Quyneax

Combat xp is very fast, 200k/h and up I think, so just Balmung dagannoths (enjoy Whirlwind and maybe Quake, but responsibly) if you want charms. I'm guessing ranged & magic xp are not very interesting, so Balmung is the way to go.

I like my platebody because you can get one-shot wearing only a hood if you've taken just ~200 damage from monsters (4500 lp with hood iirc). I hate summoning/prayer doors :(. So that's one thing armour is good for :P.

I think magic might have a slight base dps advantage due to fire blast being level 59 (vs. level 55 for gravite weapons) but I guess the abilities make melee a good alternative as well, not sure about ranged (frag shot rocks though). No other suggestions, sorry.

You can make superantifire at level 80 (with a +5 stew, 3 brown spice) and every level past that makes it easier. You don't need superantis, but it's nice because you can use dw/2h weapons on the Queen, which is 50% higher base dps than shield + 1h weapon. If you're getting 70 def, don't forget to get attack as well.

Spiders are good as far as I know. Not sure if that's the deadly red ones or stronghold of security.

I'd get the gold mining suit if you don't have it already & intend to keep mining (not necessarily going for 99, but that you're not quitting mining at 80 or whatever). Of course with warbands, the suit isn't useful, but it's good at congold.

Well yeah, good point. Guess I should've said "stays useless".

You're falling into the trap of assuming that the majority of players are in the same demographic as you. Hardly. I took that into account already, for myself, I considered myself mid-levelled at 80+. I think that if you ask everyone what level is the point people start being 'decent' they'll give you higher levels than I put there. Not having a 99 is considered 'noob' in a lot of places (one thing I don't agree with, but okay), which shows the kind of xp required to be 'decent', as in not a noob. In addition, the following: There are 316547 accounts with 80+ constitution on the hiscores, 420930 with 70+, out of 606102 (level 15+). There are 187437 accounts with 70+ agility on the hiscores, 264818 with 60+, out of 541255 accounts ranked (level 15+). There are 227813 accounts with 1750+ total level (70 average), 315500 with 1500+ (60 average) out of 659964 (1083+ xp, level 34). There is some distortion because people tend to prefer round numbers and quest requirements (for agility), but I think this is sufficient to call those levels I mentioned 'mid-level', considering the number of bots, pures and throwaway accounts amongst lower totals and agility levels especially. Given that we were discussing level requirements for starfire weapons, I'd say even a level 60 agility requirement (like crystal) would make it low-level content :P. Useless equipment that is borderline low/mid-levelled is low-levelled, useful borderline is mid-level (idk, dragon halberd or something). Naturally the whole thing is about p2p skill ranks, f2p ranks are a whole different matter.

Thanks for a well thought-out post :). I never realized it could be a pain to start playing. I think a large part of it is that lower levels mean nothing. 1-30 attack is the same amount of time as 60-61 and levels only get longer. Level balance in RS is generally pretty bad, so there's virtually no incentive not to level up. Even 'throwaway' pures got granite maul or dds (pre-eoc), which is way beyond the start of the game. By the way, I hardly think you qualify as noob muggi :P. (inb4 someone reports title)

Just watched the video - not having your own PC sucks. I really hope the making-levels-matter-more deal works out, and that the armour changes are good, but I'm afraid of two things: 1) Ports armour becomes useless. 2) Damage still won't be affected by levels - in the video, the mod only mentions hit chance.

Nobody considers level 60 mid level... if you look at what most people can easily get, and how much time things take, mid level starts at about 70-75 (for combats) and maybe 60-65 for agility and stuff. High level is 90+ stats at least. Very high level is 2400+ total minimum, if not 2450+. Don't forget there are thousands of players with 2490+ total (iirc I'm rank 6300ish with 2493). When people say 'mid level' or 'low level' they are not talking mathematics. They are talking 'value' in terms of time and effort, rareness and respectability. Anyway, starfire is still basically cosmetic and useless, but buyable mining is pretty cool. Anyone fancy doing the math on the efficiency of buying spins vs. buying starfire ores?

My computer is broken so not much scape for a while :(. Am about 6m to 118, just waiting for challenges now.

Red Alert 2. Old but good strategy game. Was always a bit more partial to Boris myself because Tanya vs. tanks is just meh (iirc).

