Troacctid

I strongly advise you to do as many quests as possible! Get the xp rewards from them while you're low-level, because the sooner you get them, the more value you get out of them. 10k agility xp from Myths of the White Lands is a lot more valuable if you're earning 30k xp/hr at lv55 than if you're getting 70k xp/hr at lv93, right?

Mind explaining how giving items less time to rise in price in response to increased demand is somehow going to make them easier to buy? Because from where I'm standing, that seems pretty far-fetched. If the bonus xp weekend was done without warning, nobody would have any time to buy supplies. People would be forced to spend their highest multipliers at the GE trying to buy them, or at chaos druids or something desperately trying to DIY them. That would be a stupid way to do it.

That makes sense if people are specifically asking for "afkable" moneymakers, but this is rarely the case when people suggest it.

Armoured zombies are a very good option, so you could try those. Living rocks aren't bad either...I think they're a little slower than AZs but still fast and with better profit? And of course slayer is a very efficient choice--that would be the one I'd personally recommend.

Fishing Floccinaucinihilipilification, Part 2: Woodcutting Floccinaucinihilipilification Or: Floccinaucinihilipilification without Alliteration Yesterday I ranted a little about how fishing is overrated for money. (See previous entry here.) Here is where I take all of that and extend it to woodcutting. Really, I could just copy and paste the whole thing and replace all the fishing references with woodcutting references, and it would still be totally accurate. As far as I'm concerned, fishing and woodcutting are two iterations of the same skill. They're pretty much exactly the same, except one of them is faster xp and the other is wet. When I got 99 woodcutting, it was basically my way of getting 99 fishing a second time. (Or a third time, depending on how you look at it, since I have enough xp for three 99's between the two skills.) Hey, what can I say, I just like training fishing. Look, obviously I like the skills as much as the next guy, but I was never under any illusions--they're not good skills for money. And this is even more true for woodcutting than for fishing. At least with fishing, you need to think a little bit to come up with a superior moneymaker. If you're a newbie, you might not be able to name a way of making 250k gp/hr off the top of your head. But woodcutting...I don't even need to try. You can't throw a stone in Runescape without hitting something that's more profitable than yew logs, the go-to "money tree." Picking flax. Spinning flax. Mining essence. Collecting snape grass. Collecting blue dragon scales. Mining iron. Mining clay. Doing slayer tasks. Telegrabbing Zammy wines. Killing dragons of any kind. Killing giants of any kind. Killing chickens. All better than yews. Anyone can do this crap, so why are yews supposedly such a great way to make money? Okay, you can go to teaks or magics or eucalyptus and make more money, but not much. Magic logs are the fastest money in the skill and they top out around 150k gp/hr, which barely beats flax-picking at the best of times. Don't even get me started on maple trees. GAH WHY DO PEOPLE EVEN CONSIDER CHOPPING THESE THEY'RE TOTALLY WORTHLESS IN EVERY WAY AND IT'S COMPLETELY OBVIOUS EVEN IF YOU ONLY TEST FOR LIKE FIVE MINUTES. (Now, see, THAT'S floccinaucinihilipilification.) My theory for both these skills is that people look at them and their minds go: no money in + positive money out = $$$. And then I guess they just don't bother to go the next step and say, "Wait, wouldn't I make more profit doing X?" I dunno, that's the best explanation I can come up with. I know that some people legitimately like the activity, which is great, but there are thousands of other people who do it because they think it'll make them rich. And that's just inaccurate. Well, that's my public service message: woodcutting and fishing are not good moneymakers. They're slow and terrible moneymakers. If you train them, you should not be doing it for the money.

Definitely abyssal demons. Lower mage defense and better drops.

