The Hardest Skill Cape?

The Hardest Skill Cape?

Every time a new skill appears in RuneScape, it appears to be "the hardest skill" ever created. Whether it takes technique and skill (such as Dungeoneering) or monetary input (such as Construction) or merely hard grinding (like Hunter and Summoning), the skill itself is always the "hardest" one to do - that is of course, until a skill guide appears, or a way of training it is revealed, or the best grind is discovered.

So for some small amount of time, the new skill is usually the hardest skill cape to obtain. But this usually doesn't last long, because there is always some hardy, determined players who will want to get 99 first, and therefore always discover the ways to train the skill - thus passing them down to others again and again, and more and more obtain 99 as this trend carries on.

Through this method, thousands of players now have 99 Hunter and Construction, and many more are on there way to 99 Summoning and Dungeoneering. So does this make a new skill the hardest skill? Or simply the rarest?

What other skills have been proven time and again hard to train? Would you consider Farming the hardest skill cape to obtain, due to the time it takes to grow certain plants and trees? Or perhaps Herblore or Prayer, which takes a huge amount of money or time, collecting items needed to train it. Or perhaps Slayer or RuneCrafting, which can take very long amounts of time and patience.

On this basis - are new skills always the hardest? Or just rarest? And what do you think is the hardest skill cape to obtain? Why?

Discuss.

For me and the fact that I'm poor, any buyable has been more difficult than a grinding skill - herblore I feel will be my hardest and most likely my last 99 to obtain purely due to its high cost

I 100% agree with you! as much as I love Herblore! it's just so over-priced! there has to be an easy way around it than cleaning herbs using Mouse-Keys.. It's so tedious and boring!

Well any skill can be hard, its just perserverance a hard skill is runecrafting because if you do it the profitable way it can be hard to get over 25kxp per hour and it just pure grinding.

I always found Runecrafting to be one of the "hardest" skills because even doing ZMI is really slow when compared to other skills and takes many hours of grinding to achieve 99 in. It's always been the skill holding me back, not including Dungeon, making my average level low until recently when I trained to 83 RC lol

I also find Slayer a "hard" skill in that there is a way to buy it but that way costs well over 120m now, even buying Slayer still takes well over 100 hours to complete, I would think, (not sure because I have never researched how long cannon+pray slaying takes). If I'm wrong about that sorry Your other option is obviously training it task by task without piety/turmoil and a cannon every task, only used them on a few tasks myself. Doing it that way took me about 5 months from 92, never kept track of exactly how many hours I played and in those hours how much time I spent slaying so idk the exact time

Of course, I also agree that all buyables are very hard and take just as long if not longer than a grind skill to achieve 99. Think about it, you have to first make the cash to buy the materials, than you must use the materials to achieve the experience and levels than finally you have to sell the after product if it is even sellable, if not you must either lose a bank space to some permanent item that you'll never fully use up or basically sell it off as junk or something. So all in all it takes quite awhile to finally be "done" with the buyable skill.

With a grinding skill you spend 100 or 100+ hours doing the same thing over and over than you're done, you have no extra stuff to get rid of and even if you do have stuff to get rid of (like chins from hunter or gold ores from mining) they are easily sold on the GE. The longest it'd take to sell them is a week just because of GE buy/sell limits.

I agree with the whole "costing alot of money" skills. The day I get 99 Herblore... well it's a long way to come yet LOL. I really am not good at making money, so any amount I spend is alot to me.

Tbh, the day I ever get 99 herblore.. will yeah.. I'll probly be 90 odds.. and not even be capable of playing by then.. so yeah.. JEALOUS!

Hardest to get would be (imo) Runecrafting as it's really slow experience and it's just grinding...

Slayer is hard again but different slay creatures = more variation plus the profit is decent. (Can also cannon/pray to increase exp a little)

Buyable skills are easy as long as you have the cash which (depending on luck) isn't that hard at GWD.

Well, firstly 'Hardest' can be interpreted differently between players with different playing styles. For example, a player who focuses a lot of his time and attention into money-making would probably consider Herblore or Prayer to be an 'Easy' 99, similar to the way a player who loves grinding through skills would consider Runecrafting an 'Easy' skill. It depends a lot upon the personality of the player behind the screen and the way that they like to play the game.

From my perspective though, I've always been truly envious of Slayer and Runecrafting skill capes, simply because of the low exp/hr when training the skills.

I'd disagree that Herblore is the hardest, simply because people who can afford it can just 'buy it'. It would take time to get 99, but it's still 'buyable'.

I'd say any skill that isn't buyable have to be hard, such as Summoning, Slayer, Agility etc.

In fact, not only is Summoning simply an 'un-buyable' skill, but it also costs a bomb for the Shards in large quantities (even if you swap Pouches for Shards, you only get a certain %).

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In my opinion though, the hardest skill to get 99 in is Agility.

It is a constant bombardment of clicking, you have to constantly watch the screen in time for the next click. In some skills you have things in your inventory where you can just click 2 or 3 times then watch as the system does the work for you, then you just have to bank and repeat.

If we went back to old RuneScape where there was no 'make x', then maybe I would say different than Agility but we're not playing the old version =)