jettrider

I don't think they should update on Thursdays - it doesn't give them enough time (a little over one workday on Thurs updates) to fix whatever got broken/unintentionally tweaked during the update. I'm sure they don't like overtime work any more than the average person does. If anything they should just save it til the next week, possibly putting it on a Jagex-employee secured testing server and letting employees play through it on their time off to give it a little last minute testing.

Just to nitpick, I think you mean the price is irrelevant. Although you certainly can take into account the cost of losing the ability to merch with the ~20-25m you'd have tied up in the BCP, if you're the type of player who does that. Not in this thread though, as the price, (thanks for correcting) isn't a factor here. Cost and value of time were mentioned numerous times in the original post.

They'll start to offer services like backtraining (removing levels) and higher exp rates and free items for real money fees, then close it down eventually as people leave for cheaper games.

I think the best player is a combination of both. I was in the 600s to 99 summoning and I've been 138 combat ever since. I maxed out just after GWD was released. That's coming up on 3 years where I've been maxed in combat or close to it. Sure, bossing is fun sometimes, but with better gear and no new boss monsters it's quite boring to kill the same thing in 5-6 hour trips (if I can even stay online that long). Skills are therefore the only way I'm able to level up. I love playing Barbarian Assault (which is partially combat), which allows me to train agility and mining quickly. The same goes for Stealing Creation which gave me quite a few Sacred Clay hammers. Past that, I like being able to open up Youtube/online TV shows/movies and watch them while still playing RuneScape. That's something you just can't do at TDs (where 1534 kills have left me emptyhanded). Basically, skilling allows me to see some progress while bossing (the only form of combat left to me) gives none. Slayer does provide a mix, but with limited effect, and with effigies it's intertwined to skilling now. The advantage clearly lies with those who have the stats in the low 90s to take advantage of free effigy exp. My exp/hour rate (total exp divided by total hours in A-log) is 49k, and I expect that to rise to over 50k soon. That's even including a score of 640 on the Castle Wars highscores which equates to hundreds of extra hours. I have little respect for the players who've logged more than 10000 hours but still have substandard skills and a mildly rich bank. As sseli said, MMOs should be first about scores/accomplishments and then communities based around those. Combat does rule, it just doesn't take very long to reach the limits of what it can provide.

More realistically, even with good teams, you will in the long run average about 40K-50K xp/hr. Even 30 hours is a lot... it's at least 1-2 weeks work of nolifing. Lots of players log 30 hours a week I'm guessing, but it's really hard to put an exact number on dungeoneering. A lot of it depends on which community you choose to do dungeons with. 30-40 minutes might be a little bit generous. Say 45 minutes per floor for all 11 floors (25-35), which all average ~45k experience (random deaths take this number down, but the marginal exp from c1s makes up for it). Add on 1.25 hours for doing c1 dungeons and you come to 9.5 hours for 495k. I'm a fan of rounding experience rates down, not trying to brag about rates and push them upwards, so we'll call this 10 hours for 500k: 40 hours tops. It's still not in either of the ranges given which I assume were mild exaggerations to make a point. I haven't done the math for what the new prestige levels mean for experience rates, but they can't really go down from here. 40 hours is pretty big - definitely bigger than most short term goals I set myself. I'd grant you that. But with appropriate cautions taken, the risk of not having your grave blessed can be miniscule. At dangerous solo places, you've got to take a couple more things into account. Chaotic weapons are absolutely the best; not using one would be worse than having to make some adverse gear choices. Also, dungeoneering experience sticks; you're going to train the skill or quit eventually, and if you think you're in it for the long haul, you'll be getting enough tokens along the way to 99/100 for 7 chaotic weapons. Not enough to waste, sure, but definitely room for a few intermittent fails.

