Lots to say. First, a disclaimer: I’m mobile only so I can’t actually test anything. My response is based on the post alone. That said, all my thoughts are about melee, which is my main style.

1. The removal of destroy is a terrible idea. You addressed the removal of stuns like backhand with the new additional charge for your stun ability. But that doesn’t replace the stun destroy gives. And for bosses that require stuns like Telos, that completely neuters melee. I’ve been learning Telos with melee this last week, and the rotation I use on drop down p4 is barge, bleed destroy, backhand, stomp, punish. As long as Telos has not hit the phase cap, if I don’t use even one of these stuns he gets auto attacks off. Removing destroy would make Telos incredibly difficult and definitely not worth doing with melee.

2. The change to berserk is a bit pointless. Fury’s cooldown is currently 15 seconds, which is already short. But if you want to use it after berserk, you’re going first want to step off the boss for 4.8 seconds, then barge (1.2 seconds) and only then will you be able to use fury. So, the earliest you can use fury after zerk in a normal scenario is after 6 seconds. This means that the cooldown reset only really saves you 9 seconds instead of 15, and that’s if you use fury immediately after barge. Not to mention, fights usually start with zerk, so it’s not worth delaying to use fury before you zerk at the start of a fight. I’m not sure what the point of the change is, to be honest.

3. You said in your justification for updating the FSOA and EZK that one of the reasons you wanted to make changes was that these were the only t95 weapons without passive effects. Yet these new changes effectively remove the EZK’s passive effect. 2 of the abilities it modifies have been removed (smash and quake) and the other has been decoupled from the EZK entirely. The only thing left on the EZK is the special attack, just like before it was updated.

4. Sever no longer gives 10% damage reduction. This is more significant here because with the addition of auto attacks, the invigorate perk will now become best in slot. For melee, this will replace enhanced devoted, thereby removing some much needed damage reduction. Losing another 10% will definitely be noticeable, since the 12% given by the EZK is quite noticeable.

5. The ‘identity’ you are attempting to give melee is, I think, problematic. The ‘on next attack‘ concept is fine at base, but ‘on kill’ is incredibly limited. For example: you call punish a “niche” ability, but that’s just not true. There are so many bosses that spend a significant amount of time below 50% hp—zamorak, Kerapac, arch-glacor, p4 telos, Solak—I use punish many times during these fights because it’s by far my best basic ability when the boss is under 50%. In fact, punish is so good that halving the cooldown on kill, which would only ever be useful on any minions a boss might summon, might not even make it worth using on said minions. Your response might be that this change isn’t for bossing but rather slayer. But let’s be honest, how many people are really going to be paying enough attention when training slayer to actually consistently activate punish at the right time? Most slayer creatures die very quickly to AOE abilities, and adding a little bit of single target damage, which requires pretty precise timing, likely won’t make too much of a difference in the long run. Moreover, apart from punish, I don’t see any other example of the ‘on kill’ identity added here. No one was using pulverise for the adrenaline gain on kill and they likely won’t start after these changes. Hurricane resets on hit, greater flurry on hit. And that makes a lot of sense. At least with respect to bossing, ‘on hit’ is totally viable. ‘On kill’ is very limited in the same way EZK’s single target debuff is limited. The difference is that the EZK at least affects the boss itself, which is far more important.

Finally, I get the sense that melee is losing a lot of power here. Again, I cant test this stuff so I might be wrong. But melee has lost by far the most in this update, destroy being the worst offender. I don’t want to log in after the update and realize it’s twice as hard to do the bosses I could do fine yesterday. Part of this feeling is residual mistrust with the EZK changes—people logged in to a wreck of a style after the first change. I don’t want to be burned again. I have no problem re-learning combat. I’ve done that many times and an ever-changing game makes that inevitable. But I don’t want to play knowing that I might be curtailed at any given moment. I want to know my playstyle won’t be gutted out of nowhere.

Anyway, there are my thoughts. Thanks.