Combat
- For the rating of a player's combat abilities, see Combat level.
Combat is an event in RuneScape in which two or more players and/or NPC fight. Combat, even when in groups, lasts individually, until that individual involved is dead or retreats. Combat is based on randomly generated numbers in the form of "damage". The damage done by all the parties involved in combat is deduced by the expertise of at least two skills, and the application of numerous other factors. There are three different forms of combat, and are four "constants" (in the form of combat based skills) in most combat situations; Constitution, Defence, Prayer and Summoning. The most important of these is inarguably Constitution, which directly correlates to the number of life points a combatant has. Once an avatar or an NPC reaches 0 life points, the event known as "death" happens (unless under special circumstances which prevent death). It is both possible to improve damage done by yourself, lessen damage done to you, and restore your life points during combat.
Combat skills
Damage dealing
Below is a brief synopsis of the three styles of combat.
- In Melee-based combat, Attack and Strength are the two skills which determine an individual's accuracy during combat and the amount of damage possible.
- For Range-based combat, an individuals Ranged level will determine both the accuracy and strength of damage given.
- Mage-based damage, conversely, is not based upon the level of a combatants Magic, but instead the possible damage is determined by the Combat spell used. While magic has no direct effect on damage, access to more damaging spells is gained with a progressively higher magic level. In addition, magic accuracy is based on the magic level.
Even though each level is designated for one style of combat, multiple styles of combat can be used in one fight, since players have the ability to switch weapons at will and at any time. The act of using two or more combat styles in a fight to gain an advantage is called "hybridding". While not usually popular or effective in PvP or low level wilderness combat, hybridding is a necessary tactic in high level wilderness combat and often used in large scale group fights such as clan wars. The purpose of hybridding is, generally, to constantly have the advantage over your enemy and avoid the damage reduction of prayers.
Defensive skills
Constitution
Constitution (originally called hitpoints) is the level that limits the life points of a player or monster. This is the skill which essentially decides a battle, as an individual loses when their life points hit 0. Since this skill is the deciding factor in combat, there are various methods of adjusting your life points.
- Primarily, it is possible to restore your life points through the use of various items, although the most commonly used are food, drinks, some potions. There are some roundabout methods of healing, including healing others through butterflies and magic, or going to an NPC for healing, but these methods are often ineffective and therefore useless.
- It is possible to boost your life points past the current maximum, through the use of saradomin brews, some foods, titan's constitution scrolls, jumping into the thermal bath in pools of Oog'log, life point boosting armour, and bonfires. While the majority of these boosts are temporary and your life points slowly would naturally reset to their regular level, they can be very significant in a fight. Bonfires and armour, though, are permanent boosts until the effect or armour is removed.
Defence
Defence is the second constant skill which plays an active role in nearly all combat situations, except when the individual in question is not being attacked and yet is attacking another from a distance, or when the opponent does not retataliate. Defence as a skill doesn't negate all of the effects of the damage based skills, but rather simply decreases the accuracy of whoever may be attacking the individual, which may contribute to it being a rather unpopular skill to train. In essence, your defence affects the chances of you being hit by both melee attacks, spells, and ranged attacks, and increases the chance of 0's, or missed attacks. In this way, Defence could be equated to "evasiveness". There is no skill in the game which reduces the effects of Strength, or the damage boosting effect of a persons Ranged level.
Magic defence
It may be interesting to note that while defence is responsible for reducing the accuracy of most hits, it is only 30% effective for magic spells. Instead, 70% of the reduction of accuracy for a spell is determined by your own magic level. To guard well against magic, you would need a sizable magic level yourself.
Other combat skills
The two other combat skills in existence are, unlike the previous skills, optional to use, but also allowed to be used in all forms of combat, unless you are in a situation which prevents you from using them. Prayer is a skill which allows the use of prayers, which can best be described as temporary passive boosts which a player can activate at will. Higher levels in prayer allow access to much better prayers. Prayers effects can include individual stat boosters, item protection, life point restoration, and even death upon damage. Prayer is an interesting system; while the effects of a prayer would normally last forever unless manually switched off, the amount of time a person can use his prayers is dependant on his remaining amount of prayer points. Like life points, the player is allotted prayer points based on his or her prayer level. When your prayer points hit 0, your ability to use prayers would be gone until you restore your prayer points.
