HCCO/Guide/12

From Melvor Idle

To start, you should have: IDK!
At the end, you should have: IDK!

This section is still a work in progress, but will be updated with details as the meta develops. Make sure to double check and test all builds before committing to idling.


Ancient Sanctuary

Since version 1.1.1, Ancient Sanctuary is now required to access all expansion content beyond Jungle Labyrinth. The biggest downside of this change is losing access to Frost Walker Boots and the DR they offer, but luckily the dungeon is still completable as a CO. The main change is that progression now requires Ultima Godsword in order to out DPS Morellia's healing, which is unfortunate for 12B players.

In order to access Ancient Sanctuary you will need to assemble 5 key parts to form the Labyrinth Solution. Each key piece is obtained by a different monster in Jungle Labyrinth. The following build will comfortably allow you to idle 4 out of the 5 monsters in Jungle Labyrinth (all except the Magic enemy) and can be used for Ancient Sanctuary as well. The Bundled Protection Body and Perfect Sight Legs upgrades are obtained in Jungle Labyrinth directly from Alraune and Conda respectively, which can both be idled safely without the upgrades. While the upgrades are recommended for Ancient Sanctuary itself, which can be tackled without them, you should pick up both of them now. Although Bundled Protection Body is less useful than Perfect Sight Legs, it is significantly faster to obtain. It is recommended to kill all the monsters while on a slayer task to supplement some slayer coin income. The monsters in this area are mostly master tier with the exception of Hungry Plant.

Note: 'Deadly poison' is just the (poorly chosen) name of a stronger version of poison. It is not actually lethal, so there is no need to prioritise slayer area negation.

Also, if you can spare the inventory slot, try to hold onto any extra Perfect Sight Legs Material as you will eventually want to farm 2 extra copies. However, that won't happen until much later, so it's not necessary to hold onto if you lack space.

The final monster, Poison Toad, can be tackled with a standard ranging setup.

The Ancient Sanctuary can be idled with the above Melee build. The body and/or leg upgrades can be substituted with Holy Aegis and/or Stone Skin (one DR prayer per upgrade missing), as Ultima Godsword will carry you to an easy dungeon clear regardless.

Preliminary Upgrades

The name of the game is to obtain DR from any of the possible sources. Damage and evasion are secondary to DR. Without access to Smithing, Crafting or Runecrafting our sources of DR are quite limited, but they exist. Note that all of the items in this section requires Impending Darkness Event to be completed. Because of the tight DR windows, this section of the guide assumes 120, Finn, the Cat, Leonardo and Erran. It may be possible to supplement lower Hitpoints levels with Holy Aegis, Stone Skin, Guardian Amulet or a Wasteful Ring. Each of these options incurs a relatively large efficiency penalty or opportunity cost so they should used be a last resort. With lower Hitpoints it will be up to the user to consult the Combat Simulator and proceed with caution.

The item we seek in this section are Frost Walker Boots and Slayer Gear Upgrade Kit (Legendary) which add a hefty amount of DR to our loadout. You should have already picked up Bundled Protection Body and Perfect Sight Legs, these items will be used all the way to end game.

Ice Trolls

The first item is the Frost Walker Boots from Large Ice Troll in Forsaken Tundra, which requires 105. The boots offer a whopping 12% DR, but do require 110 to equip. Later on, we'll upgrade these boots into Frostspark Boots which will be best-in-slot until end-game. We'll want a Frostspark set for each style, so we need 15 Frost Walker Boots total.

These monsters are relatively weak and won't cause too much trouble. They also count as legendary slayer tasks. Since we'll need 15 Frost Walker Boots, and 110, it is advised to knock out all 20 Legendary tasks on Large Ice Troll's to unlock Slayer Gear Upgrade Kit (Legendary). Try to reroll tasks over 200-250 to speed up that grind.

As usual, the spell of choice will be Water Strike.

Assuming your magic level is around 100, and depending on reroll luck, you should hit 110 around the same time as completing your 20 Legendary tasks and acquiring enough drops for 15 Frost Walker Boots. If you end up short of 110 then grind out the rest of those levels on Cursed Lich or Greater Skeletal Dragon.

Rune Farming Upgrades

Unfortunately, we won't be able to use any of the expansion spells due to lack of specific rune drops, so Air Rune remains the priority drop and Wizard the monster to farm. Melee, with Big ol Ron, continues to be the best style for rune farming. However, other slots have several upgrades since last covered in the Dark Waters section. Do note that some of the items below have not been acquired yet but will represent upgrades all the way to the current end game (GCM+).

