Once upon a Hammer

So I’ve missed a few years. Well, let’s catch up… Last we spoke, I had my Firemaking cape, my Woodcutting cape, my Smithing cape and my crafting cape and was planning on moving forward to get my Cooking cape. Well, I did get that done in November 2012. I continued to futz around until August 2013, at which point I stopped playing.

I came back a bit in the summer of 2014. In 2014 they came out with Master Skillcapes and I decided I needed to get the Master Firemaking Cape. Right as I returned to the game, then clan was having a drive for get their noobs to 99 Firemaking. While that wasn’t really relevant to me, I used it as the chance to get another 13 million FM exp, upping my drive to Mastery. And then Priffidnas opened. The opening of Prif put a charge into my skilling, due to the ease of doing so… Within about one week, I 99’d in Thieving by Pickpocketing these news elves (finishing op with 4.5 million exp gained over five days), then 99’d in Mining at the beginning of November (using Seren Stones). I also, not in Prif, decided to finally do some combat training, so I discovered the glory that is AFK Hellhounds and focused on Defense, going from Level 90 to 99 there in the space of 12 days. I also continued my slow route towards getting my magic cape and finally succeeded in January of 2015. At that point, I had to finish off my slowest 99 drive… I had been 90+ in Fletching for 3 and a half years, so I finally pushed that through in March. So, in short, after 5 years of playing, I had 5 99’s. Then, in the span of 6 months, I got five more. Kinda changed my perspective on things. I also charged ahead with the goal of getting my Quest cape. And have now finished all but five quests.

Anyway, so there we are. I am currently still hoping to get those quests done. But I am really working on getting 99 Ranged. But, oddly enough, 99 DUng and 99 Constitution seem to be right out there in front of me as well.

While I still hope for Firemaking Mastery, and I did make it to 60 mil+ exp, I have stopped that for a while as I work on more 99’s.

Oh and also, soon after I can back, the game released the Ironman modes, possibly the best update of all since Runescape 3 came out. I do have a Hardcore Ironman character, who I was putting some time into, but, alas, Hammer always ends up taking precedence…

Anyway, to counter the picture in the header, here is Hammer as of today…

To follow up my June post, yes. I did tromp ahead with Firemaking and passed the 20 million mark and kept going. But I finally have a real goal. The clan’s third bithday is in November and we are hoping to have a gala of 99 fireworks up there for it! I have settled on, whimpy as it may sound, getting my Cooking to 99 that day. So, cooking sharks at the W92 coooking guild whenever I get the chance is the order of the day (in addition to my citadel skilling and firemaking, of course).

I did, yet again, try to finish The Branches of Darkmeyer quest. I was eager for those crazy exp bonus at the end! But, after getting trounced twice by Vanstrom, I gave up again. Sigh.

Yes, yes, yes. I oppose all these silly updates that Jagex is making, and I especially oppose all of these attempts at monetizing that they are making. But…

Since the Solomon’s General Store came out, I have been sadly tempted by the Gnome Helicopter Teleport!

While I was pondering this, I began to start frequenting a Runescape blog that I hadn’t seen before… Crewman6’s Adventure Log. Well, if he didn’t have an interest in the teleports himself and, after he and his wife decided to get the Pegasi teleports, I figured, eh, what the heck. I use home teleport often enough that a few bucks to make it more fun will be fine. So there. I went and did it.

Here is a little picture, proudly displaying my clan cape as I get lol’d by some Bluenose.

So after spending many millions to hurry it along, and recovering from a weeks fixation on the Runespan, I finally got my Crafting Cape (yaaay!)!

Of course, as with my previous capes, this has led to an immediate feeling of “What now?” I thought maybe I would get into combat, or get into dung, or work on tasks, or work on quests, or pursue another skilling cape. So I blundered around for a couple of weeks. I tried Dung again, and failed. I looked at tasks, but all of the elites have level requirements that I just can’t consider. I tried Slayer but got quickly bored with combat, yet again. I thought about working on Fletching, Thieving or Cooking capes… But I just don’t have it in me. I do plan on doing what I can to finish quests, but many of them involve intimidating combat scenarios that I would rather avoid.

So my goals occurred to me. My original goal from when I started playing was to get my Smithing cape, then Firemaking, Crafting and Defence. My second years goal was to get all of my skills to at least 70.

Well, I have three of those capes now… And I am basically not going to worry about the Defence one, because that is just too much combat. And all of my skills are at 70 and above. So I had to think… With these goals being met and no other goals seeming enticing, except for my goal of 20 million fm exp… What is it that I really like to do in Runescape. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the answer there is Firemaking. I really like Firemaking. And I especially like the new bonfires. So instead of wealth, glory or capes, I think that for the forseeable future, I think I will just content myself with Firemaking in Falador. 20,000,000 exp is right around the corner and, well, why stop there?

Whoosh! Well, my confidence waxed and waned on that skillweek. After the first day, I started thinking that I might get 3rd, but that I would at least get in the top 5… Then Alan and Shan joined the fray and my confidence dropped. Then Lindi stepped away for a couple of days and it came back again, then Voodoo started seeming confident and mine fell, yet again. I cam into the last night (8pm, with the comp ending at 5am the next morning) in 6th place with just about everyone who was going for it logged in. As they logged out though, and I stayed logged in, I started to feel better… And started spending money hand over foot on Dragon Leather. Knowing that I would have to get some sleep, I decided to just get as much exp as I could stand and ended up crafting for 5 hours straight and ending up gaining 750k exp. When I finally logged out, I was in 3rd place and Voodoo was still logged in. The hopeful side of me assumed that Voodoo and Lindi wouldn’t be able to get enough exp in 4 hours to catch me and that Vak would stay in bed (having just had surgery and all). This left my hope for third place and Ticks cash prize in the hands of Shan and if he logged back in to displace me… Something I thought likely as the comp didn’t end until 10am his time.

