’’, and ‘’Melee and Defense’’.  Melee would give x2 the amount of XP Ranged or Magic would, and that XP is split evenly amongst Attack and Strength.


Conclusion:
Creating another Ranged/Magic skill would be unfair when the easier solution is to combine Attack and Strength, while compensating players with an optional choice to combine their Attack and Strength XP.




~ Combat Triangle ~(It Promotes Conformity)

If a Mage kills a Meleer, everything is okay, even if the Meleer was killed in 2 hits.  However, if a Ranger kills a Meleer in 20 hits, the Ranger is overpowered.
So what’s the solution?  Make the combat triangle stricter?  Nope, because every time Jagex does that, players complain.

Pre-EoC, there was no combat triangle.  Sure, armours were weak to certain styles, but you were allowed to wearing armour that wasn’t the same class as your weapon without a huge penalty.  Magic was supposed to beat Melee, but Melee could wear armour to counter Magic.  The same goes for each combat style.  But because there was supposed to be a combat triangle, any attempt to buff one end of the combat triangle ended up keeping things unbalanced (D Bow, SoA, D Claws, GS, Korasi, etc).
Players use the combat triangle as justification for their rants. Currently, if a Ranger dies to a Mage, Magic is overpowered, etc.
Because a majority do not want a strict combat triangle, it is impossible to balance everything with a combat triangle in place.  You cannot Melee = Ranged because that violates the triangle.  If you have Melee > Ranged, people complain it’s too strict.  
The easiest solution is to just remove the combat triangle and begin balancing everything so it’s Melee = Ranged = Magic.
 



~ Talent Trees ~(Defining Roles Better Than Your Gear)

Even if everything is equal, you have to make everything unique.  A majority of abilities are copy-paste versions of each other, and Jagex wants every class to tank, so how can everything be unique?

‘’ Our general design philosophy is to try and make strengths stronger rather than to eliminate weakness. Better for diversity.’’ ~Greg Street

The way this could be implemented in RS is by:

Making Melee a hard hitter, making Ranged very mobile, and making Magic all about debuffs and bleeds.

One aspect that is prominent in a majority of MMOs, are talent trees.  What a talent tree does is better define the role you want to be.
Currently, if you want to be a tank, you equip a shield and that’s it.  You want to DPS?  Equip a 2H, or dual wield.

A talent tree is made up of several passive buffs and a few abilities.  You put points into the talent you want, and after a certain amount of points in each row, you move down to the next row. These talents define and buff your role.

Let’s say in the Ranged Talent Tree, you can choose to be a tank, or to be a DPS.  If you pick all the tank talents, you get HP, Armour, and Damage Reduction boosts.  If you pick all the DPS talents, you get more Accuracy and extra damage.  If you want to PvP, you could pick a mix of tank and DPS talents so you can take a hit, and deal it too.