As a reminder, Big ol Ron has 100% combat doubling which is the max. Going over 100% doubling has no additional benefit, so we only want items that increase our accuracy and Min/Max damage. The Superior Attack Skillcape & Ring of Power items, in particular, are a large boost as they add 5% of our Maximum Hit to our Minimum Hit resulting it more one shots. Another powerful upgrade, acquired much later on, is the Mask of Torment from Cursed Forest which, although a Ranged item, auto-applies the Torment Curse's +10% damage taken debuff negating the loss of stats vs Slayer Helmet (Mythical).

Legendary Slayer Gear

After all of the above items have been obtained, the next goal is to finish working on Slayer Gear Upgrade Kit (Legendary). We need to complete 20 tasks and they take a long time. The upgrade offers 10% DR and 25% area negation (+4%/+5% respectively over master) per piece and will be a necessary source of DR and negation moving forward. Continue to farm Large Ice Trolls until all Legendary tasks are complete and you have collected all 15 Frost Walker Boots. You can also tackle Spectral Ice Wolf for Legendary tasks, especially since we will eventually need 5 Spectral Ice Sword for a future upgrade; but, they become significantly easier to farm with future ranged upgrades, so it advised to skip them and return later to get those drops.

Each Legendary Slayer upgrade costs a hefty 5 million Slayer Coins which is hard to come by due to the introduction of Hungry Plant in the Elite Slayer table which requires 56% DR to survive with melee. Thankfully, our prior upgrades and Legendary Slayer Gear also provides us with a much better build for slayer coin farming.

Do note that the Shield of Melee Power, and eventually a 3rd Legendary Slayer Piece, each provide a slightly more slayer coins per hour (2-3%) than Elder Crown. However, they do so at a much higher food cost and the net coin return is actually less. Unless you are swimming in food, it is recommended to run Elder Crown.

Next Upgrades

With the preliminary upgrades obtained, we set our sights on Weakness Exploiter Cape, Ethereal Longbow, all of the items from Static Chest, and Blazing Helmet.

Note: There are unique drops offered by enemies in Lava Lake, but as the area effect is particularly strong these enemies will waste a lot of food if we tackle them now. Best to wait until we have access to greater slayer area negation. In addition and perhaps more importantly, all of these items are solely for collection log purposes. The Ward of Flame Platebody and Burning Protection Platelegs require (P) Divine Platebody and (P) Divine Platelegs respectively, which are unobtainable on a CO. In other words, you can skip that area altogether.

Ancient Sanctuary

We start by farming out the useful rewards from Ancient Sanctuary. You will need to make sure you obtain Weakness Finder Cape from Poison Toad as well for its upgrade will be the best Ranged cape. Just continue using the gear recommendation above and make upgrades where applicable. After obtaining the cape, begin farming Ancient Sanctuary for 100 Weakness Exploiter Cape Material, which will require about 450 Ancient Chest. This cape is very strong for Ranged as it provides hefty range offensive bonuses, a nice 3% DR and -7% enemy DR when using Ranged. However, this grind is quite lengthy.

If you are using a 1h weapon then the Fighter Amulet is best worn in the passive slot to free the neck slot for Fury of the Elemental Zodiacs, or an Elder Crown. At this point it is no longer recommended to use Ragnar God Gloves, as the stun chance from the relentless combo is useful in stopping the boss Morellia from healing. You should not need a Wasteful Ring for this fight.

Phantom

Keeping with the theme of Ranged upgrades, we next seek to fight Phantom to obtain Ethereal Longbow. This monster is quite strong and will require a Wasteful Ring and Guardian Amulet to just barely stay alive. It will take about 20 hours to reach the drop rate for the item. It is worth killing this monster on task, as you will overall profit slayer coins as the legendary task pool is quite small. The increased DPS from the Superior Slayer Skillcape is very useful too.

This build prioritises -DR on enemies, as all of the monsters in Midnight Valley have 95% DR so reducing their DR has the biggest impact on dps. Reducing from 95% DR to 90% DR means the actual damage dealt goes from 5% to 10%, which means dps is doubled for a meagre -5% DR reduction.

Lightning Region

With a lot of good Ranged upgrades under our belt, we can work on clearing our way through Lightning Region to obtain all of the goodies within. This dungeon is very dangerous, hence why we must prepare adequately for it. To access this dungeon we need to blitz through Underground Lava Lake once. This dungeon is very easily cleared with Ultima Godsword or possibly with Spectral Ice Sword using largely the setup as Ancient Sanctuary (with Infernal Cape in the cape slot and Holy Aegis over Valor, you need a total of 70% DR), however you will have to take care to avoid fighting Magic Fire Demon while using Melee. These can very easily kill you outright, but are easily dispatched by swapping to Ranged (wearing Aeris God Platelegs / Aeris God Boots if you only have one set of Perfect Sight Legs / Frost Walker Boots) and then switching back afterwards. The boss Trogark will outheal our puny damage from Water Strike with Ocean Song, so we have to rely on the raw power of Ultima Godsword instead to get the job done.

