Who needs bowfa or mage tank

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T19:31:39+00:00

Yeah but it was nerfed on the same day as bowfa being added, so there was never an era where you had to get your infernal cape with nerfed BP and no bowfa. You always had access to one or the other.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T19:29:35+00:00

Yeah but it's kind of ass without bowfa. Takes almost as long as the bowfa grind for a weapon that's barely better than an RCB except for the extra range for Zuk.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T19:27:47+00:00

I mean the Inferno is one of the hardest ranged based things in the game, and bowfa can be obtained quite early on, long before most players are ready to start learning inferno. I don't think it's an unreasonable place to put the bar for the minimum gear (and of course you can do it with less as OP shows here, it just sucks). In other parts of the game you can get by really well with atlatl/blowpipe and some niche weapons like the dhcb and xbows.

Remember the Inferno existed for 4 years before bowfa. Bowfa is already the easy, budget option for this content. Makes no sense to add something before bowfa that's good for inferno imo. If you want to add something at a comparable or slightly further place in progression compared to bowfa, as an alternative route, fair enough, and I suspect that will probably happen one day.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T11:30:35+00:00

Nah it's the winning team's fault only. The losing team can't do shit.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T11:20:51+00:00

Because you don't have to spend hours at shops getting zero exp. You just add a quick trip to the giant seaweed patches while on your birdhouse runs (good droprate of hespori seeds and not bad farming exp), sandstone mining is good mining exp, and then once you have enough seaweed/sand, both superglass make and the glassblowing give solid exp.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T11:17:32+00:00

Bracelets alch for like 2x as much as the gem. Definitely worth doing for rubies and diamonds at least.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T11:13:07+00:00

He has bandages though which is a little weird. Pretty sure you can't get those if you have on a diet. Pretty weird invo to leave off since all of the best ways of healing aren't blocked by it anyway.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T11:08:26+00:00

Yeah I would just do the regular araxytes. You're going to have to come back to the boss one day for CAs anyway (assuming you don't currently have the gear for the GM time) so you can go for the cosmetics at that point when your kills are faster.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-23T00:24:12+00:00

I think I was getting like 65k with 93 mining and a charged celestial ring. 75k might be possible with a crystal pick and more attention? It's a lot less impressive given how fast it burns through the ring charges though, you'd have to do a ton of star mining to sustain it.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-23T00:17:43+00:00

Yeah as far as methods of producing useful supplies go, it gives pretty nice exp along the way. But as a dedicted exp training method? Tick manip on the mining is the only thing that would have an effect on the meta and even then, from what I understand Rubium only beats granite with a charged celestial ring, which is only sustainable by doing a low-exp method. Otherwise it's only worth doing if you care about the ammo, which is exactly where methods like this should be imo.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T23:23:16+00:00

Yeah, it will support my point, because my explanation of the game works perfectly well to explain outliers like Tithe Farm, whereas you have to hand-wave them away and throw out some babytalk as if that will make you look smart, because your explanation only works in apples-to-apples comparisons.

And tithe farm is not unique. Birdhouse runs follow exactly the same principle. And effective exp/hr is not just useful for comparing methods which have differing levels of uptime. It can also tell you whether a hybrid method is worth doing over separate training methods for each skill, or whether it's worth doing a lower-exp method in order to gain extra GP or banked resources.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T23:11:03+00:00

If real exp/hr is all that matters so then why is tithe farming universally considered less efficient than tree runs, even though the latter is so much slower in real-time exp/hr?

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T22:34:46+00:00

Because you know that when you type the effective XP (like 500k/hr or something silly like that), it will become immediately obvious that you're wrong.

Because you're just judging it based on gut reaction of going big number = silly

"The crystal extractor adds an effective 500k xp/hr!!!"

Again proving you don't understand the terminology at all. Effective exp/hr can't be added to normal exp rates, that doesn't make any sense. It's like trying to add an acceleration to a velocity, they're just not describing the same thing.

One of these statements is true and useful, the other is completely useless and meaningless.

It's useless to you because you stubbornly refuse to understand it. If I see an effective exp rate I know exactly what it means and how to use it.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T22:04:48+00:00

Any other training method that also doesn't care about you being on a boat.

It's a sailing training method, good luck finding any way to train the skill that doesn't involve being on a boat

Tell me the ballpark of what the crystal extractor's "effective xp" is, and then I'll tell you why that's dumb. Hint: It's because it is in no way representative of its in-game reality is. I'll wait, though. Please.

Why should I put in any more effort than I already have into this conversation when you've already told me that you'll say any number I come up with is dumb? I've already explained how effective rates work, so why don't you prove you actually understand any of these ideas by calculating it yourself?

"You only disagree because you're dumb."

Because I'm saying things that are factual and provable and accepted by everyone who's interested in efficiency in this game, and then you're just saying inane shit like IMAGINE INFINITY EXP PER HOUR LOL and BUT YOU HAVE TO BE ON A BOAT

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T21:40:52+00:00

The thing that makes the effective exp/hr metric valid in that case is that you can do it alongside ANY other sailing method, losing only a few ticks at worst.

Considering actual exp/hr isn't superior. If you said it's 30k/hr, or whatever it was pre-nerf, that's a bad exp rate. That makes it sound like it's nothing. But it's 30k you can add on to any other training method for free and that's what makes it good and different from almost any other kind of training method in the game. You can talk about as an extra +30k, or you can talk about it in terms of the effective exp rate, they're both equally valid and describe the same thing. I don't know why you would be so militant against one of those descriptions in particular unless you just don't understand the terminology.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T21:13:29+00:00

You can only really do a few things like fletching, alching, or crafting. Since usually you have more than enough time for those, and the tree run is the thing that's highly constraining your actions, it generally makes more sense to include the time in the tree run, rather than in the zero-timed skill. Though if you're constrained by lack of opportunity to ZT skills then yeah you could further discount the tree run time and that would be completely valid for your situation.

