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The Benefits of Investment Powerleveling An Overview of Powerleveling Methods for Various Skills

One of the ways in which many players categorize RuneScape’s skills is by the degree to which training the skill can be accelerated by spending money. We’ve already seen that there’s a trade-off between speed and money, but this is far from uniform across the spectrum of skills. Those that can be more easily trained by spending money are sometimes called buyable skills, while those where money has little or no impact on training speed are said to be unbuyable.

If the term “buyable” sounds a bit judgmental, that’s because it is, and in fact, this matter of money in skills is a rather controversial topic in the game. Many players feel that the ability to speed up training in a skill diminishes the sense of accomplishment that is attained by leveling it in slower ways; some go so far as to say they don’t respect skillcapes of buyable skills as much as those that are unbuyable. Of course, other players say this is hogwash, because earning lots of money is also an accomplishment, and even buyable skills take considerable dedication.

Whichever way you lean on this subject, it’s useful to understand how the various skills score on this subject. Let’s take a look.

These are the skills whose training speed is most strongly impacted by using expensive powerleveling methods. There are generally two main reasons why this is the case: either the skill is designed inherently to be expensive, or it can be trained economically at a slower pace but includes one or more higher-cost powerleveling options.

The main skill in the first group is Construction; it was openly designed by Jagex to be a money sink, and the more money you sink into it, the faster it goes. Summoning is also expensive by design, because you need to buy spirit shards for every pouch you make. It, however, is also a skill that has its speed affected by leveling decisions, because by spending money you can get charms and secondary ingredients more quickly.

Most of the buyable skills are so because demand for faster leveling options has led to them costing more. For example, Crafting can be powerleveled using dragon leather, but you lose money doing so because crafters are willing to pay a premium to go faster. Other skills in this category include Farming, Firemaking (Figure 137), Herblore, Magic, Prayer, Ranged combat and Smithing.

See the next topic for a brief look at how powerleveling is accomplished for various skills.

These are skills where money makes a difference, but not nearly as much as it does with the truly buyable skills. Here, wealth allows you to train faster, but you are still going to have to pay your dues. For example, consider Slayer; if you are rich, you can speed up the skill by using better equipment, drinking enhancing potions, and using a cannon to complete tasks. However, you are still going to have to do a lot of work to get to any goal in this skill.

Other “moderately buyable” skills, in my estimation, are Cooking, Fletching, Runecrafting and melee combat.

Finally, there are a number of skills where tossing money at training makes little difference—you are going to have to put in a lot of hours to get that skillcape regardless of your wealth. Most of these are the resource skills; you can speed these up by foregoing earnings, but you can’t really buy them. For example, you can choose to fish salmon and trout instead of sharks to train up Fishing faster, but it’s still a long haul.

The skills I consider essentially unbuyable are Agility, Fishing, Hunter, Mining, Thieving and Woodcutting. (Yes, you can get tons of XP for Thieving at Pyramid Plunder, but the amount of money you have doesn’t really impact this one way or the other.)

The Benefits of Investment Powerleveling An Overview of Powerleveling Methods for Various Skills