One issue I have with training Slayer first (about halfway through this page) is the rate at which combat training is improving. Late last year we got high-end potions, ancient curses, a new Slayer master, and the Soul Wars cape; so far this year we've had 3 new Slayer tasks, Familiarisation, level 80 weapons. Add some select patch notes as well as effigies and improved clues on top of this and training Slayer (read: combats) is incredibly easier and more lucrative than a year ago. Will the trend continue? It seems to me that the player to win the 200m all race will be the player who guesses which skills will be sped up at what times. So far that's been Zarfot hands down. I'd like to see SUOMI's dedication to the harder skills pay off, but already some of those skills have been improved.

Really seen a lot of varying numbers on the value of chaotic weaponry (2 million dungeoneering experience) here. One estimate is 50-100 hours of play (that's 20-40k exp/hour) and another is 20 hours (100k exp/hour). Let's be reasonable here. Unless you are one of the ~25 players who can play for the exact same timeframe for 16 hours every day and who also happen to be pro dungeoneers training with each other, a dungeon with a good (non-117) team averages potentially 30-40 minutes. That translates to about 6-8 hours for the (approximately; should be a little less) 500k experience for a complete runthrough of the floors with the best strategy (pre-new floors), meaning a Chaotic weapon takes about 30 hours of time give or take half a dozen. It really boils down to how much you value a chunk of time. I suspect that a lot of the risk comes from players not bothered to check the items lost on death screen (how many have you seen ragequitting after a big "I lost my bank" PvM death?). Then again, it always astounded me that so many players risk void equipment in PvP when it takes so long to regain a full set from Pest Control.

Grimy's DPS calc which uses the same formula as mine (slightly adjusted) Like you said, in those situations just replace proselyte legs with verac's. And for higher levels you should have access to good enough summoning/gear (EE/SGS) to offset that. This is not true. Safe PvP is an important part of the game, and it's not the best in that context. I speak out of both lots of experience (as a clan wars vet) and through my calculations/ I apologize for those things. I was still in the process of editing my post when those were posted. PvP is a different category altogether. I should have said PvM combat. There's a fascinating blend of offensive and defensive stat necessities in PvP as well as the mixing of combat styles that go along with them. I didn't want to get into that whole discussion. Gear choices are certainly an integral part of RS but still a controversial topic. I've always believed that the best method to train is to go out and train instead of standing around in a bank thinking about slightly more efficient gear. Saving minutes on the hour is really only important to endgame players (I will be one when I decide it's best to finish up Slayer) and you're absolutely correct that it's overemphasized as a necessity. However, for those endgame players, Bandos is an essential part of gear if you're going to more than just TDs/Corp.

Couple of things about the calculations for Slayer: I haven't seen your DPS calculator (link?) so I can't comment on any calculations involving those figures. I'm also not sold on dividing max hit by 2 to find average damage done per hit. I also have to say that 2 prayer potions is almost entirely negligible for a person training slayer in Bandos. Few tasks require much longer than an hour, and those that do are in single combat, allowing additional prayer potions to be brought in a BoB. Slayer itself will provide enough income per hour to offset that efficiency difference. I'm also not sold on the assumptions about how much damage is done by cannon/Steel titan. As for the rest, I do want to talk about this: Proselyte has considerably less defence than Bandos armor which is generally offset in one of two ways. First, the task will be done with an overhead prayer/curse on constantly. I agree that Bandos offers negligible benefits for a huge cost difference when you are using turmoil AND a deflect curse/protection prayer. But for tasks where defence matters, the only way to offset bad armour is to flick soulsplit more often (and the gear used is commonly Proselyte top with Verac's plateskirt, sacrificing +1 prayer for about +50 defence). If you're trying to disprove that Bandos is the best option for the average player, being able to flick a level 95 curse without losing extra prayer points should not be an assumption. Healing familiars...Bunyip is enough to cover you at some monsters even in proselyte. At others, absolutely not; unicorn could help at these monsters at a higher cost (healing aura scrolls do cost money). This would have to be done on a monster by monster basis. Is Bandos the best endgame gear for almost every combat situation? Yes. Is it necessary for Slayer? Absolutely not...you're better off using the money saved from using cheaper gear to flip more expensive (and/or profitable) items in the GE. For people who don't want to do that or who don't need that money, Bandos is always a worthy buy. Side note for TDs...with a Steel Titan and Chaotic Long, I still get stuck on the ranging part much more often than the melee part. Steel Titan scrolls are incredibly helpful and speed up TDs, but they *do* hit quite a lot of 0s and sometimes I go through 3 scrolls before my bolts finally switch the prayer. Adding a small strength bonus on top of that would not speed up TDs much at all if bringing more balanced defensive gear would allow you to squeeze in extra prayer potions or another overload. Already you have this tradeoff between bringing DSS/ESS/DFS and rune defender; I use both interchangeably and both save time in the end, the difference (if it exists) being too negligible to notice.

