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RuneScoop.com  >  RuneScoop Monster Secrets       >  RuneScoop Monster Secrets - Aberrant Spectre Cannoning Guide

Aberrant Spectre Cannoning Guide - Access, Location and World Selection RuneScoop Efficiency Mini-Guides

Alright, ready for action? It’s time to get out our gear and some cannonballs and start blasting some aberrant spectres!

On this page I will tell you how to prepare yourself to fight, and how to get your cannon set up and ready for combat. Once the cannon is spinning, you will have several “jobs” to do, and I’ll explain which are most important. I’ll give you some ideas for dealing with the many drops you’ll get, and how to handle your cannon. Finally, I’ll tell you how to finish up each trip, and provide you with a few extra tips that you may find handy.

First of all, if you are currently using ancient curses, you may wish to switch back to normal prayers. Both Protection from Magic or Deflect Magic will work, but the stupid animation that appears every time you deflect damage with the curse causes you to move in an erratic fashion, constantly pausing and then jumping forward. Since you are constantly deflecting attacks here, this can be quite annoying.

Now, get to any bank; you’re teleporting to Pollnivneach so the bank you choose doesn’t matter. Once there, do the following:

1. Check your health; if you are not fully healed, then top up using any sort of cheap food.
   
   
2. Check your prayer level. If it is not nearly full, then restore it. (Alternately, you can just use your cloak to teleport to the Monastery before heading to Pollnivneach for the first time.)
   
   
3. Put on all of your equipment.
   
   
4. Take out a large stack of cannonballs, say 1,000, using “Withdraw X”. This will be handy later.
   
   
5. Turn off auto-retaliate; it will get in your way here.
   
   
6. Set your quick prayer or curse to Protection from Magic or Deflect Magic.
   
   
7. Take out a ring of slaying, a macaw pouch, and your four cannon parts.
   
   
8. Take out of the bank an extreme set (if you can) or a super set (otherwise). Drink one dose of each potion, then put the remainder back in the bank.

Teleport to Pollnivneach and travel to the aberrant spectres following the directions given in the previous page. The aberrants are not aggressive here, so you are in no rush to begin combat (though obviously the faster you get going on each trip, the more drops you get per hour). Take your time setting up at first, though.

Then do the following:

1. If the southwest area of the room is not occupied by any other players, then click the cannon base to set it up (Figure 46). If there are others around, switch worlds or try a different part of the room.
   
   
2. Summon the macaw.
   
   
3. Click to turn on your quick prayer/curse; you should see Protection from Magic or Deflect Magic activate.
   
   
   
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   Figure 46: Setting Up the Cannon

   A different angle, showing where I set up the cannon for fighting. Fortunately Jagex has made this doable with a single click now.

   
   

Now you’re ready, so click the cannon and watch the cannonballs start to fly. Manually attack the nearest spectre and you’re in business.

As most experienced cannoners know, using one is rather different than typical combat, where the procedure is basically “attack monster, eat as necessary, take drops when it dies and reload for the next one”. The cannon does most of the hard work here, and you will instead be performing tasks to keep things going and pick up drops.

One difference from most cannoning situations here is that there are so many aberrant spectres and they have so many good drops that you’ll have a lot to compete for your attention. It will take some practice to get good at this, though it isn’t really hard, as long as you keep your wits about you.

The following is a list of the activities you will need to do constantly while the cannon is firing. It is listed roughly in order of the most to least important tasks you must perform, so it should help you make sure everything gets done properly:

1. Monitor Prayer Level: If you run out of prayer points with a bunch of aberrant spectres attacking, you will usually die in less than a minute. Under normal circumstances, as long as your Prayer level is above 60 or so, you should never run out of prayer points. But if you do find yourself nearly down to zero, don’t fool around—get out!
   
   
2. Feed the Cannon: The dwarf multicannon can only hold 30 cannonballs at a time, and they get used up quite quickly here, especially at the start of a trip. Fortunately, Jagex recently changed the cannon so simply clicking on it will reload it (before, you had to click the cannonballs in your inventory and “use them” on the cannon each time). You don’t have to wait until the cannon is empty to reload it, and I encourage you to “top up” the device regularly so it fires continuously.
   
   
3. Attack Spectres: You want to help out the cannon by constantly attacking the spectres around you. Your first priority should be ones that are partially damaged but have somehow moved into a position where the cannon is unable to reach them; finish these off. Then focus on ones that are already nearly dead, as this helps avoid low cannonball hits (increasing the average amount of Ranged XP you get per ball).
   
   
4. Gather Drops: Constantly scan for drops and pick up desirable items. See the section “Dealing with Drops” below for more.

This may seem complicated but it’s really not that bad, and after just a few trips it will all become second nature. Before you know it, you’ll be cannoning spectres like an expert (Figure 47)

Because you kill so many aberrant spectres so quickly, and they drop so many items, you will spend a lot of time locating, assessing and picking up drops. Fortunately, this method has one advantage compared to cannoning some other monsters: few supplies. This means lots of inventory space, so at least you won’t have to deal with juggling drops and supplies.

I have two important pieces of general advice when it comes to dealing with drops using this method.

First, use your minimap, which will show each drop pile as a red dot. While the spectres will die fairly close to your cannon most of the time, sometimes they will get trapped and fall outside of visual range. The minimap can help you locate these drop piles, which may contain valuable items. Another reason to use the minimap is that seeds are tiny, and it can be very hard to spot them if you are just scanning the ground.

