RuneScoop.com - The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #6 - The Fascinating Truth About Kill Count at The Barrows

I often say that there are three main motivators for doing anything in RuneScape: fun, experience, or profit. Rarely, there are places in the game where all three converge, and the activity known as The Barrows is one of them. Many players travel deep into the heart of Morytania to fight the fallen brothers of a bygone age, in search of loot, including the rare and sought after Barrows armor. They earn experience while they do it—including much-coveted Magic XP—and have some fun at the same time.

The Barrows is a complicated activity—by which I mean minigame; I hate Jagex’s new term for minigames, since it is so generic—and there are many ways to do it. You can use magic, ranged and/or melee attacks, and there are dozens of combinations of equipment and techniques. Many players spend a lot of time working out the most efficient ways of getting to the chest, to maximize the chances of getting some cool loot. I myself have done hundreds of runs through The Barrows, always trying new ideas to see what works best.

One of the decisions that players have to make when they go through The Barrows is how high of a kill count to get. This refers to how many of the monsters in the tunnels to kill in addition to the six Barrows brothers themselves. Opinions have always varied wildly about how high a kill count one should strive for. Jagex has said that kill count does not influence the chances of getting a Barrows item, only the coin, rune and bolt rack drops you can also get from the chest. But those can constitute a large percentage of the value you get from the chest, so how many kills should you get?

Despite The Barrows having been around for many years, this is still a contentious question. I’ve seen players say you should strive for a kill count of 15 in addition to the brothers, and some say not to kill any monsters at all, and every number in between. Most players agree that a higher kill count gives better mundane drops, but they disagree on how exactly the drops change as kill count goes up. And there’s also an important trade-off at work here, because the more time you spend killing bloodworms and crypt rats and skeletons, the longer it takes to get to the chest, and the fewer chances you get at Barrows armor pieces.

Last week, I finally decided that enough was enough, and I was going to attempt to answer the kill count question once and for all. So I sat down and began a marathon campaign of controlled Barrows runs using a variety of kill counts. What I found surprised me, and may even revolutionize how the Barrows is done from now on.

My primary goal with this test was to try The Barrows with a variety of kill counts, keep track of the drops received, and then analyze the results to see what the relationship was between kill count and items in the chest. I also had a secondary goal, though, which was to attempt to quantify how much extra time it takes to get higher kill counts. For this reason, I timed all of my runs, as well as keeping track of my chest rewards.

The exact method I used to The Barrows didn’t matter much for this test, since it was only how the runs went relative to each other that was important—I just had to use the same method each time. But I’ll describe it a bit anyway, just to be thorough.

My basic technique was maging the melee brothers using Fire Surge, and meleeing Ahrim and Karil. I did six chests on each run, starting out by banking in Canifis. I began with Dharok, maging him using Fire Surge. I then switched to my dragon dagger (p++) and used specials on Ahrim, switching to my abyssal whip if he wasn’t already dead after four specs. I then killed Karil using any leftover specials and/or the whip, then switched back to magic for the remaining melee brothers. After each chest I ran back out of the tunnels, including the last chest (again, for consistency).

I performed runs of six chests for each of kill count values 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12 and 15. I then went back and did six more runs for kill counts 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. All in all, 96 chests were plundered and their contents recorded.

I attempted to obtain kill count in the most effective way possible, focusing on the small crypt rats and the bloodworms, since they are the easiest and fastest to kill. I killed these when they spawned as I went through doors, saving some kill count for the door leading to the center room where appropriate. For runs with high kill counts, I stopped in the rooms with the bloodworms and rats to rack up kill count if I happened to run through them; otherwise I spawned them using the doors near the chest. I avoided killing skeletons except where necessary; I never kill spiders or the larger crypt rats since they have a lot of life points.

Note that getting a kill count of 0 can in fact be difficult, since you sometimes need to kill a monster to be able to open the door to the center room. When this situation occurred, I ran away from the door and then ran back until I was able to open the door without killing anything; I stopped my timer while doing this.

In addition to noting the items I received from the chest, I also kept track of the time for each run, which brother was in the tunnels, and how far the chest room door was from the entrance room. As we’ll see, the location of the door is important for normalizing run time, because it takes significantly more time if you have to run all the way around the maze to get to the chest, compared to it being right next to the rope.

This section is long, so I’m going to break it into three sections: one discussing drop distribution, one discussing time analysis, and one that ties them together.

The first thing I discovered immediately in my testing is worth noting up front. Assuming you kill all six brothers, each contributes one “drop” to the chest that you get when you open it: either a Barrows item or a mundane drop (coins/runes/racks). The exact number of items you get from each “drop” differs each time, but usually falls within a particular range; for example, you normally get 35 to 39 bolt racks when you get bolt racks, about 270 to 330 mind runes, etc. This range is not affected by kill count. If a particular brother decides to give you mind runes, he will always give 270 to 330 or so, regardless of kill count.