Only Jagex would tackle a minor problem like this and find a solution that encompasses everything but the underlying problem. <_<

i hesitate because the charms are pretty poor, sure if u pick up all 150 gold ull get a summ/slay ration of like .6 but 150 golds is more annoying than 30 crims, but yea i guess theyre comparable to vleds in more than just xp, about same charm drops too, maybe slightly higer...the less hp makes the summon xp better overall tho than vleds so i guess my logic is...i do vleds and these are better in some aspects so why not. oh except on lagotas log hellhounds are effigy per 800-900, vleds are like per 300 I think that Slayer experience rates and effigy rates have taken over as the most important things to consider when choosing which tasks to block. Summoning experience comes much more easily with Slayer experience nowadays and even if you leave those 150 gold charms on the ground the difference between Slayer/Summoning exp will be quite small. Most of the larger, more time-consuming tasks have summoning:slayer exp ratios of much greater than 1.0.

Some DKs team came through rock lobs the other day and repetedly killed them and ruined my lures. They were kind of [bleep]s. I got the last laugh though because they were 138s teaming DKs. Teaming is potentially faster kills/hr for each person than soloing depending on world population. To make the most out of DKs you need 95 prayer and 96 summoning and maxed combats (137 right there). I don't see how you got the last laugh unless at the fact that 138s feel the need to be jackasses at rock lobs.

http://www.dg-elites.co.nr/ Come up with something useful. I don't plan on getting my dunge that high for years. You can join chat (clan chat or IRC) and you can generally find teams for the 80s as well. You won't get to do a dungeon with someone high up on the highscores unless you're ranked, but you'll be able to find a team that does dungeons significantly faster than the average w117 team.

Are you kidding me? The experience cap for the Assist System should be tightened instead of raised...perhaps 25k, so you can no longer assist a 95 and 97 effigy in the same day. The Assist System was meant to be a replacement for friends trading over rune bars or onyx gems and having a piece of armour/jewelry made. Ancient Effigies were meant to be incentives for people to train noncombat skills to high levels while providing last ditch methods for lower levels to still use them. The Assist System is already quite powerful for this purpose.

I think after Lucipher6 (now Lan, if I'm not mistaken) got banned and quickly unbanned for "macroing," most people realized that Jagex doesn't mess up when it comes to highscores. The RuneScape team, at least (score altering is rampant on FunOrb), takes them seriously. No one is going to be able to cheat either ingame or through the website features, and if some odd glitch happens (120 dungeoneering randomly appearing at 64m exp?), it's a priority. @Yay0siris, totally agree.

Sliders are easy enough as it is. Being able to pay to bypass them would also make clues go by quicker, although if the price is set high enough this won't be a huge issue. If you are asking to be able to switch to numbers 1-24 for accessibility reasons (ie color blindness, or not being able to distinguish shades of one color), then I could support that I suppose.

Agreed, the other puzzles/obstacles were good but you just can't make something like this where the objective is simply to find something clickable. Sure, it makes it arbitrarily hard, but I'd rather they ask us to use some brainpower like in the beer barrel puzzle.

