Sinkhan

Is the prayer renewal even worth using? I personally get to pray on 4 brothers with 80 using protections + piety and get through it just fine.

Finished RoTM. What a good quest :thumbsup:

I think one of the popular an effective methods to use is to fill up an entire inventory with urns, suicide in the caves, hope that someone blesses it (should be easy on one of the unofficial worlds) and then essentially have 1 hour to work with 28 urns.

The markets got along relatively fine before free trade returned. People just bought out stocks from rune shops as they were pretty reasonably priced. There are also several sources of ranging ammo from monster drops and things like monkey knife fighters. Fletching was what brought the unqiue ammos into the game so if it never existed, Jagex could have rebalanced ranging or made alternative ways for making ammo. Sure crafting makes rings and the like are undeniably useful, but there are technically still ways for them to enter the game through monster drops, bird's nests, etc. Amulets are very rarely needed in massive bulk anyway, the exceptions perhaps being glories for TPs and welfare pk gear, and strength ammies also being welfare pk gear. What mage armours are you even referring to? Ahrims, Akrisae, Mystic, Dagon'hai, and Virtus were pretty much the main staples of mage gear before gano. There are also alternatives for fish, like pizzas, cakes, and certain pies. Fish does supply a large quantity of cost effective healing, but the reality is that there exist other choices and if fish didn't exist, it would be likely that players would make those other foods to meet the market demand. I agree that the game would be different without these skills, but they just provide so little utility. Had these skills never existed, the game could have been rebalanced and content would have been released differently (maybe more teleport spells in magic book, being able to get more items through monster drops, using spells for healing, etc) These skills aren't like herblore, prayer, or summoning. Prayer was almost always incredibly useful and summoning (after a few tweaks and familiar batches), became an incredibly impacting skill. The revamping of herblore made it incredibly potent in bossing, PVP/M, and training. I think a good indication of how useful a skill is if you were to imagine it never existed, was suddenly introduced into the game right now, and then judged how much of an impact it would really make on the game. Given that measure, I think it's safe to say something like FM is just about worthless.

When they update useless fletching and FMing and almost useless thieving, smithing, mining, fishing, woodcutting, crafting, and runecrafting, then I will ask for a new skill.

Mage is probably the best way to go. I'm lazy and also inexperienced so have a look at one of these posts made recently. A lot of the information contained in the rest of the threads is also very useful.

I'm jelly.

I think I might finally pick up a Karil top once prices inevitably crash.

I must have missed the part in any of the news articles that said the stats or special effects of Barrows armour were going to be updated...oh wait. You certainly did. They didn't even put it in any of the articles. Certainly hard to find it when it doesn't exist. Dw, happens to the best of us.

Aaaaand they still have useless set effects on Torag and Karil :rolleyes:

But +1 cabbage xp.

There should be a new spell: Cabbages to Cabbages. Turns all cabbages in inventory into cabbages and spawns a cabbage on the ground. Costs 1 cabbage.

I'm interested in the complete armour rebalance they mentioned at Runefest.

Is the 1.8x DPS at same casting speed or enhanced casting speed? That would affect price comparison as well.

^ +1 Are you in any particular rush to get 80 farming? Polypore staff can be bought fully charged or you can find someone to assist you with it.

Imagine if gano had 90+ slayer level reqs lol.

Why are torstols so unreliable nowadays? <_<

The prospect of smoked salmon and other various meats sounds delicious. The current FM tie in with cooking fairly weak and it's only in dungeoneering. I could also see some cosmetic (maybe even actual enhancers) for weapons/armour to make them look cooler or provide nice effects (immunity to stat lowering in freezing locations). Two other skills I feel are very outdated are fletching and smithing. Their very concept and design are incredibly outdated in the current game and now primarily serve very small niches in dungeoneering. Smithing has the unfortunate situation of mainly creating armour that is far surpassed by newer additions that cannot be smithed. Sure you can get a bit of a discount on repairing barrows, Nex gear, etc, but that feels even less useful than HC explosion reduction. Fletching falls into a similar fate. Most bows and xbows are outdated and some of the best ranged weapons (chaotic crossbow, Zaryte(?), and HC) all have basically no connection with fletching. Combine that with market flooding (meaning the few ranged weapons made through fletching people use are in huge supply) due to low cost and high xp rate training and you essentially the most useless skill in the game.