As we’ll see shortly, what kill count influences is the distribution of mundane drops you get: you get more of some drops with higher kill count, and more of some others with a lower kill count.

I was going to start out here by showing you the raw numbers of how many gold pieces, mind runes, chaos runes, etc. that I got for each kill count. However, the result was a table with lots of big numbers that really didn’t say very much—even I found it confusing. Again, since the number of items you get for each drop is fixed in a particular range, we can see patterns more clearly by figuring out the distribution of drops for each kill count value.

Unfortunately, the amount of gold you can get from a particular brother’s contribution has a very wide range: it can be 1 coin or 1,000 coins. This means it is necessary to deduce the number of coin drops by looking at the numbers of other items. For example, suppose in a particular chest I got 82 blood runes, 74 death runes, 283 mind runes and 1,123 gold pieces. That has to be 2 blood rune drops since they are usually around 40, 1 death rune drop, 1 mind rune drop, and thus 2 gold drops.

(As an aside, I did find some strange instances where there seemed to be more than six contributions in the chest! For example, one time, in one chest I got 306 coins, 298 minds, 369 chaos runes, 77 deaths and 43 bloods. That’s one drop each of minds, deaths and bloods. It has to be three drops of chaos runes, since they are never more than 140, and usually about 125, which brings us to six. But then there were coins also!)

Anyway, I did this calculation for each chest, and added up all the numbers for each kill count figure. I then calculated the percentage of all of the drops that I got for each item type; this information is shown in Table 7. The same information is shown graphically in Figure 3.

**Table 7: Distribution of Mundane Drops in Barrows Chest by Kill Count**
Kill Count	Coin Drops	Mind Rune Drops	Chaos Rune Drops	Death Rune Drops	Blood Rune Drops	Bolt Rack Drops
0	55.6%	27.8%	11.1%	5.6%	0%	0%
1	45.8%	22.2%	22.2%	9.7%	0%	0%
2	39.4%	18.3%	16.9%	21.1%	4.2%	0%
3	39.4%	21.1%	16.9%	15.5%	7.0%	0%
4	41.1%	11.0%	20.5%	15.1%	11.0%	1.4%
5	27.0%	16.2%	14.9%	16.2%	18.9%	6.8%
6	29.7%	21.6%	13.5%	10.8%	10.8%	13.5%
9	26.3%	23.7%	18.4%	5.3%	13.2%	13.2%
12	32.4%	11.8%	20.6%	11.8%	11.8%	11.8%
15	27.0%	18.9%	10.8%	8.1%	13.5%	21.6%

While subject to the usual randomness influence, this data shows pretty clearly how Jagex rewards players for getting higher kill counts. Some obvious results are that as your kill count increases you get fewer coin drops, and you gain the possibility of getting blood runes and then bolt racks in the chest.

Superficially, it seems that the higher the kill count, the more value you get from the chest (excluding Barrows items for now, of course.) And that may well have been the case when the Barrows was first released. I know that when I first started playing back in 2005, blood runes were worth a lot more than death runes, because they were hard to get and not part of the Runecrafting skill. And bolt racks were also expensive because their high speed and damage potential was highly valued.

But things have changed. Blood runes are now craftable, and are dropped in significant quantities by several monsters. And Karil’s crossbow has largely been pushed aside by new crossbow bolts with fancy effects. The end result is that death runes are worth more per item than either bloods or racks. Now consider that you normally get around 72 to 82 death runes per death rune drop, compared to about 35 to 40 bloods or bolt racks, and the death rune drop becomes clearly the most valuable. Table 8 shows the average number of each item I got per drop in my test, the value of each item as I did the test, and the resulting total value per drop.

**Table 8: Average Value of Mundane Barrows Drops**
Item	Average # Per Drop	Value	Average Value Per Drop
Gold Pieces	544	1	544
Mind Runes	291	5	1,450
Chaos Runes	125	84	10,500
Death Runes	74.4	387	28,800
Blood Runes	40.2	371	14,900
Bolt Racks	36.1	230	8,300

As you can see, death runes are what you want if it’s money you’re after, and let’s face it, that’s a main reason many do the Barrows. (It’s more fun if you make more money than less, after all!) But the percentage of death rune drops actually starts to decrease once you get above about a kill count of five!

We can combine the drop percentages and the value figures above to determine the average value of each chest for the various kill count figures. This information is shown in Figure 4. Despite a certain amount of randomness, it’s pretty clear that you get a lot of benefit for those first few monster kills, but then it actually becomes counter-productive to get more monster kills!

I then analyzed the data to determine the overall trends in the changes of drop distribution by kill count, and came up with average figures to match the data while eliminating the randomness. The result is a smoothed version of the prior graph, which is shown in Figure 5.

