Deciding your build
From level 3, get 52 pray at wildy altar. If you know what build you’re going for, and you want to go straight for max get 59+ pray straight away.
If you’re going higher than 59, get pray up in multiples of 8 – 59, 67, 75 etc.
60 attack max, with 59 pray = 83.9 combat.
75 attack max, with 59 pray = 88.9 combat.
Add 1 combat for every 8 extra pray levels (75 attack, 75 pray is 90 combat, etc.)
Tip for those going for numerous trips:
Equip an alt with ghostlies + water staff (no other risk) and get a skull at edge. Park it in the altar in the center. Have sound on. PKers will hit your alt, not you at the altar, allowing you to log or get all your bones off. Don’t bother anti pking – the guys there are typically vennie bolt raggers who aren’t worth pking.
If your alt is able to attack your other account, you can even use it to suicide/die faster to return. The high risk PVP world also works well for this – it’s less frequently hit by PKers than the “low risk” world and there’s a bank as soon as you spawn. Alternatively buy the wildy respawn (for 5m) straight away. You’ll need to have it eventually to join Foe.
Once you have your pray level, do dwarf cannon and the following attack/str xp quests:
Round off your stats at rock crabs or sand crabs to be able to wield either a granite maul (50 attack/50 str) or an obby maul (any attk, 60 str) so you can begin cannoning chaos druids at CA (burning amulet opt 1) from as low as 1 range.
Your melee (or range) bonuses dictate how often you hit with cannon and how hard. Use either maul until 50 range, and bring staminas. Then take max range + msb.
Even at low 50s in range, you can get 100k/h+.
When your combat is high enough for pkers to begin hitting you, move to the south part of the revenant caves and do lesser demons with craws bow. Just park an account at the entrance to watch for pkers. Here, you can hit xp rates of about 130k/h. At 67 range, I was hitting 165k/h.
First, bring just a cannon, set it up, and suicide. Then return with full supplies. (Bandit camp on burning ammy, run east, north through hellhounds and greens, and go west.)
To maximise XP, tag all lessers around you and pull them into double hit spots with the cannon. This costs about 1m GP/h with craws but is superior to other options.
At this rate, 70 range takes about 5 hours, with 75 taking around 8 hours. Use an alt to restock cannonballs, ether, and pots, so you never have to bank.
75 range (8 hours)
From 75, BP at NMZ. Use pray gear; range gear does nothing to boost your xp/h but reduces how much you can AFK. If you’re high pray (67+), use 10%s (hawk eye).
85 range (3-4 days)
Depending on your cash, you should start chinning from around 80-85 range, all the way to 98/99 range. If you’re loaded you can ofc start earlier. If you’re struggling for cash, my personal preference would be to chin from 85 to about 93 and then NMZ the remainder.
To maximise your XP with chins, turn Runelite’s ground items tool on and have it show bones on the floor. Make sure these are in a 3×3 box at all times.
If you need to log at any time, or if there are excess bones on the floor, pick them up and drop them as needed. They’ll begin to burn when there are more than 3-4.
99 range (7-10 days)
By the time you’ve got 99 range, you should be able to use zenyte equipment (75 hp), have obtained a fire cape, and have NMZ points for imbued b ring. Buy fremenik kilt, manacles, regen bracelet, and unholy book.
Do sand crabs until about 75 strength. You can extend your trips from getting bearhead (Mountain Daughhter) and varrock 1 armor (Varrock Easy diary), or by resupplying via an alt. Haunted mine is also worth doing early doors. It gives 22k xp and Salve (ei) gives a 20% buff against undead, opening up some fast training opportunities, incl. for 1 deffers.
10+ def accounts may want to do some wildy slayer with viggora’s mixed in.
Around 75 strength, switch to doing NMZ all the way to 99. You can expect XP rates of about 70-100k/h, depending on attack and strength levels. Certain bosses have lower melee defence and can marginally increase xp rates.
These are the ones I use:
99 strength (3-6 weeks in)
Magic training
Personally I’d do afk mage training to about 75 (splashing, sand crabs, alching, stun-alching, bolts, etc.). This can be done whenever you have down time.
Start fire waving and then surging in NMZ to 99 from there.
There are faster methods than these, like bursting in MM tunnels or doing dust devils (with 65 slayer), but expect to be pretty burnt out at this point! Realistically, mage is now 60-80k xp/h all the way to 94-99 mage in NMZ.
Alternatively, if you can’t watch the screen too actively most of the time, splashing 2/3rds of it and doing pest control for the remaining 1/3 (w/ points spent on HP) might work better for you. FYI, the fastest HP training method is organised crime.
Otherwise a high hp xp way of training your mage that is essentially free is crabs + black salamander. It costs 2 gp a strike, hits 20+ at high mage levels, and gives 66% hp xp per mage xp. It’s about 30k xp an hour in mage and 20k hp xp and costs 1% as much as splashing.
Mage can cost over 100m so if you’re short on cash work out how you’re going to afford that and chinning. There’s a splashing calculator here: https://oldschool.tools/calculators/splashing
Max (2-3 months)
Tips:
During the first few levels, use wildy equipment (vig chain, craws) at the lowest CB possible to take advantage of the accuracy bonuses (more so than the damage). Choose spots that allow you to minimise run-ins with PKers not purely for the GP loss but because of the amount of XP you’ll lose from resetting or anti’ing them on another account.
Plan out your build to maximise the bonuses you unlock for each — don’t move on to melee until you’ve got max bonuses unlocked. Range is the one combat skill that benefits least from nominal increases in bonuses so that’s why it’s best to do first, the only unlock being anguish, which is less important when cannoning.
Don’t want to do MM? Viggora’s chainmace(u) has the same str bonuses as a dragon scim. Take the ether out when not using it in wildy.
Don’t do HP-less mage training all the way to 99. If you’re wanting to clan PK or revs PK, you don’t want a maxed account with 93-94 hp. Accounts going for 99 attack, as well as the other three, can disregard this – you will have 99 hp by the time you max (I splashed all the way on my max 99 attack account – 100m+ cost).
Use the time to get good spawns at Mage Arena 2 (as soon as you hit 75 mage). It’ll enable you to farm 15+ capes an hour when you max. It takes as little as a couple of minutes a day for a week or so to get set up. See my guide here: