Vbion

TL;DR

Farm the Ancient Claw with the

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Slicing Winds

build right after you finish

100

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Volcanic Caves

.

Introduction

Ancient Claw is largely the best melee weapon that does not require late-game content to obtain.

The Ancient Claw is assembled from the fragments that drop only from the Pegasus. You need to kill 3333 Pegasi on average to get enough fragments.

The question is when to farm it and what combat style is the best for that. The main point of contention is whether to farm it before or after the

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Volcanic Cave

because this dungeon is farmed with a Melee build and is vital for idling the

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Air God Dungeon

.

To answer these questions, we will consider the following builds:

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Surge magic,
Rapier melee,
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Slicing Winds magic,
Glacia magic.

These builds were chosen to show the changes that the various drops bring into farming the Pegasus. The ranged builds were not considered because the Pegasus is

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Melee

and has the highest evasion against

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Ranged

in addition to the Combat Triangle.

In the considered situations, no prayers, potions, or other buffs are enabled unless specified.
The skill levels are given so that you can replicate the simulations in the Combat Simulator.

The

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Auto Eat - Tier III

is used.

The Whale (Perfect) was used as a food of choice because it was considered a middle ground between starting out and being fully leveled out in Firemaking, Fishing, Farming, and Cooking.

The ring slot is always occupied with Magical Ring.

Builds

The simulations were done for

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Hardcore

with all skills on level 75.

All intermediate steps can be found in this spreadsheet (link).

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Surge magic

Item	DR
Slayer Wizard Hat (Strong)	0%
Slayer Wizard Robes (Strong)	0%
Fire Expert Wizard Bottoms	5%
Fire Expert Wizard Boots	5%
Miolite Shield	2%
Enchanted Cape	0%
Amulet of Magic	0%
Paladin Gloves	4%
Magic Wand (Powerful)	0%
Total	16%

The grind time with this build is 141 hour.
However, pay attention that it would be more than 331 hours without the Slayer gear.

Rapier melee

Item	DR
Slayer Helmet (Strong)	0%
Slayer Platebody (Strong)	0%
(G) Dragon Platelegs	6%
(G) Dragon Boots	6%
(G) Dragon Shield	6%
Promotion or Glory	0%
Paladin Gloves	4%
Sunset Rapier	0%
Total	22%

The grind time with this build is 67 hours.
If you don't use the Slayer gear, the grind time with this build will be 142 hours.

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Slicing Winds magic

Item	DR
Ancient Wizard Hat	5%
Ancient Wizard Robes	5%
Ancient Wizard Bottoms	5%
Ancient Wizard Boots	5%
Miolite Shield	2%
Enchanted Cape	0%
Elite Amulet of Magic	2%
Elementalist Gloves	0%
Magic Wand (Powerful)	0%
Total	24%

You need

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Level 88

for this build.
With the following setup, you should have a bit more than 20k accuracy on

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Slicing Winds

, which means they won't miss at all.

Warning: Swapping Miolite Shield to Book of Eli will only increase the clear time because your melee defence would plummet, resulting in much more food eaten.

Overall, you want to put as much DR and Melee defence as possible when maintaining the 20k accuracy.

For instance, if you have higher

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Magic

, you might be able to swap Enchanted Cape with Fire Cape and reduce the food consumption even further.

The grind time with this build is 48 hours. The slayer gear doesn't add to the clear speed in this case.

Glacia magic

Item	DR
Glacia God Helmet	8%
Glacia God Platebody	8%
Glacia God Platelegs	8%
Glacia God Boots	8%
Glacia God Gloves	8%
Miolite Shield	2%
Infernal Cape	4%
Elite Amulet of Magic	2%
Magic Wand (Powerful)	0%
Total	48%

The grind time with this build is 44 hours.

However, this build implies that you go through the

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Air God Dungeon

with Sunset Rapier, which is a sizeable loss of DPS that will cost you more than 4 hours of the difference between this build and the Slicing Winds build.

Analysis

Essentially, we want to know which of two sequences is faster:

Rapier > Claw > Volcano,
Rapier > Volcano > Claw.

Full-Sunset Volcano vs Full-Claw Volcano

Let's consider the builds Rapier and Slicing Winds.

The difference between their timings of completing the claw is 19 hours.

The Volcano grind of the full ancient set is longer with the with Sunset Rapier than it is with the Claw.

The question is then if the difference between the rapier and the claw in the Volcanic grind is bigger than 19 hours.

We know the length of "Raper > Claw" and "Volcano > Claw", but we need the data on "Rapier > Volcano" and "Claw > Volcano".

We take this data from Volcanic Cave/Guide#Weapon choice.

Item	Adjusted clears per hour
Sunset Rapier	5.204
Ancient Claw	5.412

The goal of clearing the

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Volcanic Cave

is to get the ancient set.

As specified on in the Volcanic Cave/Guide, you need 1350 clears to almost certainly get a full set of Ancient armor or 832 clears to have a 75% chance. The median (50% or results) is 564 clears.

Item	Adjusted clears per hour	564 clears (h)	832 clears (h)	1350 clears (h)
Sunset Rapier	5.204	108.4	160	259.4
Ancient Claw	5.412	104.2	153.7	249.5
Difference (h)		4.2	6.3	10.1

All differences are smaller than 19 hours.

That means if you farm the Volcanic Cave completely with the Sunset Rapier and then farm the Claw with Ancient Magick, the sum of the Volcanic and Claw farm will be larger than if you were to farm the Claw with the Rapier and then doing the Volcanic Cave.

However, what if we were to use the Ancient Magicks as soon as we unlock it?

Sunset/Ancient Volcano vs Claw/Ancient Volcano

It is possible to clear the Volcano using the Ancient Magicks with the build from Volcanic Cave/Guide#100-Volcanoes Magic. Pay attention that you need 37% DR with

920

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HP

to idle it. That amount of DR is reached either through the

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Stone Skin

prayer or through the DR potion II.

If we consider that we clear only 100 Volcanoes as a melee build and the rest as the 100-Volcanoes Magic build, then we compare the two sequences:

Claw farm with Rapier + 100 Claw Volcanoes,
100 Rapier Volcanoes + Claw farm with Ancient Magicks.

Item	Adjusted clear time (clears/h)	100 clears (h)
Sunset Rapier	1.9027	52.56
Ancient Claw	2.0967	47.69
Difference (h)		4.87

In other words, the advantage of farming 100 Volcanic Caves with the Claw when compared to the Sunset Rapier is less than 5 hours.

If we consider the rearranged sum of what we compare

Claw farm with Rapier + 100 Claw Volcanoes,
Claw farm with Ancient Magicks + 100 Rapier Volcanoes.

and then subtract the second row from the first one, then we would get

[math]\displaystyle{ 17 - 4.87 = 12.13 }[/math]

In other words the sequence where we farm the Claw after the Volcano is faster than the sequence of farming the claw with Rapier by 12 hours.

Conclusion

Farm the Ancient Claw with the

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Ancient Magicks build right after you finish

100

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Volcanic Caves

.

If you cannot get the Ancient Magick build for some reason, then use the Rapier melee build with Slayer gear.

Vbion

TL;DR

Introduction

Builds

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Rapier melee

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Glacia magic

Analysis

Full-Sunset Volcano vs Full-Claw Volcano

Sunset/Ancient Volcano vs Claw/Ancient Volcano

Conclusion

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Surge magic

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Slicing Winds magic