Ancient Claw is largely the best melee weapon that does not require late-game content to obtain.
The Ancient Claw is assembled from the fragments that drop only from Pegasus. On average, 3,333 Pegasi kills are required in order to obtain enough fragments.
The question is when to farm it and what combat style is the best for that. The main point of contention is whether to farm it before or after the Volcanic Cave, as this dungeon is farmed with a Melee build and is vital for idling the Air God Dungeon.
To answer these questions, the following builds will be considered:
These builds were chosen to show the changes that the various drops bring into farming Pegasus. Ranged builds were not considered because the Pegasus is Melee and has the highest evasion against Ranged in addition to the Combat Triangle.
Builds
Each build assumes the following:
The ring slot is always occupied with Magical Ring.
No prayers, potions, or other buffs are enabled unless specified.
The character is on the Hardcore game mode with all Combat skills at level 75. This means all builds presented here are suitable regardless of the game mode being played.
Skill levels are given so that these simulations may be replicated using the Combat Simulator add-in.
The average time to obtain all 100 Ancient Claw Fragments with this build is 122 hours. However, note that without Slayer gear this can be in excess of 283 hours.
Reaching at least 20,000 accuracy is key for this build, as this prevents Slicing Winds from missing. Therefore, while the build only requires a minimum of Level 72, and at most Level 93 or multiple accuracy bonuses from sources such as:
Worth noting that using a Mystic Air Staff will drastically reduce the amount of runes spent - especially while using Surge Auroras. The staff will be slower, and will require more
Warning: Swapping Miolite Shield for Book of Eli will not significantly reduce kill times, while also forcing you to spend more runes and therefore more time Runecrafting.
The grind time with this build is 48 hours. Slayer equipment has no impact on the clear speed in this case.
However, this build implies that the Air God Dungeon would need to be cleared with Sunset Rapier, which is a sizeable loss of DPS that will cost more than 4 hours of the difference between this build and the Slicing Winds build.
Analysis
Essentially, we want to know which of two sequences is faster:
Rapier → Claw → Volcano,
Rapier → Volcano → Claw.
Full-Sunset Volcano vs Full-Claw Volcano
Let's consider the builds Rapier and Slicing Winds.
The difference between their timings of completing the claw is 19 hours.
The Volcano grind of the full ancient set is longer with the with Sunset Rapier than it is with the Claw.
The question is then if the difference between the rapier and the claw in the Volcanic grind is bigger than 19 hours.
We know the length of "Rapier → Claw" and "Volcano → Claw", but we need the data on "Rapier → Volcano" and "Claw → Volcano".
As specified on in the Volcanic Cave/Guide, you need 1350 clears to almost certainly get a full set of Ancient armour or 832 clears to have a 75% chance. The median (50% of results) is 564 clears.