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

The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #7 - Budget Crossbow Showdown The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #9 - Assessing the Dragon Pickaxe

Published: April 6, 2010

In my guide to fighting mithril dragons (members’ only link), I describe six methods: basic and advanced melee, ranging and maging. The advanced melee method is the fastest, making use of the Verac’s set effect on the stab setting to cut through the mith dragons’ high defence.

I had someone on the RuneScoop forums suggest that I also try the Zamorakian spear to see how it compares. This is a fast two-handed weapon with high stab attack and strength bonuses, and so would be an obvious contender. In fact, considering just the weapon itself, the spear is a better weapon than Verac’s flail, so in theory, the contest would come down more to the Verac’s set effect than anything else.

This was a pretty simple lab test then: Verac’s flail versus the Zamorakian spear, straight up. But as I did the test, I got a nice reminder of how important it is to do a lot of testing before jumping to conclusions...

Mithril dragons are tough hombres, and a full description of all of the nuances involved in fighting them is beyond the scope of this report. I’ll briefly summarize the key points, however.

To start with, I equipped myself in full Veracs, along with my usual complement of meleeing gear: Soul Wars cape, amulet of fury, Barrows gloves, dragon boots and berserker ring. I did one test with this setup, and one with the flail swapped for the Zamorakian spear. The weapons were always set to their “stab” setting.

Combat was done using the Deflect Magic and Turmoil curses. These prevent taking high damage from the dragons’ magic attacks, reduce damage from their melee attack, and increase kill speed.

I use extreme attack, strength and defence potions when fighting tough monsters like miths. I took a dose of each of these potions before each kill (normally I wouldn’t bother doing this for each kill, but this helped ensure consistency in the tests). Super antifire potions were used to allow safe combat with two-handed weapons.

I used a pack yak to carry additional food and to bank drops. All combat was timed starting from the first attack until the dragon began its death animation.

I thought that this would be a remarkably short test, based on my initial run. In that test, I was able to kill 8 mithril dragons in 7 minutes 13 seconds of actual combat time, while the same 8 kills using the Zamorakian spear required 9 minutes 56 seconds—over 35% slower. I figured, well, this isn’t much of a contest at all, and was ready to stop there.

But I thought, only 8 kills isn’t very many, so I did another run of 8 kills using each setup. This time, the Veracs setup required 8:48, while 8 kills with the spear took only 7:46!

So, I settled in and did three more runs of each, totaling 40 kills with each setup. The results are shown in Table 13.

I was quite amazed at just how variable these numbers were. Sure, 8 kills isn’t a large number, but mith dragons have a lot of life points, so even 8 of them take a while to do. I expected more consistency between runs, instead of the wild swings I saw here. Full Verac’s was more inconsistent than using the spear, probably because of the impact of getting lucky versus unlucky with the set effect’s invisible special.

In terms of the test itself, my conclusion is that sticking with full Verac’s is better than using the Zamorakian spear, but that the difference is much smaller than I initially thought. Overall the flail was slightly faster, and it also has a better prayer bonus (+6 versus +2). It costs a lot less than the spear as well.

The spear has some advantages, though. It doesn’t incur repair costs where the flail does. Also, if you aren’t relying on the Veracs set effect, this frees you up to use other armor pieces instead of being forced to use Verac’s helm, brassard and plateskirt. I still prefer the flail, overall.

The secondary conclusion is a firm reminder of the importance of large sample sizes when doing tests. Even if one option seems to completely dwarf another at first, you have to test for a prolonged period of time to be sure.

The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #7 - Budget Crossbow Showdown The RuneScoop Laboratory - Report #9 - Assessing the Dragon Pickaxe