But I have to ask, do we really need another way of training firemaking? We already have a 300k/h method which immediately puts it amongst the faster skills in the game and this 300k method is also free, which cannot be said of a lot of the other skills with high rates of training. The only thing a faster training method would really bring is a faster level 99 and more time with that sort of empty joy of knowing that your HC now has the lowest chance of blowing up. I just want them to update skills so they reward players with something other than more methods of training, quest reqs, and small uses in dungeoneering. Two really good updates to skills were Herblore Habitat and looking a little further back, Extremes/Ovls. These updates gave players access to very useful and exclusive content that could only be accessed with those levels. One helped out with skilling in a decent way and utilized hunting (with a smidgen of farming and cons); the other made a very large impact on combat and utilized herblore. One update I thought was bit of a flop was crafting urns. Just about anyone could make them as a lot of even the better ones didn't have very high requirements and they were also tradeable. You didn't really feel good about training up crafting that much since you could just buy the urns (although now with bot nuke it's somewhat more useful that you can make them yourself).

To go into deeper detail with PPS, you can buy a polypore stick which cannot cast the polypore spell. To charge it, you need polypore spores and fire runes, 5 runes for every spore. A staff can be charged with up to 3000 casts at a time. With any charges, the stick becomes the staff and you can cast the spell. To cast the spell, all you need is to equip the staff and start attacking. The staff has an accurate and long range mode. The benefits of PPS over fire surge is that you don't need to worry about boosting to use the spell, it requires no inventory spaces (although that's generally not an issue at barrows), it is ridiculously cheap (1 cast costs less than a death rune atm), and it has a slightly shorter animation

+1 for polypore. SoA is probably about the same if not worse at your level. I don't have Akrisae, but my current run looks like this: Spec out Ahrim Free cast on Dharok with pro melee (no freeze) Kill the other brothers, leaving Torag and Karil, using freeze + PPS Spec out Karil Depending on the brother I meet in tunnels, I may sip a dose of ppot. After the run, teleport with ardy cape 3 to restore prayer, Drakan Medallion back to Barrows. Don't worry about medallion charges since it holds ten and recharging is trivially easy. Gear is mix of magic bonus and defense (ie Ahrims top + verac skirt) This makes for very simple and easy runs and cost very little.

Barrows: Rapier on Akrisae, Ahrim, Karil, Polypore Staff or SOA on the rest. SoA is faster/higher DPS and still very affordable; Polypore is probably the most cost effective high damage spell in the game and has a fairly short animation. PPS also allows you to use ancients for freezing.

I agree with the notion that FM is essentially useless to train. You train primarily to train it faster. Along with fletching, it is one of the most useless skills for the actual utility it brings. I can't really see why people are excited that there's a high req for FMing. I have for a long time held the strong belief that Jagex should really update skills so that they have something for the player other than quest requirements, training methods, and small uses in Dungeoneering. Adding a high requirement for a skill in a quest seems like a very contrived way of making a skill seem more useful. High level FM is only used for getting the adze, which is really just for training WC/FMing faster (It's not even a utility item since toolbelt came out), and preventing HC explosions, which isn't even a good guarantee at 99 FMing. As for the Barrows updates, I really hope they update set effects. Karil and Torag are basically useless, Ahrim and Guthan are largely outdated, Akrisae and Verac are very situational, leaving Dharok as the set effect people really ever use.

Going for a shameless plug for the Temple Trekking question

Nomad's doesn't take that long if you ace it. Plus soulwars cape is not the best prayer cape in-game. The best one that most people can easily[sic] obtain, yes, but the best in-game it is not; compeletionist cape offers +13 Oh well of course completionist is the best, it's pointless mentioning it because anyone that is close to getting one already knows that it's the best for practically everything, and you actually need to do nomads to get the comp cape anyway :3 And you're saying it takes less than an hour? I think my best time was 40 minutes or something, but that was my third run through. (I usually take most time on the first water puzzle. God that's annoying.) And i doubt anyone would do considerably faster than an hour on their first go, especially if they're constantly checking a guide. I know of someone who beat it as level 112 with maxed ranged and ovl. Did it in ~hour. There was a whole thread about lowest levels beating Nomad and how many tries it took.