kdb148

I find steel dragons are good, only because they drop 3 charms at a time, and blues somewhat frequently. Giant Rock Crabs aren't bad either, because they drop 10 charms at a time, but they are a real pain to kill. And even though they don't drop blues very often, 2 blue drops an hour is 20 blue charms. Not bad if you can kill them quickly, like with ancients.

Smelting is the only way to profit from smithing as an f2p. Smithing the bars you make loses money, even if you gather the materials yourself, since what you smith will always be worth less than you can make from selling the bars.

For XP, your best bet is to powermine iron in the hobgoblin mine. There are plenty of iron rocks grouped close together. If mining and dropping isn't your thing, you could try either iron and coal in the mine by the abyss, or coal in the skeleton mine. You could also try getting these in the hobgoblin mine, but it's not really worth the trip & danger of going up there unless you are after fast sources of mith and/or addy.

No, making cballs is way slower than making single items from iron bars. About twice the time.

Cannonballs are far too slow to be worth doing. Never make them.

Enchant enough air orbs to cover the cost of alching the yew longbows.

Fairy rings are definitely faster than using the general store. Not a whole lot slower than the abyss. the abyss is a better option, but if you are dead set against using the abyss, and can't use graahks, then fairy rings will do fine.

Outside of the blast furnace, you're still going to lose a lot of money with bolts.

Cannonballs are the biggest waste of time in the game. The money is low and the XP rate is dreadful. You can try making mith bolts at the blast furnace - you break even or even make a bit of money, but it's still pretty slow. Making mith plates down there and alching would be significantly faster, though you'd lose more money. But unless you are willing to piss money away buying bars to make plates, or using gold ore, the blast furnace is your best bet. Superheating is also a nice alternative - the smithing XP isn't all that great, but the mage XP is good.

Killing metal dragons with fire blast is pretty good training. It's a bit slower than alching, but you also get HP experience.

Ironically, banshees are probably the most profitable slayer monster to kill. So if money is your bag, no need to train it past level 15. Although the ability to use slayer dart makes getting to level 55 very useful as well.

Why not just browse through tip.it's item database? They list GE price and alch value for just about every item in the game.

Oh, and the fact that you've died to metal dragons is not an argument against slayer. It's an argument for paying attention when you are doing a fairly dangerous task. Nothing in Runescape is dangerous if you pay attention when you have to and know what you're doing.

No, I read the entire OP. The 30 pages in between no, I did not read those beyond the first few pages, but thanks for telling me what I have and have not read, since clearly you'd know this better than I #-o First of all, I don't think my character is capable of getting 100k melee XP per hour attacking bloodvelds. Second, that's a bogus argument. It might hold water if you operate under the assumption that melee XP is worth as much to me as ranged XP, but for many, many players, this is not the case. You can't make blanket statements like that with any kind of authority. These things are far too subjective. Also, nowhere in the OP that I read mentions anything about 160k/hour FREE ranged XP. Where are you getting that? If this is true than no, you haven't been updating the OP like you claim. Um, the thread title is "Slayer Sucks."

Am I the only one wondering why, if the skill sucks so much, the OP has gotten 7 levels in it since posting this thread? :? I find your XP calculations to be lacking. Not that that necessarily means your point is wrong, but you seem to be basing your conclusions on faulty logic. For example, you say "Never range slayer." Even though some slayer tasks are excellent ranged XP per hour. If I get a task of bloodvelds, I'm going to range it. But just because I went and ranged the bloodvelds doesn't mean that I'm going to range the next task. Part of maximizing efficiency of combat and slayer XP while completing tasks is to know how to most effectively and quickly kill the monsters you've been assigned. To properly calculate the XP, you have to take into account that someone who only ranges certain tasks is training at an XP rate that is almost certainly higher than 35k per hour. I also think you ignore how much more efficient things like ring of slaying and lunar magic is to speeding up the time between tasks. Combined with the ability to blaklist, I really think it has gotten more efficient than you give it credit for. And even though it still isn't the most efficient or profitable method on its own, it's reasonably efficient, somewhat profitable, and an excellent method for training combat - as long as efficiency isn't your only goal in playing. And I think you would agre, considering you've been working on the skill since you first posted this rant ;)

I'm curious as to why people seem to prefer teleing to Lunar isle instead of simply glorying to Edgeville or Draynor to bank.

