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

The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #3 - “R” is for “Random” The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #5 - Penance Versus Apes

Published: March 3, 2010

For years, the ring of wealth has been one of RuneScape’s most controversial items. Introduced back in 2004, it was presented by Jagex as an item that was intended to increase the chance of getting rare drops from monsters. The company gave some information about what this meant, but never explained the ring in detail, nor specifically how it worked. Over time, players became split roughly evenly between those who thought it helped make getting a rare drop more likely, and those who thought it was a waste of an equipment slot. And since rare drops are, well, rare, it was never possible to gather enough empirical evidence to prove the ring’s worth either way.

On February 6, 2010, Jagex finally provided a detailed description of how the ring actually functioned. On that date, we all learned that the ring only increased the chance of getting an item from the special rare drop table that is shared by several monsters: items like uncut gems, half keys, rune javelins, the dragon shield left half and so forth. The ring has no effect on items unique to particular monsters, so all of the players who had been using the ring to try to get Saradomin hilts, abyssal whips and dragon claws had been wasting their time.

This led to a great deal of annoyance on the part of many players, especially high level ones, who were quick to write off the ring as useless. There is some validity to this argument, for two reasons. First, the ring only has an effect if the drop rolled for a particular monster happens to land on the slot for the rare drop table in the first place, and for most monsters, that is not very common to begin with. And second, even when this does occur, the value of even the rare items on the rare drop table is a fraction of what it once was: long gone are the days of players getting super-excited about a rune spear or a dragon shield left half.

I wondered, though: what if there were a monster where “landing” on the rare drop table was a much more common occurrence? Is it possible that in that case, the ring of wealth might actually be useful? It didn’t take long before a particular beast came to mind: the gorak.

Goraks are fairly high level monsters that players initially encounter in a special extradimensional plane as part of the quest A Fairy Tale, Part II—it is necessary to kill them in order to obtain gorak claws, which are ground and used as a potion ingredient in that quest. Goraks can also be killed after the quest is over, and are now even assigned as Slayer monsters (by Duradel).

One interesting thing about goraks is that you cannot use protection prayers against them, which makes them quite annoying to fight. But I noted also the fact that whenever I killed these monsters, they seemed only to provide gems and half keys as their normal drops. (They also drop big bones 100% of the time and gorak claws occasionally.) Could these drops be coming from the rare drop table, and if so, would a ring of wealth help?

Let’s find out.

This turned out to be a very simple test to do. Unlike the others I’ve conducted so far as part of the RuneScoop Laboratory series, this comparison wasn’t based on comparing kill rates, but rather drop rates. This meant that careful attention to combat time wasn’t really that important, so it was much easier for me to set up and run the test. I just fought goraks for an hour wearing a ring of wealth and counted kills and drops, then did the same without the ring of wealth (using a warrior ring) and compared the results.

I used a fairly standard setup for gorak combat, consisting of Barrows armor for defence, my Soul Wars cape, “Barrows” gloves and dragon boots. I used my Saradomin godsword—which helped me deal with the damage these monsters do—and an amulet of fury. For the first test I wore a ring of wealth, and for the second I put on a warrior ring.

During the first test I was able to kill 114 goraks; in the second, I killed 117. The difference might be attributable to random chance—it’s a small discrepancy—but it is possible that the warrior ring helped me kill a bit faster as well.

Table 5 shows the complete results of my drop test from one hour of killing goraks with a ring of wealth and one hour of killing them with a warrior ring.

A couple of noteable things stand out from this table. The first row shows that using a ring of wealth reduced the number of “nothing” drops from the goraks by nearly 50%—this was quite a bit more than I expected. Also interesting is the much larger number of rubies and diamonds obtained when not using the ring of wealth. Frankly, I think this was just a fluke: there were far more special drops with the ring of wealth and far more sapphires and emeralds; I don’t see any logical reason why “in between” drops like rubies and diamonds would be fewer with the ring of wealth. So I think it was just random chance, since those items are fairly low in probability to begin with. (In the same manner, I don’t think the chance of a half key is three times higher with a ring of wealth than without one, even though that happened here.)

In Table 6 I have summarized the results of this test, which are also shown graphically in Figure 2.

The direct conclusion here is pretty simple: the ring of wealth definitely has at least one use. It significantly increases the number of drops you receive when killing goraks, giving you more gems per hour, more half keys, and a greater likelihood of receiving one of the special drops. So if you are fighting goraks on a Slayer assignment, or you want to try to train on them for gems and half keys, the ring of wealth is the right choice.

Unfortunately, goraks are fairly awful monsters to fight, and it’s not likely that even this discovery will make them a popular training or resource collection option. And I am not aware of any other monsters that drop gems and other items from the rare drop table often enough to bother using a ring of wealth when fighting them. There are some, like dust devils, that do seem to drop gems fairly often, but this still means only a few per hour. With such low numbers, doing any sort of reliable test is simply not possible.

Jagex has said that it is considering changing how the ring of wealth works, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #3 - “R” is for “Random” The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #5 - Penance Versus Apes