As I mentioned last week, one of my short term goals right now is to obtain all of the dungeon boss pets. Currently, I have 7 pets out of 8 from the lower tier dungeons. The last pet I need is from the Dragons Den Dungeon which is what I spent most of this week preparing for.
In order to farm the dungeon without baby sitting my health bar I have to make sure my max health can withstand any dungeon monster’s max hit. To help with this, there is an auto-eat perk which can be upgraded three times from the shop. Once fully upgraded, auto-eat kicks in when your health is at or below 40% Hitpoints and the consumed food fills up your HP to at least 80%. So 40% of my max health needs to be higher than a given monsters’ max hit in order to idle the dungeon. As long as I have enough food equipped the dungeon can be farmed endlessly.
What happens when the max hit of a monster is higher than 40% of your health? There are two options, get more health or get some damage reduction. That’s where I found myself this week with the Elder Dragon boss. It’s max hit is 470 which would mean my health would need to be at least 1175 to have auto-eat kick in. The max level for HP is 99 which would leave me at 990 health without. I’d need some serious bonus HP before I could effectively farm this boss. Not to mention, I’d need to get my Hitpoints up 15 levels which would take a while.
This is where Damage Reduction comes in. Up until this point, I didn’t have any equipment that provided damage reduction so I wasn’t paying little attention to the stat. Since I wanted to take a shot at this dungeon this week I went over to the fantastic Melvor Idle Wiki to figure out where I could get some DR.
The easiest thing I could do was upgrade my armor. I’ve stubled on this option before but thought it was more of a cosmetic thing riffing on Runescape’s gilded armor variations. It turns out these provide a huge stat boost as well a bunch of damage reduction once fully upgraded. I was able to upgrade my Dragon Armor set to the (G) Dragon Armor set and my Black D-hide set to the (G) Black D-hide set. That set me up for success with Melee and Ranged attack styles. I still needed something for Magic which I planned on using for that attack style for the Dragons Den.
Unlike Melee and Range, the magic armor set with damage reduction comes from the Runecrafting skill rather than upgrading existing armor. I had three out of four pieces of the Fire Expert set and needed to hit 90 Runecrafting before I could obtain the last piece.
You might be wondering, how do you know how much damage reduction you need before you can take on the dungeon? Well, you could do the math and figure out what percentage of the max hit you need to reduce by to equal 40% of your current health. Or you can head over to Can I Idle Melvor? which does the math for you. It shows you how much damage reduction or HP is needed with your current stats and combat style for each dungeon as well as Slayer Tiers. I needed at least 25% Damage Reduction to take on the Dragons Den with Magic which is what most of the week was spent working towards.
I was able to obtain 26% damage reduction with my Magic equipment and spent most of Friday and this morning taking on this dungeon.
Combat Skills
| Attack 82/99 (+3) | Strength 95/99 (+0) | Defense 77/99 (+5) |
| Hitpoints 84/99 (+4) | Ranged 77/99 (+3) | Magic 91/99 (+8 |
| Prayer 91/99 (+5) | Slayer 73/99 (+9) |
Crafting a bunch of damage reduction potions was ne of my earlier ideas to get more damage reduction. After getting Herblore up to level 90 I realized I needed Large Horns for the recipe. They drop from monsters in the Desolate Plains which requires level 70 Slayer. Early in the week I decided to try get Slayer up to par to take on the Raging Horned Elites. The drop rate for horns was a little slow for my liking so I decided to pursue other options to increase damage reduction.
Over the course of leveling slayer I was able to increase my other combat stats a fair bit. Defense and Prayer I got a whopping 5 levels in this week!
Non-Combat Skills
| Woodcutting 105/99 (+0) | Fishing 117/99 (+0) | Firemaking 99/99 (+0) |
| Cooking 101/99 (+0) | Mining 105/99 (+0) | Smithing 102/99 (+0) |
| Thieving 87/99 (+2) | Farming 114/99 (+3) | Fletching 99/99 (+0) |
| Crafting 87/99 (+0) | Runecrafting 90/99 (+3) | Herblore 90/99 (+5) |
| Agility 85/99 (+14) | Summoning 95/99 (+1) | Astrology 79/99 (+0) |
Agility was the other source of damage reduction I looked in to. Agility is a skill that provides bonus stats in the form of an obstacle course . Agility is leveled up by running the course which nets you a small amount of GP and XP for each obstacle completed. Unlike Runescape, you can’t fail these obstacles so it’s effectively a slow money printing skill with added bonus stats. Every 10 levels, another obstacle can be built to provide additional bonusues. Some obsacle’s provide both positive and negative effects.
Looking through my course, the Spike Trap obstacle provided two negative effects -40 hitpoints and -2% damage reduction. That whole category of obstacles only have negative effects and this one was the lesser of all evils. Getting an obstacle to 99 mastery halves it’s negative effects so my plan was to run the course until either the Spike Trap was at 99 mastery or I had enough in the mastery pool to level it to 99. I ended up doing the latter but not before gaining another 15 levels in Agility.
I continued to tweak my course where I could to either increase my health or add some more DR. My course now includes the following obstacles:
- Lake Swim: +3% Damage to All Monsters, +1% Damage reduction
- Raft Building: +2% damage to All Monsters, +20 Maximum Hitpoints
- Ice Jump: +10% chance to Preserve Resources in Skills, +10% Food Healing Value, +5% Chance to Double items Globally. +2- Maximum Hitpoints, +10 Mining Node Hitpoints, +10% Slayer Coins, +5% Slayer Skill XP.
In the event I need more health, I can swap out the Lake Swim for Rocky Waters which would provide an additional +50 Hitpoints.
Pets
I unlocked Harley while writing this post! Yep, this is the boss pet from Dragons Den so that goal is complete.
Now I’ll have to figure out how to get my stats high enough to take on the Volcanic Cave. I’ll either need 37% damage reduction or 980 health to take this on. This should be an fun challenge to star figuring out week!
I also unlocked the HP pet Finn, the Cat (+10 Maximum HP) and the Summoning pet, Tim the Wolf, which provides +1 shard cost reduction when creating familiars.
Completion Log: 54.08%
| Skills 91.13% (+2.72%) | Mastery 30.39% (+1.46%) | Items 48.53% (+2.04%) | Monsters 42.59% (+3.08%) | Pets 57.78% (+6.67%) |
My biggest win for the Completion Log this week was getting 100% Farming Mastery. This means all items in the Farming skill have been leveled to 99 mastery rank. This is probably the easiest 100% mastery to get since Farming runs along side whatever else you’re working on. It took 238 days, 23 hours, 27 minutes, and 22 seconds to complete!.
Goals for Next Week
- Figure out the best way to either get more damage reduction or more health to take on the Volcanic Cave Dungeon.
I’m not sure that I’ll be able to take on the Volcanic Cave this week. I have a feeling this will be more of a preparation week.
Many Welps 