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The Time-Money Equivalence of Skills and Dealing with Grunt Work Understanding and Exploiting Skill Synergies

Players who don’t understand the monetary value of time and the concept of opportunity cost frequently fall into the trap of false economies. Simply put, a false economy is an action that is taken because it seems on the surface to be more efficient, but turns out to be less efficient when the full cost of the move is taken into consideration. False economies are the bane of efficient skill leveling, because they trick players into wasting time and XP.

Here are some of the general classes of false economies, and why you should avoid them. Note that many of them are combat-related, because this is where I see most of the bogus “money-saving tips”.

I mentioned grunt work in the prior topic; it is a common false economy in RuneScape skills. I constantly run into players who try to “save money” by gathering “free” or low-value supplies using tedious, time-wasting methods that provide little or no XP and only slow them down.

Here are just a few examples of what I consider to be pointless grunt work:

• Combat: Killing chickens to get feathers.
  
  
• Cooking: Milking cows to churn for butter for baked potatoes, when you can buy buckets of milk for very little cost. Or even picking the potatoes yourself, when they too are quite inexpensive (Figure 140).
  
  
• Crafting: Collecting buckets of sand for glass.
  
  
• Farming: Getting apples for farmer payments by collecting them from a respawn point.
  
  
• Magic: Mining and wetting soft clay to make teleport tablets.
  
  
• Fletching: Making arrow shafts (except at very low levels).
  
  
• Herblore: Gathering low-value ingredients like eyes of newt, jangerberries, toad’s legs and so forth.
  
  
• Smithing: Mining coal (except at low levels.)
  

  Figure 140: Avoid Grunt Work

  Surely you have better things to do than pick potatoes?!

  
  

These and other activities should only be done when you cannot make more money in other ways to buy these items—which is rarely the case— or if you value self-sufficiency very highly.

I realize that not everyone can afford the best possible equipment, and am certainly not suggesting that efficient leveling requires you to go out and buy a full Armadyl ranging set and a godsword. At the same time, deliberately using cheap-o equipment to save a few bucks is short-sighted.

For example, I still sometimes see high-level players fighting monsters using rune boots instead of dragon boots. With the latter now down to about 300k a pair, there’s really no reason to give up its superior defence and strength bonuses.

I also often run into players who tell me they “can’t afford” to use Barrows sets for combat, because of the repair costs. My reply is that they can’t afford not to! Sure, Karil’s top and bottom may degrade over time compared to black dragonhide, but how much food is it going to save you when fighting a monster with a magic attack? And how much time will it save in terms of not running back to the bank?

Low-level monsters cost less to fight, but also usually give less in terms of drops and XP. In nearly every case, if you have the levels to fight a good monster at a decent pace, you are far better off doing so even if you have to spend some money on supplies to do it.

The best recent example of this is Summoning, and the efforts made by many people to get large numbers of charms to make pouches. Many of the best charm dropping monsters are also the most difficult ones, frequently requiring the use of prayer potions and/or food to fight effectively—examples would be dagannoths, waterfiends and black demons. I’ve run into quite a few players who proudly tell me that they don’t bother with these monsters because they are “too expensive” to fight; instead, they do easier monsters that also drop charms, such as shadow warriors or moss giants.

Well, it turns out that this is a classic false economy. Sure, you don’t have to use pricey supplies to kill shadow warriors like you do for dagannoths, for example. But you also get charms that provide less than half as much Summoning XP. Is the price of a few prayer potions and some food worth getting charms twice as fast? It is for me. When you further consider that the other drops of dagannoths pay for the cost of supplies many times over, this is a no-brainer.

The healing ability of Guthan’s means that with it equipped, you can fight many monsters nearly indefinitely, without needing food. This makes it useful for completing Slayer assignments, as well as “camping” to get XP or drops. However, some players are far too reliant on using Guthan’s—some don’t even bring food to battle at all—and don’t realize what overuse of the set costs them in terms of time.

The Guthan set is wonderful, but it has one main drawback: the speed of fighting with the Guthan warspear. It is a slow weapon with not much of a strength bonus, and whenever you are using it, you are slowing down your pace of combat. This is magnified further when it comes to Slayer, as well, because using Guthan’s means you must take off your black mask. The entire time you are trying to heal up, you lose the 15% Attack and Strength bonuses of the mask.

For these reason, it is always best to use the Guthans effect only when it is really needed. Don’t skimp on that food—bring it with and use it, and then fall back on Guthan’s only when you run out.

If you are trying to save money by fighting monsters without using super attack, super strength and ranging potions, you are likely wasting money, losing out on XP or both. The reason, again, is the monetary value of time. Even though you may conserve some cost in not having to consume the potions, this makes you take longer to get kills, slowing down both what you can earn in drops and the amount of XP you acquire.

Let’s take a simple example to figure out what the real cost is of a super strength potion, compared to what you pay for one. The potion raises your maximum hit by 20%, but slowly wears off over time. Let’s suppose I have 99 strength and so get 19 bonus points per dose, and that I take a dose every 10 minutes. On average, my strength level will be about 14% above what it would be otherwise, so I should do 14% more damage. In an hour I will use six doses, and with 3-dose super strengths at around 2,500 now, that’s a cost of 5,000 gp.

Now, let’s say I am fighting green dragons hides and bones. If I can kill around 75 or so dragons per hour without the potion, I should be able to kill at least an extra 10 dragons with it. The value of just the extra bones and hides I’d receive in this time is about 36,000 gp at current prices: seven times what the potion cost. And I also got the XP from 10 more kills.

Incidentally, the same analysis goes for using cheap potions instead of good ones. With super attack potions now costing 100 gp or less per dose, there is no justifiable reason to ever use regular attack pots in combat. Period. You are just wasting your time and XP potential. With super strengths so much more than regular strengths, that’s a slightly different equation, but even here, it usually pays to use the better potion.

Certain non-combat skills, such as Agility and Runecrafting, involve a great deal of moving around, which depletes your run energy. When it falls to 0%, you start walking instead of running, and that’s really slow! The solution is to use energy potions or super energy potions to restore run energy on a regular basis, but some people don’t take advantage of them because they are trying to “save money”. This is a short-sighted decision that saves a small amount of gold at the cost of greatly slowing down training.

Consider that super energy potions are now under 1k and regular energy potions below 200 gp for three doses, and you can see that using these potions is hardly a big demand on the pocketbook. There are also other options now, such as using the special move of the bull ant or spirit terrorbird familiars, or the salt-water pool at Oo’glog.

The Time-Money Equivalence of Skills and Dealing with Grunt Work Understanding and Exploiting Skill Synergies