Magic and Prayer

Magic and Prayer are the two skills that let you steer a fight rather than just trade blows. Magic covers 51 spells: four elemental attack ladders, a curse line, alchemy, enchanting and fifteen teleports. Prayer covers 27 prayers you switch on and off while a points bar drains underneath you. Both are expensive, and both are worth it.

Wands, runes and binding a spell

Every spell is cast through a wand or staff, and each one has its own Magic level: the apprentice wand at 1, the beginner's wand at 10, master's at 25, wizard's at 50, the apocalypse wand at 70 and the 3rd age wand at 85. Open the spell book with /magic, or from the magic icon in your skills panel, pick a combat spell and bind it to left click or right click. After that, clicking with the wand out casts it. Click a monster and the spell locks on and follows it.

Spells take time to arrive. There is a wind-up in your hands, a flight across the gap, then the impact and the damage together, so a target that moves while the spell is in the air is still hit. Range is fifteen blocks and combat spells fire every one and a half seconds. Damage comes from the spell and the wand added together, then scaled by your Magic level, which is why the same fire wave is worth far more from a 3rd age wand. Miss entirely and the spell splashes for a trickle of experience and no damage.

Runes are the running cost. Elemental staves supply unlimited air, water, earth or fire runes from level 1; battlestaves do the same from 30 and hit harder, and the lava, mud and steam battlestaves each cover two elements at once. Bryophyta's staff holds up to a thousand nature runes, spends one on every cast, and now and then fires without taking any runes at all. A Magic skill cape and an arcane spirit shield both give a chance to keep your runes. Otherwise buy them: the magic shops stock elemental, mind and chaos runes, and the Magic Guild in Yanille adds death, law and blood.

The elemental ladder

Four elements, four tiers. Strikes cost one elemental rune and one mind rune: air at 1, water at 5, earth at 9, fire at 13. Bolts cost two elemental runes and a chaos rune at 17, 23, 29 and 35. Blasts cost three and a death rune at 41, 47, 53 and 59. Waves cost four and a blood rune: air at 62, water at 65, earth at 70, fire at 75. Inside each tier the order never changes: air is the cheapest and weakest, fire the dearest and strongest.

Three spells sit above the ladder and abandon the elements entirely. Elemental force at 90 costs a death rune and a wrath rune, Dark elemental force at 95 costs two death and one wrath, and Apocalypse at 98 costs two of each. Apocalypse hits harder than anything else in the book. Wrath runes come from the highest altar in the game, which wants 95 Runecrafting, so feeding these three is a project in itself.

Freeze sits off to one side at level 25 and costs an air, a water and a nature rune. It does modest damage and holds whatever it hits still for three seconds, which is long enough to walk out of range, reposition, or line up the next cast. It carries its own six second cooldown rather than the usual one and a half, and bosses ignore it completely. Against everything else it is the most useful low level spell you own.

Curses, alchemy and enchanting

Six curses weaken what you are fighting for seven seconds each, all built from earth and water runes. Confuse at 3 and Stun at 80 cut your opponent's Attack, Weaken at 11 and Enfeeble at 73 cut Strength, Curse at 19 and Vulnerability at 66 cut Defence. The three lower ones take a body rune; the three higher ones take a cosmic rune and cut twice as deep. Stun is the expensive one, at twelve earth and twelve water runes a cast.

Alchemy turns your bag into coins. Low alchemy at 21 pays back two fifths of an item's base selling price, high alchemy at 55 pays three fifths, and both burn fire and nature runes. Superheat at 43 smelts an ore into a bar wherever you happen to be standing, with no furnace involved, and pays Magic experience alongside the Smithing. Bones to banana at 15 turns every ordinary bone you are carrying into a banana in a single cast, which is worth knowing before you decide to bury them.

Enchanting has six tiers, each needing a cosmic rune and a helping of elemental runes that grows with the tier, and each tied to one gem. Level 1 at 7 handles sapphire, level 2 at 27 emerald, level 3 at 49 ruby, level 4 at 57 diamond, level 5 at 68 dragonstone and level 6 at 87 onyx. This is where the jewellery people actually wear comes from: amulet of glory, ring of wealth and the skills necklace at tier five, amulet of power and ring of life at tier four, ring of dueling at tier two.