The drop analysis above already shows that there are not just diminishing returns from getting a kill count above 5, but actual decreases in total value. And that’s before taking into account the extra time required to get higher kill count, which is what we’ll look at now.

Like assessing drops, measuring the time needed for a run to the chest inherently means dealing with some randomness. Factors like which brother is in the tunnels, how lucky you get with specials, and which room you enter the tunnels in, can all influence how long it takes to get to the chest and then back out again. However, the greatest impact comes from how far you need to run from where you enter the tunnels to the door that leads to the chest.

I wanted to mostly remove this element from the equation, so I tested roughly how much longer it takes to go from the first door adjacent to the rope to the fourth door, all the way around the maze. I kept track of where the door was for each chest, and then adjusted the times I measured based on how far I had to run. This worked pretty well; the resulting adjusted average time figures are shown in Table 9.

**Table 9: Average Barrows Chest Run Time by Kill Count**
Kill Count	Average Time (min)
0	6.2
1	6.1
2	6.2
3	6.3
4	6.5
5	6.8
6	6.7
9	7.7
12	8.0
15	8.4

I also did a test where I just killed 30 bloodworms in a row, simulating roughly how I would do so on a Barrows run. This took 308 seconds, so about 10 seconds per kill. I was pleased to discover that this was fairly consistent with the results I obtained in my timed tests. For example, if we assume a figure of 6.0 minutes for a kill count of 0, then a kill count of 9 should add 1.5 minutes for a total of 7.5; I got 7.7.

Okay, so we’ve seen that higher kill count isn’t always better in terms of drop value, but it usually takes more time. That extra time means that we can do fewer chests per hour, which also reduces net value. The final step in this test was to take the drop value information I calculated and the time measurements and combine them to come up with an overall value for the Barrows activity for each kill count figure.

First, I had to calculate the average value of the Barrows items you can expect to get per chest. I assumed one such item every 18 chests, and on the day I did this analysis, the average Barrows item was worth 1.45 million gp. This means that each chest contributes, on average, a value of about 80,800 gp per chest. (This assumes an equal chance of any Barrows item, which is probably the case.)

Next, I added this Barrows item value to 17/18ths of the mundane value of the chest for each kill count, to yield a total expected value of each chest.

Finally, I computed a net value per hour figure by dividing the total value by the average time per chest, and multiplying by 60. The results are shown in Figure 6. Note that these are theoretical figures only for the amount of value you get per chest, since I haven’t added in costs, nor travel or banking time—these are not realistic hourly profit figures...

This final set of data shows that in my test, I actually made the most money using a kill count of only 2! Now, I happen to think that this was a result of random chance: I got 15 death rune drops out of 12 runs with a KC of 2, but only 7 with a KC of 1 and 11 with a KC of 3.

The first and most obvious conclusion from this test is that most players who do the Barrows—including me—have been wasting time getting high kill count figures of 8, 10, 15 or more when this not only doesn’t help you get more valuable goodies from the chest, it may actually hurt. In my test, peak value, taking into account both drop value and time, was achieved with a KC of just 2. As I mentioned, that was likely a fluke, but using smoothed percentage figures for the drop rates, the optimal value was still a KC of just 3.

This discovery means not only that you can improve the profit you make at The Barrows, but other improvements come into play as well. First, a lower kill cound means a greater chance of getting a Barrows item. Second, you spend less time killing boring monsters in the tunnels. Third, if you are maging the melee brothers, you also get more Magic XP per hour this way as well. Fourth, you have an opportunity to increase the number of chests you do per trip.

Of course, all of this is predicated on some key assumptions that I have made, chief among them that kill count doesn’t affect the chances of getting a Barrows item. There’s really no way to verify this, and if higher KC did make you more likely to get a piece of gear, that would change everything. (For the record, during my tests I got four items: Torag’s helm and Guthan’s helm with a KC of 12, Verac’s brassard with a KC of 3, and Guthan’s warspear with a KC of 2. Two items with a KC of 12 was unusual, but this isn’t enough data to conclude anything.)

So, what is the optimal KC to use at The Barrows? There is no one single answer. The ideal count depends on the current values of various items, what you assume for the Barrows item drop rate (1 in 18 or something else), and also on how long it takes you to kill the brothers.

RuneScoop members can use the nifty Barrows Kill Count Optimization Guide, which computes the ideal KC based on the latest item values and parameters that you specify. Usually, though, KC figures of 2, 3, 4 or 5 are pretty close in the value department. Use the lower figures (2 or 3) if you want to increase chances of a Barrows item, and 4 or 5 if you want to get more blood runes and bolt racks. Of course, if death runes drop to 200 gp each and bolt racks increase to 500 gp in the time since I wrote this, all bets are off... :)

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