Pick a Skill! Any Runescape Skill!

Starting Runescape for the first time? Starting a new character? Just looking for some tips on what certain skills are good for? You’ve come to the right place! In this article I’ll go over every skill in the game, members or otherwise and give you a description of what that skill is, and what it is good for. Afterwards I’ll share with you my ideas on what skills and skill combinations are good for certain things in the game, example, money making, or questing.

Well before I dive right into it why don’t we talk about why exactly this is useful at all shall we? In Runescape personally I’ve always believed in a well rounded character, as in raising all of your skills rather then just some skills and leaving others untouched, but I do however think it’s good to focus on certain skills depending on what you want to do in the game. For example, on my character in the game, his highest skills are: mining, strength, attack, and defense. Most of my other skills are well up there too, but those are my highest ones, because I focus on melee combat as my main means of combat and mining ores as my means of moneymaking. I know there are plenty of faster ways to make money but I like mining so I stick with it. For basically any normal character (not including skillers, pures, yadda yadda) You want a main combat style and a main moneymaker with a few backup moneymakers as well, but we can get into that all afterwards. Let’s start on the skills and their uses.

ATTACK: Might as well go in order, let’s start with attack. Attack your most basic combat skill, the attack skill determines how often your melee attacks hit their target. The higher your attack level the better your chance of hitting your enemy is. So if you have an attack level of one, you may only hit a goblin one out of 15 or so swings, but when you get up to say attack level eight, you might hit a goblin say, one in 5 swings, much better rate. (Note: how often you hit also depends on the monster you are fighting and its level in relation to you. You will hit a monster 5 levels stronger then you less often then you will hit a monster 5 levels lower then you) attack is trained by leaving your attack stance In the default position. Coupled with defense and strength this skill makes the first type of combat class, the warrior. The warrior is especially strong against archers, but weak to mages.

STRENGTH: Strength is the second part of your attack trio of skills. Strength level determines how hard you will hit your foe. So the higher your attack level the more damage you will do to a baddie when you hit him. Supposing you have a strength level of 12, you can hit around the area of three or four as your strongest hit, where as at strength level one, you can’t hit anything more then a one. Strength is trained by setting your attack stance to aggressive.

DEFENSE: Defense, the third skill in the attack trio, technically this isn’t an attack skill but it still gets lumped in cause it has to do with them, sort of… Anyway, defense is the skill that determines how evasive you are. A higher defense level means you will get hit less, and when you do get hit it won’t be as hard. A good defense is always a good skill to have for a melee type character. Defense is trained by setting your attack stance to defensive

HEALTH: Health is closely tied into the trio above it but not exactly. Your health level determines how tough you are. Health level is what your HP (health/hit points) is based on, meaning higher level gives you more life. I’m not sure exactly what the health to health level relation is but all you really need to know is that health level is a good thing to get up. You can raise it by, well pretty much by getting whacked by baddies.

MAGIC: While were on the topic of combat skills we might as well finish them all off together, this skill is called magic, it is little known that this skill is originally intended to be a support skill to your main attack style of melee. Over time though new spells have been released and people have worked with the mage power so that now people dedicate their player to the skill, creating the second fighting class, Mages. Mages use magic as their form of combat casting various spells from throwing fire or earth blasts to freezing and enemy in place. Using spells require items called “runes,” basically magic rocks. The mage types are very powerful types against warriors, but are weak against archers. (see also runecrafting)

ARCHERY: The final combat class is the archer, the archery skill, also first intended as a support skill for melee has become its own standalone combat type. As one can guess an archer uses a bow and arrows to fight. A common way that archers (as well as mages) fight is to stand behind something then begin attacking their target, the A.I. in Runescape being what it is, the monster will just walk at the obstacle while the archer shoots away at him. (see also fletching)

MINING: Well let’s move into those basic tutorial island skills. We can start with mining. Now mining is my favorite skill in the game, why it is I don’t know but I like it. Mining is one of the core moneymaking skills in the game, for it you will need a pickaxe and some patients. You find some rocks containing ore and you just hammer away at them, the higher you’re mining level the better the rocks you can mine. When you mine a rock you get an ore, ores can either be smelted to make different type metal bars or straight out sold in raw ore form. The big moneymaker of rocks is coal. The reason being that as you start to get into the high quality metals in the game, all the ores have to be combined with coal ore, so there is high demand for it but little supply because it’s such a pain to get. Coal is a good, but a bit slow way to make money.

SMITHING: Hand in hand with mining goes smithing. Smithing is the skill used for smelting ores and then making the bars into different things. After you mine ors if you choose not to sell them you can bring them to a furnace and smelt them, they then become bars (again, good moneymaker selling bars, especially steel). The second part of the Smithing skill is the actual smithing part of it. You get a hammer and go to an anvil with your bars and you can hammer them into armor, weapons, nails, and arrow heads. Lots of other things can be made this way too and the higher your level gets the more things you can make and the better the metal that you can use is.

