The Hardest Skill Cape?

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.