It makes banking a lot faster for crafting airs, because you can teleport right near the east bank in Fally and then get about as close to the air altar as you would be from the west bank in Fally, perhaps even a little closer. Should cut your time per run almost in half. Not to mention the fact that crafting earth runes loses money until level 52, while you only need level 33 runecrafting to profit from airs.

Are earth runes faster if you are using an explorer ring and Fally teleports to craft airs?

I've killed a lot of dust devils, and their charm drop rate seems to be right around 40%. 2/3 to 3/4 of these will be crimson charms. They have a lot of alchable drops, so you definitely want to bring some alching runes, unless you deicde to ice burst them, in which case you'll likely end up leaving those goodies on the ground. Never meleed them, so not sure about melee XP. They don't seem like the best option for training, the range XP is sort of slow.

I enjoy cannoning them under the lighthouse with guthan's. Hello, herb seeds!

Yeah, they're random. Agility level makes a difference, I think, which might explain why the traps keep getting you.

Good luck! You'll get it eventually :thumbup:

You are looking at superheating as your only real option for smithing XP that is reasonably fast but doesn't lose tons of money. You can't buy bars and smith them and hope to do anything but lose ridiculous sums of money, because your options are so limited. If you don't want to stand at the GE all day buying ores and nats and superheating, then smelt mithril. Mithril smelting is the best XP per furnace trip, because you can smelt 5 mith bars and 1 steel bar per trip. Straight smelting, you can do about 300 mith bars and 60 steel bars an hour this way, buying all the ores to smelt will make you around 70k gp and 10k smithing XP per hour. Superheating I haven't done large-scale, but I hear you can superheat around 1k bars, which if you are using mithril will lose you 20-30k per hour and gain you 30k smithing and 53k mage XP. From an XP standpoint, because the cost is so low, superheating wins hands down. But smelting at the furnace in al-Kharid requires much less clicking, and doesn't require much attention. While superheating is constant clicking. Alternate methods involve mining a part of what you smelt. The money you save through mining can then allow you to save a portion of what you smelt in order to smith it yourself to add to the XP you obtain. Finally, you can simply buy mithril ore and go mine coal and superheat. A good place to do this in Edgeville dungeon, because the coal rocks there are much less crowded than the ones in the mining guild. And there is even a mithril rock there for you to grab some ores from on each trip, and 2 addy rocks for when you make it to 70. It's good mining XP, and you can smith all of the bars you make and still come out way ahead.

You shouldn't need to pray much, if at all - the monsters are fairly spread out, and you won't get hit that much if you are running the entire time. I would replace the prayer pots with more food, though you could maybe keep one or two of them in case you are getting hit a lot. I'm not sure how many energy pots is the right amount, since I made it through on my first try, but you might want to replace a couple of the super energies with food as well. Or get rid of them all and use the Ooglog pool and replace them all with sharks.

Without the hammers, you spend about 5.8 gp per XP by buying addy bars, smithing plates, and alching. Halving that with sc hammers makes it about 2.9 gp spent per XP. You can get around 160k XP per hour this way, but you will lose over 900k gp in that hour without hammers. With hammers, you would seemingly be able to get over 320k per hour, at the same cost. I would not recommend doing it this way. You can get the same 160k XP in about 3.5 hours using the blast furnace to smelt your own addy bars, but you will make around 400k. An extra 2.5 hours to save yourself 1.3 mil or thereabouts is definitely worth it. Hammers change the equation significantly, and depending on your other moneymaking methods, it could be worth the cash to just buy bars and make plates with them, although if you factor in the time spent playing stealing creation to get the hammers, it might not save as much time as you think. Unless you really enjoy the game. I haven't tried them though, so I don't know for sure how the time and everything works out.