Styles	Hitpoints	Attack	Strength	Defence
Controlled	25%	25%	25%	25%
Accurate	25%	75%	0%	0%
Aggressive	25%	0%	75%	0%
Defensive	25%	0%	0%	75%

Most players used "aggressive" when fighting other players in the wilderness (i.e strength mode) and this encouraged players to make pures.

A great site on pures and how they worked is found here:
http://games.infoseka.lt/warrior.html

Strength was everything. You could do some serious damage just by having a high strength level, 1 defence, 40 attack, a rune-2-handed sword and monk clothes. Back in RSC, weapons did not have any speed restrictions. All your weapons would hit your opponent with the same speed. Naturally, players would therefore pick the weapon that gave the highest strength bonus, since this would be the most advantageous to have. The best weapon to free players was the rune-2-handed sword (R2H). In its hayday, it was worth up to 1 million gp (A huge sum of money in RSC). Most players would use the R2H weapon, but if they wanted to wield a shield, players would use the rune battle axe, again because it gave the best strength bonus for a single handed weapon. Other weapons such as the rune scimitar and rune long were rarely used.

The actual combat animation is now very different from its RS2 successor. If you wielded a shield in RSC and attacked an opponent, the shield would not move, only the weapon would slash against the opponent. In RS2 however, the shield moves to cover your face, an update long since taken for granted. The music accompanied with the graphics was extremly basic, but nonetheless still gives a few chuckles to this day.

Magic on Runescape Classic also worked differently. You would only get experiance for every successful hit on an opponent or npc. This was later revised in RS2 after an update, allowing players to get experience regardless of the proportion of damage. On RSC, if your spell failed, you would not get experience and you would be unable to cast another spell for 20 seconds. Luckily, and thankfully, you did not lose any runes for a failed spell.

Prayer was more or less similar in RSC as it is now in RS2. Big Bones only gave 12.5exp in RSC and small bones only gave 3.75exp in RSC. The highest prayer spell available was the "lvl 40 protect from missiles" spell. There were no premium prayers (i.e. no prayers exclusively for members at the time). Your prayer would drain depending on your prayer level, which differs from RS2, since in RS2, your prayer drains as a result of your level AND the prayer which your doing. In the runescape developer blog on 15th September 2011, Gower revealed that getting a level 99 was never though possible, which may reveal why prayer was limited to level 40. Players were able to drop bones relatively quickly by clicking on the first bone in your inventory (top left), since the last bone (bottom right) would disappear first.

Ranged was actually very similar to RS2, except there were far less items in RSC with no crystal bow and no dragon arrows/bows to name but a few. The best type of arrows were rune and free players could only use up to steel arrows. (This was later changed some year(s) later) after one of the biggest updates to f2p RS2 since the RS2 launch. The ranging animation has also changed a little too. Despite being a useful skill, ranging was less popular than melee.

There was no summoning skill in RSC. The highest combat you could get was level 123 (by getting level 99 in str, att, def, hit and prayer). This was first achieved by Gearshifter. He later continued to train in edgeville dungeon during the early launch of RS2.

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