The other optional combat skill, Summoning, has a variety of functions. But combat wise, it enables the user to conjure familiars to aid them. Familiars act as an extension of the players damage, hitting the opponent and using their own special attacks if the appropriate command is given with the appropriate item. As with Prayer, the best familiars can only be accessed with high Summoning levels. While familiars can be summoning anywhere, combat familiars can only do damage in multi-combat areas. Also, when using familiars in dangerous PvP, extra levels get added to your combat level, and the multi combat restriction is still not lifted. These two factors, along with a defunct AI, make summoning far less popular for the damage purposes. However, there are some non-combat familiars which aid the player by restoring their life points, but passively and upon the activation of their special attack.
Other factors
While skills are an important aspect of combat, damage done and received is mostly determined by external traits, and there is a multitude of other factors which contribute to the fight.
Armour and Weaponry
The most glaringly obvious of these is armour and weaponry, As a general rule of thumb, armour boosts a persons defensive capabilities through the form of accuracy reduction, and weaponry boosts a players offensive capabilities. However, this is not always true, as some pieces of armour boost a player offensive traits, and vice versa. High levels without corresponding armour and weapons usually greatly inhibits your ability in both dealing and reducing damage.
Damage absorbtion
Armour, on top of boosting your defence to ranged, magic, and certain melee styles, also have been given the ability to absorb percentages of damage from oncoming attacks dependant on the soaking of the armour.
Skill boosts
Stat increase is available to anybody through the use of certain items, mainly potions and certain food. What this does is temporarily increase a specific combat statistic, albeit temporarily, to a (sometimes much) higher level. The advantage of this, obviously, is to give yourself the abilities of a higher level. If you are the appropriate level and using the appropriate boost, you can elevate your levels beyond the known cap of 99.
Special attacks
Special attacks are determined by the weapon being used by a player. Special attacks are unique traits of high level weaponry which give the ability to initiate a unique move which can have diverse effects, from damage to run energy absorption.
Attack speed
All weapons in Runescape have specific speed on them, which will determine how often you attack with that weapon. The stronger a weapon is, the more likely it is that it will have a slower attack speed. A fast weapon is usually used when a person is fighting something with a high defence level, as it is far more consistent and it is far easier to make up for low hits.
- For magic, almost every spell has the exact same attack speed, except for the exception of the spell Storm of Armadyl when equipped with the Staff of Armadyl. This boosts the speed of the spell by one bar.
Combat instances
PvP (Player Vs Player)
PvP, or more commonly known as PKing (player killing), is the act of two or more players fighting each other. Normally, players cannot fight each other, except in certain minigames, such as Castle Wars. However, players can fight each other anywhere in a specific section of the map known as the Wilderness, except in specifically designated "Safe Zones". PvP combat, generally, is more dyanamic than fighting NPC's, and can vary greatly. IF you are going into a PvP environment, anything can be expected. On top of this, there are plenty of restrictions in a PvP environment. For a full explanation on how PvP works and various strategy recommendations, head over to the PvP page.
It may be important to note that the Duel Arena is a minigame designated specifically for 1vs1 PvP, and the only location to specifically do so. The minigame also allows the two contesting players almost complete control as to how the battle be played out.
PvM (Player Vs Monster)
PvM, whether it be large amounts of relatively weak monsters, or bossing, is the largest part of combat. The majority of all combat in the game will involve you fighting NPC's, unless you specifically aim to PvP the majority of the time. Normal monsters usually do not have many restrictions and are easy to kill as long as you are an appropriate level. Generally, there only three reasons to kill average monsters; you need to for a quest, you are training your combat levels, or you are training the Slayer skill. The latter is by far the most popular as it, while not being a skill that affects your combat level, assigns the players a number of monsters to kill in the form of Slayer assignments. The restrictions for killing monsters of this caliber are usually the restrictions of the area in which they spawn in.
