Skilling in Runescape

Originally published as an email for my clan.

Before I get started, one more tip about making money (the topic of the previous newsletter): Postpone buying things just because they “look cool”. Your first priority should be investing – whether you invest in the market (i.e., merching - if you choose to do that); in weapons and armour to improve your combat; or in training skills. Other things, which simply look good, should be postponed until you have quite a lot of money.

 

Now, to the main topic. I am assuming that the reader wants to get as high a level as possible in all skills. This is what gives you a high level in the RuneScape rankings; also, high levels in different skills unlock many different game features (better weapons, better armour, certain quests, high-level potions, great ways to earn money, etc.). Of course, I am aware that some players have different objectives – some players specifically want to AVOID training certain skills. In such cases, you may want to avoid certain activities, such as Tears of Guthix which always gives you experience in your LOWEST skill, or specific Circus activities if you don’t want the corresponding experience. While there is nothing wrong with setting your personal goals, that’s not my style. In any case, many of the recommendations below are based on the assumption that you want to train as many skills as possible, to a high level.

 

I have not included lots of detail about each of the activities; the guides at runescape.wikia.com (and other, similar, guides) provide enough of that. Here, the purpose is to give a general overview.

 

Glossary:

* Profit: This simply refers to income minus expenses. If you have a profit of a million coins, that means that you earned a million coins MORE than what you spent. For example, if you get items that you can sell for 1.5 million in some activity, but you also spend 0.5 million, your profit would be 1.5 million – 0.5 million = 1.0 million. You might also call it your net income.

* UTC: The central world time. This is also the time used by the RuneScape servers. Several activities reset at midnight UTC. You can look up your country or time zone in Wikipedia, to see how many hours you need to add or subtract to get from UTC to your own time zone. As an example, since Bolivia has the time zone UTC – 4 hours; therefore the RuneScape reset time, which is midnight UTC, corresponds to 8:00 p.m. in Bolivian time (4 hours before midnight).

* Bonus experience: Some activities, such as killing Agoroth, or fallen stars, provide “bonus experience”. This experience is counted separately from the regular experience; you convert it to “regular” experience, 1:1, during regular training. For instance, if through training you earn 10K regular experience, another 10K of your bonus experience in that skill - should you have any - is also converted into regular experience – so in this example, you would get a total of 20K experience, and your bonus experience would be reduced by 10K.

 

Membership: First and foremost, it is important to keep an active membership. If you are not able, or not willing, to spend real-life money, you can buy bonds. This should be more than compensated by the extra money you can earn as a member.

 

As an example, just by making vis wax, you will get a profit of about 400-500K a day, on average, spending just a few minutes – that, by itself, should be almost enough to maintain a membership using bonds (assuming you sell it). Vis wax requires a membership, and Runecrafting level 50 to access the Runecrafting Guild. If you also buy some items (such as runes) from shops and re-sell them at the Grand Exchange – which should also take but a few minutes - you will easily have enough money for a membership, and some money left over. For additional ideas on earning money, refer to my previous newsletter, or check runescape.wikia.com for “Money making guide”.

 

Having a membership is a requirement to access certain skills at all – skills such as Slayer, Summoning, Hunter, Farming, and others. For the remaining, “free-to-play” skills, you usually have much better options as a member than in free-to-play mode.

 

For the remainder of this article, I’ll assume that you have a membership.

 

Keep a schedule: Either use a specialized scheduling application, such as Windows Live Mail, Outlook, Google Calendar, etc.; or simply keep a document in MS-Word, Notepad, Notepad++, etc., so you don’t forget important daily, weekly, or monthly activities.

 

Premier Club: If you can afford it at all, get the premier club offer when there is such an offer (currently it is offered during all of December 2014 and January 2015). One of the benefits is an extra spin in Treasure Hunter every day – and many of those spins either give you direct experience (lamps), bonus experience (fallen stars), or various items that help you when skilling. The total cost (in bonds, assuming you buy the bonds with in-game money) is more or less the same than if you use a bond every fortnight. Unfortunately, you have to pay it in advance. Also unfortunately, at the time of this writing bonds have risen in price (about 9 million each, instead of the usual 6-7 million). This is probably due, in part, to the announcement that the price of membership will soon rise.

 

Prioritize: You may have trouble keeping up, even if you only do the “extra activities” mentioned below rather than regular training (as well as daily activities to earn money). If this is so, you may need to prioritize – that is, choose the activities that give you the best rewards, compared to the time spent. In any case, most of the “extra” activities mentioned below give better experience than regular training.

 

Get filthy rich: Okay, you might be thinking that this is easier said than done. However, for various skills, training can be made much faster if you have lots of money to spend. And there are ways in which even a low-level player can earn somewhere around half a million to a million coins an hour. In many cases, I consider it more effective to use such methods to earn the money, and then use the money to train a skill the fast way, than to find ways to train the skill “for free”, but at a much slower rate. With “more effective” I mean that you may end up spending less time total (the time required for earning the money + skilling), for the same amount of experience points. Of course, if you are in no hurry, you might also wait until you get “extras” (prismatic lamps from Treasure Hunter, penguin points, etc.), and apply them to expensive skills.

 

In any case, the previous newsletter was dedicated to several ways to earn money. Refer to that.

 

Extra activities: There are lots of extra activities that usually give you better experience than regular training. Many of these have a limitation on how often you can do them, or when. Therefore I suggest you give higher priority to these activities than to regular training. These activities include:

* Clan Citadel: Once a week. There is a limit to how much resources you can gather for the clan (and therefore, how much experience you get yourself). Reset depends on the clan. In our clan, it currently resets on Thursday, around 3:30 UTC – but it seems to get a few minutes later every week. Here you can get experience in several skills. Note that in any case, working in the citadel helps the clan, and that doing this is a requirement to continue in the clan (check with the clan leaders if you need an exception). You can train a variety of skills. It is requested that you do the Summoning first (limited to 10% of the weekly total). After that, you may want to check what resources are needed by the clan. After skilling a certain amount, you can go to the Quartermaster to get an extra experience reward; I suggest you use it for Cooking or Firemaking – at high levels, you get about 90K experience of either. For other skills, you get much less extra experience.

* Daily challenge: Once a day. Resets at midnight UTC. The challenge is to carry out a specific task that trains some skill. After the job is completed, you can go to the challenge master in Burthope or Prifddinas, and get extra experience in the same skill. The extra experience varies, depending on the task and sometimes on the level – for Dungeoneering at level 119 or 120, you get over 179K extra experience; for some tasks you get much less. If you spend something for the skill, in most cases you will get a surprise bag that has approximately the value of what you spend. However, there are some exceptions, especially in Firemaking and Prayer. Other than that, you may want to double the daily challenge by paying 50 vis wax. You can also pay 25 vis wax to change your daily challenge for another one. – Also, once you get to the highest level in a skill (120 for Dungeoneering, 99 for other skills), you can turn it off (with the same NPCs that give you the rewards), so that you won’t get any more daily challenges in that specific skill. Also note that you can accumulate up to five daily challenges, before the oldest one goes off the list; that means that if you don’t want to do daily challenges in certain skills, you can postpone up to four of them indefinitely (this is cheaper than repeatedly paying vis wax to change the challenge).

* The Circus: Once a week. Resets on Wednesday, midnight UTC. In a few minutes, at high levels you get over 100K experience total, spread among several skills – assuming you have access to all the activities. At low levels you’ll get less. Some of the activities have quest requirements; but even without the quests, there are several activities you can do in the Circus.

* Jack of Trades aura: Once a day. Or twice a day, if you reset it by paying 40 vis wax. Resets on Wednesday, midnight UTC. Must be purchased with loyalty points. It costs 15,000 (first level) + 30,000 (second level) + 60,000 (third level) loyalty points. Earn any amount of experience in 10, 15, or 20 different skills, and get a skill reward in the skill of your choice. At high levels, the reward is more than 20K every time you use it (i.e., over 40K a day if you reset it with vis wax).

* Tears of Guthix: Once a week. Gives you extra experience in your lowest skill. Typically around 50-80K experience at high levels. You get more time to gather tears (and therefore a better reward) if you have lots of quest points. Once you do this activity, you have to wait 7 days minus 1 hour to do it again.

* Troll invasion: Once a month. Resets on the 1st of the month, at midnight UTC. Experience reward in the skill of your choice. Typically around 80K experience at high levels.

