Melvor idle

This Week In Melvor Idle: Entering the Volcanic Cave

KluwesLeave a comment

Last week, I predicted that this week would be another round of preparing for the Volcanic Cave Dungeon and it almost was. That is until last night when I finished crafting the last of my Damage Reduction IV potions and decided to see how well I would fair in the dungeon with my setup

I completed all of my goals for the week which were:

  • Gather materials for the Agility obstacles I want so I can gear the buffs towards combat.
  • Get the Damage Reduction Potion to Mastery Rank 90 so I can create Damage Reduction Potion IV
  • Gather enough materials to make a lot of Damage Reduction Potion IV
  • Restock Food Supply

I knocked out a few of these easier Agility obstacles early in the week and chose ones more geared towards combat. The higher level ones require a fair bit of Slayer coins to purchase which I had used up last week when tuning the course for XP and leveling up Agility to 99.

My current Agility passives. There’s room for improvement but I’m happy with it for now.

I wasn’t originally planning on pursuing Slayer tasks this week but I’m glad I did. Not only did I acquire enough slayer coins to purchase some more Agility obstacles but I also looted a pair of Paladin Gloves which grant 4% damage reduction. The Dragon Gloves I was wearing offered no damage reduction but had a slight boost to damage stats. I figured I could take the a little hit in the damage department for a nice boost to damage reduction. This is what prompted me to try my luck at the Volcanic Cave to see if I was able to idle through it.

The Volcanic Cave Dungeon is the first of the Elite dungeons. The jump in the Highest Combat Level Monster between the previous dungeon, Dragons Den ( Highest Level 272), and the Volcanic Cave (Highest Level 677) is significant. Clearing the Volcanic Cave once awards a Fire Cape for every completion and unlocks 4 additional God Dungeons, Air, Walter, Earth, and Fire. I was surprised to find it also awards a lore book, A Tale of the Past, a future’s prophecy, which is 1 of 3 books. If you follow the wiki link you can see there’s a lot contained in that little book!

Clearing the Volcanic Dungeon 100 times unlocks the Infernal Stronghold Dungeon as well as spells form the Ancient Magicks spell book.

This dungeon is tough. With 35% damage reduction and 920 hp I was able to idle through and let auto eat heal me but just barely. The boss, Malcs, The Guardian of Melvor, has a max hit on one of its abilities that hits me for 338 health. Auto eat stops kicking in at 368 so I have very little damage reduction to spare. Malcs doesn’t have a normal attack (thank goodness because it would hit for 662!) but has two special attacks instead. There’s a 70% chance it will use Razor-Sharp claws which is that big attack that does 338 damage twice and it has a 30% chance to use Dragonbreath does 39×30 damage over 2.9 seconds. Dragonsbreath won’t out right kill me but it chews through my food supply like no other.

I was able to get away with doing this dungeon without using my Damage Reduction potions. Instead I opted for Melee Accuracy Potions so I could get more hits in and thus complete the dungeon quicker with melee. Even with the Accuracy potions, whetstones, melee prayers, and +12 attack level necklace, I only have a 53% chance to hit Malcs on every attack. As a result, this dungeon run uses up a massive amount of resources, Prayer Points and food in particular. With 100k prayer points I was only able to idle this dungeon for about 2 hours which resulted in 78 kills on Malcs and drained of 1k whales form my food supply. I’ll have to get the additional 22 kills this week to unlock the new dungeon and spells.

I opened the dungeon chests after my run last night instead of waiting until I get the pet to open all of the dungeon chests. I was hoping to get a piece of Ancient Armor to add to my melee setup. I lucked out and got an Ancient Shield which can be upgrade 3 times to the Dragon Fire Shield which offers more defense, damage reduction, +30 hitpoints, and 30% damage reduction from that pesky Dragonsbreath skill. That should make runs on the Volcanic Cave a bit easier.

Combat Skills

Attack 87/99 (+4)Strength 95/99 (+0)Defense 79/99 (+2)
Hitpoints 87/99 (+3)Ranged 83/99 (+6)Magic 92/99 (+2)
Prayer 94/99 (+3)Slayer 77/99 (+4)

There was a ton of opportunities to level up combat this week. Resupplying the food stocks required Raw Chicken which can be obtained in large quantities by running the Chicken Coop Dungeon and opening the chests. I leveled up Defense this way while I collected my chests for chickens.

I did a bit of active Slayer where I changed my equipment set to match the weakness of my Slayer task monsters. Most of the monsters were Magic based so I eventually left the Ranged set on and collected some levels there.

I needed a ton of Long Horns to make Damage Reduction potions which required killing a lot of Raging Horned Elites in the Desolate Plains. I got most of my Attack levels here this week.

Non-Combat Skills

Woodcutting 105/99 (+0)Fishing 117/99 (+0)Firemaking 99/99 (+0)
Cooking 106/99 (+5)Mining 105/99 (+0)Smithing 102/99 (+0)
Thieving 92/99 (+2)Farming 114/99 (+0)Fletching 99/99 (+0)
Crafting 89/99 (+2)Runecrafting 90/99 (+0)Herblore 96/99 (+5)
Agility 99/99 (+0)Summoning 97/99 (+2)Astrology 79/99 (+0)
All skills over 99 are virtual levels based on additional experience gained after level 99 cap.