FISHING: Ok, fishing is a skill where if you stick with it, some real money can be made. Fishing is exactly what it sounds like, you fish. You start off fishing small game like shrimp with a net, but as you progress you can catch better and better fish. If you tick with it to the higher levels where you can catch lobsters swordfish, and sharks, you can rake in the money with this skill. Another reason this skill is good is because you can kill a lot of birds with one stone training it. If you do a catch, cook store and repeat method, meaning you catch the fish, cut some logs, light the longs, cook the fish, store them in the bank then repeat the process you are training fishing, woodcutting, and cooking as well as storing up a lot of fish that can either be sold or eaten to regain health in fights. Again, if you are looking to power level then just catch and drop instead of storing them.

WOODCUTTING: Since this goes a bit with fishing I’ll put it next. Woodcutting is the skill you use to cut down trees. Depending on your level you can use different kinds of axes as well as cut different kinds of trees down. After cutting logs you can either: burn them for fire, sell them, make them into bows, and make them into arrow shafts. If you really have the self control to sit and get your woodcutting up to a high level when you start being able to cut yew longs, and magic logs you can make a lot of money.

FIRE MAKING: Woodcutting’s brother, fire making is the skill used to light fires, aside from cooking stuff fire making is pretty much a useless skill, good for getting your total level up but it isn’t going to get you much of anywhere in the game.

COOKING: To finish off this little not of skills related to fishing is cooking, obviously not only related to cooking, but this skill is well…. where you cook stuff; Cakes, pies, fish, pizza or whatever else. Cooking is not a phenomenal money making skill but when you cook lobsters or swordfish or sharks people will pay good money for that, so it is a good skill to have.

RUNECRAFTING: At this point Runecrafting is one of only three free to play skills there are left. We mentioned runes before right? Remember that they are those magical rocks that allow you to use spells; well you can make them yourself. To get into this skill you have to complete the “Rune Mysteries” quest so that you can have access to the essence mining sites. To make runes you need two things, ess (essence) and a talisman. The talisman is different depending on what kind of rune you want to make (I.E Body tally for body runes) and when you click it it says it pulls in a certain direction and you follow it until you hone in on the place it wants, you take your ess In there and turn it into a rune. And you’re done. This is not a suggested skill to use as a moneymaker for F2Pers, but it can be decent money for members if they get higher up or do nature or law rune running (see future article for details on running)

CRAFTING: It is not the same a Runecrafting with the rune lopped off the front, crafting is the skill sued to make jewelry and things. Again, not exactly the best moneymaker so it isn’t recommended as one. You train crafting by making things like pots, necklaces, and working with leather. Not much to say about the skill it’s got a lot of different stuff you can make with it, but most of it is pretty much useless.
PRAYER: And so we come to the very last of the F2P skills, prayer. Prayer is a good skill, it is sort of like magic except that it affects you instead of others, and prayer is stuff like thick skin faster healing, personal buffs to you. When you activate a prayer power it slowly drains you’re prayer points, when they hit 0 you can’t use prayer anymore until you go pray at an altar to refill them. Prayer is a pretty good skill to have for any type of fighter and some for the high level prayers like protect from melee, protect from range, protect from mage. You train your prayer by burying the bones of the monsters you kill. The bigger the bone the more prayer xp you get for it, so regular bones give less then giant’s bones witch give less then dragon bones.

At this point if you are a F2P player then skip right over the rest of these skills to the next part of the article, the following skills are member only and useless to you. If you area member then these skills apply to you. Keep on reading.

AGILITY: What this skill allows you to do is jump over, walk across, and crawl under the various shortcuts throughout Runescape. These shortcuts are spread over the map in places that can help to shorten a long walk by letting you say, go over a river that you would otherwise have to walk around by walking across a log. The agility skill is not a hard one to train; there are special training places throughout Runescape that you can run through courses for experience. Though not hard, agility is a bit tedious to train on.

HERBLORE: Herblore is a skill that has potential to make good money if you stick with it. Unlocked by doing a quest involving some druids this skill is all about potions. For herblore, you collect different types of herbs and you combine them in different ways to make different things, such as strength potions or poison to put on weapons. Making high level potions can make you good money as well as selling the herbs to people if you can find a buyer.

