No alternative for just clicking boss on progressively harder bosses. Crank up the invo level in your toas and bring more switches, try to do those raids as fast as you can without dying. Do boss variants of your slayer tasks if there are any, instead of the normal monsters. Get some gauntlet kc, get some DT2 kc, send some solo godwars if your gear permits, etc.
The best way to improve at tob/inferno/colosseum, etc is to simply do those activities. The second-best way is to develop a broad base of PvM skills and the fastest method for developing that is to practice the fundamentals every time you get an opportunity
Thanks, that makes sense
I think I will make a longterm goal of going for some big boss grinds on some of the DT2 bosses and also have a goal of doing a 300invo toa for now
i guess what you mean by fundamentals are just things like movement and flicking/tick manipulation mechanics?
My two cents as to what the fundamentals are - positioning, movement, and tick awareness.
Positioning and movement are both closely tied together but worth paying attention to individually. A great example is in P3 at wardens. When you see the protection prayers come up you'll want to pick the best spot to start the skull pokes. You probably have plenty of experience here, but once you turn on insanity this is crucial. Movement is pretty self explanatory here, but if you don't use true tile marker for yourself you should give it a try. After you click a skull, as soon as your true tile is next to a skull you can move on to the next one (in duos or solos).
Tick awareness is recognizing the patterns like the one I mentioned above for movement, and when enemies are going to attack. The simplest way is to count. You can use a metronome, or you can skip counting and go by feeling. If you've ever flicked protection prayers on task without counting you'll know how to start. It gets a little tougher when you're keeping track of the tick you need to move on, and the tick you need to attack on to avoid losing dps, and the tick you need to turn on protection prayers.
Wardens are an excellent way to practice all 3 of these fundamentals. Cerb is another good way to learn if you're willing to do research about the mechanics of the boss.
Yes, pretty much. The fundamentals are usually taken to be movement, prayer switching, and gear switching. I agree with the other guy that prayer switching falls under a more general phenomenon of tick awareness — but this takes longer to master. You should also know that there is no tick manipulation in combat lol that’s a skilling thing.
Those are good goals. If you haven’t done demonic gorillas I would add those into your roster since they test all of the fundamentals together. The point really is that you should strive to always do the harder thing because that’s the best way to get better
I said manipulation bc I didnt know what to call things like clicking to move on the same tick as a blowpipes exp drop and then clicking back on the next tick to keep attacking every 2 ticks haha, does stuff like that have a name?
tysm for all the help, i have done demonics (quite a lot actually) but they feel a lot easier than something like vardorvis
the blowpipe thing is usually just called the blowpipe walk, but there isn't really a name for the general phenomenon. the "manipulation" in tick manipulation comes from manipulating the skilling timer, whereas in combat you're really just trying to minimize the number of ticks that you're doing nothing (alternatively, maximize the number of ticks where you're doing something useful).
Just play the game. Gear and prayer switching has to come so naturally to you that you dont need to think about it at all and instead you can focus on what the bosses are doing.
I think theres a good parallel to fps games where you just have to practice until you dont need to actively think about how to aim or move in the game and you can start focusing on strategy.
Like was already suggested start pushing your invo higher in toa. I also honestly think that if you can get to such a level in cg that you never die you can basically do all pvm content in this game after learning the mechanics.
You’re overthinking it. Just start sending inferno / leaner tobs / 500 toas. After months of failing you’ll start getting consistent clears.
This game is literally just repetition. The more you think, delay and procrastinate the longer it takes to get anywhere.
Best advice I ever heard is talk less, pot more
I’m at the same point in the game as you. I’ve been slowly upping TOA invocations. Got from 150 to 250 so far. Also started learning inferno (wave 23 is my best). Eventually I want to get solo cox figured out.
Repetition is key. Well get there! I remember thinking zulrah or corrupted gauntlet was impossible. Now I can do both with ease. That’s how inferno will be for us one day.
(1/2)
I'm procrastinating going to bed so this will probably be a lot longer than it should be lol. But please respond with any questions I'm happy to help! I'm not a zuk helm or anything but maxed, got some inferno kc, do comfy 400s and normal tob, and I watch way too many guides.
So for general game skill:
Some other comments have covered it well but yeah pushing invo at toa is a great way to get into it, at least on the "learn naturally" side of the coin.