* God statues: Once a month. Resets on the 1st of the month, at midnight UTC. 5 statues; at high levels, each of them gives you Construction experience equivalent to a large xp lamp; and experience in either Prayer or Slayer (depending on your choice) equivalent to a medium xp lamp. At high levels, that’s a total of over 50K for each of the statues; more than 250K for all five of them.

* Fight Agoroth: Twice a week. Resets Wednesday, ca. 1:00 a.m. UTC. Get up to ca. 2 x 20K bonus experience in one or two skills of your choice.

* Player-owned ports. Several new missions every day. Here you can earn both experience, and items that you can convert into money. Requires a high level in one of a list of skills, or better, in several of those.

* Meg. Once a week. Resets Wednesday, ca. 1:00 a.m. UTC. You can find her in player-owned ports. You do NOT require any of the high-level skills required for the regular Ports activities.

* Penguin points: Resets on Wednesday, midnight UTC. In my opinion, the rewards are not enough to make it worth to go looking for the penguins. But if you happen to find one while doing other things, the extra experience is welcome.

* Effigies: This is not a “regular activity”. Rather, you get them as random monster drops, especially from high-level monsters. If you happen to get one, try to do all the skills you can yourself – temporarily raising your skill level if necessary – since the experience you get is quite significant: 15,000, 20,000, 25,000, and 30,000 xp. If you can’t do one of the levels yourself, have somebody assist you. You won’t get the experience (the player who assists you does); but it isn’t worthwhile to wait until you have them, since this will lower the drop rate of effigies from monsters. After that you get a dragonkin lamp, which you can use on any skill you want. The reward depends A LOT on the level of the skill to which you apply it – it is proportional to the cube of the level. For example, at twice the level you get 8 times the reward. Therefore, better don’t use the dragonkin lamp on a low-level skill.

 

* Activities for specific skills, listed below.

 

Decide where to spend “extras”: Many of the “extras” mentioned above give you rewards which you can apply to any skill you want. I suggest you consider applying it according to one of the following criteria, depending on your priorities.

* A skill that gives a higher reward. In many cases (for example, dragonkin lamps, mentioned above under “effigies”), the reward is greater if you apply it to a high-level skill. For other extras, such as lamps, the reward depends on the level, but not as much (and you don’t want to keep your low skills low forever!). The reward from the citadel work is much greater if you apply it to Firemaking or Cooking.

* An expensive skill, such as Herblore, Construction, Prayer, Summoning.

* A slow skill, such as Agility, Divination, Summoning.

* Whichever skill is currently lowest.

* A skill that you want to train for any other reason. For instance, you may want a specific level to be able to use a certain weapon or armour part; to access a certain quest; to be able to use a certain prayer; etc.

 

Clan avatar: Pay the clan avatar (or better, the clan Quartermaster) 300 anagogic orts a week. If a clan avatar has been taken out, on the same world you are in, you get a 3% bonus to skilling. If you are near the clan avatar, the bonus is 6%. Our official clan world is world 39; if an avatar is out, it should usually be in this world.

 

Combine skills when training: In some cases, it can be convenient to train more than one skill at a time.

* Fishing and Cooking combine very well. You fish a full inventory, for example near Gunnarsgrun, west of Varrock, then light a fire and cook the fish. Since these fish are not very valuable, you will probably want to drop the cooked fish. Combining the two skills saves you the time of taking the fish to the bank (after fishing) and then out again (for cooking). Of course, you might prefer to train the two skills separately; in that case, you can sell one type of fish which you get from Fishing, and buy a different type for Cooking. If you combine these two skills, you neither earn nor lose money.

* Woodcutting and Firemaking: Similar to the above, these combine very well, and save you the trouble of taking the logs to the bank and back out again. Don’t use this method with yew and higher, since they are fairly slow to cut. If you combine these two skills, you neither earn nor lose money.