Well, so I slept and woke to find myself in 5th place! Yay! I made it and got my siggy! I feel like it is my first repectable finishing in a Skill Week. And yes, while Lindi and Voodoo didn’t opt to invest the time to overtake me in the middle of the night, Shan did and Vak crawled out of his sick bed also to pass my by. Regardless, I am quite pleased with the result, though I think that after selling/alching what I made over the week that I will see a loss of about 10 million coins from this skillweek! Ha! And Alan did end up beating the record (which he held anyway) for most exp gained in a skill week.

Now I need to prepare a bit for Bonus Exp weekend. I did feel a bit silly burning through all of these crafting supplies this week when it could have been turned on much more exp just a week later, but, whatever. I will try and start off the Bonus Weekend making a couple thousand Fire Battlestaves, so I need to be buying those and making the fire orbs (need to stop losing money) over the next week. Aside from that, my Bonus goal is to do Pyramid Plunder as much as I can… Working on 91 Thieving so that I can finally use my effigy.

And after that well, I need to use up my wolf feet on agility and my paws on combat (should finally get slayer up to 70) and use all extra exp on Runecrafting to get it to 70. Then, once those are done, Dung will be my only sub-70 goal. At that point, well, I hope to try and make a serious effort and getting into Dungeoneering… Both solo and in groups. Not only to get it to 70, but also just because UI really would like to like it. I think that I would already if I didn’t have such a hard time soloing the bosses. Bleh.

So yeah, crafting was one of my original interests back in the day. I never focusef too much on it because there only seemed to be two training options: slow and expensive, neither of which appeal to me. Occasionally i do what I can with battlestaves though, and the huge stack of gold bars from my smithing training sometimes calls out to me.

I couple of weeks ago they released the new potion vials which has led me to put more effort into it. Then, wonder of wonders, this months clan skill week is crafting!

I went into it just hoping to get to level 89, not with any goal of placing well. Then there was a sneak peak at the forum siggy for the winners and, well, I thought I would like one, and then a clanmate of mine and I got into an informal challenge with each other! Now the game is on!

Well, sort of. There ia a strict limit on buying battlestaves, my key supply for training craft so I am stuck using my remaining 33,000 gold bars… But that is slow slow slow and I don’t have much time for playing.

Anyway, though I was in second for a bit, and third, I seem to be hanging out around 4th place… Behind my competitor Lindi and with other folks rapidly sneaking up on us. Leading me to think that I won’t beat Lindi or get a siggy.

On the bright side, this drive has led me to get exp faster than expected and tonight I should hit my original goal of level 89.

Okay so to get back into the swing of things… I tried some Slayer, but couldn’t get into it. I bought a Robin Hood hat (the value of which dropped by a half million soon thereafter) to inspire me to try ranging… But I couldn’t get into it. At least I like the hat.

In my goal of doing more questing, I did finish my last two RFD subquests and then RFD itself, which had been hanging over my head for a long while.

Also, I did some Trouble Brewing with a clanmate, which has got me into the habit of brewing… Which I quite enjoy. If only it was faster or had more places to do it.

I think my next goal will be to try out the new quest Firemaker’s Curse, which was released yesterday.

So keeping at it because one of my clanmates was also heading for 99 Smithing, I finally reached it last week during the Xmass Overall Skill Competition! And was also able to train my favorite skill by burning some curly roots in my off hours to make up for the low exp rate of gold bars. It is a big relief to have met my original game goal. But… I find that, rather than free me up for other things, I just feel like I have lost focus and don’t really know what to do next.

So even with my statement three weeks ago about taking a break from Smithing to actually play the game (noted by in these pages and on the Clan’s Proboards forum), I did not take a break. For a month now I have averaged over 100,000 Smithing Exp a day and had time to do little else in game aside from the Citadel, Hanky point and Tears. At this point, with my Smithing at level 98 and 1.2 million exp from level 99 (about 10 more days), I will stop acting as if I am going to take a break from it and just plow forward until 99 is done.

But I swear! Once that is done, no more power anything for a good while. Maybe until Double exp weekend when I’d like to make a big push at Thieving the Pyramid (and Herblore if I get bored). I’d really like to get back to quests, and I’d really like to do some slaying to get my combat up in the hopes of taking on more creatures with better drops.

Well, so no, none came to pass. I terms of just trying to get some skills to 91, I have failed and, instead, just kept plugging away with Smithing. My goal I came up with this summer of getting 100,000 smithing exp a day did not really come to pass until a week ago and so now I have achieved that each of the last 7 days. While that sounds good, with the limited time that I actually have to play, it has overwhelmed the rest of my game so it is almost all that I do. No quests, Rock, Pengs… Very little but gold bar after gold bar and, instead of stopping at lvl 91 to pursue other skilling, I am now sneaking up on level 96 Smithing and I think I need a break!

I am strongly feel the need to pursue weekly, rocks, pengs and quests and maybe even finish my languishing clue scroll!

Last week I was made a clan General, which I am quite excited about, but it just made me feel more out of it by hiding at the port and Smithing gold bars the whole time that I am on so now… I will again profess a goal to stop power training for a while… To go find all of those those Pengs every week, try all the skills weekly for rocks and get some more questing under my belt! And try to do more Clue Scrolls so that I can get the pages to build my Guthix book, since no one seems to be willing to sell those at the GE. And, still, to Smith gold bars when nothing else is convenient…