HCCO/Guide/6

To start, you should have: 1 and 1
At the end, you should have: 85 with Full (U) Ancient D-hide, Ancient Crossbow and Scaled Shield and 85 with Mystic Air Staff and Ancient Wizard Robes or Black Wizard Robes

Chapter VI: Non-Melee Training

Chapter VI-A: Ranged

Ranged is quite straightforward, but we’ve been putting it off for a few main reasons. Firstly, it doesn’t provide any real benefit until you start fighting Wizards, or other magic monsters, and getting its gear without having the space in your bank or loadouts for the gear and weapons will be annoying. It is recommended to wait until one has 10,000,000 to afford Extra Equipment Set to make gearing much less of a headache. This upgrade is a lower priority than Auto Eat - Tier III, which is why we wait until now to train Ranged.

Progression in Ranged can roughly be broken into three phases: preliminary, (1), training (1-85) and late (85-99). We only need to worry about the first two phases now, which will get us far enough to tackle Water God Dungeon, Fire God Dungeon and possibly even Into the Mist and beyond.

Preliminary phase

Since none of the gear or weapon progression for Ranged relies on the actual skill itself, we can prepare for the entire skill ahead of time. This is the preliminary phase, and it has three main considerations being ammo, weapons and gear.

Ammo

Before starting Ranged, it is recommended to complete the Elite Amulet of Ranged portion of the Fury of the Elemental Zodiacs grind at Bandits. This will set you up with all the arrows needed for the entire early and midgame Ranged grind, as well as the item itself offering substantial ranged offensive bonuses while being equipable at level 1. Obtaining 200 Amulet of Ranged will yield around 48,000 Steel Arrows, 32,000 Mithril Arrows and 16,000 Adamant Arrows, which is much more than needed. A lot of arrows will also be supplied by Basic Resupply/ Standard Resupply as well, so ammo is not much of a worry. It is also possible to clear Bandit Base for possible Ranged weapon upgrades, but these are not worth the time investment due to the low drop rate and can be skipped if desired. Bandit Base will yield a decent amount of ammo, but it is slower overall than killing Bandits directly. At 70 one can use the abundance of Ancient Arrows obtained while killing Raging Horned Elite for Trout. It is not necessary to conserve arrows either, as most late-game Ranged combat takes place with a crossbow using Sapphire Bolts.

Note that it is no longer recommended to kill Frozen Archer for Ice Arrows anymore, as this monster was buffed and is considerably stronger now as well as dropping far fewer arrows.

Weapons

The overall weapon progression will be:

Normal Shortbow (1-5) → Oak Shortbow (5-30) → Maple Shortbow (30-40) → Yew Longbow (40-50) → Elerine Longbow (50-85) → Ancient Crossbow (85+)

These items will be obtained from Ranged Golbins, Holy Archers, Elerine Archers and Dragons Den (discussed below) and can all be farmed ahead of time if bank space is not a concern. As mentioned above, it is possible to farm Bandit Base for a Ancient Longbow, but it will take more time to obtain than what will be saved by using the item. The Elerine Longbow is a very strong weapon for its level, as it rivals Redwood Longbow from Holy Archer / Bandit Base. If you do decide to farm Bandit Base or have done so in the past, you can replace the Maple Shortbow with a Maple Longbow instead.

An alternative (but less efficient) route for early Ranged training is to kill Thieves in the Runic Ruins for throwing knives, which, due to their higher attack speed and inherent 15% ammunition saving, can help with early training. This can be paired with Throwing Power Gloves to increase effectiveness as well.

Gear

From 1-40 you will mostly be naked, as there are few options for gear at this low level. The cape slot is the only slot that you will likely be able to fill, and the options for capes are:

Cape of Prat > Cape of Ranged Preservation > Fire Cape > Obsidian Cape > nothing

It is not really worth grinding for any of these, just use whatever you have access to already. Paladin Gloves don't have any negative bonuses so they are worth using to save on a bit of food. An Elite Amulet of Ranged is extremely good, as it offers more bonuses than an entire set of green dragonhide.

From 40 onwards, the gear you will use will be a mismatch of dragonhide armour. Use whatever hides you obtained from the Amulet of Looting and Volcanic Cave grind from earlier. It is not worth going out of your way to obtain any singular piece of dragonhide, as it only offers accuracy with no strength bonus, and your accuracy will quickly become saturated on the enemies you train ranged on. Using Green D-hide Vambraces at 70 for instance is perfectly acceptable. Green, blue and red dragonhide armour can also be easily upgraded in exchange for GP. Green d'hide costs 60k to fully upgrade, blue d'hide costs 225k and red d'hide costs 630k. These only offer a small amount of accuracy and DR, but this will come in handy for monsters such as Master Wizards and the likes, so it may be worth it.

You will need to farm Dragons Den for the almighty Ancient Crossbow for 80+ at some point before progressing. Again, as this dungeon doesn't rely on Ranged, this could technically be performed before commencing training. The goals of this dungeon are to obtain the Ancient Crossbow and the Ancient D-hide Shield, the latter of which will be upgraded to a Scaled Shield which is a huge DPS increase for Ranged and even for Magic in many situations. The shield can technically be substituted with a Dragonfire Shield or Earth Layered Shield for meeting raw DR requirements, but the damage sacrificed will be noticeable so obtaining a Scaled Shield is recommended. The crossbow is an incredible weapon for the two Ranged God dungeons, as well as in Dark Waters, however it is worth noting that all of the other items still have uses.

