Easier said than done...

I had originally intended to smith the 6k+ mithril bars into knives, but now that I've put a price tag on this particular level, it doesn't really sit well with me. 5.2 mil is a whole lot just to blow on a skill. But I had a little time to think about it...

My first instinct was to see what the bars were worth, in order to try and make a bit of money. I check, and indeed: I'll make about 3 million more off my origional investment (for a total of 8 million gp). This was my origional plan.

You can only make 5 mithril bars at a time, because you have to carry an obscene amount of coal, too. This make the smelting of 6k+ bars take a very long time. 3 days to be exact.

To smelt somewhere in the neighborhood of 15k mithril bars would take about 8-9 days, so this doesn't sit well with me either. So I do several groups of calculations based on sale prices of the mithril bars vs. the cost of buying gold ores to smith with goldsmithing gauntlets. I settle on a nice little happy medium in my mind: I sell all but 1k of the mithril bars, and buy enough gold ore to get me to 69 smithing. This leaves me with about 3.5 million gp left over. I use part of my proceeds to buy a dragon woodcutting axe, and bank the rest for future usage (I end up with about 1.8 million gp left over). Doing things this way has given me a nice profit, 5k mithril throwing knives, 69 smithing, and more gold bars than I'll probably ever use.

With this done, I start ectoing the baby dragon bones I gathered a while back (along with a few good bones from zogre hunting) in order to get the Prayer level I need for Summer's End. I only need 2 levels (one of them rather short), and while I process all the bones, I only ecto what I need to get 55 Prayer.

It is at this point that I unwittingly walk headlong into hell.

To say that Summer's End is a difficult quest would totally reset the scale (making quests like Dream Mentor moderate difficulty level by comparison), so I'll create a new difficulty level for quests of this magnitude: OMFG! Yep, that about says it all.

I went into this quest with no illusions that I would probably die numerous times. I had little idea at the time that I would die more times than I could possibly count. In fact, I spent 3 days doing little in the quest other than dying. I struggled on several points, which I will outline below:

1) I lived in horror of losing the dragon wood cutting axe I had just bought. This was silly, since armor was totally unnecessary (and would also reduce your run faster, resulting in an unavoidable, horrible, and nearly instantaneous death), any axe you would think about using would probably be the most expensive item in your inventory. When in doubt, check the screen that tells you which items you'll keep upon death.

2) I spent a great deal of time trying to do it the way someone else did. Don't do this. Every quest guide I looked at offered very little in the way of help. Look at what they did to get a general idea of what is expected, and find a way that suits you best. My way was to cut the roots closest to the exit. If the beast wandered on the radar, I left the cave and waited a minute before I went back in. I did this until I had 5 logs. Then I went in and built a pyre and lit it. Building the pyre is the hardest part, as if you leave before you light it, you lose any logs you put down. It's best to run back and forth: put on a log, run to the other side of the room. The second and third parts are easier, since you're not required to stand in one place for any amount of time. Another thing to note that no other guide mentioned is that (during the second part) when the "dark core" leaves the beast, the beast stops shooting. This makes it relatively easy to lure it.

3) Finally, I lost a lot of food because I was initially filling my entire inventory with food. Don't do this, because you're very likely to lose it. It's best to just take about 10 pieces. The problem is that once you have to start eating, it will slow your movement down to some extent. Once you get hit, you're likely to get hit again soon. A good tactic is to run straight past the beast to the opposite side of the room, while eating. It does wonders to put you out of the range of the splash.

My only advice for this quest is to be patient and watch what's going on. If you watch long enough, you'll be able to identify your window of opportunity.

With this horrible quest done, I have a grand total of 264 quest points.

The quest also boosted me up to 30 summoning. An objective a long time in the coming has been achieved: all my skills now rank on hiscores.

The Cost of 69 Smithing

First things first:

I replanted my 4 fruit trees in an effort to help my Farming skill...which wasn't quite enough for 2 levels. This forced me to hit the Vinesweeper minigame again. In spite of the rabbits and the idiots stealing xp from me, it only took me about 2 hours to get to 53.

This opened the way for me to get Back to My Roots out of the way. This quest isn't really hard, but it's best to use a guide to keep you from getting lost in the jade vine maze. The final fight would have undoubtedly been easier if I had access to a dragon hatchet, but my rune axe worked alright anyways.

News Flash: Pking worlds are here. Big deal. On to the next subject.

Now I've decided to get the nasty requirement out of the way: Smithing. I need 14 levels in all, which will meet the qualifications for two different quests (both of which have other requirements). I could mine, but I decide to buy ores instead, since I need 6160 Mithril ores and 24,640 coal. The price tag for all of this? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million gp.

First thing I do is sell those yew logs. I don't need them right now, and I can always get more somewhat easily. Then I head off to do...yep, you guessed it: fish.

I fish about 1k lobs, and when I head off to sell them I noticed a bit of a side-effect of the recent Pking activity: food prices are skyrocketing. This is good for me, but it's not going to last. I'm all too familiar with the process: something new hits Runescape, prices of related items go way up untill they stop selling altogether. It is at this point that prices will then plummet back to their origional value. I switch over to sharks, in an effort to cash in quickly before the bottom drops out.

This happens a couple of days later, and I spend some time with fish on the Grand Exchange that won't even sell at minimum price. Not to worry, I have a back-up plan: I pop off to cut some yews. I only cut a few hundred before the fish sell, so I head to the GE to turn my gold into coal.

It's not long before the whole fish market crashes, and I'm relagated to wood cutting to buy the last 5k coal. A friend of mine lent me his dragon hatchet, which did help speed up the process. I only needed to cut about 2k yew logs at this point.

With the logs cut, I spend the money on the last of my coal. I finally did a price check on the ores (although I didn't think to get a screen shot).