Teleports

Fifteen destinations, and law runes in almost all of them. Home teleport is free from level 1 and drops you at your spawn point, but it will not fire again for ten minutes. After that: Lumbridge at 10, Varrock at 25, your own island at 40, Camelot at 45, Edgeville at 48, East Ardougne at 51, Falador at 55, Taverley at 60, Trollheim at 61, the Watch Tower at 65, Canifis at 70, Entrana at 80, Crandor at 85 and Eagles' Peak at 90.

Casting is not instant. Home and Lumbridge draw a glyph under your feet and hold you for five seconds; everything else lifts you off the ground and takes three. Walk out of the circle and you are put back where you started with nothing spent. You cannot start a teleport at all while something is still fighting you, and taking a hit part way through cancels it, so it is not an escape hatch from a fight you are losing. Inside a PvP area, any click in the closing seconds breaks it too.

Three of them are gated beyond the Magic level. Canifis needs Priest in Peril finished, Crandor needs Dragon Slayer, and the island teleport goes nowhere at all until you have bought an island from an estate agent. Crandor and Eagles' Peak are also the dearest to cast, at five law runes, five death runes and five of an element each. Everything else is available the moment you have the level and the runes in your bag.

Prayer points and the prayer book

You start with 50 prayer points and gain one for every Prayer level after the first, so a level 99 account carries just under 150. Natural regeneration is a slow trickle and should be treated as nothing. The real refill is an altar: click one and you go straight back to full, then wait ten minutes before it will do that again. Prayer potions cover the gap in between, in three strengths, and a Prayer skill cape squeezes extra points out of every dose. Dying refills you completely and switches every prayer off.

There are 27 prayers in six groups, and you can have one from each group running at once. Melee, ranged, magic and defence each climb a five step ladder: Burst of strength at 4 through to God strength at 80, Sharp eye at 9 through to Sniper at 95, Mystic will at 11 through to Mystical powers at 99, Thick skin at 1 through to Rune skin at 85. Four healing prayers speed up how fast you get health back, from Clarity of thought at 7 to Super fast heal at 80. The protection prayers unlock at 37, 40 and 43.

Cost decides how you play. The lower steps of each ladder drain one point a second, the second highest drains two and the top step drains three, so God strength, Rune skin and Super fast heal together empty a full bar in under twenty seconds. Protection prayers cost one a second each and halve incoming damage of the style they name, though they count for far less against another player. Monk robes, blessed d'hide and god books raise your maximum; god robes, holy sandals, the helm of Neitiznot and skill capes slow the drain.

Bones, the holy forge and the sceptres

Prayer is trained by burying bones and ashes, and where you bury them matters. Doing it in the Wilderness pays more, and so does dropping them into a fire you lit yourself, with a higher level log making a better fire. Best of all, use the bones on an altar first: that imbues them and doubles what they are worth, which is why imbued dragon bones and imbued dagannoth bones are what serious training runs on. Ashes and infernal ashes behave the same way.

Under the mausoleum, west of Canifis, sit an incinerator and a holy forge. The incinerator is the other way to train: it burns bones together with wood ashes for Prayer experience, and the better the log those ashes came from, the more it pays. The forge will not build anything until Experiments part 1 is done. That quest asks for 43 Prayer and pays back 15,000 Prayer experience, along with access to the Experiment Cave and Fenkenstrain's Castle.

The forge makes prayer sceptres. A silver one takes three hundred noted silver bars, a gold one three hundred noted gold bars, and both also need a holy relic and a length of sacred wood. Silver needs 30 Prayer and holds three toggles and one quick prayer; gold needs 44 and holds five and two; the royal sceptre, a very rare elite treasure trail reward, needs 60 and holds six and three. Left click opens the toggle bar and the number keys flick through it, right click fires your quick prayers, and sneaking with either configures it. Both spend charges, refilled free at the forge.