Second, check and re-check those drop piles, especially the ones near the cannon. You will not be picking up the lesser herbs that the spectres drop, which means some items will stay on the ground for a while. Sometimes a spectre may die and leave its drops underneath items that were already on the ground. So, even if you already know that there’s a grimy guam just to the west of the cannon, for example, check it again periodically. On many occasions I have done this and found, to my initial surprise, a grimy ranarr or grimy kwuarm hiding under there. The same goes for charms.

Here are some specific suggestions on dealing with drops, by drop type:

• Coins: These usually are not worth picking up. You get exactly 460 per pile, and rarely more than one per trip, so they aren’t worth a slot.
  
  
• Gems and Half Keys: These are always worth a slot.
  
  
• Herbs: These drop one, two or three at a time. I recommend picking up everything harralander and above, which usually provides the best balance between keeping herbs of high value and not needing to bank constantly. As mentioned above, watch for valuable herbs hiding under common ones.
  
  
• Herb Seeds: These are nearly all worth keeping, except perhaps irit seeds, which sometimes are worth less than 1k. I still recommend picking up all herb seeds, since they stack; you can decide near the end of the trip if you want to drop a single irit seed, for example, to make room for something else.
  
  
• Other Seeds: Poison ivy seeds are usually worth keeping, especially if you get more than one, so pick them up (they’re white). Belladonna and cactus seeds are cheap and usually not worth a slot.
  
  
• Weapons and Armor: All of these are worth picking up and taking home to sell or alch.

Jagex doesn’t want players to be able to just set up a cannon and feed it cannonballs for hours at a time without paying attention to what they are doing, so about every 25 minutes or so the game will cause the cannon to “degrade”. Five minutes before this happens (20 minutes after setting up the cannon), you get a message in your chat box saying “Your cannon has almost decayed!”. When you see that message, you must pick up your cannon and then put it back down. If you do not, a few minutes later you’ll see a message saying “Your cannon has decayed!” and it will disappear.

The message can be easy to miss if you have normal chat enabled. Turning the “Filter” option on in the game message settings makes it a lot easier to notice when the message appears.

Of course, you can also just keep track of the time yourself. Another option is to simply get in the habit of picking up and replacing the cannon every two or three trips (depending on how long each one takes). I average about 6 minutes per trip, total, so every three trips works well for me.

If you find yourself low on prayer, end the trip immediately. Otherwise, continue feeding your cannon, killing spectres and picking up drops until your inventory is starting to get nearly full. When you have only a couple of slots left, I recommend that you stop refilling the cannon and just finish off any spectres that are nearly dead. The reason you don’t want to keep the cannon going when your inventory is full is that any drops that appear from spectres killed while banking usually will be gone by the time you get back.

You won’t be able to pick exactly the best time to stop filling the cannon, so just do your best. If you happen to get more good drops than you can carry, then drop the least valuable item(s) in your inventory and pick up the new drop(s). You have more time to pick back up something you’ve dropped than something a monster drops, so it will probably still be there when you bank and return. On the other hand, if you stopped too soon, that’s no problem either: just pick up grimy tarromins, marrentills, guams or other “less desirable” drops to fill your inventory.

When you are ready to bank, go to your equipment interface, right-click the Ardougne cloak and select “Kandarin Monastery”. Turn off your quick prayer/curse and recharge at the altar there. Then right-click the ring of duelling and head to Castle Wars to bank.

The fastest way to bank is not to select each item individually to store. Instead, use the special bank interface button to dump your entire backpack into the bank. Then just take back your ring of slaying and another 1,000 cannonballs (or whatever your “Withdraw X” was set to the prior time).

Before leaving the bank, you may wish to boost your stats by taking another dose of your extreme or super set. How often you do this is up to you; doing it more often takes more time and costs more, but you get a few more kills. I use extreme potions every second trip.

Finally, be sure to watch your macaw’s timer, and bring a new pouch to renew when it has only a few minutes left.

Following the instructions above, you can do as many trips as you want in row. When you are completely done, save four slots in your inventory for your cannon, then pick it up and bank for the last time.

Here are some extra hints that you may find useful:

• Once in a while your macaw will forage an herb for you, in addition to affecting your herb drop probabilities. Be sure to check and save these!
  
  
• If you have a very high Prayer level and find yourself consistently finishing trips with more than half your prayer points remaining, you can try skipping the monastery every other trip. Alternately, you could experiment with turning on combat boosters like Piety or Turmoil—just be careful.
  
  
• If you kill a spectre that is standing very close to the cannon, be sure to check right under the cannon itself; I’ve had drops hide under there, where they are impossible to see.
  
  
• Inventory too full at the end of combat to take the cannon? Just bank, return using your ring of slaying, grab the cannon and bank again.
  
  
• If your cannon does decay, you can get a free replacement from Nulodion the dwarf, who lives in a little house near the main entrance to the dwarven mine north of Falador.
  
  
• After they are done, some players who are low on bank space let their cannon degrade intentionally if they won’t be using it for a while, saving four bank slots.
  
  
• There’s a Summoning obelisk conveniently located right in the aberrant spectres’ room.

Aberrant Spectre Cannoning Guide - Access, Location and World Selection RuneScoop Efficiency Mini-Guides