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RuneScoop.com  >  RuneScoop Monster Secrets       >  RuneScoop Monster Secrets - Mithril Dragon Guide

Mithril Dragon Guide - Common, Uncommon, Rare and Special Drops Mithril Dragon Guide - Location, Access and Positioning

Mith dragons are difficult to kill, and that means that finding the best ways to kill them requires a great deal of experimentation. In creating this guide, I spent a lot of time trying out various methods and types of equipment, rejecting some techniques and refining others. Along the way, I’ve learned a few things about the challenges that these monsters pose, and devised several strategies that work well for them. Before we get to the specific techniques, here’s a general discussion of some of the issues involved in killing these beasties, so you know what my thinking was in coming up with my methods, and why I made some of the choices that I did.

This famous and somewhat controversial saying is often applied to sporting events, where it has a fairly simple meaning. Those who believe it is true take the view that rather than devoting too much effort to trying to defend against the opponent, the best way to win is just to score early and often. If you score a great deal then it doesn’t matter if your opponent scores a little bit too.

The saying can apply to fighting mith dragons too—again, depending on your point of view. One of the basic problems with fighting them is that in most cases you are going to be using up resources: prayer potions and food. The amount of resources you use up depends on both how good your defence and prayer bonuses are and on how long it takes to kill them. Thus, there’s an essential trade-off between going for the kill fast at the cost of taking more hits, or trying to increase defence and prayer at the cost of slower kills, the extra time meaning you will take more hits anyway.

In my experiments, I have generally found that in most cases, with mith dragons the best defence is indeed a good offence. I have the best success when I try to kill them as quickly as possible so that I do not give them time to wear down my stat boosting pots and use up my food.

This strategy translates to using the best available equipment—within reason. I assume in my techniques the use of most of the typical high-level gear appropriate to each type of combat. I figure that if you’re an advanced player who likes ranging, you probably do own an Armadyl helmet; if you’re a mage who does combat casting, you have a mage’s book; and so forth. The only exception I make to this rule is with extremely expensive gear (I don’t do tests using third age equipment, fancy spirit shields and so forth.)

The same approach applies to the use of supplies. When fighting mithril dragons, you should use the best enhancing potions you can (extreme potions if possible; super potions otherwise). You should also use prayer to boost your combat effectiveness; usually this means prayer drains faster, but the kills go faster as well. On the other hand, I also try to balance this by not using very expensive supplies.

Like it or not, Herblore is now an important combat skill, and nowhere is that more true than with metal dragons. Being able to make super antifire potions is so important in terms of its impact on kill speed of these dragons that I felt I needed to define distinct methods both using and not using these potions. If you plan to regularly fight mithril dragons—or any other dragons, for that matter—getting level 85 Herblore should be at the top of your priority list. It allows you to use Verac’s, which is clearly the best melee technique; and improves ranging and maging techniques as well (though not by nearly as much).

Remember that you can make these potions at lower levels using enhancers.

The first question you have to answer in going after mith dragons is which combat style you want to use. There was a time when ranging was considered the most effective method, but changes to the game, combined with extensive testing, have convinced me that this is no longer the case. In fact, ranging is now the slowest of the three techniques (especially at very high levels).

Meleeing is the fastest method if you can make and use super antifire potions. Using those pots, you can equip full Veracs, which has a stab option and the ability to cut through the defence of the toughest creatures (Figure 15) . If you can’t use super antifires, you are stuck poking at the dragons with a short sword, which works but is much slower (though still tied for the fastest method below level 85 Herblore).

This may surprise you, but magic is the second-fastest method, and in fact nearly the same speed as melee. Mithril dragons are very susceptible to magic attacks, and using high level spells you can kill them pretty close to as fast as meleeing. The problem here is the cost of the runes. If you are looking for the most cost-efficient technique, maging is not the way to go. But if getting Magic XP is something you value, then maging mithril dragons can be very effective.

Ranging is a decent approach for players with more modest skills, and especially those who lack 85 Herblore: it is the combat method least affected by the need to use an anti-dragon shield. But it’s not the best way to go unless you are a die-hard ranger. It is slightly slower than melee and magic before level 85 Herblore, but falls far behind the competition at very high levels. See below for more details.

The two main factors determining trip length are supplies and inventory space to carry drops. Both of these are, in turn, affected by your choice of familiar.

