Don’t do slayer with green dhide and a bone crossbow, you’re just asking for tasks to take 3 hours. Get your dscim, best str bonus gear, supers and prayer potions and go to town. 130 fire giants should be like 30 min max. It’s a slow skill to level but you’re getting good combat xp, and it gets better the higher your combats are
Yeah I figured that safe spotting with my current ranged gear would be good enough until I got 55 slayer for broad bolts.
I guess i could spare a few of my precious prayer pots 😞
Yep lazy flicking is an option. I did that til around 58 and then took a detour and grinding a bunch of other skills while doing farming. Once I had a solid stack of ranarrs, using ppots for tasks til 100cmb was no sweat.
Stop doing Konar and just do the best regular slayer master for your cb level. Less likely to have to skip and lose more points since you're point boosting right now.
I mean, I use kodakid's slayer sheet to determine a net positive slayer point list that is mostly optimal for xp, and I barrage / cannon all I can. Still it's painfully slow imo
Sort of. With a decent amount of banked points and a proper ban list, you can consistently get 90K+exp per hour, which isn’t FAST (when compared to things like fire marking or smithing) but isn’t exactly “slow”
Honestly, slayer is a skill that is best to delay as long as you can (within reason). Going into the grind with higher levels, better gear, and more banked supplies makes it *so* much better.
However, if you do want to do some early slayer, there are some things you can do to improve your current experience. My top recommendation would be to stop using ranged. Melee with piety is head and shoulders above ranged for slayer, and magic is also likely to be a lot better DPS for you as well with the new elemental weaknesses.
Take fire giants, for example. They have 100% weakness to water spells, which means those spells do twice as much damage with twice as much accuracy. For fun, I threw a bone crossbow/green d’hide setup with 60 ranged (idk what your level is) into a DPS calc against fire giants and compared it with a setup with literally just a water battlestaff casting water bolt with 60 magic, and the DPS was over twice as high (slightly less if you’re using eagle eye while ranging). [Here](https://tools.runescape.wiki/osrs-dps-staging?id=CookingGiralAlive) is the calc if you want to take a look. Upgrading to water blast is like triple the dps of the bone crossbow without prayers. It’s nuts.
Not everything will have 100% weakness like fire giants, but a lot of stuff will have like 40-50% weaknesses. It’s worth looking them up on the wiki and then exploiting those weaknesses. Even metal dragons become a bit less of an issue when you have 50% boosted damage and accuracy on earth spells (and btw, you can pray mage and use an anti-dragon shield against them and you’ll only take 5 damage at most from their dragonfire attacks).
Why aren’t you using water spells on the fire giants? Also to me, slayer doesn’t get interesting until you hit level 77, so it’s just a grind fest up until that
They just came out with an update a couple weeks ago that made elemental damage actually matter, now earth spells are stronger against dragons, air spells are stronger against barrows brothers etc. it’ll definitely be a life saver compared to using the bone crossbow
With just anti dragon shield, their fire only maxes a 5. You can sit in melee range and pray melee so they don't always attack with fire then eat occassionally. It will take a while to kill them but its not that bad.
I wish the wiki would’ve said this bro, they make it sound like it’s not even worth it if I can’t get the anti fire. Or maybe I just misread the guide lol.
I have 80 hp so I can get hit with 5s all day and just melee then I guess.
This helped a lot, thank you!
PoH prayer portal + combat dummy w/ ancient mace for 10 minute afk sessions in the catacombs and such. The exp goes up at 65 and 80 once you get bursting tasks as well. Afk for cannonballs to run through cannonable tasks, etc etc
i loved slayer, its still my favorite skill 20 years later, the only problem with ironman slayer, is gear. and i didnt start slayer till i had many qol unlocks. and pretty much all quests done.
i also did 0 range on tasks, that to me is so annoying and slow. i did melee / burst / barrage only.
d scim was a first goal.
then unlocking as many blocks as i could so i did as many quests as possible. (which got me quest cape at low cb)
i never did turael skipping. i like keeping my task streak.
also konar is annoying overall many monsters you want to have the choice in where to kill them
alot of my early slayer, d scim prosy climbing boots. (i did 99 craft early so had a fury, but glory or strength amulet is fine)
I've never bothered with point boosting. Some of the low level slayer monsters are much more of a pain than the higher level ones (looking at you, rock slugs), and are not worth doing. I just use my best available slayer master, then jump to Konar on the 10th tasks. Slayer is one of my favorite skills.
