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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Beastopedia - RuneScape Monster Data, Combat Guide and Drop Logs       >  The RuneScoop Beastopedia - Understanding the Beastopedia            >  The RuneScoop Beastopedia - General Information

Beastopedia Caveats and Limitations Key Issues and Decisions in Combat Testing and Measurement

Nearly every RuneScape character has a unique set of skill levels, including combat skills that affect how quickly they can kill monsters. There was obviously no way for me to simulate what combat would be like for every possible combat skill level on each of over 200 monsters—I had to just use my own main character, Qeltar, to do the combat tests in the Wikipedia. And as I mentioned in the prior topic, Qeltar has very high skill levels: “maxed out” in melee skills and pretty close to it in Ranged and Magic.

Skill levels impact equipment usability, kill rates, supply consumption and drops—pretty much everything associated with the actual combat tests. This means that when you read the Beastopedia and see the figures I’ve provided, you must bear in mind that they apply only when fighting with a very high level character. If your character has lower combat skill levels, you cannot assume you will be able to achieve what I did in my tests.

Unfortunately, compensating for lower skill levels is not always easy to do, because there is no simple straight-forward relationship between combat level and how quickly or easily you can kill a monster. You cannot say that if I get 137 kills per hour for a particular monster at my combat level of 137, that you can get 90 kills per hour of the same monster at combat level 90. In some cases you might be able to get almost as many kills as I can, and in others, less than half. It all depends.

The “S-Curve” Relationship Between Skill Levels and Monster Kill Ability

In my testing, I’ve found that there is generally an “S-curve” (sigmoid) relationship between combat level and the number of kills per hour a character can obtain. At low levels the kill rate of a monster is very slow; it then increases rapidly as a character gets skill levels that are in the right range to kill the monster more quickly. But the kill speed then tails off as you get to even higher combat levels, where the extra few successful hits and points of damage don’t make all that much of a difference compared to how they would for a less experienced player. The middle of the curve is where you start to get diminishing returns from higher levels and is called the inflection point.

A complementary but inverse version of this “S-curve” also exists for supplies used in killing most monsters. At very low levels you need large amounts of supplies; this drops quickly once you get to high enough levels that the monsters don’t hit much, and then this advantage tails off when levels get higher still.

To illustrate this phenomenon, I did a special combat test where I simulated killing baby blue dragons at melee combat levels of 30, 50, 70 and 90, in addition to my usual 99. In each case I wore level-appropriate regular melee equipment and used super sets to enhance combat performance. Table 168 shows how many kills per hour I was able to get (not including banking time). At level 10 I doubt I would have been able to kill even one, so its figure is 0.

You can see here that there’s a big difference in kill speed when you go from level 30 skills to 50 and then to 70, but then the advantage tails off. At very high levels you don’t get a big advantage because it’s already easy to kill these monsters, and other factors such as respawn time come into the picture.

Understanding and Analyzing the “S-Curve”

Looking at the “S-curve” relationship between levels and monster kill speeds tells you roughly how to approximate how your character will deal with monsters in the Beastopedia. The key to this is the steep middle portion of the curve, where kill speed starts to rise rapidly, before leveling off.

If your combat level is higher than the combat level where the steep portion of the curve levels off, you won’t notice much difference between your combat ability and mine. In the baby blue dragons example, you can see that at level 90 skills you kill almost as many as at level 99.

If your combat level is below where the curve starts to rise, you’ll experience a huge drop-off in combat ability compared to what the Beastopedia shows. Taking the baby dragons example again, someone with level 50 melee skills kills 56% as many dragons as someone at level 70 skills, but a level 30 character kills only 31% as many as at level 50.

The middle portion of the curve, around the inflection point where the curve starts to approach the top of the “S”, is where things are more difficult—it is here that small increases in combat level make a big difference in kill ability. In general, the middle of the curve often corresponds to about half the kill speed that is possible at level 99 skills, but that’s not absolute.

The other big problem, of course, is figuring out where the rapidly increasing portion of the S-curve is, that is, at what skill level you find the inflection point—it depends on the monster. In the case of the baby blue dragons, the greatest increases in kill speed come between around level 30 skills and level 70 skills, as you can see in Figure 8.

Lower-level monsters will have the inflection point shifted to the left; for example, if you are fighting chickens, there’s a big difference between level 10 melee stats and level 30, but not a lot between level 50 and level 70, and almost none between 70 and 90. Conversely, with high-level monsters every skill level counts, and there can be a major difference between level 70 and level 90 skills, while those with level 10, 30 or 50 skills would all be the same (zero!)

The Bottom Line: Approximate Level Adjustments for Beastopedia Kill Rates

Again, I must emphasize that there’s no way for me to tell you exactly how well you can fight each monster type at different levels. That said, Table 169 should give you a ballpark idea of what percentage of the kill speed at level 99 skills I would suggest is possible for a range of monster and player levels. Again, this is only an approximation—you’ll need to test out the monsters yourself to see precisely how well you do.

As a final note, you’ve probably noticed that all of the evaluations I’ve done here assume balanced combat statistics. Obviously that is not true of all players, so again, you’ll have to adapt my figures to suit your circumstances if you have a character with both very high and very low combat skills.

Beastopedia Caveats and Limitations Key Issues and Decisions in Combat Testing and Measurement