We can now work on clearing Lightning Region. The boss will stun you frequently and heal a lot, but with the setup listed below you will be able to clear it. This dungeon is extremely lucrative, as every single item is useful. The Lightning Aura Helmet is our first 12% DR for the helmet slot and synergises with stuns so it is useful for Melee and Magic. Lightning Coil 2H Staff with Water Strike (any elemental spell is fine, but Wind Strike uses 2 Air Rune while the other strike spells only use 1 Air Rune and you will likely have an abundance of the other elemental runes) completely replaces Ocean Song and you cannot leave this dungeon without it. You will want 5 Lightning Strike 1H Sword in order to make FrostSpark 1H Sword, which heavily synergies with stuns and the rest of the gear from this dungeon. This sword will replace Ultima Godsword as our go-to Melee weapon. You will want 15 Lightning Boots and 5 Lightning Amulet, as those upgrades are very useful and help with dealing with stuns and capitalizing on enemy stuns.

Note that there is a small chance of dying while using Slayer Cowl (Legendary), so to ensure 100% safety until you can secure Lightning Aura Helmet use the prayer Stone Skin. You could also forgo Guardian Amulet for Fury of the Elemental Zodiacs but there is also a small chance of dying. You need 87% DR for the Lightning Golem and 83% DR for Lightning Monkey. The lightning mobs have a passive buff: "+20% chance to apply Shock (Reduce Target Damage Reduction by 2%) per successful hit. Stacks up to 10 times." This buff is on top of their 10-11% DR pierce. While the Lightning Golem is not likely to reach max stacks, the Lightning Monkey can and so Guardian Amulet is recommended to be 100% safe.

Once you get Lightning Coil 2H Staff, jump to the next section to farm a Blazing Helmet from Underground Lava Lake before returning to speed up this grind. And make sure to upgrade to Frostspark Boots as soon as you get 5 Lightning Boots.

Underground Lava Lake

With Lightning Coil 2H Staff, we can also idle our way through Underground Lava Lake. The main item we need from this area is Blazing Helmet. This becomes our go-to helmet for the foreseeable future as the burn damage adds a considerable amount of dps. With magic we make sure to prioritise DPS prayers that lower enemy DR or increase attack speed, as Magic accuracy and Magic damage are useless with the unavoidable, fixed damage special attack of Lightning Coil 2H Staff. This makes prayers such as Divination completely worthless.

You will eventually want 3 Blazing Helmet for each style. You can farm them now or come back later when farming the pet with slightly better gear (e.g. Mythical Slayer).

Road to FrostSpark & Mythical Slayer Gear

Next we are looking to complete our FrostSpark set and acquire Slayer Gear Upgrade Kit (Mythical). These next upgrades are significant and will greatly increase slayer farming.


Frostspark 1H Sword

In order to obtain the FrostSpark 1H Sword, we need to grab 5 Spectral Ice Sword from Spectral Ice Wolf and combine them with the 5 5 Lightning Strike 1H Sword we acquired in the last section. Spectral Ice Wolf is quite difficult and requires a lot of DR. However, with all our ranged upgrades, we should have very little trouble. These are a legendary task and should be completed on task at all times.

With 120 this build should net you ~110/kph and ~6.5 shards per hour. The overall farm will take around 77 hours to collect the 500 shards needed for all 5 Spectral Ice Sword. Also note that Blazing Helmet can be substituted for the Helm or Passive slot if you are tight on slayer coins and can't afford 3 pieces yet.

FrostSpark 1H Sword will become your go to melee weapon and immediately becomes a significant upgrade to your elite slayer farming (see mythical slayer gear section below) over UGS. Make sure to use them on stab and not slash, as the stab bonuses are considerably higher.

Ice Hydra

With our very good set of Ranged upgrades, it is possible to work on completing Ice Hydra tasks which count as mythical tasks. In fact, Ice Hydra is the only mythical task we have access to. At the time of writing this guide, there is an issue where you can never roll the same Slayer task twice in a row, even if that is the only Slayer task you have available for that tier. There is a Mod available in the Official Mod Manager which fixes this issue. If you choose to use the mod to fix the issue, then simply equip you pimped out Ranged gear and begin working towards 20 mythical tasks through Ice Hydra to obtain Slayer Gear Upgrade Kit (Mythical), leaving Auto Slayer on for the first time since elite slayer (which feels wrong somehow). If you decide not to use the mod fix, then still don your drip and prepare to manually reroll tasks by selecting an easy task after each Ice Hydra task and then selecting another mythical task.