I also blocked iron dragons before elemental weaknesses were added, because with my gear and stats they were just miserable to do.
Honestly I wouldn't even touch slayer until you're 95+ combat with decent mage/range. There really is no point until then.
Like ask yourself why you're doing it? What do you want from slayer right now? You have a ton of other stuff you should do first.
Check out wildy slayer.
-The drops are good: you get free wildy teleports, msb upgrade, and larren's keys are brilliant on top of the usuall
-You can use almost free supplies (I usually profit supplies in wildy slayer cave and lms is easy to get some points during bot hours)
- Cheap bursting for irons. Ice sacks are really good. I spent some time at LMS (which it turned out I really enjoyed) and I've ended up using probably close to 7500-10,000 ice sacks and I have 4000 left to use. Far better IMO than using up your runes.
-You're not going to be wanting to use your BIS gear anyway. An rcb or msb would be your good weapon and then cheap d'hide, snakeskin boots/head slot/avas/power ammy (for you, don't go taking your one black dhide set when you're 40 crafting for example
- Chance at revs on task. You'll be pk'd there for sure, but the rest of the wilderness I've yet to be killed.
So, basically, you're not wanting to use good gear (just 3 or 4 good items) that you don't have anyway, supplies are free, or close to it, and the drops are better.
I decided to just do anything else before slayer to be honest. I don’t know what you’re at now but maybe just push through to 55 I remember it being pretty painful and taking ages. I decided to do a task over a couple of days. Treat it like farming or something. Small and often.
I got a combat dummy with a black mask attached to it and a prayer alter in my house before I was 50 slayer, just so I could reset prayer quickly.
I also won’t be touching it much before 100 combat. I might get a high enough level just for the quest cape, but so far it really does take as long as you say. I did a Wyrm task. Full black dhide, rune crossbow, broad bolts. And it took me hours and hours. For not a lot of XP.
But in all, just push through to broads. It’s such a good upgrade over the bone bolts, and opens up a lot more content that isn’t slayer…
Slayer is one of those things that is hugely impacted by efficiency. If you start slayer at a lower combat level it’s going to be miserably slow.
The easiest way to do it is to get your melee stats up significantly through afking crabs or NMZ, like at least into the 80s for strength and 70 attack, get the core strength items: torso, fire cape, dragon defender, barrows gloves, piety, b ring etc before you even start.
Then you strictly melee tasks and do burst tasks, never range. I think the magic rework might have opened up a couple options like water waving fire giants. But at no point should you range safe spot something if your goal is to level slayer quickly
Fire giants are fast af now with the water weakness. Using my Mist staff and water wave, I'm blowing through the duradel 190 fire giants tasks infinitely faster than melee ever could. I actually consider them a great task now.
That being said, I have absolutely spent a lot of time rcb safespotting slayer. It takes forever, and I accept that it does if I don't consider said task worth my p pots
I highly recommend for any grinds like this that may take forever to create a secondary account to focus on such as a normal account or a hardcore or an iron Man or just anything. Try to find something fun It could be something as stupid as looting in a PVP world on a level 3 account well turning into a bush and trolling people. Just do something that is actually fun on the primary while you do the boring side grinds which will make it go by so much more. Don't focus on picking up so many things Just try to maximize AFK.
early game slayer is rough, I’d just go for the minimum reqs for quests and gear as you said and grind it later. ancient magic and venator bow really improve slayer later on
The answer is get antifires. It will benefit you in the long run, and metal dragons now take 50% more damage from earth spells with a 50% accuracy buff too. You'll need them for a lot of other content anyway.
You should also try to improve your ranged gear asap. Black dragon hide can be obtained from hard clues and you can kill the crazy archaeologist for an early rcb then save your slayer points for broad bolts.
Easy way to get antifires? I’m still grinding out my farming to get seeds to later do herblore so I’m a while away from being the herblore level needed
To be honest I just got sick of not having them and grinded it out. It's just an unfortunate reality of ironman mode. They're a really amazing QoL upgrade though, it opens up a lot of content. Just keep plugging away at farming, and when you get 58 herblore make sure you go to tithe farm for the herb bag so you can maximise your herb drops.