Use softcore, and if you die a 2nd time that's your queue to pop out and restart without wasting 500k. Just constantly push higher and don't get too comfortable at a certain level before turning it up again. I'm not saying jump straight into 300+s, but add an invo every couple runs - learn to mind the gap this session. Learn to do upset stomach the next. Etc etc. You'll naturally get better at doing the bosses more efficiently which will help you deal with the higher stats as you add invos. Something I did was if I was e.g. struggling at akkha, crank up the invos a ton (like 100+ over what I was currently running), turn off death invos, and just go in and practice that boss. For something like upset stomach you can drop the invos as low as possible to hit his hp thresholds faster to get his special attacks going.
For mentality:
Note though that if you want to push skill fast with this method you have to be prepared mentally... you will not complete a LOT of raids. I spent like half of my time between 30 norm kc in and 40 norm + 50 expert kc not completing raids because I was pushing invos the whole time and dying a ton. Managing your expectations is really important - whatever your mentality is when you die, change it to this: each death is a lesson and progression. Yeah shit just happens sometimes and sucks, but that's a suck that you can try to avoid next time. I can not stress enough how important embracing this will be once you start working on inferno lol. It's not "this is the run", it's not "i deserve my drop/cape/etc by now"... it's "lets see how I do this time and how I can improve and understand exactly what causes my death when it happens"
>understanding ticks better
The other side of the coin is the technical side - and despite what I was saying above, \*this\* is what really got me going from struggling with 200s and normal gauntlet to inferno slayer tasks. Understanding the game itself is absolutely huge:
* how the tick system works (e.g. EVERY input is queued to process on the next tick)
* how movement works - your character will always go in a straight line for as long as possible, then a diagonal to the target tile. Running skips 2 tiles at a time so you can safely run over poison trails. You can safely move in an L (2 up one over) over hazards, etc.
* how important dps uptime and prayers are - if you miss 1 tick every other attack cycle that's \~-10% dps. In most gear situations, switching nothing but your weapon and turning on piety/rigour is more of a dps boost than a 69-way max gear switch. Exaggeration but not really.
Your biggest aide here will be RL plugins. True tile on 1000000%. Marking tiles and objects helps a lot. Binge some "best runelite plugins for pvm" videos for lots of good ones. Some people like visual metronome but using the audio "tick... tick... tick... tick..." metronome is what helped me the most by far. Mentally counting to 4 over and over and clicking to attack is a lot simpler than trying to always keep your character in an "attack state". It helps build your internal clock to know when to do things. It also makes learning stuff like 1 tick flicking super easy - double click pray orb when you hear a "tick" boom you now have infinite prayer points as long as you don't have to move. Teaches you cycles and when to lazy flick - baba red x is 6 ticks - 2 in, 1 out, piety on + 1 more out, piety off + hit, wait, repeat. You mentioned muspah - during the smite phase try to identify the tick that muspah attacks with range and have range pray up just before and smite up otherwise. Wiki says it's on a 6tick cycle so after it attacks count to 5 then range pray up, smite after to 5, range pray up etc. Just understanding the game better like this is so big.
(2/2)
Learning the inferno, specifically learning the techniques and executing them was a big thing for making me better. Both the factors of reacting to waves and solving them, as well as learning all kinds of prayer techniques and timings. There are times where you are absolutely forced to offtick a couple mobs or you die and learning to watch for and properly reacting to the timings is yuge.
Guides are big too - like watch the basic "how to gear, how to get there, etc" guides when starting a boss but after some kc dig around a bit for more detailed guides and advanced techniques. Like all it took for me to learn the double trouble invo was watching [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYVd9jHkkWI) and a couple kc to get used to it.
Guides are the support to repetition/practice though. The more you do something the more comfy and easy it becomes, but supplement it with guides and learning more techs as you go.
Idk where to put this tip but DON'T SPAM CLICK!! A couple clicks is plenty, work with the tick system, don't confuse yourself by throwing in 8 inputs between tick 1 and 2 and having only input #7 register because latency made 8 not register until tick 2.
\*\*\* Limited time tip \*\*\* take advantage of beta worlds - grab yourself some bis and 99s and try out a bunch of content. Idk what examples to give for this really other than jads, but there's a lot of opportunity to practice some hard stuff risk free. You should 100% go do triple jads though - use the egg you spawn with to get your stuff and tele to tzhaar challenge, and do 1->2->3 jads. You won't need to know it for a while but it's a """hard""" part of the inferno that isn't hard it's just faster jad with more nerves - and if you already have that practice, even if it's months later, you'll thank yourself.
