General Method Description

Red dragons are easily the least popular of the "regular" color-coded dragons in RuneScape, because they are only found deep in Brimhaven Dungeon and deep in the Wilderness. Neither location is particularly easy to get to, and since you need to bank frequently, this is a bit of a turn off. An added annoyance is that in Brimhaven there are aggressive wild dogs in their area, which will distract anyone who has a combat level below 127.

The flip side of these disadvantages is easy to guess: none of the crowds at the red dragons that plague their green, blue and black counterparts. And since the addition of Summoning, you can use beasts of burden to dramatically cut down on the amount of time wasted running to and from the bank.

You are guaranteed about 7k worth of drops per kill, so these are a good moneymaker. But note that red dragons have very poor secondary drops -- they are arguably worse than blue dragons and even green dragons.

With level 70 skills, red dragons are fairly slow to kill. With level 90 skills you can kill them much more quickly.

At extremely high levels, I like to switch gears and take advantage of a couple of advanced abilities. I use super antifire potions (level 85 Herblore required) to allow me to make use of two-handed weapons, and then fight the dragons using Dharoks. This is somewhat dangerous, but you can get a lot of kills very quickly. I combine this with the pack yak's Winter Storage scrolls to let me stay for a full hour per trip rather than having to run back and forth to the bank constantly. This is a trade-off, because the scrolls themselves are worth about 400 gp each. However, in my tests, I have found that the scrolls allow me to make more money, especially given the long run to the red dragon area. This method also has some other advantages, including more Combat XP, more Summoning charms, and even a little bit of Summoning XP from the scrolls.

I tested this method using both food and prayer. While prayer is slightly more expensive, it is much safer, more enjoyable, and lets you get more kills per hour because you can let your HP level get lower (for bigger Dharok's whallops) and you don't have to spend so much time eating and juggling inventory.