When they were first introduced to the game, waterfiends were mainly viewed as annoying pests that would attack you when you tried to run past them to get to the mithril dragons in the Ancient Cavern. All of that changed with the introduction of the Summoning skill, because Jagex made waterfiends one of the very best sources of crimson charms in the game, making them a very popular monster among high level players training Summoning. They are aggressive and somewhat tough monsters; because they use both a ranged and magic attack, you cannot avoid damage using just prayer.
The desire to get large numbers of charms quickly for Summoning training has led many players to devise clever ways of killing these beasties very quickly, often involving the use of enhancing prayers. However, if you are willing to be a bit more frugal, you can kill them a little more slowly for much lower cost, allowing you to get many crimson charms and also make money off the waterfiends' other drops.
If life is like a box of chocolates as Forrest Gump said, then waterfiends are as well, at least when it comes to drops. They drop a surprising array of valuable items, including herbs, herb seeds and gems; large numbers of mithril arrows, death and blood runes; noted water orbs, snape grass, seaweed, water vials and mithril ore; combination runes and much more. Because of this variety, every time you go for a trip you'll get a rather different selection, but almost always quite a few items of value. Waterfiends also drop unnoted raw sharks and lobsters, which makes them an ideal choice for using a bunyip familiar. You can use the raw fish to heal if you need it, or use the fish on the bunyip to get water runes (a random number from 1 to 12 for lobsters, or 1 to 20 for sharks).
Since the goal here is to make money, I devised a system that keeps cost to a minimum -- in particular, no prayer potions are required. Each trip should last just about an hour, depending on how lucky you get with food drops and so forth.
Effective waterfiend combat requires a good crush weapon. For those on a budget, Veracs flail is a decent choice, but the Saradomin sword and Zamorakian spear are much better, because they are faster weapons and hit more frequently. I have assumed the use of Veracs flail for the very high level method here, and a Saradomin sword for the extremely high level method. Other weapon choices include the barrelchest anchor or a godsword, but the slow speed of these actually makes them inferior here. |
All information based on Grand Exchange price data from: May 19, 2012. Note that the three-day delay in price updates is waived for RuneScoop members. 