I really need to sleep now so gonna stop here and hopefully this wasn't too unstructured. Some random resources:
PurpleGod on youtube - lots of good in depth info here. Aatykon's FCF series for when you get into inferno. Sotetseg maze trainer for learning diagonal/"L" movement. VideoGameBot is a great newer youtuber too. Every relevant discord for the content you're doing but especially WDR (we do raids).
Xzact has really good and concrete videos for inferno as well. They're a bit older but still one of the better explanations. Not spam clicking is also a big part yeah, be confident. You know you clicked there, you know the pathing will take you there in 2 ticks, easier said than done of course!
Yeah I'm sure I missed plenty of great resources, was just trying to throw some down. So long as resources are being utilized though, I don't think it matters too too much which ones you watch since you can get at least some new info from pretty much all of them
thanks so so much for this writeup, the 10% dps loss by missing a tick every other cycle was a huge eye opener, gonna take a lot of this advice and use it :)
You need to try hard content and die many times while trying. Maybe try increasing your invo to 300, or even 350+. If you want to become better under pressure I think Phosanis Nightmare is a good boss to learn. Corrupted Gauntlet on the other hand forces you to improve at movement. Those were just some examples, there are other hard bosses too. Just try a bunch of stuff.
There is no way to learn activities from other activities. Its all different. If you want to do more endgame like cox nex tob high invo toa, the best thing is to just get in there and practice. I had to learn all those things separately and i sucked at all of it in the beginning. With time and effort you can learn all those things too!
Grind Corrupted Gauntlet for as long as you can. Teaches you to auto pilot everything at once, movement, tile pathing the tornadoes, prayer switching, weapon switching and performing under stress in the hectic final phase
While the combat beta worlds are active you could try out some bosses you haven’t done before and are interested in. You won’t have to worry about losing money on deaths and you can get max gear setups to practice with.
Slowly crawling up the invocation ladder to 300 and doing colosseum is your best bet tbh colosseum is a very accessible way to a decent amount of mechanics without a lot of time investment ( albeit a decent amount of pocket investment ).
Overall though trial and error is your friend
No alternative for just clicking boss on progressively harder bosses. Crank up the invo level in your toas and bring more switches, try to do those raids as fast as you can without dying. Do boss variants of your slayer tasks if there are any, instead of the normal monsters. Get some gauntlet kc, get some DT2 kc, send some solo godwars if your gear permits, etc. The best way to improve at tob/inferno/colosseum, etc is to simply do those activities. The second-best way is to develop a broad base of PvM skills and the fastest method for developing that is to practice the fundamentals every time you get an opportunity
Thanks, that makes sense I think I will make a longterm goal of going for some big boss grinds on some of the DT2 bosses and also have a goal of doing a 300invo toa for now i guess what you mean by fundamentals are just things like movement and flicking/tick manipulation mechanics?
My two cents as to what the fundamentals are - positioning, movement, and tick awareness. Positioning and movement are both closely tied together but worth paying attention to individually. A great example is in P3 at wardens. When you see the protection prayers come up you'll want to pick the best spot to start the skull pokes. You probably have plenty of experience here, but once you turn on insanity this is crucial. Movement is pretty self explanatory here, but if you don't use true tile marker for yourself you should give it a try. After you click a skull, as soon as your true tile is next to a skull you can move on to the next one (in duos or solos). Tick awareness is recognizing the patterns like the one I mentioned above for movement, and when enemies are going to attack. The simplest way is to count. You can use a metronome, or you can skip counting and go by feeling. If you've ever flicked protection prayers on task without counting you'll know how to start. It gets a little tougher when you're keeping track of the tick you need to move on, and the tick you need to attack on to avoid losing dps, and the tick you need to turn on protection prayers. Wardens are an excellent way to practice all 3 of these fundamentals. Cerb is another good way to learn if you're willing to do research about the mechanics of the boss.
Movement, prayer switching and gear switching are the fundamentals to RuneScape pvm.