Scale is one of the things Jagex has given up as a result of making gameplay enjoyable. Even in classic, where fewer players had the luxury of teleporting, it only took a couple minutes to go from Varrock to Falador or vice versa. Exploring the members area took quite a while however. Now it seems that the distance factor is being confined to a couple places where it enhances the atmosphere (from Ardougne to the elf land gates down through the winding path and through the forest...yikes) while being compressed to make cities, especially the Varrock/GE/Barb/Edge complex, easier to navigate. That's ok by me really, it's just a video game.

Oh, as for skilling goes, I forgot to mention that hunting Grenwalls makes a lot of money per hour, exceeding 2m by some counts. However, it requires raw pawya meat which is generally pretty hard to buy on the GE. Morningrise333, I don't think that skilling should necessarily beat monsterhunting in max cash per hour with all the best methods. However, I think that skilling with a high enough level, using a method that does not give the fastest possible experience in its skill, should be competitive with the average monster hunter. I'm sure we can agree that efficient monsterhunting should always be the best way to earn cash, but for the many people that kill monsters ineffectively and slowly, skilling should be a viable alternative. For example, Frost Dragons are 1.5-2m/hr at low speeds and up to 3m/hr going full out. With requirements for the "full out" method being maxed combats/pray/herblore, and with 85 dungeoneering being a constant requirement, the equivalent should be a level 95+ skilling method that makes somewhere in between those two numbers. Actually, I am probably being a little unfair as the average RSOF Bandos team member probably makes less than 1m/hr. However, there is absolutely no comparison between the requirement for that (70-80 melee stats and a whip) vs the skilling methods that can surpass it (91 hunter/runecrafting). I really liked the idea you posted involving using Dungeoneering ores to make armour and I'll be sure to check it out in the Suggestions forum :smile:

Yeah, combat also requires 80+ hours of training to get to that level. And you only need 88 hunter, not 91. If you are considering potions/boosts, 86 herblore becomes as good as 89. And is counting hours for combat really necessary? Over 100k people have 99 attack and even more have strength. Yes, I read that. By "make or break" I meant getting that 500-800k (which doesn't cut it anymore) or a couple million or more. Farming herbs, picking trees, making (unf) pots, Puro-Puro if you have a decent amount of luck, making summoning scrolls (doesn't directly involve combat). So I'm reading: 1. Farming, which is high hourly profit if you only consider time spent farming but bad daily profit. 2. Luck from a minigame. 3. Buying stuff from the GE and creating junk/items that will crash when people realize the price difference. How about a SUSTAINABLE skilling method? I'm sure Puro Puro is good average cash, but it involves luck. Monsters like Frost Dragons involve no luck whatsoever. And when you add luck to monsterhunting, the hourly profits get crazy. I thhink someone has missed out RuneCrafting. At around 91+ RCing you earn approximately 20K each Nature Altar run which, at a good speed, is about 1 minute (judging from best time, being around 41s or so). 20K x 60 = 1.2M So whereas 2M is near enough impossible p/h w/ Skilling, with RCing you can get pretty close. Sure, 91 RC is high but it's worth it. Bit more like 15k per run, but even so, 1.2m is 60% of 2m. Since when is 60% "pretty close?" Actually, more profit is made crafting deaths through the abyss with chances at double runes (which make it nearly impossible to calculate exact hourly profits, but more than nats) in the 90s. I'd guess 1.3-1.4m perhaps. Still, this stuff is just breaking the 1m mark or creeping up towards 1.5m and is not equaling the 2m number thrown out there or even getting close to the 2.5m average at frost dragons or the 5m some people claim to get at TDs. It's clear that 91 is no longer high enough to be a level requirement exclusive enough to grant massive profits if Jagex wants to realign the game towards a skilling/monsterhunting balance as far as cash in concerned. I think they'll opt to do all the skilling changes through D&Ds and minigames though instead of frequent new content. The latest skill-related updates in reverse chronological order were: -Ancient Effigies -Fish Flingers -Bonus XP Weekend (if you would count that) -Shattered Hearts -New Implings -Familiarization -Chance at 2x death, law, blood -Agility benefits to Hunter -High level herblore potions -Ivy -Living Rock Caverns Of those 11 updates, 5 were D&Ds or event weekends, 1 was combat-oriented, 2 boosted skill-related moneymaking, and 3 increased the exp rates or ease of training. Take what you want from those numbers but I've stated my conclusion above.