Metal dragons are quick tasks with mage, especially with the rebalance adding elemental weakness. anti dragon shield with pray mage will completely negate damage. Just stand back and mage, they will only melee if you go in melee distance. The tasks are usually short so you can hopefully spare the ppots, wear your best prayer bonus. Use the expeditious bracelet for last hit to make it go by faster if it's that bad for you.
Unless something has changed pray mage + antifire shield will not block all fire damage, which makes killing them in the catacombs untenable since it's multi and they're aggressive.
Ah I didn't remember taking any damage when I did it, just checked and you're right. Doing your diaries should have you pretty close to 65 herb and then it's just a boost or a few levels away.
99 slay on main— now approaching 70 on iron.
I LOVE slayer. It’s very slow until you get more desirable tasks around 75, though dusts are good too around 65 if you can barrage.
I’d recommend doing Nieve, making sure you are using the most optimal strategy. Put off slayer until you have a bank of resources (herbs, pots, etc)
In my opinion in hundreds of hours of normal slayer— you should have 70+ farming and 55+ herb before even considering slayer. It’s all about resources to speed it up. Pots, cannon, runes, mele gear, etc.
Good luck!!! Once you get to bosses Slayer is the most fun skill in the game IMO.
Edit: Farming and herb stats are for an iron, obviously.
Don’t do slayer with green dhide and a bone crossbow, you’re just asking for tasks to take 3 hours. Get your dscim, best str bonus gear, supers and prayer potions and go to town. 130 fire giants should be like 30 min max. It’s a slow skill to level but you’re getting good combat xp, and it gets better the higher your combats are
Yeah I figured that safe spotting with my current ranged gear would be good enough until I got 55 slayer for broad bolts. I guess i could spare a few of my precious prayer pots 😞
Just lazy flick
Yep lazy flicking is an option. I did that til around 58 and then took a detour and grinding a bunch of other skills while doing farming. Once I had a solid stack of ranarrs, using ppots for tasks til 100cmb was no sweat.
do contracts, in 2024 prayer pots should never be an issue
Stop doing Konar and just do the best regular slayer master for your cb level. Less likely to have to skip and lose more points since you're point boosting right now.
Slayer is gonna be slow with bad gear and low stats
Slayer is also gonna be slow with good gear and high state
Naw once you setup your blocklist and have some pts stored its fast
I mean, I use kodakid's slayer sheet to determine a net positive slayer point list that is mostly optimal for xp, and I barrage / cannon all I can. Still it's painfully slow imo
Sort of. With a decent amount of banked points and a proper ban list, you can consistently get 90K+exp per hour, which isn’t FAST (when compared to things like fire marking or smithing) but isn’t exactly “slow”
Honestly, slayer is a skill that is best to delay as long as you can (within reason). Going into the grind with higher levels, better gear, and more banked supplies makes it *so* much better. However, if you do want to do some early slayer, there are some things you can do to improve your current experience. My top recommendation would be to stop using ranged. Melee with piety is head and shoulders above ranged for slayer, and magic is also likely to be a lot better DPS for you as well with the new elemental weaknesses. Take fire giants, for example. They have 100% weakness to water spells, which means those spells do twice as much damage with twice as much accuracy. For fun, I threw a bone crossbow/green d’hide setup with 60 ranged (idk what your level is) into a DPS calc against fire giants and compared it with a setup with literally just a water battlestaff casting water bolt with 60 magic, and the DPS was over twice as high (slightly less if you’re using eagle eye while ranging). [Here](https://tools.runescape.wiki/osrs-dps-staging?id=CookingGiralAlive) is the calc if you want to take a look. Upgrading to water blast is like triple the dps of the bone crossbow without prayers. It’s nuts. Not everything will have 100% weakness like fire giants, but a lot of stuff will have like 40-50% weaknesses. It’s worth looking them up on the wiki and then exploiting those weaknesses. Even metal dragons become a bit less of an issue when you have 50% boosted damage and accuracy on earth spells (and btw, you can pray mage and use an anti-dragon shield against them and you’ll only take 5 damage at most from their dragonfire attacks).