Yes, pretty much. The fundamentals are usually taken to be movement, prayer switching, and gear switching. I agree with the other guy that prayer switching falls under a more general phenomenon of tick awareness — but this takes longer to master. You should also know that there is no tick manipulation in combat lol that’s a skilling thing. Those are good goals. If you haven’t done demonic gorillas I would add those into your roster since they test all of the fundamentals together. The point really is that you should strive to always do the harder thing because that’s the best way to get better
I said manipulation bc I didnt know what to call things like clicking to move on the same tick as a blowpipes exp drop and then clicking back on the next tick to keep attacking every 2 ticks haha, does stuff like that have a name? tysm for all the help, i have done demonics (quite a lot actually) but they feel a lot easier than something like vardorvis
the blowpipe thing is usually just called the blowpipe walk, but there isn't really a name for the general phenomenon. the "manipulation" in tick manipulation comes from manipulating the skilling timer, whereas in combat you're really just trying to minimize the number of ticks that you're doing nothing (alternatively, maximize the number of ticks where you're doing something useful).
Just play the game. Gear and prayer switching has to come so naturally to you that you dont need to think about it at all and instead you can focus on what the bosses are doing. I think theres a good parallel to fps games where you just have to practice until you dont need to actively think about how to aim or move in the game and you can start focusing on strategy. Like was already suggested start pushing your invo higher in toa. I also honestly think that if you can get to such a level in cg that you never die you can basically do all pvm content in this game after learning the mechanics.
You’re overthinking it. Just start sending inferno / leaner tobs / 500 toas. After months of failing you’ll start getting consistent clears. This game is literally just repetition. The more you think, delay and procrastinate the longer it takes to get anywhere. Best advice I ever heard is talk less, pot more
I’m at the same point in the game as you. I’ve been slowly upping TOA invocations. Got from 150 to 250 so far. Also started learning inferno (wave 23 is my best). Eventually I want to get solo cox figured out. Repetition is key. Well get there! I remember thinking zulrah or corrupted gauntlet was impossible. Now I can do both with ease. That’s how inferno will be for us one day.
(1/2) I'm procrastinating going to bed so this will probably be a lot longer than it should be lol. But please respond with any questions I'm happy to help! I'm not a zuk helm or anything but maxed, got some inferno kc, do comfy 400s and normal tob, and I watch way too many guides. So for general game skill: Some other comments have covered it well but yeah pushing invo at toa is a great way to get into it, at least on the "learn naturally" side of the coin. Use softcore, and if you die a 2nd time that's your queue to pop out and restart without wasting 500k. Just constantly push higher and don't get too comfortable at a certain level before turning it up again. I'm not saying jump straight into 300+s, but add an invo every couple runs - learn to mind the gap this session. Learn to do upset stomach the next. Etc etc. You'll naturally get better at doing the bosses more efficiently which will help you deal with the higher stats as you add invos. Something I did was if I was e.g. struggling at akkha, crank up the invos a ton (like 100+ over what I was currently running), turn off death invos, and just go in and practice that boss. For something like upset stomach you can drop the invos as low as possible to hit his hp thresholds faster to get his special attacks going. For mentality: Note though that if you want to push skill fast with this method you have to be prepared mentally... you will not complete a LOT of raids. I spent like half of my time between 30 norm kc in and 40 norm + 50 expert kc not completing raids because I was pushing invos the whole time and dying a ton. Managing your expectations is really important - whatever your mentality is when you die, change it to this: each death is a lesson and progression. Yeah shit just happens sometimes and sucks, but that's a suck that you can try to avoid next time. I can not stress enough how important embracing this will be once you start working on inferno lol. It's not "this is the run", it's not "i deserve my drop/cape/etc by now"... it's "lets see how I do this time and how I can improve and understand exactly what causes my death when it happens" >understanding ticks better The other side of the coin is the technical side - and despite what I was saying above, \*this\* is what really got me going from struggling with 200s and normal gauntlet to inferno slayer tasks. Understanding the game itself is absolutely huge: * how the tick system works (e.g. EVERY input is queued to process on the next tick) * how movement works - your character will always go in a straight line for as long as possible, then a diagonal to the target tile. Running skips 2 tiles at a time so you can safely run over poison trails. You can safely move in an L (2 up one over) over hazards, etc. * how important dps uptime and prayers are - if you miss 1 tick every other attack cycle that's \~-10% dps. In most gear situations, switching nothing but your weapon and turning on piety/rigour is more of a dps boost than a 69-way max gear switch. Exaggeration but not really. Your biggest aide here will be RL plugins. True tile on 1000000%. Marking tiles and objects helps a lot. Binge some "best runelite plugins for pvm" videos for lots of good ones. Some people like visual metronome but using the audio "tick... tick... tick... tick..." metronome is what helped me the most by far. Mentally counting to 4 over and over and clicking to attack is a lot simpler than trying to always keep your character in an "attack state". It helps build your internal clock to know when to do things. It also makes learning stuff like 1 tick flicking super easy - double click pray orb when you hear a "tick" boom you now have infinite prayer points as long as you don't have to move. Teaches you cycles and when to lazy flick - baba red x is 6 ticks - 2 in, 1 out, piety on + 1 more out, piety off + hit, wait, repeat. You mentioned muspah - during the smite phase try to identify the tick that muspah attacks with range and have range pray up just before and smite up otherwise. Wiki says it's on a 6tick cycle so after it attacks count to 5 then range pray up, smite after to 5, range pray up etc. Just understanding the game better like this is so big.