* You can combine Mining, Smithing, and some magic, and earn some money, as follows. Wield a staff of fire. Make sure you are using the standard spellbook. Take nature runes, optionally teleports, and lots of mithril ore to a coal mine, leaving 4 free inventory spaces. Mine coal, and use the Superheat Item spell to make a mithril bar. Note: using the Superheat Item spell requires magic level 43, and whatever Smithing level you need for the bar – in the case of mithril, Smithing level 50. Repeat, until you use up all your mithril ores. Then go to a bank, deposit the bars, and get more ores. Similarly, you can do this with adamantite ore, or with runite ore, once you get the required Smithing level – or make steel bar using iron ores, at Smithing level 30-49. I suggest using teleports, to quickly get to the bank, and back to the mine. You can teleport to a bank quickly, and for free, with the Dungeoneering ring; with the TokKul-Zo ring, or at a small cost with the ring of duelling (use the “Castle Wars” option). You can teleport quickly to the Mining Guild with the Skills necklace. None of these options use an inventory space.

* Training different combat skills can be combined very conveniently with Slayer, or with Dungeoneering, since both involve a lot of combat.

 

SPECIFIC SKILLS

 

You may want to consult an online guide (for example, runescape.wikia.com) for tips about the best options to train a specific skill, according to your level. However, note that many of the extra activities mentioned above give better experience per hour than regular skilling.

 

For the “expensive skills”, you can spend a lot of money on the skills (using the profit you get from other skills, or other activities). You may also want to dedicate extra experience bonuses (the reward from Jack of Trades, lamps, etc.) to such skills. You may also want to dedicate “double xp weekends”, as well as the festive aura, to such skills, since you will then get more experience for the same money ... except that the price for many items required for training tends to go up right before double xp weekends, for obvious reasons. Well, just in case you don’t think it’s obvious, the key phrase is “supply and demand”. Doing daily challenges in a skill helps, too – at least in most cases. Some time ago I estimated that some of the more expensive skills cost about 300 million each, to reach level 99. This was just a rough estimate, prices have changed in the meantime, and there are usually different options for any skill. In any case, I am pretty sure you can surely get this cheaper now, with all the extra experience points. (For example, if you apply lots of bonus experience to a specific skill, you only need to spend half the regular amount while it lasts.)

 

The skills are presented in the order in which they appear in the skills window.

 

I included comments on the “usefulness” of each skill; though personally, I try to train every skill, useful or otherwise, just to increase my level on the high-scores. Also, certain levels are required for each and every skill to access certain quests.

 

Combat: I strongly recommend to combine this with Slayer tasks. That way, you train one more skill. Also, Slayer tasks usually give good drops, especially at high levels, and most Slayer tasks give a decent amount of charms, required to train Summoning.

You should choose a combat style (melee, magic, or ranged) according to the monster’s weakness. Some monsters (for example, airut, or kal’gerian demons) don’t have a specific weakness; in that case, I suggest you train the combat style in which you have the lowest levels, or one on which you want to concentrate for some other reason.

Of course, you might also want to go against specific monsters simply because they are profitable. But note that some of the best monsters require a high Slayer level.

Whether for slayer or otherwise, to prepare for combat you should get the best weapons and armour you can afford. Higher-level weapons cause significantly more damage than lower-level weapons – while high-level armour mainly protects you by reducing the damage you receive.

Don’t be afraid of using degradable weapons. The extra cost of repairing them is usually more than offset by the fact that you can kill the monsters much faster (since the best weapons are high-level, degradable, weapons), and thus get more money from drops. In other words, by using weapons that are degradable, but have a high level, you should get more profit per hour, not less. Degradable and high-level armour, on the other hand, may save you some time since you have to go back to the bank less often (to restock food).

That being said, some high-level weapons are VERY expensive, and it may take a while until you can afford them... Or you may simply consider they are not worth the cost. For example, at the time of this writing, a noxious staff (level 90) costs about 300 million coins, so you may just prefer (or have to) settle for a chaotic staff (level 80 – requires Dungeoneering tokens). Also note that the price of such weapons and armour tends to go down over time, as more alternatives become available.

Using high-level food may also save you some time, since you’ll have to get back to the bank less often.

It also helps to use other enhancements for combat, either to kill faster, or to require less trips to the bank. For example, using different prayers can help you either cause more damage or (especially with the “soul split prayer) recover health and therefore save food; using a Vampyrism aura can recover health and therefore save food. Combat scrimshaws are too expensive, in my opinion (not worth the cost if it is the money you are after). If you get the ancient bones required to make the scrimshaws yourself, I think you are better off making tradable scrimshaws and selling them for about 900K each (at the time of this writing). Better spend the 900K for other improvements.

