qeltar

He's a new member, probably did a search and didn't notice. Try not to be a jerk to newcomers -- it doesn't help the community.

Where do people come up with this stuff? Have you done any actual timed testing? Personal expierence. I found that with d pick at around 75 mining, coal mines as fast as iron with rune pick, if not slightly slower, mith as fast as coal with rune pick, and addy as fast as mith. It is a negliable difference, but I think reading on the RSOF somewhere that the d pick would shave somewhere like 6 hours off of 99 mining. Might of been more, but the junk up is the same between rune hatchet and dragon So that would be "No, I have NOT done any actual timed testing". When you have, and long enough to get around small sample size error, *then* you can make grand pronouncements about it -- not before. If nothing else, the d pick is 15% faster on pure essence than the rune pick. And since essence mines at a consistent rate, that's a reliable improvement.

Where do people come up with this stuff? Have you done any actual timed testing?

In the end, the biggest problem with Nomad's Requiem as a grandmaster quest is not the word "grandmaster", but rather the word "quest". A good quest demands a good storyline. Not only was there not a good storyline here, there pretty much was NO storyline. I am not a quester -- I generally don't like them, and I do them when I need to in order to unlock content. And even *I* found the storyline here to be rather farcical. The entire quest is "Nomad's doing something weird! Go down there and figure out what it is!". One could argue that if this is a quest, so is Bork.

I would have. I specifically didn't read it because my first reaction was "this can't be legit". So I skimmed it, found the disclaimer at the bottom, rolled my eyes and shut the window. Well, I believe you said you did it as you did because you wanted a "hook" to get people to read the article. But if you take a short-cut like hoodwinking the reader, the other edge of the sword is that some won't be very happy about it. I think a better approach is a more interesting title. Something like "What if Tip.it got a sneak peek at this year's updates...?" or similar would have intrigued plenty of readers without tricking them.

I guarantee that within a week there will be players with combat levels under 100 finishing this quest (unless the requirements themselves preclude this). And then more folks will start to wonder if it really lived up to its billing.

You kinda contradicted yourself there. And this quest was not aimed at the "80-115 crowd", by Jagex's specific requirements and recommendations. So what? So it makes the fight too easy.

An hour? Hardly. It can be done in 10 minutes. What is the point of having difficulty ratings on quests, and then making a new category for the most difficult quests, when they aren't really that difficult? And there are people who kill him on the first try without high prayer or Herblore. Or without spending a million on supplies. Obviously, my point was simply that this is going to look like a really weak "grandmaster" quest later on, given that it kinda does now. Edit: A guy above posts a screenie of him killing the guy in CW armor. Can the rubber chicken be far behind? ;) But those games are designed around the reload capability. They deliberately make the bosses super, super hard so that the challenge is figuring out how to kill the guy, because they know that's how the games work. Here, Jagex seems to have tried that but come up short -- Nomad just isn't that difficult. Decent equipment, a bunch of sara brews and restores and down he goes. And that's *before* all the guides are published!

Yep. Which is why this big bad boss fight has no teeth. Think about this for a second, though. I've judged from reading on many forums that most people require three or more deaths before they are able to beat him. If you lost your items every time, it would be extremely frustrating for many, many people. As it is, you spend quite a bit on supplies for each attempt. They wouldn't necessarily have had to make it so you lose all your items. But right now you lose *none* of your items. It's quite possible to kill him using inexpensive gear. If you kept your standard three or four items then it would have been quite doable. This is supposed to be a "grandmaster" quest, and let's face it -- the quest itself was rather weak. The only real challenge was supposed to be the guy at the end. Only there *isn't* much of a challenge, you just throw some potions at him and down he goes in a couple of tries. Also consider how well this quest will "wear" over a couple of years. I mean, there was a time when beating TzTok-Jad was considered a major accomplishment, and now guys do it with rubber chickens. After a year or two of additional updates this quest is not going to age well..

Try ranging with ruby (e) using the best beast you can summon filled with sara (4)'s, lots of restore, super restore and ranging pots.

Yep. Which is why this big bad boss fight has no teeth.

My recommendations: One overload pot, several super restores and several regular restores, and a ton of Sara brews. Put brews in a yak, set your left-click on "Take BoB". Wear d hide and your best stuff that will show up in a gravestone. Turn on Soul Split and Turmoil and have at him. Use brews liberally, restoring with the restore pots and super restores as needed. Do that and you should be fine.

Hmmm, if a quest MUST involve danger to be classed as Grand Master, why not do it on a pvp world for kicks? Danger right there for you. The snide answer would be "because PvP sucks" (which is generally true), but also that would involve too many variables for Jagex to control the difficulty (clans would have a huge advantage, etc.) I'm not saying you should have lost all your stuff or anything, but I do think some penalty aside from a few lost supplies would have been good.

No danger = no difficulty. And there is no danger here. So it becomes like any video game with a ridiculously hard boss and a save game feature. It was fun to do the fight, to figure it out. But a grandmaster quest that is based nearly entirely around a tough fight should have some danger. And this one has none.

And a third larger group will see what you mean and think you're wrong.

There are several ways you can make $ with crafting. Some are predictable and consistent, others change as prices of raw materials and outputs vary. Most are slower than the expensive methods -- by definition. BTW, there is NO profit in making battlestaves because the value of the outputs is less than the value of the inputs. Any profit involved in making them comes from getting the battlestaves from Zaff (which you can resell immediately for a profit).

Well yes, that's what a "requiem" generally implies. ;)

That cape is now the best in the game except to those who are obssessed with every strength point. It is certainly a no-brainer for anything where you use prayer, and (unfortunately) removes much of the appeal of the Ardougne cloak 3 to those who can complete the quest.

If that first article had been posted here, the author would have been flamed to a char and then the thread would have been locked. That's all I have to say about that.

Dharoks, done properly, is the fastest way to get melee XP, period. I've done literally hundreds of hours of timed tests and nothing else comes close to doing as much damage.

Well yes -- you do have to balance things. And I try to warn people about that as well. Why Jagex made these untradeable -- as opposed to just unusable below the level required to make them -- is utterly beyond me.

The problem with wine, as I understand it, is getting decent quantities of grapes.

If you want to do it on the cheap, then use a bunyip and bring food and prepare to make a lot of trips. Be sure you take home the bones -- they are valuable now. Pray for a good drop. ;)

Jagex has made it very difficult to make any sort of meaningful guide for Herblore, for a couple of main reasons: the GE and untradeable potions. So what I try to do is see if the item is actually trading on the GE, and if the price is realistic; if it is, I use it. Otherwise, I estimate the value of the potion by comparing it to other similar potions, or trying to figure out what value it provides. Super restore mixes are a perfect example of how the GE does a terrible job when it comes to potions that trade infrequently. According to the GE, a super restore (2) is worth 9,557 gp and a super restore mix (2) is worth 4,440 gp. Huh? So I value the mix at 500 gp more than the potion it starts with. That's actually conservative, since super restore mixes are pretty nice pots. Super antifires are untradeable, but as far as I am concerned, making this potion *always* provides a profit, because it is strictly and clearly better than what you make it from. The ability to use two-handed weapons fighting dragons is worth a lot of money per hour. I value super prayers at 1.45 times the cost of regular prayers. 0.33 of that is because at very high levels you get 33% more points, and the 0.12 is a fudge factor to take into account the fact that being able to put 164 points of prayer into a slot instead of just 124 is valuable in and of itself.

Veracs, whip, ele/mind shield; Sara brews + super restore + super attack/defence; extra prayer pots. Good food. Use piety. Bring a beast of burden to carry drops home.