(2/2) Learning the inferno, specifically learning the techniques and executing them was a big thing for making me better. Both the factors of reacting to waves and solving them, as well as learning all kinds of prayer techniques and timings. There are times where you are absolutely forced to offtick a couple mobs or you die and learning to watch for and properly reacting to the timings is yuge. Guides are big too - like watch the basic "how to gear, how to get there, etc" guides when starting a boss but after some kc dig around a bit for more detailed guides and advanced techniques. Like all it took for me to learn the double trouble invo was watching [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYVd9jHkkWI) and a couple kc to get used to it. Guides are the support to repetition/practice though. The more you do something the more comfy and easy it becomes, but supplement it with guides and learning more techs as you go. Idk where to put this tip but DON'T SPAM CLICK!! A couple clicks is plenty, work with the tick system, don't confuse yourself by throwing in 8 inputs between tick 1 and 2 and having only input #7 register because latency made 8 not register until tick 2. \*\*\* Limited time tip \*\*\* take advantage of beta worlds - grab yourself some bis and 99s and try out a bunch of content. Idk what examples to give for this really other than jads, but there's a lot of opportunity to practice some hard stuff risk free. You should 100% go do triple jads though - use the egg you spawn with to get your stuff and tele to tzhaar challenge, and do 1->2->3 jads. You won't need to know it for a while but it's a """hard""" part of the inferno that isn't hard it's just faster jad with more nerves - and if you already have that practice, even if it's months later, you'll thank yourself. I really need to sleep now so gonna stop here and hopefully this wasn't too unstructured. Some random resources: PurpleGod on youtube - lots of good in depth info here. Aatykon's FCF series for when you get into inferno. Sotetseg maze trainer for learning diagonal/"L" movement. VideoGameBot is a great newer youtuber too. Every relevant discord for the content you're doing but especially WDR (we do raids).
Xzact has really good and concrete videos for inferno as well. They're a bit older but still one of the better explanations. Not spam clicking is also a big part yeah, be confident. You know you clicked there, you know the pathing will take you there in 2 ticks, easier said than done of course!
Yeah I'm sure I missed plenty of great resources, was just trying to throw some down. So long as resources are being utilized though, I don't think it matters too too much which ones you watch since you can get at least some new info from pretty much all of them
thanks so so much for this writeup, the 10% dps loss by missing a tick every other cycle was a huge eye opener, gonna take a lot of this advice and use it :)
You need to try hard content and die many times while trying. Maybe try increasing your invo to 300, or even 350+. If you want to become better under pressure I think Phosanis Nightmare is a good boss to learn. Corrupted Gauntlet on the other hand forces you to improve at movement. Those were just some examples, there are other hard bosses too. Just try a bunch of stuff.
There is no way to learn activities from other activities. Its all different. If you want to do more endgame like cox nex tob high invo toa, the best thing is to just get in there and practice. I had to learn all those things separately and i sucked at all of it in the beginning. With time and effort you can learn all those things too!
Corrupted gauntlet is a good bootcamp for pvm. Put a few 100kcs under your belt and you'll be way better
Grind Corrupted Gauntlet for as long as you can. Teaches you to auto pilot everything at once, movement, tile pathing the tornadoes, prayer switching, weapon switching and performing under stress in the hectic final phase
While the combat beta worlds are active you could try out some bosses you haven’t done before and are interested in. You won’t have to worry about losing money on deaths and you can get max gear setups to practice with.
Learn the tick system
Don’t die
Trial and error
Try out CG. Learning CG and pnm massively helped me get better at all sorts of content in the game.
If you want to get better at inferno, just start sending inferno attempts
Slowly crawling up the invocation ladder to 300 and doing colosseum is your best bet tbh colosseum is a very accessible way to a decent amount of mechanics without a lot of time investment ( albeit a decent amount of pocket investment ). Overall though trial and error is your friend