The final cost of 69 Smithing for me? 5.2 million gold pieces.

I hate Woodcutting

Boring, boring, BOOOOOOOORING!!!!!

I hate it. I always have and I always will. Still, I need it. Since it's cheaper than Smithing, I decided to spend a bit doing it. I've spent close to a week to get to 71, which was all I needed to do Grim Tales. Another quest point, and a snazzy new helmet (which isn't as good as my dragon medium helm). It only took me another day to get to 72, which is all the Woodcutting I need to do to get my quest cape. I've also amassed about 2.3k yew logs. I haven't decided what I'm going to do with those yet, though.

I also did the penguin hide and seek, which got me another 2 points of Farming. But since I still need 2 more levels, I decided to plant all the tree seeds I got from Woodcutting (a willow, a maple, 3 apple trees, a banana tree, 2 orange trees and 2 curry trees). I should get a lot of xp from these after I check the ones growing now, and the one's I'll plant tomorrow. Maybe 2 levels, but I doubt it. Time (which is a major factor in Farming unfortunately) will tell.

That's 261 quest points, with 6 quests left to do!

Agility and two more big ones

I did as I said I was going to do in my last post (for once), and spent a few hours at Brimhaven Agility Arena, where I managed to break my current record for most tickets in a single trip (150 tickets!). While I did extremely well my first trip, I got seriously beat down on my second trip. Luckily, I didn't need very many after my first trip. While I met the qualifications for two quests, I still need more training to do them.

After my agility training, I went over to the Edgeville dungeon to train range on hill giants. I choose hill giants because they're relatively easy to hit, and I can get xp fast. I started out with my magic composite bow and mithril arrows, but as the hours began to drag on, I decided to experiment with something else. I made about 1k steel throwing knives a while back, so I went and grabbed them to see how they worked.

I was astounded to realize that I hit dramatically faster with the knives than I did with a bow...and I only lost 1 point of my maximum damage! This allowed me to get the rest of the xp I needed in a remarkably short amount of time.

This opened the way for me to do Mourning's End Part 1. The only really good part about this quest is the fact that you end up with a sweet looking bazooka. It didn't take a whole lot of time to finish this quest, despite the bit of running around you have to do.

Finishing this quest opened up the way to Mourning's End Part 2, which I set about doing immedately upon finishing the previous quest. Unfortunately, this is one of the quests that I absolutely hate, because there is a lot of work involved in finishing it. The rewards aren't really that great at my level either. The only good thing about finishing this quest is knowing that you don't have to do it again. Get it over with and done is my philosophy...and it takes me two days.

Total quest points: 260.

Currently, my plan is now to get started on Woodcutting. I need some big levels, so this should take me a bit of time. I intend to head to Seer's Village to cut maple logs, although I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with the logs. I'll probably "fletch and drop."

A few more behind me

It's been a long time in comming, but I managed to get 59 Slayer, and I'm well below my combat requirements. This is good news, since I thought that getting the Slayer level I needed might push me a bit over what I needed combat-wise. I've got plenty of room to maneuver.

I still need 1 more Defence level for Kings Ransom, so I go and play with the fire giants in Brimhaven dungeon for an hour or so to get it. This quest isn't very hard, it's just a lot of running around...and I'm still trying to figure out why I needed a 65 Defence for it. The highest level armor you need to wear is black.

Having finished Contact!, I decided that Dealing with Scabarous should be next on my list. I made this decision based on two factors: Thieving would be the easiest skill to get two fast levels out of, and to be finally finished with the desert based quests. This will give me leave to move my house to Yannelle at my convenience. The only reason it's been in Pollvenich so long is to make it easier to get to these quest locations.

After some minor calculations I determined that it would take 19 glasses of the red squirk juice to get me from 58 Thieving to 60. While this might not seem like a whole lot, keep in mind that you need 3 red fruit for each glass (for a total of 57 fruit). I was very lucky in my time at the Sorceress Garden in that I didn't experience much in the way of lag. Lag kills you there.

Dealing with Scabarous isn't really a difficult quest if you know what you're doing. It's also one of those quests that will kill you the moment you think you've got a handle on it. My advice to any of you is NEVER THINK YOU'VE GOT THE QUEST BEAT UNTIL YOU GOT THE XP REWARD! Case in point is to follow:

I'm doing this quest, and I know that most everything I'll be facing will be both hostile and dangerous. The average enemy level is somewhere in the neighborhood of 100, and while they don't hit obscenely hard, they do hit often enough to make it a problem. I run through, kill a bunch of zombies, skeletons and scabarites to get the information for the archeologists. I switch to mage to kill the giant level 200 something scarab (while having to allocate more power to everything else because my skills aren't overly exceptional), and kill it easily.

I think to myself at this point: "Hard part over. Cakewalk from here." As I'm running through the underground tunnels filled with scabarites, I'm not paying as much attention to my HP as I should be. I lag for a second, and I'm dead. I lost a bunch of sharks, 2 full prayer potions, about 75 blood runes, 7 times as many water runes, and my Mystic hat, gloves and boots. Never think you've got it beat. Never.

On a side note, I'd like to point out here that Sal's Realm of Runescape has wrong information posted about this quest. It says that the giant scarab uses magic and melee attacks. This is wrong. While it does melee, it's ranged attack is just that: ranged. I used protection from range and stayed outside the door and took absolutely no damage.

I also went out and did the new Defender of Varrock quest. While I had a few concerns about the Wilderness, the quest didn't turn out to be very difficult. It gave me a Smithing level and two Hunting levels.

I now have 256 Quest points.

I'm thinking that my next plan will be to head out to Brimhaven Agility Arena to get 60 Agility. This would fulfill requirements for two quests.