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The Difference Between Natural and Artificial Leveling Goals Contrasting Buyable and Unbuyable Skills

I’ve already explained that I’m not a big fan of powerleveling in general, but I do think there are situations where it can make sense. If you are working towards a natural goal that you really want to achieve badly, it might make sense to decide you are going to throw some money at the task to make it go faster. This can be a particularly good move if the goal is to reach a level that will let you go faster than you can at present. This is really using powerleveling as an investment of sorts, paying money now to gain capabilities that will hopefully let you earn XP or money in the future.

A good real world analogy would be going to college. You could just start working right out of high school, so you are giving up that potential income, and also the cost of tuition to go to college. Assuming you are actually going for an education—as opposed to attending to pick up girls and drink beer J—you do so in the hope that the extra income you’ll earn will pay back the cost of those four years and then some.

Well, the same thing can apply in RuneScape as well. I’ll use an example from my own RuneScape career, which I actually already mentioned in my discussion of natural goals: raising one’s Firemaking skill up to level 80 in order to burn magic pyre logs at the Shades of Mort’ton minigame. This goes back to a project I undertook in the spring of 2006.

I was involved in a discussion with some folks on the RuneScape forums about how hard it was to do this minigame, because the only world most people were in was World 2, which of course is hard to access for most players. So I decided, with the help of some friends, to start a new temple building location in World 42. I figured this would be a useful contribution to the community, and at the time, that minigame was a good way to get combat, Crafting, Firemaking and Prayer XP, while making money at the same time.

My Firemaking level was not very high, however, so I was limited to making and burning yew pyre logs. These give less XP and significantly worse item rewards than magic pyre logs—for example, you get around 700 gold from cremating shades using yews, but up to 4,000 with magics. You also get better items in the chests.

So I decided to powerlevel up my Firemaking skill to level 80 so I could burn magic pyres. This was quite expensive for me, at a time when I had little money, but I viewed it as an investment. And it paid off—while I literally burned up a couple of million gp in logs, I made back more than that in better rewards, and also got substantially more Firemaking and Prayer XP from the minigame.

Here are a few more examples of where investment powerleveling can make sense:

• Getting Defence, Attack, Magic and/or Ranged to 70 in order to wear Barrows armor, which enables far faster combat training.
  
  
• Leveling Construction to enable the building of an altar, lecterns, portal rooms and other handy features in your house.
  
  
• Training Farming to level 32 and Herblore to level 38 so you can grow ranarr weeds and make prayer potions.
  
  
• Powerleveling Runecrafting up to level 44 to make nature runes.
  
  
• Raising Agility to level 75 so you can use the Ape Atoll course without falling.

I actually did train Runecrafting to 44 by using dueling rings to go back and forth between Castle Wars and the fire altar. This and the speed Firemaking I mentioned before are two of very few instances of me ever powerleveling! J

The Difference Between Natural and Artificial Leveling Goals Contrasting Buyable and Unbuyable Skills