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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Laboratory - RuneScape Gameplay Testing and Myth Busting

The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #2 - Sara and Zammy Have a Water Fight The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #4 - Does It Actually Have a Use?

Published: February 12, 2010

As I began combat testing for my new waterfiends guide, I initially reached for the same set of gear that I’ve always used to kill them. However, the results of my first RuneScoop Labs test led me to question my standard setup. If it was possible to get better results from a ring with a +4 attack bonus than one with a +4 strength bonus, maybe there were other possible areas for improvement too?

Well, for waterfiends you need a crush attack, and there isn’t a ring that gives a +4 bonus there the way the warrior ring does for slash attacks. But I realized there was a different opportunity here: the head slot.

I have always used the helm of Neitiznot as my default headgear (when not using Barrows sets) because of its nice defence bonuses, along with boosts of +3 to strength and prayer. But there’s a quest item called the dwarven helmet that is similar defensively, except it trades the strength and prayer bonuses for +6 to crush attack. This is a reward for completing the Grim Tales, a quest that anyone who regularly kills waterfiends won’t have much trouble with.

This doesn’t seem like a fair test, does it? If +4 to slash attack is more useful with a slashing weapon than +4 to strength, then surely +6 to crush attack versus +3 to strength should be a slam dunk. Well, that’s what I thought too...

Like most item comparisons, this was a pretty straight-forward test, where I engaged in combat using one item and then the other, while trying to keep all of the other conditions constant. Having already concluded that the Saradomin sword is better than the Zamorakian spear for waterfiends, I chose the Sara sword as my weapon for the test. I then used all of the other typical gear that most high-level players select for waterfiends: Karil’s top and skirt, Soul Wars cape, amulet of fury, “Barrows” gloves, dragon boots and berserker ring.

For this lab report I did four sets of tests. Frankly, I expected this to be a really simple victory for the dwarven helmet, and I started out with my usual test conditions, using no potions. I do that for consistency, to avoid potential issues with potions wearing off faster when testing one item than the other. However, after I got the results of that test, I realized this might not be an ideal test setup because usually one would be potted during combat.

The second test was done using overload potions. These set your combat stats to maximum and keep them there for a period of time; I watched carefully and “repotted” immediately when they wore off.

For the third test I went back to the no potion setup to see if I could duplicate my initial results. As you’ll see shortly, I couldn’t.

My final test was an attempt to evaluate the area in the “middle” between using no potions and using overloads. In this case I used super sets, potting up my combat stats to 118, letting them trickle down to 106, then repeating. I did that for both pieces of headgear.

As always, I used a stopwatch to time my combat, which I started at the beginning of combat with each monster, and stopped when it died. I then checked to see how many experience points I gained during combat, and normalized the results to equivalents for a full hour of combat.

Each test involved approximately 15 to 20 minutes of actual in-combat time (not including time to run to the monster to attack, pick up drops, heal, etc.) This worked out to about 2.5 hours of time in combat, or close to the equivalent of 3.5 to 4 hours of casual combat.

You can find the results of my tests in Table 4.

Uh... okay! You got any idea what those numbers mean? Nope? Well, neither do I. :) At first it seemed like the dwarven helmet was going to win the test fairly readily, but I was surprised that there would be more advantage for it with the overloads. (In theory, an attack bonus should help more if you have a lower Attack level, because it means it helps avoid more zero hits.) So I redid the first test, only to find that suddenly the Helm of Neitiznot did better. And the results of the last test left me completely baffled.

The only conclusion I can draw from this test is that it was unconclusive. The best explanation I can come up with for the results was that the infamous RuneScape random number generator reared its ugly head, giving me atypical results. What’s especially surprising here is that the sample size here was fairly large: I killed on the order of 350 to 400 waterfiends combined in these tests. But the randomness issue is something important to keep in mind, the next time you have one of those long Barrows dry streaks or wonder why you haven’t gotten a bird’s nest in ages...

So is the dwarven helmet really better than the helm of Neitiznot for waterfiends? My guess is that it is, even if these tests don’t prove it conclusively. But it’s also pretty clear to me that if there is a difference, it’s a pretty small one, so if you feel more comfortable with your “wings” then by all means wear them. Certainly, the helm is preferred if using any method that involves prayer.

The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #2 - Sara and Zammy Have a Water Fight The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #4 - Does It Actually Have a Use?