The question for this week was how to get enough mastery pool XP in Herblore to level up the Damage Reduction potion from 1-90 without using any resources to craft them. That’s because the resources are hard to come by and I didn’t want to waste them on the lower tiers of the Damage Reduction potion. I did this by first crafting enough Herblore Potions to get 99 mastery, then used those potions to craft enough Melee Accuracy potions to get 99 mastery on that item too. Once those were done, I had enough in the mastery pool to get the Damage Reduction potion up to 90 mastery and instantly start crafting tier IV potions. Thanks to 63% chance to reuse crafting materials and the Herblore Potions which have a 6% chance to produce a random tier of the potion your crafting I turned 1.500 long horns into 5,000 Damage Reduction Potion IVs.

Completion Log: 57.82% (+2.94%)

Skills 93.54% (+2.41%)Mastery 33.13% (+0.78%)Items 51.56% (+3.21%)Monsters 53.09% (+10.50%)Pets 57.78% (+0%)

This week saw a huge gain of almost 3% overall completion. I must have fought more Slayer monsters I’ve never seen before than I thought. Also, the additional 8 monsters in the Volcanic Cave probably helped that as well. I’m guessing the item completion gains came from this as well. There was also a lot of levels gained this week across various skills.

Goals for Next Week

  • Upgrade the Ancient Shield to the Dragon Fire Shield
  • Complete the Volcanic Cave 22 more times to unlock additional spells and dungeon
  • Acquire the pet for Volcanic Cave
  • Check out the Air God Dungeon

This Week in Melvor Idle: 50% Completion

KluwesLeave a comment

When thinking of ways to get more posts out for Blaugust I thought it might be fun to track my progress in Melvor week by week. Well, fun for me at least.This gives me a guaranteed easy post topic and will fill up the pesky weekend slot on Saturday. So it’s a win-win really. Well, again, at least for me.

I’ve been playing Melvor Idle on and off for the past year and a half. Mostly off until recently when I remembered it existed again in June. As I’ve said before, idle games are my guilty pleasure and Melvor Idle is basically Runescape without having to walk around or ever log off. It’s even published by Jagex now so it’s official.

At some point, I must have started my Standard character over though I’m not sure when or why. When I came back to the game in June this new character had been sitting doing nothing but had maxed out Woodcutting and Fishing. For all intents and purposes this is a new character.

In June, I also started a Hardcore character, which gets deleted on death, and an Adventure Mode character, which unlocks individual skills with money. It’s also restricted to leveling skills up only as high as it’s combat level. I have since relegated both of these characters for now to fishing while I focus on my Standard character. The hardcore character is fishing for Leaping Broad Fish which provide a tiny amount of Strength XP. The adventure mode character is fishing for whales which are a great money maker.

The ultimate goal on my Standard character is to get 100% Completion. This entails leveling up all of the skills to max, finding all the items in the game, facing off against all of the monsters, acquiring all of the pets, and maxing out all of the skill mastery. I hit 50% overall completion this week. Halfway there!

The Mastery system adds a secondary leveling system to individual items within a skill. Leveling the mastery up on an item applies permanent bonuses for that item. It’s also the completion category that’s going to take the longest.

Here’s where I stand right now skill wise:

Combat Skills

Attack 79/99Strength 95/99Defense 72/99
Hitpoints 80/99Ranged 74/99Magic 83/99
Prayer 86/99Slayer 64/99

Non-Combat Skills

Woodcutting 105/99Fishing 117/99Firemaking 99/99
Cooking 101/99Mining 105/99Smithing 102/99
Thieving 85/99Farming 111/99Fletching 99/99
Crafting 87/99Runecrafting 87/99Herblore 85/99
Agility 71/99Summoning 94/99Astrology 79/99
All skills over 99 are virtual levels based on additional experience gained after level 99 cap.

Pets

My current project has been unlocking all of the Dungeon Boss pets. In addition to counting towards completion these pets also provide small passive bonuses. The first 9 dungeon bosses have a 1/350 chance of dropping a pet. So far, I’ve gotten the pet from the first 8 dungeons.

I unlocked Ayyden (provides +2% slayer coins) from the Deep Sea Ship dungeon on Tuesday after 454 kills. Followed by Artic Yeti (+2% ammo preservation) from the Frozen Cave dungeon after 129 kills on Thursday.

Ayyden (left) Artic Yeti (right)

Much of my leveling over the last few weeks has revolved around getting my combat skills up to snuff to take on the next dungeon. The Deep Sea Ship was my excuse to get my Magic level up. There’s a rock-paper-scissors combat triangle in Melvor where Magic does more damage to Melee monsters, Ranged does more damage to Magic Monsters, and Melee does more damage to Ranged monsters.

I could have done the Deep Sea Ship with melee combat but since it’s filled with other melee monsters I figured this was a good opportunity to start leveling Magic. Training Magic led to the need to level up Runecrafting which lead to needing to leveling up Herblore so I could make potions to more efficiently craft runes to use for magic attacks. It was a whole thing. It took about two weeks but I’m happy at where my skill levels are now to continue to take on more dungeons.

The next Boss pet I’ll need is from the Dragons Den dungeon. This is another dungeon filled with Melee Monsters so it looks like Magic is the way to go again. However, the boss here, the Elder Dragon, can dish out more damage than I can auto heal for. So unless I want to run and heal manually I’ll need to start acquiring some sources of damage reduction.