Lol,you were playing for 10+ years and even participated in WoE but you didn’t know that there was the /quickspell2 option to spam potions via turning the mousewheel? Oo
Spamming potions via mousewheel made it never a hassle to pot. Also, builds with VIT and demihuman reduction never died in 2-3 hits, that applied only to Acid Demonstration and Guillotine Fist/Asura Strike (whatever name you prefer), since most skills required a really high upgraded and carded weapon to boost your damage enough to nuke someone.
Real oneshotting came with the increasing frequency of godlike item creation and the renewal update/3rd Classes, where ± every new Jobclass got an option/setting of items that can be used to oneshot others.
And lets not forget that RO had elemental armor and elemental reduction cards to make tactical survival even easier(as Ghostring card e.g. could negate most of Acid Demonstrations and Guillotine Fists damage [-75%]).
There was also Ganbantein added to some bosses skill reservoir to remove said skills.
In contrast to TOS, those skills required gemstones to cast them, which made spamming them a costly practice.
Still, I believe that prerenewal RO was alot harder for the majority of players than TOS is now. You generally never really hunted monsters close to your level, because they were too strong most of the time — some Jobs like Mage or Archer had a range/trap/knockback/Firewall/Stone Curse/Frost Diver advantage that allowed them to hunt monsters that were even higher than their own levels, but that was ± the exception of the norm.
In TOS, you collect 1 basic set of 315 rare HG armor and you’re basically at the same level as a high defence,high upgraded & race resistance carded player of pre-renewal RO in terms of survivability.
