Dumb question about combat styles.

[Herr Gutentauben]

Are ranged and magic more effective than melee in equal terms? Because it seems both magic and ranged have costs (runes/arrows) whilst melee is just "click fight and go pepega".

[RaptorSolutions]

Well, you know about the combat triangle right?
Other than that, they seem more effective in the sense that they don't have multiple different skills all of which also contribute to the other skills while also having a combat method that trains half defense and half that combat style.
Melee has ultima godsword though. While at least magic has some ancient no-miss magic spells. Dunno what ranged has. Throwing knives is pretty fast and scale well iirc.

[Herr Gutentauben]

Originally posted by RaptorSolutions:

Other than that, they seem more effective in the sense that they don't have multiple different skills all of which also contribute to the other skills while also having a combat method that trains half defense and half that combat style.

That's a good point. Ease of training is pretty nice. Specially early on when i can't really afford to fight offline since i can farm the ammo.

[beautheschmo]

As a general rule of thumb, magic > ranged > melee for DPS, basically the inverse of their supply cost. Magic especially spikes extremely hard in mid/early late game because ancient spells is the first easy and consistent source of guaranteed damage, though the differences do flatten out later on. It's also good early on because it gains bonuses to min hit in addition to max hit, and also has the most good matchups into dungeons and the cheapest route to DR armor (just level runecrafting, no need for long silver/gold/dhide farms to upgrade melee/ranged gear)

Melee suffers the most from how important 1-handing is; magic gains virtually no benefit from 2h weapons, for ranged crossbows are just straight up better than bows (most of the time at least, with the tradeoff being the difficulty/extra time needed to create bolts compared to arrows), melee damage drops off hard with a 1H basically all the way until you get infernal claw/tidal edge.

Ultimately, you are required to use all 3 styles anyways and they all end up good, but it's generally faster to progress with mage/range than it is with melee

[Dwane Dibbley]

Its down to the combat triangle. And its not just about dps, but also about DR. Later, you will use specific style simply cuz other two cant idle fights.

When it comes to dps, its down to gear. Magic might be good early, especialy in reversed triangle mode, but if you get ultima sword, melee is just op. Or royal toxin spear with 0.25 attack interval is jusr crazy. But you wont be able to use them always cuz you wouldnt have DR for idling dungeons.

Theres even one dungeon where are all enemies immune to ranged/melee. Theres also this one boss that has 3 phases and each can be damaged only by 1 style.

[Herr Gutentauben]

Originally posted by Dwane Dibbley:

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Theres even one dungeon where are all enemies immune to ranged/melee. Theres also this one boss that has 3 phases and each can be damaged only by 1 style.

A bit spoily but good to know that even outside of completionism you're still forced to level up everything.

I'd assume the most suitable for idle fighting is melee then?

Also I guess it's safe to assume it's better to focus first on defenses?

[Dwane Dibbley]

Originally posted by Herr Gutentauben:

Originally posted by Dwane Dibbley:

.

Theres even one dungeon where are all enemies immune to ranged/melee. Theres also this one boss that has 3 phases and each can be damaged only by 1 style.

A bit spoily but good to know that even outside of completionism you're still forced to level up everything.

I'd assume the most suitable for idle fighting is melee then?

Also I guess it's safe to assume it's better to focus first on defenses?

Melee is good for farming weak enemies or low tier slayer tasks. If you farm strong enemy, you will chose style based on triangle cuz of DR. Same goes for hard dungeons where you usualy chose style based on boss, cuz boss hits the hardest.

You want to have autoeat treshold above enemy strongest attack to avoid death while idling. And using combat triangle properly gives huge boost. Once you overlevel/overgear content you want to farm, you can chose different combat style.