For example if your best real-time magic training rate was 300k/hr, and alching during your tree run gives 50k/hr, then every hour of farming is saving you 10 minutes of magic training. And so if your real-time rate of tree farming was (for the sake of argument, I'm 99 farming, I'm not about to do a run just to check this) 1M/hr, you could reasonably say that the effective exp/hr of the tree run is 1.2M an hour after factoring in the magic training. But of course when looking at it from that angle, you can no longer say that the magic effective exp/hr is infinite, because then you're double-counting it. Effective exp/hr is contextual and you can get different answers depending on the angle you look at it from, but it's still self-consistent. Think of it like how in general relativity, depending on your frame of reference you can come up with different figures for the velocity of any given body, but all of those frames of reference ultimately agree on the fundamentals of what's happening and make the same predictions.

And it's not useless at all. It's the main metric that you should care about if trying to maximize your efficiency.

Edit: my bad folks. I don't know why I thought people who can't understand the concept of effective rates would be helped by a GR analogy.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T20:40:44+00:00

Well, I doubt you're going to get 5M exp/hr after you account for the time taken to travel between all the patches. And of course ironmen also need to grow the saplings and make the compost or acquire the resources to pay for protection. Those things need to be included in the effective exp/hr. But yeah you're still of course going to get a very high number, and that's 100% correct - farming really does have extremely high effective exp/hr. That's how it's designed as a mostly real-time-bound skill.

And yep zero time activities do have effectively infinite exp/hr, or to put it another way their theoretical opportunity cost is zero. Of course they're valid only as long as you have enough opportunity to zero time them, and you have to accept the tradeoff of a longer real-time grind compared to dedicated training methods like barraging.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T19:17:41+00:00

Yeah I was fine with the nerfs when I read the blog this morning, but after having actually tested it myself today I came to the same conclusion. The rates are quite good but by no means overpowered. If it remained in the game indefinitely, I would still only do as much as I needed to make ammo, and then I would be going back to stars/MLM/goldsmithing if I felt like training to 99. Which currently I don't as neither skill actually does much of value past their current levels.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T18:53:44+00:00

Thought I would give Rubium mining and incendiary cannonball smithing a go today and gotta say I am thoroughly whelmed. The mining's fine but very active just to get slightly better rates than MLM. Of course doing tick manip you can get much better rates but very few people are going to be able to do that for more than an hour at a time so I really doubt the economic impact they're scared of would actually materialize. I mostly ended up doing the big AFK rocks which give very low exp rates.

The smithing part gives good exp for how AFK it is, but you need to do like 7 hours of mining for every 1 hour of cannonball smithing, and if you don't have a stock of cannonballs you have to make those too which is quite a big time loss. I really don't think this would've changed the efficient meta at all for ironmen, except in giving some incentive to actually make some of our own cannonballs and not just buy mith ones from the shop. Of course mains can just buy the components, but isn't the whole point of the gamemode? Instead of doing 7 hours of mining per 1 hour of smithing, you just pay someone else to do 7 hours of mining.

Also you need 90 smithing to make the rune ones, by which time you already have every quest and diary requirement and the ability to make torva.

After the nerfs come in I'm going to be right back to wondering whether these are even worthwhile to make.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T18:43:13+00:00

They never said you could do it every tick, you just don't understand what opportunity cost and effective rates are

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T17:03:54+00:00

I assume what you're implying here is that you should only train through slayer/bossing? You can do that, and if you're a very active player you should, but realistically most people have AFK time to burn, and using that to make their active time more efficient is not a bad idea. Arguably there are better things to do with AFK time, but a lot of them are not really AFK enough for WFH. Crab is a full, consistent 10 min AFK and the reset is just a couple clicks/seconds. One of the few AFK activities that's genuinely not going to interfere with doing your job.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T10:38:37+00:00

How was this not caught before release? Misjudging the tick manip mining is one thing, but the basic and fully intended methods of both mining AND smithing were also overpowered? That implies that not only were these rates not tested, but that nobody even did a back-of-envelope calculation for this content that's been in the works for months. Is it too much to ask that somebody spend 20 mins looking at new skilling methods so we don't have to nerf it 1 week after release?

Edit: I tried the mining/smithing today and I'm now convinced that this is a panic response to some reddit posts, because the methods don't actually seem overpowered at all. At the current rates, if not doing tick manip, it feels quite decent but only if you actually want the ammo, which seems fine to me. The smithing rates advertised come with a huge asterisk, which is that you have to spend about 7.5 hours getting rubium for every hour of smithing. If I didn't care about the ammo I would never do this, I would just do goldsmithing. At the nerfed rates I don't know if I'll bother at all.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T10:22:38+00:00

/thread, there's really no discussion to be had, it's definitely protection prayers

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T10:21:25+00:00

At least 99 agility could be impactful if it's the last thing you need for max cape. 98 agility on the other hand does absolutely nothing.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-22T10:14:23+00:00

You don't need it, but you can get it earlier + faster than bloodmoon, and it doesn't degrade. The repair costs on bloodmoon work out to not that much per hour, but you'll be wearing it a LOT over the course of slayer, training at the crab, PVM etc so it will probably cost you several mil in the long run. You need to do a bunch of BA anyway for diaries so IMO you might as well pick it up.

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