With the arrival of summer, many more players will be flooding back on to Runescape. One of the favourite activities of most players is training combat. A question I see asked more often than any other is “How should I train my combat?” My answer to that question each and every time is the same: Slayer. Although combat includes all three sides of the combat triangle, this article will focus solely on melee. That reason being because it is the most common of the three, magic and range have special methods much more effective than conventional training, and slayer is best done with melee for almost all tasks.

Typical answers you might hear that aren’t slayer are: Armored Zombies, Bandits, or Vyrewatch. These are common answers because these monsters are constantly aggressive, so they provide good experience and require little attention from the player, or are “AFK” so to speak. While these types of training methods have their time and place, I would argue that they should never be used when actively training combat. Camping these monsters for hours on end just makes combat more of a grind and a chore. The lack of variety and interaction takes all the fun and adventure out of the game. The solution to this is Slayer. With Slayer you get to experience so much more of Runescape than just a few monsters that you grind out for hours on end. You get it broken down in to tasks, none of which are too long, which forces you to move around and tweak your setup to increase your kill speed. Overall it gives the player a broader experience of monsters and helps cut down on the grind at the cost of a small amount of combat xp.

Whether you are just starting out in Runescape, attempting to max, or just like to maintain a holistic and well rounded account, Slayer is an essential skill that needs to be trained. For lower leveled players who can’t train on those aforementioned monsters and have a harder time finding something to train on than most, Slayer couldn’t be more perfect. The slayer master gives them a specific monster, the number of those monsters to kill, and some hints on how to kill it. As this player progresses they unlock new masters and monsters to fight. If you wish to think about it this way, leveling attack, strength and defence all from level 1 to 99 solely through Slayer, you would still need over three million slayer xp for 99 and this gap becomes even larger the more you neglect training slayer. I often hear from players with a high combat level who trained “off-task” and are now going back and training Slayer how much they regret not training Slayer in the first place. If you reach 99 attack, strength and defence, without training the majority of them through Slayer, your motivation to train Slayer will be next to none. Besides new players who need a good introduction to combat training and higher leveled players who want the most efficient way to train, how does Slayer benefit the average player? First off I think a lot of the variety and experience I mentioned previously is good for mid-level players too, as often times they never went through Slayer as a lower level and are just learning it now. On top of that, Slayer provides a great mix of profitable creatures, easy to kill creatures that allow for very fast tasks, and creatures that require little attention and are comparable to those AFK methods. What makes slayer even better is the ability to use a black mask or slayer helmet, which give an additional 15% boost to attack and strength while on a slayer task. This boost is extremely helpful when fighting monsters with high defence, such as dragons, that a player might struggle to kill otherwise or just speed up easier training even more.

One of the great things about Slayer is the drops it provides. Not only does Slayer make for a good money making method, but it is a great way to fuel summoning. Whether slaying dragons for their bones and hides, any special monster for its unique drop, or just collecting drop after drop from the rare drop table, the profits from Slayer can rack of quickly. Plus, when you bank between tasks you have plenty of opportunities to manage some small flips in the Grand Exchange or do a five minute herb run to add on to your profits. Similar to those other methods of training that offer good experience rates at the cost of grinding out at a single location, there are several monsters in Runescape that you can camp that provide an excellent charm rate. However, as a whole, slayer monsters generally have good drop rates for charms and are much cheaper and easier than barraging rock lobsters or doing waterfiends off task. On average, you gain about the same xp in Summoning as you do in Slayer, which just adds on to the list of benefits of training Slayer.

In my opinion, when it comes to training combat, Slayer is by far the best way to do it. No matter what kind of player you are, Slayer is a great skill to help you accomplish any of your combat related goals. Although individually it isn’t the best way to get combat experience or charms for Summoning, it allows you to train your combat, earn good money, and collect a steady amount of charms all at the same time. So next time you are wondering what to go train on, just head on over to your favorite slayer master, I’m sure they’ll have a nice task just waiting for you.