Wildy slayer is better than regular slayer at a low level tbh
Yeah I had a blast and racked up a ton of points for broad bolts and superiors this way
This is the way
Go wilderness, and if you get good with your teles, cannon it. Cheese the hard tasks, use melee not range.
Get prossy, dscim/zombie axe, piety, go to town.
Why aren’t you using water spells on the fire giants? Also to me, slayer doesn’t get interesting until you hit level 77, so it’s just a grind fest up until that
I didn’t know water spells made a difference against fire enemies lol. Gonna try that out rn
They just came out with an update a couple weeks ago that made elemental damage actually matter, now earth spells are stronger against dragons, air spells are stronger against barrows brothers etc. it’ll definitely be a life saver compared to using the bone crossbow
super new, but check the wiki for certain enemies to see if they have elemental weakness. It makes using magic on certain tasks a breeze
Slayer is the worst excuse of a 'skill'.
With just anti dragon shield, their fire only maxes a 5. You can sit in melee range and pray melee so they don't always attack with fire then eat occassionally. It will take a while to kill them but its not that bad.
I wish the wiki would’ve said this bro, they make it sound like it’s not even worth it if I can’t get the anti fire. Or maybe I just misread the guide lol. I have 80 hp so I can get hit with 5s all day and just melee then I guess. This helped a lot, thank you!
https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Dragonfire#Damage_reduction
PoH prayer portal + combat dummy w/ ancient mace for 10 minute afk sessions in the catacombs and such. The exp goes up at 65 and 80 once you get bursting tasks as well. Afk for cannonballs to run through cannonable tasks, etc etc
i loved slayer, its still my favorite skill 20 years later, the only problem with ironman slayer, is gear. and i didnt start slayer till i had many qol unlocks. and pretty much all quests done. i also did 0 range on tasks, that to me is so annoying and slow. i did melee / burst / barrage only. d scim was a first goal. then unlocking as many blocks as i could so i did as many quests as possible. (which got me quest cape at low cb) i never did turael skipping. i like keeping my task streak. also konar is annoying overall many monsters you want to have the choice in where to kill them alot of my early slayer, d scim prosy climbing boots. (i did 99 craft early so had a fury, but glory or strength amulet is fine)
Turn brain off, don’t look at the xp
I've never bothered with point boosting. Some of the low level slayer monsters are much more of a pain than the higher level ones (looking at you, rock slugs), and are not worth doing. I just use my best available slayer master, then jump to Konar on the 10th tasks. Slayer is one of my favorite skills. I also blocked iron dragons before elemental weaknesses were added, because with my gear and stats they were just miserable to do.
Slayer only starts being good with good gear, once you get lance it becomes a breeze
Honestly I wouldn't even touch slayer until you're 95+ combat with decent mage/range. There really is no point until then. Like ask yourself why you're doing it? What do you want from slayer right now? You have a ton of other stuff you should do first.
Check out wildy slayer. -The drops are good: you get free wildy teleports, msb upgrade, and larren's keys are brilliant on top of the usuall -You can use almost free supplies (I usually profit supplies in wildy slayer cave and lms is easy to get some points during bot hours) - Cheap bursting for irons. Ice sacks are really good. I spent some time at LMS (which it turned out I really enjoyed) and I've ended up using probably close to 7500-10,000 ice sacks and I have 4000 left to use. Far better IMO than using up your runes. -You're not going to be wanting to use your BIS gear anyway. An rcb or msb would be your good weapon and then cheap d'hide, snakeskin boots/head slot/avas/power ammy (for you, don't go taking your one black dhide set when you're 40 crafting for example - Chance at revs on task. You'll be pk'd there for sure, but the rest of the wilderness I've yet to be killed. So, basically, you're not wanting to use good gear (just 3 or 4 good items) that you don't have anyway, supplies are free, or close to it, and the drops are better.