Hence why I said items that will crash when people realize the price difference. Unfinished potions are forever limited in profit because they are kept in check by the fact that anyone can buy them and at some point it becomes equally worth it to make unf pots yourself instead of buying them. Same with summoning scrolls. Drops from monsters are held in the same balance but they have requirements to obtain; also, since the items sought for profit are generally the best available for their respective slot, prices are guaranteed to remain higher than less useful items. The reason why monsterhunting is such high gp/hour is that most people kill monsters inefficiently and someone with the best gear and stats can rip through monsters faster, while the vast majority of the supply comes from players clogging up worlds with slower kills/hr rates. With the exception of dungeoneering, those levels are commonplace now. Being high leveled with good gear/stats no longer distinguishes players from each other. Also, Kingly Implings have a pretty high hunter requirement (91) that requires 80+ hours of Hunter to achieve (finding kingly/dragon implings is going to make or break your hourly profit). Look it up on the highscores - there are similar amounts of people with 95 prayer as there are people with 91 hunter (herblore is a little behind because at that rank the level is 86). Hard to believe, sure, but prayer are herblore are standard skills now. 80+ hours gives you about 82-83 dungeoneering, depending on your method for the early levels, close enough to sprint to 85. The only requirement that doesn't match up is summoning and the combat skills, but since everyone trains combat and many methods do not rely on Winter Storage, this is not a huge issue. There are a myriad of profitable monsters to kill where the high hourly profits come from 100% or common drops; if you really want a full list, I'll respond with one. Combat is already the standard. We clearly need methods that require more than level 91 in a skill if profits are going to go anywhere with skilling. When you start talking about monsters that involve luck, they go like this: DKs (96 summoning gives most of the hourly profit; drops that are 1/30-1/50 boost this rate on a steady basis). TDs (with the best methods, averages one set of claws per 7 hours; most players kill them much more slowly, so one set of claws every 10-15 hours for 88 summoners) GWD (the average hilt takes more than a dozen hours of killing, with secondary drops more common) Corp (you miss most of the sigils you see, which are rare in the first place) When you talk about hours per kingly impling or hours per dragon claws, you start talking about profits that are not set. However, skilling is supposed to provide the steady cashflow, and we still have no cashmaking methods that require over level 91 in a skill (whereas high skills like 96/99 summoning, 89/96 herblore, 95 prayer play a huge role in combat's hourly profits). To solve the combat/skilling issue, Jagex is going to have to create higher level content for skilling. Things like the Living Rock Caverns are great for helping people max out but they do nothing for the people looking for ways to make money off this work.

Reading a book while training agility? Best I can do is watch a video and even then I sometimes miss things <_<

I don't remember getting any GP from the tutorial in classic :D Making me feel nostalgic just thinking about it...

Farming herbs, picking trees, making (unf) pots, Puro-Puro if you have a decent amount of luck, making summoning scrolls (doesn't directly involve combat). So I'm reading: 1. Farming, which is high hourly profit if you only consider time spent farming but bad daily profit. 2. Luck from a minigame. 3. Buying stuff from the GE and creating junk/items that will crash when people realize the price difference. How about a SUSTAINABLE skilling method? I'm sure Puro Puro is good average cash, but it involves luck. Monsters like Frost Dragons involve no luck whatsoever. And when you add luck to monsterhunting, the hourly profits get crazy.

First article: good, and to keep up with the combat updates, noncombat updates are going to have to raise the best experience rates quite dramatically. Follow up with an article expanding on that. Second: recycled material on having "fun" in RuneScape that appears every other week. Seriously, go through the archives.