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Ice Trolls Cannon Training Guide - Monster Description, Statistics, Attack and Defence Ice Trolls Cannon Training Guide - Equipment and Inventory Items

As I mentioned in my introduction and discussion of benefits, what’s great about this method is that you get experience while having fun and making money, since the value of the drops always exceeds the cost of killing the trolls. Let’s take a look at this in more detail now with some hard figures that show what it costs to kill these trolls, what you typically get in drops, and how much experience you get as well.

I have computed costs, drop values and experience based on actual trips where I kept track of everything spent and everything dropped, as well as my experience levels. The method I use is based on a trip out to the trolls lasting around half an hour; I discuss trip duration and alternatives to discrete trips as part of my comprehensive discussion of combat technique for the trolls.

Note that as always, all costs are based on the approximate trade value of the item. Yes, you can acquire food and cannonballs for less by “getting them yourself”, but then you are just trading money for time. A lobster, for example, is worth 200 gold even if you fish it yourself, because that’s what you could sell it for if you didn’t eat it.

There are some monsters that people kill because they want a chance to get a rare drop; mithril dragons, for example, have several special drops. Ice trolls are different—they are great monsters not because they drop a special item worth millions, but rather because they consistently drop good quantities of relatively mundane but useful items. Since they have few hitpoints, you kill hundreds of them per trip, and the drops can really add up. In a similar vein, they have a few drops that aren’t really “special”—there are other ways to get them—but are noteworthy because ice trolls drop them so often, such as rune kiteshields.

In general, all three ice troll types—male, female and runt—have about the same drops. However, Jagex appears to have made a small number of the trolls different, in that they drop lower value items (especially armor and weapon types) instead of the ones dropped by the majority of the trolls. There seem to be only a couple of these in the area where you will be cannoning, and you will see what I mean when you occasionally get a drop that is fairly ordinary, but “rare” in that most of the trolls don’t drop it. These trolls appear the same as the “regular” drops so you can’t really tell them apart that way (not that you will worry about this while cannoning anyway.) Finally, there is one ice troll female that has no drops at all aside from big bones; we’ll discuss this further later on in the guide.

I’m not going provide a comprehensive table listing every drop and its value and frequency here as I did with the mith dragons. Most of them are, again, fairly ordinary, and since I kill so many of them I don’t keep track of drops from individual trolls, just what I usually get in total at the end of a trip. I’ll just provide you instead with some quick lists of the trolls’ common and less common drops.

Let’s start with common items that can be dropped by any of the trolls (except that oddball female):

• Gold and Gems: Coins (up to around 300); uncut sapphire; uncut emerald; uncut ruby; uncut diamond; half key (loop); half key (teeth).
  
  
• Runes: Earth (about 15 up to 60); Law (2 to 8); Nature (5 to 11).
  
  
• Herbs and Seeds: Unidentified herb (the standard variety); herb seed (from marrentil up to torstol); mushroom spore; wildblood seed; cactus seed; belladonna seed; limpwurt seed; strawberry seed; watermelon seed.

The “regular” trolls (most of them) drop the following regular items in addition to the ones above:

• Armor and Weapons: Adamant axe; mithril warhammer; steel platebody; adamant full helm.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: Shark (2 to 8, noted); seaweed (4 to 8, noted); ball of wool (about 15 up to around 45, noted).

The small number of “lesser” trolls drop the following armor, weapons and miscellaneous items instead of the ones just above:

• Armor and Weapons: Steel medium helm; steel warhammer; black warhammer; addy warhammer; mithril square shield.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: Mackerel (3, noted); coal (3, noted).

Finally, these are the “three biggies”, the drops for which ice trolls are famous and the ones where you can really make back your supplies costs quickly:

• Rune Warhammer: This is far less common a drop than the other armor and weapon items, obviously, but still fairly common. The ice trolls came out after the new treasure trail clues that required rune warhammers, so for a while these were quite valuable; now I usually just alch them (for 24,900 each, not bad).
  
  
• Rune Kiteshield: These are the only monsters in the game that drop rune kiteshields with great frequency; they are usually easy to sell for 40,000 to 50,000 each. (In fact, they drop them so often that many high level smiths were quite upset with Jagex when the trolls came out…) See Figure 358 to get an idea of just how easy it is to get rune kites and lots of other goodies from these trolls...
  
  
• Granite Shield: These shields provide great ranged defence and are otherwise only obtainable from the much more difficult troll generals. They drop less frequently than rune warhammers and kiteshields but are still not that hard to get.
  

  Figure 358: “Rune Kite, Anyone?”