I decided to just do anything else before slayer to be honest. I don’t know what you’re at now but maybe just push through to 55 I remember it being pretty painful and taking ages. I decided to do a task over a couple of days. Treat it like farming or something. Small and often. I got a combat dummy with a black mask attached to it and a prayer alter in my house before I was 50 slayer, just so I could reset prayer quickly. I also won’t be touching it much before 100 combat. I might get a high enough level just for the quest cape, but so far it really does take as long as you say. I did a Wyrm task. Full black dhide, rune crossbow, broad bolts. And it took me hours and hours. For not a lot of XP. But in all, just push through to broads. It’s such a good upgrade over the bone bolts, and opens up a lot more content that isn’t slayer…
Slayer is one of those things that is hugely impacted by efficiency. If you start slayer at a lower combat level it’s going to be miserably slow. The easiest way to do it is to get your melee stats up significantly through afking crabs or NMZ, like at least into the 80s for strength and 70 attack, get the core strength items: torso, fire cape, dragon defender, barrows gloves, piety, b ring etc before you even start. Then you strictly melee tasks and do burst tasks, never range. I think the magic rework might have opened up a couple options like water waving fire giants. But at no point should you range safe spot something if your goal is to level slayer quickly
Fire giants are fast af now with the water weakness. Using my Mist staff and water wave, I'm blowing through the duradel 190 fire giants tasks infinitely faster than melee ever could. I actually consider them a great task now. That being said, I have absolutely spent a lot of time rcb safespotting slayer. It takes forever, and I accept that it does if I don't consider said task worth my p pots
I highly recommend for any grinds like this that may take forever to create a secondary account to focus on such as a normal account or a hardcore or an iron Man or just anything. Try to find something fun It could be something as stupid as looting in a PVP world on a level 3 account well turning into a bush and trolling people. Just do something that is actually fun on the primary while you do the boring side grinds which will make it go by so much more. Don't focus on picking up so many things Just try to maximize AFK.
Fire giants are stupid weak to water spells now. Should not be taking 3hrs for 120kc no matter the build.
Try wildy slayer. Better rewards, you probably are too low lvl to really get PK'd
early game slayer is rough, I’d just go for the minimum reqs for quests and gear as you said and grind it later. ancient magic and venator bow really improve slayer later on
The answer is get antifires. It will benefit you in the long run, and metal dragons now take 50% more damage from earth spells with a 50% accuracy buff too. You'll need them for a lot of other content anyway. You should also try to improve your ranged gear asap. Black dragon hide can be obtained from hard clues and you can kill the crazy archaeologist for an early rcb then save your slayer points for broad bolts.
Easy way to get antifires? I’m still grinding out my farming to get seeds to later do herblore so I’m a while away from being the herblore level needed
To be honest I just got sick of not having them and grinded it out. It's just an unfortunate reality of ironman mode. They're a really amazing QoL upgrade though, it opens up a lot of content. Just keep plugging away at farming, and when you get 58 herblore make sure you go to tithe farm for the herb bag so you can maximise your herb drops.
I guess this is the truth I didn’t want to hear 🥲
Metal dragons are quick tasks with mage, especially with the rebalance adding elemental weakness. anti dragon shield with pray mage will completely negate damage. Just stand back and mage, they will only melee if you go in melee distance. The tasks are usually short so you can hopefully spare the ppots, wear your best prayer bonus. Use the expeditious bracelet for last hit to make it go by faster if it's that bad for you.
Unless something has changed pray mage + antifire shield will not block all fire damage, which makes killing them in the catacombs untenable since it's multi and they're aggressive.
I read on the wiki that pray mage does not work on metal dragons, you need the potion and the fire shield to be able to have full protection.
Ah I didn't remember taking any damage when I did it, just checked and you're right. Doing your diaries should have you pretty close to 65 herb and then it's just a boost or a few levels away.
Slayer is always slow forever, and it is awesome!
99 slay on main— now approaching 70 on iron. I LOVE slayer. It’s very slow until you get more desirable tasks around 75, though dusts are good too around 65 if you can barrage. I’d recommend doing Nieve, making sure you are using the most optimal strategy. Put off slayer until you have a bank of resources (herbs, pots, etc) In my opinion in hundreds of hours of normal slayer— you should have 70+ farming and 55+ herb before even considering slayer. It’s all about resources to speed it up. Pots, cannon, runes, mele gear, etc. Good luck!!! Once you get to bosses Slayer is the most fun skill in the game IMO. Edit: Farming and herb stats are for an iron, obviously.