While doing Slayer tasks or other combat, you can save quite a lot of time by using signs of the porter, which take some types of drops directly to the bank (as soon as you pick them up); a pack yak (requires Summoning level 96), which you can use to send items to the bank (though I prefer a combat familiar); and magic notepaper, which you can use to note items. Note that using magic notepaper is only worthwhile once you get drops that are worth significantly more than the notepaper itself!

 

Attack: See “Combat”.

Usefulness: Combat in general is very profitable. A higher Attack level increases the chance of a melee attack being successful. Also, each melee weapon has a certain Attack level requirement.

 

Constitution: See “Combat”.

Usefulness: Combat in general is very profitable. A high Constitution level increases your maximum health.

 

Mining: Fallen stars give a good deal of extra experience in mining. This is one of the skills you can train at the Citadel. See also notes above on “Combining skills”. To train quickly, you may want to consider “drop-mining” (dropping the ores you mine).

Usefulness: Depending on how you train, you can earn some money selling the ores you mine.

 

Strength: See “Combat”.

Usefulness: Combat in general is very profitable. A high Strength level increases the amount of damage you cause in melee combat.

 

Agility: With regular training, this skill is one of the slowest skills – and quite boring. Once you can access Prifddinas, do the daily activity in the Hefin sector, to get 20,000 experience in Agility (and to use up an additional 20,000 bonus experience, should you have any), in a few minutes.

Usefulness: Get to places quicker, using shortcuts. Also, run energy depletes slower at high Agility levels.

 

Smithing: This is one of the skills you can train at the Citadel (for free). See notes above, about “combining skills”. Other than that, I would recommend to spend some money to train this quickly, making mithril, adamant, or rune platebodies, depending on your level and budget.

Usefulness: A high Smithing level makes it cheaper to repair most degradable weapons and armour. Other than that, it is not very useful, since the smithed items are usually cheaper than the raw materials.

 

Defence: See “Combat”. You can set the combat preferences so that you get part of your combat experience in defence, or even all of it, for any of the three combat styles. I believe “shared” is the default for new accounts; if you are getting too much defence (compared to the other combat skills), you can change the combat so that you get only magic experience when you attack with magic, for example.

Usefulness: Combat in general is very profitable. A high Defence level reduces the chance of getting hit during combat.

 

Herblore: To train this at a reasonable speed is quite expensive. I recommend spending money to train this skill quickly, making potions according to your level.

Usefulness: Very useful (but also, very expensive). At high levels, you can make untradeable potions, many of which provide powerful help in combat – for example, super antifire, or overload.

 

Fishing: See notes above, about “combining skills”. A great way to train fishing is the Fish Flingers activity, which you can do twice a day (or more, if you find extra tickets). It’s a bit tricky at first, but once you learn to do it, you should be able to get about 20K experience in 5 minutes. Doing this, you should be able to achieve a level of 99 in 2-3 months.

Usefulness: You can earn some money while training this skill (if you decide not to drop the fish).

 

Ranged: See “Combat”.

Usefulness: Combat in general is very profitable. Ranged weapons have specific minimum requirements for the Ranged skill.

 

Thieving: The Pyramid Plunder activity is great for most levels (level 21 or higher). To speed this up, use a pharaoh’s sceptre to get there quickly. Or you can thieve from master farmers, to get some profit. At high Thieving levels, pickpocketing from elves in Prifddinas is both profitable, and fast experience.

Usefulness: Training this skill can be profitable, depending how you train.

 

Cooking: See notes above, about “combining skills”. This is one of the skills you can train at the Citadel. Training Cooking is one of the fastest and cheapest skills. With a few million coins – probably less than 10M – you can get to level 99.

Usefulness: Not very useful. Cooked food is usually cheaper than the corresponding raw food.

 

Prayer: This is an expensive skill. I suggest you spend money on it, by buying babydragon bones, dragon bones, or frost dragon bones. DON’T burry those – rather, go to a gilded altar, at your own player-owned house or that of a friend, light both burners, and offers the bones on the altar. This will give you 3.5 times the experience you get from just burying the bones.