THIEVING: Thieving is one of the skills I consider to be the, fun skills. In all honesty the main use of thieving is if you need a quick bit of gold to pay for a boat ride or something and don’t feel like running to your bank just to take out like 30 coins. Thieving is the skill where you just find people and you pickpocket them. The higher the level the better the type of people you can rob is and the more money you can steal from them. If you get caught, you get whacked and stunned momentarily before being able to go back to stealing. Its and easy and fun skill to train but it isn’t exactly a skill that you can use to make a load of money. It’s hard to make a ton of cash pick pocketing men in Lumbridge for 3 gold each time

FLETCHING: This goes hand in hand with Archery because fletching is the skill used to make bows and arrows. Depending on your fletching level you can make better and better types of bows from logs and you can make arrow shafts, which you attach with feathers and arrowheads that you can smith for different types of metal and make your own ammo for your bow. This is a GREAT money saver for archers as well as having the potential for moneymaking if you use alchemy on the higher level bows you can make

SLAYER: This skill is very bounty hunter-like. Slayer is the skill where you talk to a slayer master and they assign a certain number of a certain creature for you to kill, and then you go hunt that creature down and kill it. You get slayer skill experience for killing whatever the monster that is assigned to you to kill is, as well as regular xp for whatever you are using in terms of attack style. This skill also unlocks some pretty cool slayer gear such as clothing and weapons and stuff. Not a moneymaker at all but if you are a fanatic for the cool costumes like I am this is a good skill.

HUNTING: We come to one of the two newbie skills. Newbie not meaning that this is a skill that only newbie players do it, but meaning that has been released relatively recently. This skill is just what it sounds like; you get traps and set them up trying to catch stuff. This is one of the skills I like a lot, it is fun and easy to train it, and with it you unlock AWESOME outfits that you can make yourself. Currently there is a great article about breaking into hunting out by another fantastic author here if you think this might be a skill you are interested in.

CONSTRUCTION: Everyone’s favorite (except mine) skill, construction. This is the skill that people were clamoring for, for ages before it came out, it is the other newbie skill. Construction is the skill where you build your own house! With higher levels you can add new rooms, different objects, better nicer furniture. All sorts of stuff can go into the construction of your house. I don’t know much about the skill past that as I’ve not dabbled into it too much, what I’ve provided is all you really need to know on a general basis about it.

FARMING: This is mine, and most peoples least favorite skill. Its just downright annoying, boring and slow to do. This skill is the skill of, you guessed it, planting seeds and stuff and having them grow. I know very little about it since I never got passed about level 3 with it before deciding I hated it. As far as I know not much money can be made farming so I don’t really suggest it as a skill to focus on if at all.

Well there you go folks. That is every skill in the game. Now as always my idea is that it’s just good to train everything and get the full blown experience of the game but even I like to choose several powers to focus a lot more on then others depending on how I want to play my character. I usually go for the warrior type character so I focus on training attack, defense, and strength as well as health. Like I said I like mining so I use that as my main moneymaking skill (this is also coupled with smithing to make and sell steel bars) These are my main focus skills.
There are certain skills that you always want to level up no matter what you are doing with the character, primarily this means prayer. But almost always I would recommend fishing, cooking, woodcutting, and magic as must train skills, they are just good all around skills that will help with just doing random stuff in the game and are good moneymakers.

Now if you are considering choosing a mage as your main type of combat then aside from those must haves I mentioned, that go for any character, with a mage you want to focus a lot of energy on Runecrafting, it can serve very useful for a mage for multiple reasons. First being that you will save SO much money making your own runes, second being if you are a member, then this can be a good secondary cash maker as well.

Assuming that you choose a ranger as your combat style, thinking about training woodcutting and fletching up high is something you should do. This will allow you to make your own bows and arrows instead of having to buy them. Along with that you will need mining and smithing for the arrowheads, and mage is always just a good skill to grab in general because of the teleport abilities that will save you some annoying walking.

That does it for skills that go with good combat styles so let me go over moneymaking skill selection briefly before bringing this novel to a close. When you are looking at skills for moneymaking the main ones people usually look at are mining/smithing, fishing, and woodcutting. With these as a highly trained base for moneymaking you can’t go wrong. There are however a few other nice skills that done correctly can be good cash earners. For example; Runecrafting if you are a member, can get you good money when you get into being able to make some of the higher level runes. Fletching is also another good money skill when you train it a bit. If you can get to the point where you can cut down and fletch yew trees into yew longbows, then combine this with a high magic level to get the “high alchemy” power and make and alch the yew bows you can make a good lot of cash.

Now, combat training and moneymaking aside, a lot of people like to do quests. In Runescape often there will be a level requirement in a certain skill for a quest. Nothing is more annoying then getting ready for some fun new quest then having to spend a week raising your crafting level 20 levels before you can do it, so I suggest that you get a good basis of at least 25 to thirty for all your skills, even if you don’t use them a lot just incase, as well as always being sure to get your magic level up for those teleports. A good teleport will save you time and energy in both training and in doing quests.

As of right now there is not much else I can think of in terms of special skill combinations without getting into the every bothersome topic of pures. If you have any other good ideas about different skill combos let me know em and maybe I’ll put them up here (with you getting the credit of course)!

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