EoC is fine for zerker pures, there's just the usual problems with (solo) GWD and anything requiring WGS - RotM - TWW as they require King's Ransom (65 defence). Turmoil zerkers with void & drygore & cstaff/vwand & rxb/dw ccb are very good at what they do. Low attack doesn't really work anymore though.

Impact isn't very good, even with the increased damage from Wrack. Concentrated blast and Combust are very good. You have more adrenaline than you know what to do with normally, magic ults are very underwhelming, so just use Wild Magic and Asphyxiate both and if using dual wield magic you can use Revenge on the glacyte stage to also heal a bit with Resonance, not sure if it works on unstable exploding.

Fire blast is t59 damage, I think f2p only has up to tier 50 equipment otherwise, so that would explain the advantage for magic.

Your melee is nearly useless because you lack good weapons at 60 attack, but with your ranged and magic you can kill a lot of things for money. You will need good armour, void is nice (requires 22 prayer). Monsters to go after are probably dragons. Bosses are mostly drygored these days, requiring 90 attack, but you may be able to go as a team @ arma in void + rxb, and you can perhaps do QBD depending on your herblore level.

How can you stand being level 3 in something when you have other skills are 80+ :S. I'd have boiled in my skin from irritation by now. (not effiency criticism btw, got to add that or flame etc.)

Nice thing about calcs is that you (e.g. you, Meredith, not you, generic user) don't have to be online :P. Anyway about research, regardless of preferences, I can almost guarantee you will not get a lot of researchers if you have nothing working to show yet. Even if it's something 100+ hours off (which by the way is still pretty good, considering max is about 2000 hours/80 days or in that area). Proof of concept is very encouraging. Really the time to max isn't so interesting (people change their plans all the time and get messed up by rl, you'd have to recalculate every other day), and the point where you can tell people in 5 mins is when they're about 90+ anyway. The interesting part is what you should do when you're low-mid level. Overloads or turmoil first? Rush for drygores or train all styles evenly? Go for torstol farming, but do I do calquats, and what about fruit trees? And most importantly: which (mini)quests do I do, what things can I ignore, when should I do WGS and what do I use 400k xp on? What do I do with Ports, dailies/weeklies/monthlies, how do I use Tears as efficiently as possible, what challenges do I do, what tasks (slayer and others), do I bother with ee? All these things are pretty tough to answer with a calculation. Usually we can ballpark it with intuition and experience, but that's hard to program. The smallest details, like going for EE instead of just using t70-75-80 2h (ee is a few % extra melee dps at 70-89 melees?) are probably too small to implement anyway, but that's the kind of thing you need to calculate to get to the accuracy level you want to go for. Remember significance: 3.1 * 1.578904 (measurements) is still only 4.9. If your algorithm can't get close to perfect, it won't matter how accurate your skilling xp/h models are.

Wait what, you were intending to make a max calc that doesn't tell you what methods were used to calculate the time to max? What good is that :P? Anyway, there is basically no incentive to do research on hit/miss when you can plug in experimental xp rates and approximate for lower levels from 10 minute samples. I don't need to know whether PP would theoretically average 156.728 xp/h at level 81, I need to know that I can get 150k at 81 and about 1k extra per level up to 90 (or whatever the figures are). Getting the time to max to within 5-10% of the real value is good enough (I think that most people are between 1-10% slower than ideal rates anyway, so a tick-perfect calc would be off as well), after that you can begin to refine stuff with hit/miss data. You say it's a waste of your time to code this without data, but it's a waste of everybody's time (a lot more, too) if the research gets done and no calc results. It's like building the supercollider before inventing the smartphone. It's really great to see someone work on this, but remember that Tip.it crew has tried before and didn't get the optimization done. It's not as easy as it looks, with daily challenges and D&Ds and effigies and quests and whatnot. Making a calculator which uses perfect methods but doesn't take into account any of these is 100% theoretical and won't see much use. Anyway for skills like Dungeoneering it may be best to provide a slider bar going from 'solo only, 12 min meds' to '5:5 only, 10 min larges' so people can pick what suits them, because there's just too many options to really pick one. There are also quite a few people who pick slower methods on purpose, so multiple options in general would be useful, but for dg (maybe slay too) it can save you a lot of trouble :P. (lot of criticism from someone who hasn't done any work on any maxing calc, but you see why I won't touch it maybe :P)