Twin Exiles is the next most sought after item, as they are the best item in the game for farming low level mobs with low max HP. It is worth keeping for future rune grinding and completionist farming purposes. Any Ancient Dragonhide Armour obtained here can be worn as an upgrade, but it is not necessary to grind for any pieces. Use any leftover Elder Dragonhide to upgrade elder dragonhide pieces before selling it all off to unlock some free collection log slots.

Training phase

The best options for Ranged training are magic enemies. However, the entry level enemy ( Wizard) is too strong to be tackled at 1, so killing various easy slayer tasks such as Cows is fine until around 40 to equip some dragonhide. After this point, farming Wizards and Master Wizards for runes is ideal. One can then use these runes to train their Magic to increase their magic defence to make killing them more efficient. At higher Ranged and Magic levels (around 50+), the option of killing Shamans for Chaos Runes and Necromancers for Death Runes opens up to supplement further Magic training. Seething Horned Elites can be killed for any outstanding Amulet of Furies that weren't obtained from Volcanic Cave.

Chapter VI-B: Magic

Magic in this challenge will mainly consist of casting Air spells, since you can remove one colour from the rune costs. All spells cost Air Runes, but Water, Earth, and Fire spells additionally cost their respective runes.

This is a bad thing for us, since we have no real way to farm a lot of runes yet. However, we can get started by farming some catalyst runes ( Mind Runes, Chaos Runes, Death Runes, etc.) from the Vampire and the Master Wizard. The Vampire is probably best for now, since it is a Ranged monster, meaning we can strike it with our powerful Melee. Even considering the drop chance and drop rates are lower than from the Master Wizard, this will be faster overall as it will crucially save more food. Killing Wizard until one piece of either Green Robes or Blue Robes (at 10) for each slot is recommended.

Catalyst Runes are the runes you use to power up your spells, while Elemental runes select which element you’re using. You can remove the cost for Elemental runes with staves, which we will abuse to completely nullify the Air Rune cost, and thus primarily use air spells. Remember, since prayer points are a lot easier to farm on a CO than runes, you will generally want to run the two highest offensive prayers at all times when training magic. However, it is only worthwhile if the prayers give magic damage boost ( Mystic Mastery, Augury and Battleheart) or if you are very low level and your accuracy is low (below 90%).

The Staff of Air (obtained from Fairy) reduces the cost by 3, allowing you to cast all spells up to Fire Bolt with the sole exception of Wind Bolt for no Air Rune cost. Air Rune are by far the most valuable elemental rune on a CO, so you should use the other elements to level your magic early on as these runes have little use outside of very late game situations by which point you will have a huge stockpile. You should aim to use most of your Mind Rune on Fire Strike and your Chaos Rune on Earth Bolt to make the most use of your varied runes gathered, until you are 30. At this point you can equip an Air Battlestaff to save 5 Air Rune/cast, so obtain one from Master Wizard and use that until 40. You also have enough magic defence from levelling Magic that you can consider clearing Hall of Wizards for some Ranged exp and better robes. The Red Wizard Robes can be worn at 30 (levelling from 1 to 30 cuts food usage against magic enemies roughly in half) and the dungeon will be important in the a following section anyway. You can alternatively wait until 40 for even higher magic defence. Lastly, now that you have some magic defence, gathering 200 Amulet of Magic is on the table. You will obtain a lot of catalyst runes in the process which can be put towards levelling, so it is worth making a dent in this decently long grind now. Master Wizard are the best overall source of catalyst runes, as they have the lowest HP while dropping one of three catalyst runes 85% of the time.

You can now make use of every standard spell that is worth considering on a CO, which is up until Wind Blast. Prioritise all other elemental spells until you consume your elemental runes, and then finish training on the highest level air spell that has no elemental rune cost. Make sure to use the highest level aurora that you can that has no elemental cost. This will be Surge I from 15- 40 and Surge II afterwards. The light runes will be supplied from Standard Resupply and will be in considerable abundance, so these should not be conserved.

After 40, you will now use a Mystic Air Staff to conserve 7 elemental runes and primarily use Wind Blast to level up, as this is the new highest no-elemental cost spell available. The relative damage increase between spells is lower as flat damage has diminishing returns, so there isn't much dps sacrificed by sticking to this one spell. However, the only way to obtain this staff is from Hall of Wizards at a relatively low drop rate (~1/191.67). On the plus side, you will get some nice runes (albeit at a slower rate than other options) along the way and a good pet, hopefully. You will also want to obtain a full set of Red Robes. It is debatable whether staying here all the way until full Ancient Robes is worthwhile. The robes have a very low drop rate and will likely take awhile to complete, but you will obtain some useful runes and almost certainly obtain the pet. It is also important to maximise rune efficiency by maximising magic damage bonus, as rune gathering is a slow process. If you are completionistic in nature then it may be a good idea, although strictly speaking it would be faster to focus on simply obtaining more Death Rune from Master Wizard and Necromancer than worrying about min-maxing the rune efficiency.

Once you have your gear, the best monster to kill is Raging Horned Elite as they are melee and drop valuable food, as well as giving a decent income and ammo. They have 5% DR, so using Battleheart if you have the Prayer level is recommended, along with Augury. Kill either Master Wizard or Necromancer for Chaos Rune and/or Death Rune whenever you need more runes. It is both more rune-efficient and time-efficient to gather runes and use them separately, rather than try to kill Necromancer with magic directly to slightly replenish the consumed runes. Making use of the triangle bonus is starting to become very important. You will be here until 85. Once you have 85 you will upgrade to Glacia Armour, and then return to get a single level to 86.

The rest of your magic training will come after Into the Mist once you have the passive slot. You will return again to Raging Horned Elite to get 90 to wield Ocean Song, and then train from 90- 99 on Umbora while grinding out Tidal Edge.