I've been working on a guide to questing for levels. Here's the section on magic: Begin with Witch's Potion and Imp Catcher. The 1200 experience from the two of them should put you at 10 magic. Now do A Fairy Tale Part 1. You'll get 1000 experience, enough for level 14 magic. 14 magic is enough for Watchtower, which gives a whopping 15,250 experience! This should take you to 32 magic! Rune Mechanics is worth another 2.3k experience for level 33.This is a pretty good head start. The quests start to make less of a difference from here on out, so if you want to stop here and train traditionally, go ahead. otherwise... Now that you can telegrab, you can complete Spirits of the Elid and The Giant Dwarf. Together these quests will give you 2500 experience, enough for 35 magic. Continue on to do the Lumbridge Guide portion of Recipe for Disaster for another 2500 experience. You should be at 36 magic. Now that you can use all of the Bolt spells, you should be able to take out the Dagannoth Mother in Horror from the Deep. Do so to get another 4.6k experience, enough for level 36. You can now do Enakhra's Lament. With zero actual training, the 7000 experience reward should leave you about 1k xp short of 40 magic. Conveniently, Tale of the Muspah gives 1k xp. So there you go, that should get you to 40. Some of the quests might be too high for you right now, but it should be a useful skeleton anyway, I hope. The best way to level summoning is to train combat, specifically melee combat. A great place to start off combat is killing the lv2 Men in Edgeville...they're pretty weak and you can pick up the herbs and bones they drop to sell on the Grand Exchange for a nice profit. They don't drop charms, but most of the decent charm droppers are too strong for you at the beginning, and you'll need the money for spirit shards anyway. There are summoning pures who train summoning and defense as their only combat skills, but it's much slower than just leveling up traditionally to get a strong foothold in combat and I don't recommend that style of training.

When in doubt, do quests! You are obviously in doubt, so...do quests! Start by turning on the filter option in your quest list so that it only shows the quests you can currently do. Then do all of those. Inevitably, completing those quests will unlock more quests, so do those too. Once you run out of quests in the filtered list, you can turn off the filter and start training up your skills to do more quests! Quests are, hands-down, the best way to develop your character. (Second-best: leveling up combat skills.) They're also (imo) the most fun part of the game anyway. Oh, and also the best way to level your magic, since you asked. Watchtower Quest in particular gives amazing xp as a reward. Edit: Pikkupstix (the summoning guy) is in Taverley. You can find it with the search function on your world map. (The globe icon in the upper-right if you haven't found it yet--use it, it's really useful if you get lost.) You can get more charms by killing monsters.

floc·ci·nau·ci·ni·hil·i·pil·i·fi·ca·tion    /ˌflɒksəˌnɔsəˌnaɪhɪləˌpɪləfɪˈkeɪʃən/ [flok-suh-naw-suh-nahy-hil-uh-pil-uh-fi-key-shuhn] noun. The act of estimating something to be worthless. There are things about the fishing skill that I like a lot. It's no accident that I have more than 20m xp in the skill and spend most of my time in Runescape hanging out in a fishing-based clan chat. It's very low-key and relaxed, probably more so than any other skill in the game (except maybe woodcutting, which...well, I'll get to that). In its own little way, it's enjoyable to train. Besides that, as a staple profession in adventuring games (even in some games where it probably doesn't belong...*coughSonicAdventurecoughZeldacoughcough*) and it adds to the flavor of the universe for players to be able to make use of the natural food resources in the water--although we'll skim past some of the stranger aspects of that flavor for the purposes of this floccinaucinihilipilification. Unfortunately, many players' perception of fishing is...shall we say...out of line. Fishing has this reputation as a moneymaking skill. People think, "Oh, I need some money. I'll go fish some lobsters." Or maybe somebody will ask, "What's a good way for me to make money?" and someone will answer, "Try training your skills. Skills like hunter, runecrafting, woodcutting, fishing, and so on are good for increasing your cashpile." Or maybe someone is considering training a skill to 99 and a friend recommends, "Fishing is a pretty good one to go for. You earn like 50m from it." I hang around in plenty of help forums and I talk to my share of fishermen in-game, and it astonishes me how much I hear this sort of thing. Guys, it's not. Fishing is not a moneymaking skill. It just isn't. It never makes good profit. Not even at 99. It maxes around, what, 200-300k gp/hr? After hundreds of hours of training to get to 99? That's not a good moneymaker. If that's your best way of making money, you are poor. Seriously. People need to stop talking about fishing like it's somehow a money skill. It just isn't. I mean, how often do you hear people saying, "I need some money right now, so I'm training my cooking"? But cooking is a better moneymaker than fishing. Adding toppings to pizza is faster cash than fishing rocktails, even at 99 fishing, and all you need is a flat 60-something cooking. Did you know I made more money getting 99 cooking than I made from 99 fishing and woodcutting combined? It's true. Hell, compared to some methods that are actually fast, cooking still isn't a good moneymaker, but it's better than fishing. Yet which skill has a reputation as a steady profit machine and which has a reputation as break-even at best? "Oh, but what about free players? They don't have all the fancy P2P moneymakers to compete with fishing, so fishing is still fine if you're not a member!" Sure, it's a defensible option since there are comparatively few sources of profit in F2P, but it's still mediocre at best and most players can do better. I mean, in the best case scenario, you're still only looking at marginally faster profits than mining rune essence. And that's in the best case, with a high fishing level. And of course, that's to say nothing of the profits you could get at the Runecrafting Guild or mining runite or, hell, even making pizzas again. You can still do that in F2P. If you don't have a high fishing level? Well, at that point you might just as well pick the bananas and sell those instead. Totally serious here--compare the prices. Can you catch lobsters faster than you can pick bananas? It all boils down to not a money skill. You can train it all you want (low-input, relaxing, blah blah blah) if that's what floats your boat... ...but treating it as if it's a decent source of income is a good way to stay poor. Now, woodcutting. Woodcutting is even worse. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and make this a two-parter. Come back tomorrow and we'll get to woodcutting. (Okay, it's tomorrow now. Click here for part 2.)