  Here are the results of one of my better trips to the trolls: about 700k worth of drops in around 45 minutes of cannoning, using up 1300 cannonballs and some cheapish food. You won’t always get this lucky, but it happens. Notice the 169k of gold, which included 3 or 4 rune warhammers that I alched plus all the other alchable items and regular coin drops. One of those seeds is a ranarr.. and 89 sharks is pretty handy too. Note that the fires were leftover from alching, and I used a lot of nats for alching and still had 45 left.

  
  

Incidentally, I am pretty sure that the “lesser” trolls only drop the kiteshield and not the other two.

In addition to all of the above goodies, every troll drops big bones; you won’t really have time to stop and collect them all, or even bury them, but if you did you could get a lot of Prayer XP. J More interestingly, monsters that drop big bones have a small chance to also drop the special long bones and curved bones that you can exchange for gold and Construction XP in Dorgesh Kaan. Most players rarely see these items, but since you kill so many trolls when cannoning, this makes the method your best chance to get these rare bones. (There’s a long bone in Figure 358.)

The main cost associated with this technique is, of course, the cannonballs. They are not cheap, and you use a lot of them. Secondary costs are from food and potions, though they will of necessity dwarf the cannonball cost.

You can find a summary of typical costs for a half hour trip in Table 79.

This yields a total cost per trip of around 220k.

Now, the flip side... drops. The value of the drops obtained during a trip is far less predictable than the cost of materials, because, of course, the drops are random and vary wildly from one trip to the next. Obviously if you get a granite shield on a trip then you made out better than if you didn’t; I can recall one trip where I got five rune kiteshields in about 40 minutes! Even the herbs and herb seeds obviously vary a great deal, since a snapdragon seed is now over 40k while marrentil seeds are worth almost nothing.

Given all that, I can’t tell you how much you will get per trip, but I can show you a summary of the drops from two trips that I did just to record drops; they are illustrated in Figure 359. Of course, this is just what I brought back, I left some low herbs and seeds on the ground. Here’s the first trip, which was a shorter session of only 27 minutes (thanks to being kidnapped by the Annoying Old Man, grrr). The four empty spots had the cannon in them:

• 42,658 gold (drops and alching).
  
  
• 1 uncut sapphire and 1 uncut diamond.
  
  
• 629 earths, 46 natures and 29 laws.
  
  
• 1 harralander, 1 avantoe and 1 cadantine herb.
  
  
• 1 harralander, 1 toadflax, 1 irit and 1 dwarf weed seed.
  
  
• 3 limpwurt seeds and 1 watermelon seed.
  
  
• 37 raw shark, 128 balls of wool, 79 seaweed, 3 coal.
  
  
• 1 rune kiteshield and 1 granite shield.

The approximate total value of these drops is around 310k, and I used up around 800 cannonballs and 8 prayer pot doses. My profit was about 120k, which works out to 265k per hour. Not bad.

My second trip, done right after the first one, yielded completely different drops, with far more in terms of good herbs and herb seeds, but less seaweed and sharks... just luck of the draw I guess. (See the right side of Figure 359.) Note that this trip was longer, though, at around 36 minutes, and used 1,100 cannonballs instead of 800:

• 67,568 gold (drops and alching).
  
  
• 1 half key (loop).
  
  
• 597 earths, 65 natures and 53 laws.
  
  
• 1 avantoe, 2 cadantine, 2 kwuarm and 1 ranarr herb.
  
  
• 1 harralander, 1 toadflax, 1 cadantine, 2 ranarr and 1 snapdragon seed.
  
  
• 4 limpwurt seeds, 1 strawberry seed and 3 watermelon seeds.
  
  
• 24 raw shark, 329 balls of wool, 38 seaweed.
  
  
• 2 rune kiteshields.
  
  
• 1 long bone.

I can’t really estimate the value of the bone, but the rest is worth around 450k. The cost of supplies was about 270k, so the profit was 180k in 36 minutes, or 300k per hour.

Anyway, this should give you an idea of what to expect. As you can see, these trolls drop a lot of very valuable and useful items. You can either keep them to use or sell them and easily make 250k to 400k of gold per hour… all while raising ranged!

I have conducted several tests where I kept track of my Ranged XP level while cannoning the ice trolls. The results were fairly consistent at around 45,000 Ranged XP per hour. This is not the fastest way of getting ranging XP by any means, but it’s pretty quick, especially considering that you make money instead of blowing millions.

You will also get small amounts of XP in the melee skill you choose, and some mage XP from alching your drops.

Ice Trolls Cannon Training Guide - Monster Description, Statistics, Attack and Defence Ice Trolls Cannon Training Guide - Equipment and Inventory Items