It is recommended to reroll lengthy tasks (above 200 or so) in order to expedite this process, as Ice Hydra is very slow slayer coins/hr. Even with rerolling, these 20 tasks are expected to take several days to a week of continuous Slayer, with a few days spent replenishing the approximately 50,000 Static Jellyfish that will be consumed.

Ice Hydra is extremely strong, tanky and powerful. It requires a lot of DR in order to survive its basic attacks and it can freeze us, making it more deadly. Against this monster in particular, we rely on status effects for over half of our DPS through Blazing Helmet and Poison Virulence Ring+ Poison Virulence Gloves. Without these items our kills/hr is cut in half. Protect from Magic results in more kills/hr (and more effective kills/hr by saving a lot of food) than offensive prayers due to reducing the amount of time spent frozen considerably, allowing more status effects to be applied.

Once you've killed enough Hydras for 5 Frostshield Amulet, make your first FrostSpark Amulet and equip it in the amulet slot. Again, less time being frozen increases kills/hr more than raw stats. You've also unlocked the full potential of the FrostSpark set which provides another increase your elite slayer farming (see next section).

The alternative to tackling Ice Hydra now would be to manual one completion of Lair of the Spider Queen in order to obtain access to Afflicted City to fight Plague Doctors. This monster drops Area Control Potion III which can be used to combat the intense slowing aura of Forsaken Tundra. This will speed up the Mythical tasks by about 35%, but farming Plague Doctor takes more time overall than the time saved on Ice Hydra. The advantage is that you will also accumulate a healthy stack of Penetration Potion III and Hinder Potion III while doing so, which will be helpful for future grinds. Details on how to tackle these dungeons are given in the next chapter.

Mythical Slayer Gear

Each piece of Mythical Slayer will cost a whopping 10 million Slayer Coins to purchase. Luckily, the Frostspark set has fantastic synergy with the Fighter Amulet and greatly increases your coins per hour on Elite Slayer.

Take note the loadouts above are 2 separate builds for elite slayer farming. Pre and post FrostSpark Amulet.

Once you get the FrostSpark 1H Sword, you'll use the setup on the right that utilizes Elder Crown in the passive slot and Ragnar God Platelegs - this is a ~20% increase in slayer coins per hour over the UGS build (~264k/hour). Once you get FrostSpark Amulet, and unlock the set bonus, put that amulet in the passive but swap out Ragnar for Perfect Sight Legs for another 6% increase in slayer coins per hour. The Perfect Sight Legs offers roughly the same DPS output of Ragnar (due to the 20% Accuracy Bonus) but at a much lower food cost thanks to the near double DR it provides.

It will take about a week or so to farm all the coins needed to upgrade all 3 slayer sets to Mythical. Be sure to upgrade your melee set first and swap those pieces into the above build as soon as you get them.

Post-Mythical Upgrades

The next areas require all previous upgrades to idle effectively. We'll pick up all the remaining items needed before entering End Game content (Manual Territory). Our next items are Freezing Touch Body, Ethereal Greataxe, all the masks from Cursed Chest, potions from Plague Doctor, and the all powerful Gauntlets of Rage. In order to access these areas we will need to manually clear Lair of the Spider Queen once.

Polar Bear

After obtaining Mythical Slayer Gear, a good upgrade to get next is the Freezing Touch Body from Polar Bear. The bonus frostburn dps from the body will be nice for dungeon clearing, even though the DR matches that of Slayer Platebody (Mythical) and Bundled Protection Body. Mythical gear helps considerably with this grind, as not only does the extra area negation speed up kills, but without the +4% DR then we would be forced to use a Wasteful Ring instead of Hunter's Ring or Relentless Fury Ring, which cuts our DPS down a lot. Note that the extra HP and DR from FrostSpark Amulet keeps us safe when Polar Bear freezes us.

This is quite a fun loadout as we are able to make use of 2 independent sets of item synergies spanning 5 individual items. Again, make sure to use the weapon on stab as this is significantly more accurate.