Bossing, however, is much more interesting and requires far more attention than that. Bosses are spread around Runescape, each one having its own set of attacks and abilities which set it apart. Usually, bosses require much better equipment and levels to take down compared to low levels NPC's, and many require groups for all but the elite players. To boss effectively, many factors must be taken into consideration, including the bosses special attacks, the bosses life points, and the area in which they are in.
Some bosses have abilities that players have as well.
- Protection prayer have rarely been used by bosses. In the case that they are. the bosses have a seemingly infinite supply of prayer points, and no known abilities can deactivate the prayers. However, the set effect of Verac the Defiled's armour works even on the prayers of bosses.
- Bosses can use poison, dragonfire, and attacks that hit multiple players all at once (sometimes all players in the room).
Bossing in some instances presents the opportunity to tank. While this role is not popular, it is sometimes done when the majority of the party is a low level.
Dungeoneering deserves a special mention, as it places a player or group into an instanced environment where they must handle difficult monsters and a boss to complete the dungeon. Thus, it exposes the player/s to the two base forms of PvM, and is usually a very dynamic experience.
Also, it is recommended to be well rounded in all your combat skills if you intend to be an avid PvMer. Skills only help, and it is far easier to level a lower skill ten times than level a higher skill even once.
Combat level
A players combat skills display themselves through a persons combat level. As a person increases his or her base statistics, their combat level will rise in accordance to that. The current highest possible combat level in-game is 138, and 126 for free-to-play. This is due to the exclusion of the summoning skill in free-to-play worlds. Additionally, a players actual combat level will not be displayed in the Wilderness unless this person has a pouch with him, or summons/has summoned a familiar.
Combat training
The basics of levelling combat is simple. Each splash of damage gives a player experience in a certain skill/s. The amount of experience given is based on how much damage was done, and what experience multipliers the person was using. To select which experience you would receive after a successful hit, you have to be using the appropriate weapon and setting. For melee combat, your attack style interface is where you can choose what skill to train; the possible options are Stength training, Attack training, Defence training, and controlled, which trains all three equally. Each weapon may or may not have any of those options; it depends on the weapon. For Ranged, Long Range for any weapon will train both Defence and Ranged. The same is true for Magic; if the toggle to train Defence is active, you will receive experience in both skills.
Training is usually done by necessity via the Slayer or Dungeoneering skill. If you find yourself in need of combat levels, there are specific monsters in the game which yield high experience rates. Killing random monsters for experience is usually a waste of experience, not to mention time.
There are no methods to get purely defence experience with spells or ranged weapons.
There are various areas in the game which give decreased or no EXP when fighting, but they are usually very specific and restricted, such as Dungeoneering in free-to-play worlds when your combat level is above 90, or clan battlefields.
See also:
Trivia
- Sometime during 7 December-12 December, 2009, when players would hit damage including a zero in it (like 10 or 0), it would show as "0", without a diagonal line across it.
- Sometimes there is a glitch that the message level up appears two times.
- It's a common misconception that you must be 99 attack, strength and defence to be level 138, however this is untrue. There are two ways to achieve level 138 including 99 Attack, 98 Strength, 99 Defence, 98 Prayer, 98 Summoning, or 99 attack, Strength and Defence, 98 Prayer and 96 Summoning. (Attack and Strength being interchangeable.)
- Experience is granted before the hit lands, meaning that players with the experience counters and displays active can see whether or not they're going to hit with their next attack.
- Combat training areas are identified on the map with the combat training icon (
), but combat training is only allowed to players with an Attack, Strength, or Defence level less than 9, depending on what is being trained. Also, these training dummies will only provide experience in the Attack, Strength, and Defence skill. Magic can be trained at the training area in Lumbridge, but ranged must be trained on other attackable NPCs.
