Player guide
From the RuneScape Wiki, the wiki for all things RuneScape
Looking at skills is one thing, but what type of player would you like to be in RuneScape? How do you start, and can you switch? Some character types must be decided at the start. While you can move a pure character to a balanced or hybrid, you cannot make a balanced or hybrid character a pure.
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[edit] Skiller
Focusing only on non-combat skills will vastly increase the challenges you face. Only able to wear basic armour and having the lowest statistics makes navigating round some areas difficult.
[edit] Challenges
Slayer is possible to train, and easier since the release of Soul Wars.
Quests requiring combat will also be tough - rings of recoil and large amounts of food are often required.
[edit] Benefits
There are a few notable benefits. Firstly you will not have to spend money on armour and weaponry, which are some of the most expensive items a player can purchase. This leaves you to spend profits on skills and discontinued items (Note that given your risk of dying, you should think carefully about carrying rares round - Gravestones however have lessened this risk).
Secondly, as you are training less skills, you will spend more time per skill and get higher individual skill levels as a result.
[edit] Combat Pure or balanced
A pure is one who focuses on training a specific combat skill, most commonly attack, strength, ranged, and magic. They focus little on defence. A pure combat character typically hits hard for their level, making them ideal player killers (PKers) mostly in Bounty hunter and in PvP worlds. However, their lack of a decent Defence level is their major weakness, making it harder to survive attacks from multiple opponents or pass through a cluster of aggressive monsters.
[edit] Combat type
How would you like to kill monsters and opponents? Jagex has tried over the years to make each combat style equal through the combat triangle.
[edit] Melee
Melee is physical combat. The character is commonly referred to as a warrior.
Striking with fists, feet or weapons requires no ammunition. The only resource commonly consumed by the warrior is food, but occasionally one would require replacement of lost equipment or upgrade to better armour and weapon tiers. Smithing your own armour and weapons may provide an advantage to warrior equipment, but apart from the full iron armour of the pure warrior, this would require dedication to smithing rather than combat. (It is also important that you keep yourself relatively close to your defence level so you won't die as quickly.)
Other than the increased reach of a halberd, the warrior is limited to striking opponents who are close enough to hit back. Because of this, warriors can suffer high damage from magic users casting spells at a distance that can kill quickly with a high magic level. Ranging armour, such as leather and dragon hide armour, and the appropriate prayer can reduce the effect of the magic attacks, balancing the fight.
[edit] Ranged
Rangers face a number of problems. Gathering arrows and avoiding warriors who can easily rip through leather armour are among these difficulties.
On the other hand, ranging armour provides increased defence from magic, allowing rangers to defeat mages with greater ease.
The ranger uses ammunition that may be costly. If the circumstances are favourable, however, the ranger can pick up most of their ammunition and still attack from the distance. Additionally by completing the quest Animal Magnetism rangers can use their attractor or accumulator to create or retrieve arrows. Members can use the Dwarf Cannon, a powerful ranging device, which can decimate groups of monsters in multicombat zones. However, because of its sheer strength, the Dwarf Cannon is unusable against other players.
With a high crafting level, members can craft higher quality leather items, including the different levels of dragonhide armour.
[edit] Magic
Magic users are lethal against armoured opponents, as metal armour conducts magic to the wearer. In PK areas, the high level mage is the scourge of warriors.
What bothers the mage most when starting out is the high price of runes or the difficulty of gathering them with the runecrafting skill. For a low level mage, getting a mind talisman may be as much a priority as is getting enough cash to buy an elemental staff. Once you own a Mind talisman, an Air talisman, and a suitable staff, then you can craft your own runes for the first group of combat spells.
In free-to-play, the runes which can be crafted are limited. Higher level runes are commonly obtained from buying, monster drops, and free respawns, although the higher level rune respawns are found in the wilderness.
The mage is weak to the ranger, since ranging armour is quite effective against magic and the longbow out-ranges the mage's spells. In addition, free-to-play mage clothing offers no protection against weapon or arrow impact.
Mages are the least common Pkers found in Bounty hunter
[edit] Summoning
Although extremely difficult to pull off, a Summoning Pure wouldn't be impossible. A combination of rings of recoil and thieving chests in Doregesh-Kaan enables you to create a Summoning pure.
However, if you do decide to use it in combat, damage done by the familiar is given to you in experience, so from a combat perspective it is fairly pointless.
[edit] Supporting your combat
So you're ready to attack the first monster, or even harmless villager who crosses your path. But wait, you're already dead? What can help you survive?
[edit] Food
One form of low level cooking is "kill and cook". Taking on low level animals that drop meat, such as the chicken, cow or giant rat, and equipped with a tinderbox and some logs or an axe to chop them, you can cook the meat, and so long as you sustain fewer than 3 hit points of damage for each piece successfully cooked and consumed, you can recover your health. Also if you are a regular cook and you have a redberry pie with you, that is also a reliable way of getting some of your health back.
There are many other things to cook, and few places with any regular food supply, so you should certainly cook your own "recovery" food, even if you buy better items from other players to see you through tough quests and wilderness.
[edit] Money
If you cannot make what you require, then you need a skill which creates items to trade to stores or other players.
At lower levels, the most reliable is mining rune essence and trading it at the east Varrock bank, where it's unusual not to find any buyers, though many prefer to buy in quantities of 500; also available at Grand Exchange for 63 coins. Although if you want to make something that is sometimes more productive, mine ores and smith them into different objects. Once you get that you can sell them at a general store or to other players.
The guide to the economy also has some other suggestions.
[edit] Self-supply
You can organise things so that your character can create their own supplies; sometimes it can help if you have a lot of money and can afford to buy a lot at once.
[edit] Smithing - Warrior
Easier at lower levels than at higher, since the progress of smithing is much slower once you hit mithril level, while that is only medium grade weapons and armour for a warrior, though the iron armour of a pure warrior should soon be within reach, aided by The Knight's Sword quest.
[edit] Runecrafting - Mage
While higher level runes cannot be crafted in free-to-play, the lower level ones are useful in training, and though progress in runecrafting slows at higher levels, getting multiple runes per essence is very useful.
The first mark of the accomplished runecrafter comes when you can craft the runes cheaper than you can buy them with the proceeds from trading essence, for the most used, this will often be the point at which you get two per essence. The next mark is when you can trade the runes at a better price per essence than selling it "raw".
The ability to craft a sapphire amulet and enchant it into an amulet of magic will also be useful.
[edit] Fletching - Ranger
An option only possible for members, making their own bows and arrows, and even if progress is not made to the better bows and arrows, a huge supply of bronze arrows can be amassed even at the lowest level.
Even in free-to-play, most of the basic leather armour can be crafted.