Doesn't permanently affect the economy more or less than other new skill updates. And that is clearly accurate. Are you in sarcasm mode here? Because yes. It does. It absolutely does.

I guess if you have two of them, you'd get twice as much as if you had one. Otherwise, no.

Use your d'hide. Pray 10% strength and just try tanking; hopefully, you shouldn't need protection prayers, but if you do then pro melee, or switch to ranged and safespot 'em. Attacking with melee is faster against them, but ranged is reasonable as well if you prefer (there are safe spots). You should be using either the fairy ring from Fairy Tale 3 or rum from Trouble Brewing to get to the cave. And this should go without saying, but remember the light source and icon, haha.

Most definitely will not be doubled.

Just rocks. Possibly a graphical bug is involved.

Whatever you search? It adds everything I mark with my mouse. >.> You can disable that.

Well, Ahrim's is better than Infinity. But yeah, modern magic really is weaker than ancients. Especially in Castle Wars where movement is super-important to the gameplay.

Runecrafting, definitely. You may want to use GOP tabs instead of the abyss. Strong choice for money, though. Mining is quite good as well. Oh, and farming, of course. Not quite as fast without the ability to do some of the quests involved, but still very good.

Slayer is indeed quite efficient. Use Sumona as your slayer master. Switch to Duradel later, and go straight to Kuradal once you have the combat and slayer level to do so.

That sounds great. I don't mind about the slow XP but since I'm losing lots of money buying Runes for Spells this could be a lifesaver. How and where do I do this? At the chaos temple north of Goblin Village. You should be able to telegrab 170 wines per hour. Of course, this is a ridiculously slow way to train, about 7.3k xp/hr.

It's very easy to miss, as the game message filter blocks the message notifying you when you crush an ore.

Why do people always say this? No it doesn't. Just because something gives 100% profit doesn't mean it's a good moneymaker. I never said it was a good moneymaker, I said it NETS you a decent amount. Most people who are going for 99 fishing come out with over 30m. It's not quick by any means, but I'd say that's a nice bonus to a 99. At the time, I didn't realize he was 98, so he won't get that much money, but you WILL get a decent profit. Again, notice the NET, not "good moneymaker" anywhere. Well, nice, good, close enough...it still perpetuates the myth that fishing is a moneymaking skill, which is one of my pet peeves. :shame: I'll go away now.

That's not a nice thing to say about the OP just because they think this historical landmark for the game is worth a discussion thread. You think so? I thought those particle effects and the new cape design are pretty damn sweet. =D>

Yes. [hide]Nah, I'm only messing with you. Of course imbalance and power creep are not flatly "okay." It's just that the problems they cause are largely independent of how they're obtained--quests don't really factor into it. So while your concerns are somewhat valid, your overall analysis is flawed.[/hide]

Setting aside the various other problems with that statement for a moment...how is that hypocrisy?

Why do people always say this? No it doesn't. Just because something gives 100% profit doesn't mean it's a good moneymaker.