I am a max combat player that hasn't played since before this whole combat change. I have access to chaotics and have about 1600M in gold. My stats are as follows:

 

What gear should I be using? Before I quit I used bandos with d defender and a chaotic rapier, but now everything looks different. Halp.

nex gears, glacor boots, dominion tower gloves, chaotic maul, zaryte, royal crossbow, virtus wand

Would you still use a slayer helm for slayer or would set bonuses from something like pernix or torva outweigh that?

No, slayer helm is still the best for tasks.

What's the argument for using wand instead of staff? The relative strength of auto-attacks in magic? I've just used my chaotic staff since EoC.

Only autoattack damage gets boosted by the staff, but with the lower speed that's not too useful. As a result, magic dps is the same with wand and shield as with staff, except that you lose the shield, which can be used to build adrenaline and heal etc..

What spells do you use for magic now? Is it still fire surge?

Totally depends on the monsters weakness. Using their weakness is actually essential now.

Magic is a bit quirky.

 

All spells scale by the level required to cast them, e.g. fire blast is a level 59 weapon.

 

However, there are no weapons past level 80, or level 90 for dual wield melee, or level 78 for thrown for example.

 

Because of that, spell damage is capped at level 80 spells, e.g. air surge. All surges do the same amount of damage, but not all waves/blasts/bolts/strikes do.

 

In dungeoneering, where weapons do go up to level 99, this cap is also in place. So dungeoneering magic is capped at two tiers below the maximum. It's bad.

 

Also, when an ability says 100% spell damage, it means spell damage without magic level included.