There are only two logical choices for a Summoning familiar when fighting mithril dragons: a healing familiar or a beast of burden. The attraction of a healer is obvious, due to the damage you’ll take constantly when fighting these; using a bunyip or a unicorn stallion, you can restore a lot of damage quickly and save yourself from food. But a beast of burden is a better choice, because its extra inventory space lets you bank less frequently (or keep more drops, depending on how you look at it). The beast can also carry food into combat for you, thanks to the new fairy ring in the Ancient Cavern.

The higher capacity the beast of burden, the more kills you can get while keeping all of the monsters’ drops. With a pack yak you have a total of 58 inventory slots, so getting 10 or more kills per trip is entirely doable. With a lower level familiar you will aim for shorter trips.

One option for players who have pack yaks is to use that familiar’s special move to bank drops remotely. I tested this out and it does allow the possibility of staying for 15, 20 or even more kills per trip. However, you run into diminishing returns here, because you end up having to use more expensive food, and the scrolls themselves aren’t cheap either. It turns out that you are better off not using the scrolls.

This one is easy: the ancient curses are superior to conventional prayers for these monsters.

For protection, the Deflect curses are better than the Protection prayers because these dragons have hard enough hits that the rebound damage can actually have an impact. This is especially useful for maging and ranging, where you’ll use Deflect Melee.

In terms of enhancing options, the Leech curses turn out to be more useful than the boosts available on the conventional prayer book. I compared ranging using Eagle Eye to ranging with Leech Ranged and Leech Defence, and the latter was far more effective. For meleeing, Turmoil is better than Piety in all respects—it gives better boosts and it drains prayer more slowly. It requires a much higher Prayer level, though. So the only situation where it might make more sense to be on conventional prayers is if you are meleeing and have a prayer level too low to use Turmoil. In that case, Piety might be a better choice than using the three lower-level curses (Leech Attack/Defence/Strength), which combine to impose quite a bit of drain on your prayer.

Mithril dragons have multiple attacks and you cannot defend against all of them. The usual way to deal with this is to use prayers/curses to protect against one attack form and your gear to reduce the damage dealt by the others. (This ignores dragonfire, which we deal with separately). You can either stay in melee range and deal with melee and magic attacks, or step back and handle ranged and magic attacks.

The most dangerous attack is melee, which can hit up to 280, so for most methods, I assume the use of Deflect Melee, and then use magic defence gear. This is better than using Deflect Ranged from a distance, because it provides more deflection damage. It is also safer and more effective than using high melee defence gear with Deflect Magic.

The exception to this is when using Veracs in the high end melee method. Veracs is a melee defence set, and you use Turmoil, which also boosts defence. Here, you are vulnerable to magic attacks, so you use Deflect Magic and count on your armor and Turmoil to reduce melee hits.

If you’re going to melee, you want to use Veracs if you have a high enough Herblore level. Otherwise, the right weapon may not be as obvious you’d think. Most players automatically reach for an abyssal whip in nearly every case, but miths seem to have very high defence against slashing attacks, and I’ve found a whip very frustrating to use. Their only slight weakness melee-wise seems to be stabbing weapons, and there really aren’t very many good stab weapons in the game.

I tested several candidates, including the dragon dagger, dragon longsword, dragon battleaxe, and dragon longsword. But it turns out that the leaf-bladed sword is actually the best choice among the single-handed weapons. While it’s nothing fancy to look at, it is a reasonably fast weapon and has a good stabbed attack bonus (+67).

Magic Attack Spell Selection

As I mentioned above, mithril dragons actually are fairly weak to magic attacks, but you must have a high Magic level, use proper gear, and also select a powerful spell. In my tests, I have found that low-cost options like using Fire Bolt with chaos gauntlets are not effective, because you splash too often, so you waste a lot of runes as well as prayer potions due to the slow kill speed.

Magic Dart is an effective spell against mithril dragons, and with the appropriate gear and magic boosting potions, can hit for more than 200 LP. The problem with this spell is that it gives poor Magic XP: its base is only 30 XP. And really, the only reason to mage these guys is for the XP.

The best choice is to use the new surge spells, especially Fire Surge. With the correct boosters, this spell can hit well over 300, enabling you to kill a mithril dragon at speeds approaching the Veracs method (Figure 16). The base experience for this spell is also 90 XP—contrast that to only 42.5 for Fire Wave—and so you can get quite a bit of XP per hour. Thanks to recently reducing rune prices, it isn’t even that expensive any more. Those who do not have the levels for Fire Surge should use Fire Wave, which despite the much lower base XP number is still pretty good.