Usefulness: Combat in general is very profitable, and Prayer helps in combat. Specific prayers require a minimum Prayer level; many of these are very useful for combat. At the very least, try to get level 43, so that you can use the protect from magic, protect from ranged, and protect from melee prayers, which will reduce the damage received from the corresponding attacks. Also, a high prayer level increases your maximum “reserve” of prayer (it takes longer to run out), and the effectiveness of prayer potions and similar (your prayer points increase more, at higher levels).

 

Crafting: This is a skill that you can train at the Citadel. Otherwise, this is a fairly expensive skill, if you want to train it reasonably fast. I suggest to spend money to train it quickly – for example, by cutting gems.

Usefulness: Not very useful. Usually, crafted products are worth less than the raw materials. However, there are some specific items which can give you a good profit when crafting them – those are the items that don’t give you much experience.

 

Firemaking: This skill can be trained in the citadel. Other than that, training Firemaking is both fast and cheap. It should cost just a few million coins to achieve level 99.

Usefulness: Not very useful.

 

Magic: See “Combat”. Sure, I know there are other ways to train magic. For example, many players like to do high alchemy. However, if you do lots of Slayer tasks – which, as I mentioned several times, are quite profitable - you will get lots of magic experience (as well as ranging, and melee combat skills).

Usefulness: Combat in general is very profitable. A high magic level gives you access to powerful combat spells, as well as to many useful non-combat spells, such as Remote Farming to check the status of your farming plots (Lunar Spells; also requires work for Pauline Polaris); NPC Contact (Lunar Spells); High Alchemy (to convert an item to coins – this can be used to save inventory space while doing Slayer tasks); etc.

 

Fletching: To train this quickly is fairly expensive. It is one of the skills for which I suggest you spend a lot of money to do it quickly.

Usefulness: Not very useful. Similar to Smithing and Cooking, the items you produce are generally worth less than the raw materials.

 

Woodcutting: See notes above, about “combining skills”. It is one of the skills you can train at the Citadel.

Usefulness: You can get some profit when training this skill, if you decide to bank the logs you cut.

 

Runecrafting: To train this quickly, this is best trained at the Runespan. Here, you basically get no profit. However, you can also make a handsome profit (but gain experience more slowly) by making runes the old-fashioned way. For example, at the time of this writing, the “Money making guide” at runescape.wikia.com (which of course is incomplete) lists making nature runes as the most profitable non-combat money-making method – assuming you have 91 Runecrafting (to make two runes at once), and 57 Summoning (to summon the familiar that provides good teleports). At the time of this writing, that’s supposed to provide you with a profit of 2.6 million per hour. Please note that, as the guide itself notes, prices change all the time; this will affect your profits. Also, some of the estimates in the guides might be a bit optimistic. You’ll have to try it out for yourself.

Usefulness: At high levels, this skill gives you some of the most profitable options to earn money – it seems that the most profitable ways to earn money, apart from combat, are making certain types of runes. You can also earn money at lower levels; but I would suggest you use the RuneSpan to train quickly, and only make runes for profit once you have a fairly high level (for example, at 91 Runecrafting you can make 2 nature runes at once).

 

Slayer: At high levels, this skill can be very profitable. Also, while training Slayer, you train combat skills, and you get charms, required for Summoning. Much of what you need to know for the Slayer task is mentioned above, under the section “Combat”. Other than that, you should:

* Always use the highest Slayer master accessible at your current Slayer and Combat level. Mainly, higher-level Slayer masters tend to assign better monsters – monsters that give more valuable drops.

* Do the quest “Smoking Kills” as soon as you have the required levels. This follows from the previous point (since it gives you access to the Slayer master Summona); but having done this quest will also give you more Slayer reward points, and let you make a Slayer helm, and rings of slaying.

* Unlock the ability to make rings of slaying as soon as you have enough Slayer reward points. The teleports are very useful.

* Also unlock the Slayer helm as soon as possible – and improve it, since such a Slayer helm will provide extra damage against monsters while on a Slayer task.

* Do the quest “Lunar Diplomacy”, to get access to the Lunar spellbook. The “NPC Contact” spell saves you some time every time you need to get a new slayer assignment.

* If you want to use Slayer to make profit – which I recommend – you may want to use slayer reward points to (1) select profitable tasks as “favourite tasks”, and (2) block unprofitable tasks.