Not true about points 3 and 5, and point 6 is subjective. I think a comp calculator is just as useful as a max calculator, so if you're making one, you might as well make the other. There is no reason to limit a project like this because you want people to do skilling research :P. It matters whether a skill is maxed because you do not want to mine+superheat if you are 99 mining or smithing, but it's best if you are not 99 in both. There are a lot of multi-skill methods that stop being efficient if you max one or more of them. Another thing is that getting the gold mining suit stops being efficient after a certain time (not sure, maybe around level 85?) but it is worth getting for mining if you are sub 80 mining. I don't know if it's worth getting the suit if you are superheating. And no, creating a calc for 25 skills won't do, exactly because of the order. You can't say 'okay, now get 99 all skills using the following methods: ..." and be done with it, you need to provide an order. A very simple example: for 99 firemaking, do you a) grind out all of 99 with pyrelord or b) use adze until 99 woodcut, then grind with pyrelord or c) use Book of Char, Char's Cave, Circus? If b, do you have 92 firemaking yet? How much woodcutting xp do you have left? If you're 98 woodcutting, you'll need to do more pyrelord and less adze than if you were 80 woodcutting. Same thing with C2 woodcutting + fishing (best to not max one before the other), but c2 woodcut will also reduce the fm xp you get from adze, if any. And farming needs to be added in between as well, but depending on how much time you have left to max, it may be more efficient to do cheaper trees because you have time to spare anyway. If you're going for comp, major xp gainers like 120 dg and Livid need to be taken into account, and the efficiency of for example Remote Farming and elite tasks and their rewards. Plenty of good methods are also quest-locked (adze for one, but also PP and barraging), a bunch of slayer tasks are (dark beasts and ice strykes mainly), some areas or methods are skill-limited or miniquest-limited (barbarian course, certain parts of dungeons, Morytania, MTK/pengs/tears/troll invasion), shortcuts can speed up skills, and prayer can speed up or slow down depending on the availability of an altar in your poh. The hours till max is not relevant, anyone could say '10k hours' and you'd be able to max in exactly 10k hours using some combination of methods. You need to determine an efficient way to max, and ideally the most efficient way to max. To be useful for many players, you would need to determine the best way to max starting at any combination of levels.

Yes. Cooking too, if you count burn rate, and agility too, counting failure rate, and crafting if you were doing gem cutting at really really low levels. I'm pretty sure Ape Atoll is good from like 60-75 even though you fail before 75.

Hmm I guess. Should try using Fury that way hmm... edit: need to wait a tick to interrupt Fury or it'll hit only once. So it's 184% over 4 ticks rather than 125% over 3, 138% equivalent. Not bad, bit annoying that you can't spam abilities after it. Tui recommended that bar but with Slaughter instead of Fury. Not many basics, but if you stall adrenaline properly you should be at halfish adren often.

Most people would be slightly amused by anyone looting their ore/fish/whatever drops, the money is absolutely horrible and there is no xp reward. You'd be better off gathering items that are rare enough that people don't drop them, maybe flax or pure essence or something. Not that those don't suck, but better than leaping trout :P.

You also need to determine the optimal order to max. For example, getting 92 firemaking before starting on woodcutting, or getting chaotics before maxing combat. Another thing to take into account is obtaining xp-boosting sets and doing quests. For example, Smoking Kills before starting slayer, but also the 400k xp from WGS. A third thing to take into account is people who are starting to use the max calculator, but who already have stats, which make certain orders or certain methods inefficient. For example people with 99 firemaking and 80 woodcutting, or people with maxed combat and 90 slayer, or people with almost all 99 just missing farming and construction or similar. This means the optimal order must be calculated live for each user. Ideally, you would also take into account completionist cape requirements and side-goals such as hybrid, but that is a long way off. Above reasons are basically why there is no maxing calculator yet. Simply combining 25 skill calculators doesn't come close to determining efficient ways to max at lower levels. On the other hand, calculating time to max starting at 80 base with quest cape is barely interesting, as most skills have narrowed down a lot by then. By comparison, hit and miss data are relatively unimportant. If you can get the optimalization code working, you can plug in a number of approximate xp rates even without knowing the average ticks to level or xp per tick or whatever. Hit and miss data only really help to calculate lower-levelled xp rates, but that is less important than a working calculator.