I do not recommend using Ancient Magicks here: the spells are prohibitively expensive and the special effects (like freezing) provide little real benefit.

Ranging Ammunition

The best ammunition for killing mithril dragons is a combination of enchanted ruby and diamond bolts: you start with the ruby bolts, hoping to get a big hit (up to 500 is possible) and then switch to the diamond. This is what I recommended when I first wrote this guide, but unfortunately, the prices of gems have gone through the roof since then, and these bolts are now not cost-effective to use for mithril dragons.

Yes, I know I said that it makes sense to use the best supplies for faster kills, but with these bolts each kill can cost more than maging, and you aren’t getting tons of XP for your effort. The best compromise is to use regular adamant bolts. They are not nearly as expensive as runite bolts or the gem bolts, but hit quite hard. I tested broad-tipped bolts, but the number of misses was much higher.

The dark bow is not effective on mithril dragons, even with overpriced dragon arrows.

Most of the primary weapons used to fight mithril dragons have either no special attack, or no special attack worth using. If you have a weapon with a special that is appropriate to high level monster combat, bring it with and use it periodically. You can also use recover special potions to allow you to “spec” more frequently.

The best weapon for this purpose is the Saradomin godsword: its special will restore both prayer and life points on a successful hit (Figure 17). The Bandos godsword is also useful as its special will lower the defence of the dragon you use it on; unfortunately this is a full drain spec. The ancient mace would seem like a good choice otherwise, since it can give you bonus prayer points, but in practice, it rarely hits monsters as tough as miths. Enhanced Excalibur is another option as it heals 200 LP for a full spec bar.

The ability to take beasts of burden into the Ancient Cavern has revolutionized the issue of food when it comes to fighting mithril dragons. Before you had to use good quality food to conserve inventory space, but now you can use much cheaper food, consuming it as you fight to make room for drops.

For most of my techniques, I use a “standard” food package: 10 salmon, 5 strawberry baskets and 5 monkfish. The salmon are inexpsnive, heal 90 LP, and what I usually eat first. The strawberry baskets have 5 strawberries in them, each of which heals 60 LP (for high level players); these I use to top up health while waiting for the dragon I am fighting to respawn. The monkfish are the most economical of the “better” food items, and are there in case of unexpected heavy damage.

I no longer use Saradomin brews for healing. These are certainly a viable option, but they are expensive, and given the frequent banking to store drops, not necessary.

I also like to use the new Barbarian “mix” potions, as they provide 60 healing per dose and let you pot up and heal a bit in one swig. If you have these, by all means use them, but they aren’t mandatory.

You have to run past a couple of annoying monsters to get to the lair: waterfiends and brutal green dragons. The former have a ranged and mage attack; the latter a melee, mage and firebreath attack. Always drink your antifire or super antifire potion before entering the main part of the dungeon (or moving off the fairy ring). You may also wish to put on Deflect Magic before running to the mith dragon stairs, and try to avoid getting close to the brutal greens.

If you are using any method where your melee defence is particularly low—such as ranging with an anti-dragon shield instead of a dragonfire shield—you may wish to put on Deflect Melee instead while running past the brutal greens, but usually Deflect Magic is better. If the technique uses Deflect Melee or Protection from Melee, definitely put that on before going up the stairs to the miths.

Fight mith dragons for long enough, and eventually you are going to die—it seems inevitable, even if you are following my well-crafted techniques. Heck, I’ve done it myself. :) Fortunately, the new gravestone feature means you don’t have to lose anything, as long as you keep your head and think quickly.

First, get to a bank. If you have completed Nomad’s Requiem, you should have your spawn location set to Soul Wars, as this puts you right next to a bank chest.

Next, take out the following items: an anti-dragon shield or dragonfire shield; lunar or dramen staff; ring of slaying; basic armor (like black dragonhide); antifire or super antifire potion; inexpensive food; beast of burden pouch. Always keep a spare lunar/dramen staff and anti-dragon shield in the bank for these sorts of emergencies! If you don’t have an extra staff, take out a games necklace instead.

Get to the mith dragons either using the fairy rings or the alternate way via games necklace and the whirlpool. Put on Protection from Melee, quaff the antifire potion, and run to your gravestone. Summon the beast of burden to give you extra inventory space, pick up your stuff and you should be all set.

Mithril Dragon Guide - Common, Uncommon, Rare and Special Drops Mithril Dragon Guide - Location, Access and Positioning