Usefulness: It should be clear from the above that I consider Slayer to be VERY useful. In summary, while training Slayer, you train several skills at once, and at high levels you get a significant profit.

 

Farming: On the one hand, you can get a decent profit with diverse herbs at different levels; with cactus spines (Farming 55); and with morchella mushrooms (Farming 74). On the other hand, none of these gives you fast experience; to get that, you should plant trees, starting at Farming level 15 (6 farming plots), fruit trees, starting at level 30 (7 farming plots), calquat trees (1 farming plot), elder trees (1 farming plot), and spirit trees (3 farming plots). The spirit tree seeds are untradeable; you can get one as a drop from certain monsters, or from bird’s nests (you get lots of those from the Miscellania activity).

Usefulness: You can get some profit while training this.

 

Construction: One of the expensive skills. Basically you’ll have to spend lots of money on it; for example, building mahogany tables at higher levels. Don’t forget to do the God Statues every month!

Usefulness: Not very useful. Having the level to build a gilded altar can make it easier to train Prayer – that is, it’s easier to use your own gilded altar than to go to a friend’s house.

 

Hunter: Doing the “Big Chinchompa” activity twice a day, you should be able to achieve level 99 in 3 months or so.

Usefulness: With Big Chinchompa you don’t get much profit, but with normal Hunter training, which is slower, you can earn some money while training this skill.

 

Summoning: This is one of the skills you can (and should) train at the Citadel, for free. Otherwise, the tricky part here is to find enough charms, since making pouches with charms is just about the only reasonable way to train Summoning. If you train Slayer to level 99, you might not get enough charms for Summoning 99, but you should get close. You can get additional charms by killing Bork once a day – 20 blue charms and 23 crimson charms if you fulfill all the requirements (wear a ring of wealth; all Varrock tasks up to and including Elite; having done the quest The Mighty Fall). The OTHER tricky part is that this is a fairly expensive skill. You’ll just have to earn a lot of money to finance it.

Usefulness: Very useful. Specific Summoning levels give you access to useful familiars, such as the Magpie (gradually produces gems and other items, while you do other things); a variety of combat familiars; beasts of burden at different levels that can help you carry more items with you; and familiars that have great teleports (for example, close to the nature altar, to make a profit with nature runes; or close to a Summoning pillar to train Summoning faster).

 

Dungeoneering: Any method you use to train Dungeoneering is free. It is also a fairly fast skill to train. Two methods are especially fast: (1) Do the Sinkhole activity twice a day. At higher levels, the rewards are typically around 100K every time. Sinkholes open once an hour, 30 minutes after the full hour. (2) Daily challenges in Dungeoneering give a greater experience reward than for any other daily challenge. With regular training (which of course includes the daily challenge), just as with regular combat outside of Dungeoneering, it is important to get good weapons and bind them. Having some good armour helps, too, since you are then less likely to die. It is interesting to note that you can get good experience in several other skills while in a dungeon, for example fishing and woodcutting – especially if you concentrate (for example) on the one or two highest-level fish available for your current level.

Usefulness: High Dungeoneering levels give you access to the resource dungeons, which provide different benefits. For example, at level 85 you get access to a resource dungeon with frost dragons, generally considered one of the most profitable monsters to kill (frost dragon bones are a 100% drop – at the time of this writing, they are worth about 13K each). Also, you can use Dungeoneering tokens to buy a variety of useful items, including the chaotic weapons, which have a fairly high level (level 80), a gem bag to store 100 gems, a charming imp that automatically picks up charms (or converts selected types of charms to a small amount of experience), a bonecrusher that automatically picks up and buries bone drops for you (thus providing prayer xp without any time penalty), and many more.

 

Divination: The new activity “Guthixian cache” is supposed to give great Divination experience, but I didn’t try it out yet. The guide says that if you get the full 100 points, you get about 50K Divination experience. In the case of regular training, you can train somewhat faster if you buy the corresponding energy and use the right-most option to convert the memories... assuming you are willing to spend the money. On the other hand, if you use the middle option to convert the memories, you can sell the energy you gather and make a decent profit.

Usefulness: You can make profit training it, by selling the energy – depending how you deposit the memories. Also, at higher levels you can make several items, some of which are untradeable – for example, signs of the porter, which transport certain drops to the bank as you pick them up, or divine locations.