Free Gaming: Runescape #3 - The Grand Exchange and Shifting Gears

by Richard Rowell, Gaming Successfully Staff

Xylophonia has definitely been finding her quest in the world of RuneScape rather challenging. After completing the “Let Them Eat Pie” quest, she proceeded to wander around and level up various skills, including hunting and woodcutting. What to do with all those logs? Burn ‘em, of course, and level up firemaking! You never know when that will come in handy!

The next quest was “The Death of Chivalry”. It was a fun, challenging quest with some clever persuasion, tricky puzzles, and powerful enemies. Problem was, it turns out I was overmatched by the boss and her skeleton minions. Fortunately, I’ll be able to go back and fight the boss once I level up a bit more and get better equipment. So I’ve had to shift gears for now, until I’m more powerful.

I looked into the Grand Exchange. It’s pretty cool. I’ve already sold a brass necklace for 250 gold and a bunch of logs for over 800 gold. The best part of the Exchange is you can sell your mined and collected materials for a fair amount of profit. The main drawback is that there’s no advanced search that I can tell. So you can’t find level appropriate equipment unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. I’m finding a lot of the cool stuff I could use is members-only, which is a bummer.

I’ve been debating if I should go the Combatant route again, since clearly I’m going to need better combat gear and skill levels. But the Skiller path seems cool, too. The best part of RuneScape is that combat isn’t everything. There’s a lot to do.

On the Combatant front, I decided to check out Slaying. It seems like a skill that has a lot of members-only components, though. Still, there’s something to do with the free-to-play version, fortunately. I took on the Gelatinous Abominations I was first assigned. They were fairly easy but you needed special gauntlets to finish them off. My next task was to take on 18 wolves. The experience was good. So while I don’t get special rewards past the experience, it seems, it’s worth the combat skill training.

I’ll probably do this training for awhile before heading back to take on the Ashdale caves again as part of the Combatant path. I want to get some better equipment before I continue the Adventurer quests. Since the quests scale to your level, that’s clearly what I need.

If you’ve ever played RuneScape, I’d love any advice you could give me so I can share it with everyone.