Note that even though with FrostSpark Amulet equipped we should be within AE threshold while stunned, this item suffers from the same issue as Bundled Protection Body and will not 100% reliably keep you safe. Without Holy Aegis, the Polar Bear max hit is 501 while you are frozen, so there is a small chance of the enemy stunning you on the attack it takes you to 485-501 HP which would not trigger Auto Eat as FrostSpark Amulet only activates after the attack. The monster could then follow up with a max hit to finish you off. This is quite rare, so it is up to the user if they wish to YOLO for much more kills/hr.

Spectre

Next up is Ethereal Greataxe from Spectre. As with Phantom, these monsters are quite hard and require a specific setup. We'll have to use Magic and rely on the special attack from Lightning Coil 2H Staff. We get to use Freezing Touch Body for the Frostburn effect which not only slows the enemy it also inflicts 3% Max HP damage whenever they attack (for the duration of the debuff). DoT debuffs that inflict % of Max HP becomes a key part of our damage as we progress into the end game areas.

Any Strike spell will do though it is recommended to not use Wind Strike (for reasons mentioned previously) or Fire Strike as you will want to conserve Fire runes for end game content (GCM+).

This build should net you ~35.5/kph. Expect to spend ~14 hours on this grind using ~20k jellies and ~19k of the each rune.

Lair of the Spider Queen

The Lair of the Spider Queen features a completely unique mechanic where the boss, Spider Queen, has a completely random attack style each time she spawns. The minions in the dungeon also have a similar mechanic as their spawn pattern will be completely random, so expect to face all 3 combat styles in this dungeon. Ranged is preferred for killing minions in the lead up to the boss as Ranged has the lowest overall DR penalty against its weak style (-25% DR against Melee) compared to something like Melee (which has a -50% DR penalty against Magic enemies). The boss can comfortably be dispatched with appropriate late game gear (needed to out-dps her healing) and the corresponding style, so the main difficulty of this dungeon is simply being present when the boss spawns in order to switch to the correct gear loadout.

Since we only need one clear to access the next areas, the easiest strategy is to only use Ranged and run if the Spider Queen's style isn't Magic (i.e. so we can use Ranged against her). However, that leaves a 2/3rds chance you'll have to run each attempt. The alternative is also gearing up to also use Melee against the Ranged version and Magic against the Melee version, but you'll want to farm extra copies of certain items so you don't have to manually switch gear and risk dying.

Ranged Build for Clearing Trash & Magic Spider Queen:

The above build can comfortably idle through all the trash as well as the Spider Queen (if her style rolls Magic).

Melee Build for Ranged Spider Queen:

Magic Build for Melee Spider Queen:

For all builds, you must reach 85% DR to survive the Spider Queen above 50% HP (before Guardian Amulet kicks in).

You'll note several items from the Ranged Build are also in the Melee & Magic builds. You will have to manually switch gear between the sets very fast or spend some time farming additional copies (reccomended). You should already have extra Frostspark Boots for each style and farming another couple Blazing Helmet is pretty quick. That would leave you with only needing to swap Perfect Sight Legs and Guardian Amulet which isn't too bad.

The alternative to gear swapping is farming 2 additional Guardian Amulet & Perfect Sight Legs. Eventually, you'll want 3 copies (one for each style) for when we return to Lair of the Spider Queen to farm the Royal Toxins Spear and Webbie, so might as well grab the extra copies now (though not explicitly required, the QoL is significant).

Terran God Dungeon & Conda Redux

We'll use the same Melee build for both Earth God Dungeon & Conda to prevent any unnecessary rune farming. An argument could be made to farm with Magic to help train to 120, but the xp:rune ratio is much better elsewhere when the time comes. As stated above, we're here to farm 2 additional copies of Guardian Amulet & Perfect Sight Legs (one for each style).

Once again, in both cases, while Ragnar God Platelegs just barely edges out Perfect Sight Legs in DPS, the increased food cost is not worth it.

For Earth God Dungeon, this build should net you ~2.5k Earth Shards per hour (or ~23 clears per hour). Overall, the grind should take about 24 hours to get the two extra Guardian Amulet's using ~650k prayer points and less than 1k jellies.

The Conda grind is 12-13 hours using ~400k prayer points and ~4k jellies. Farming on task will reduce this grind by ~1.5 hours, but would require logging in every 1-2 hours, or less, to refresh the task as your kph is ~242/hour on task.

Goliath Werewolf

Cursed Forest

Manual Preparation

Pets, Gear, etc

Plague Doctors

Next Chapter

This marks the end of idle content for the TotH expansion. The remainder of the game involves monsters and dungeons that simply hit higher than the eat threshold for the maximum HP+DR that's obtainable on a CO. It is possible to manual all of the remaining content, but as this style of play may not be desirable for all players, it's included in its own chapter.

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