I am making this guide because I see people struggle to get into PvMing a lot and I feel like I can help. This doesn't mean this guide is perfect by any means, nor is it objective. It is more of a course into how I got into PvMing and some tips I could give others who want to do the same.
I am by no means perfect at PvM and will never claim to be, I struggle at bosses like Telos and the Ambassador and rarely do group bosses such as Vorago and AoD. I am still improving as well and will try to help anyone who is interested to do the same.
The guide will go over the basics (some beginning requirements), what to work towards, and how you can perhaps motivate yourself to try for higher bosses. It will however not go over strategies for every single boss, however I will do this for the low level bosses to some extend.
The basics:(click to show/hide)While this is by no means a requirement to start bossing, it is highly recommended to have the following stats:
-70 Defence
-70 Constitution
-43 Prayer
One of the following:
-70 attack & strength
-70 ranged
-70 magic
While summoning is not required, 52 can help a lot since it allows you to summon a spirit terrorbird.
If you have these stats you can start gearing up so you can start PvMing. There are 2 types of gear: tank and power. Tank gear includes most craftable gear (like all smithable armour for melee with the exception of masterwork) and barrows gear, while power gear comes from bosses such as GWD1 for t70, Nex and GWD2 and t90 & t92 from higher tier bosses (vorago, rise of the six, legiones (kinda) and elite dungeons).
To start with you can use the normal GWD1 gear:
-Subjugation for Magic
-Bandos for Melee
-Armadyl for Ranged
If these sets cost too much, you can downgrade to Superior Fremmenik armour. These cost less and will help you get on your way as well. This gear cannot be bought directly and you will need to combine a Fremmenik equipment patch with the inferior piece.
-Superior Skeletal for Magic
-Superior Rock-shell for Melle
-Superior Spined for Ranged.
For weapons it would be a lot easier: if you have done the quest 'Roving Elves' you can use crystal weapons. These will already help you on your way and are very cheap (around 200k). A staff, bow and halberd will get you on your way.
If you do not have the quest done, you can use these replacements:
-Ahrim's Staff
-Karil's Crossbow
-Guthan's Spear
Some other things to equip:
-Amulet of fury > Amulet of Glory
-Ring of fortune > Ring of Wealth
You should always have a few things with you:
-Super warmaster's potion
If you have level 70 in combat stats, this will boost them to level 80 which will help you a lot. These potions are tradable and thus won't have requirements to use. I am not sure if these are easy to buy though, so if they don't buy for 35k each, just let me know and I will make some for you.
-Prayer potions (4 or 5)
-Runes if using magic (also high-alch runes can sometimes help when able to do longer trips).
-Notepaper if you refuse to high-alch like me
There are more items that can help you but I will go into those later.
If you have all of this you should be set up to go bossing :)
Starting out:(click to show/hide)While you could start with bossing at a very low level when doing bossing like Chaos Elemental, Giant Mole, Kalphite queen and King Black Dragon, these bosses are just not worth doing. They have very bad loot and are just boring to kill because of it. I highly recommend skipping these because they are more likely to make you hate PvM than like it.
Better bosses to start with are Barrows Brothers and GWD1 (especially if you find a higher player who is willing to help).
Barrows:(click to show/hide)For Barrows Brothers you should use magic, so get the best magic gear you got and fill your inventory with the following:
-1 Super warmaster potion
-7 Prayer potions
-50 or so Barrows Amulets (you won't need this many but they are very cheap anyway).
-Runes to use magic
-Fill the rest of your inventory with sharks
To get to Barrows I suggest finding someone who can help you for a minute to teleport you there. Create a group, invite the other player, select Rise of the Six and teleport to barrows. Running there will make you lose food and it is quite a long walk.
If you have done a lot of Temple Trekking you can teleport to Burgh the Rott with a games necklace which will help too, or if you are partially into Branches of Darkmeyer you can use Drakan's Medallion to teleport directly to barrows.
Once you are there you can dig into the mounds and kill every brother. The easiest way to do this is to only kill the melee brother, these are the 2 north and 2 south hills. The middle ones are Ahrim and Karil (magic and ranged). For these you go into the hill and use a Barrows Amulet to kill them instantly (before spawning them). Once you killed 5/6 you can enter the tomb and make your way to the middle room. Use your amulet on it before looting to kill the last brother. Once you have looted the place, just leave the tomb and repeat.
While the loot is not that great, you can get lucky and get a 1.5m worth drop. I myself find doing this quite enjoyable but I might be one of the few ;)
GWD1:(click to show/hide)I suggest doing this boss together with either a higher leveled friend or a few lower leveled friends so you can stay for a full hour (or close to). This will make it much more enjoyable since you don't have to get the killcount over and over.
For this boss I don't have many recommendations, so I will just give an ideal inventory setup for lower levels:
-2 Super warmaster potions
-6 to 10 Super restore (slightly more prayer than prayer potions)
-Runes if using magic
-Fill with sharks
-One click teleport (such as teleport tabs in case of panic)
These bosses don't have many mechanics, so just hit it.
All 4 are rougly the same difficulty, however I find Kree'Arra the best because of the lack of KO potential, you can't damage Kree'Arra with melee though.
Corporeal Beast:(click to show/hide)Corporeal Beast is the last boss I would suggest you can do comfortably at this level. For this you would need to upgrade your gear to have at least full Bandos and a Zamorakian spear. Corporeal beast can barely be hit with anything but spears so magic and ranged cannot be used here. Trips also won't last as long so the setup is a bit different.
For Corporeal Beast you need to have completed the Summer's End quest, after which you can fight it and teleport there with a games necklace (don't run there as this is in the Wilderness). At low levels it is best to do this with 3-4 people so you can get the kills comfortably. Banking only takes a minute or so, so there is no need to risk anything for 1 extra kill in a given trip.
To do this boss, just protect from magic and hit the boss. Try to keep AOE abilities (such as Hurricane and Quake) to kill the shadow core. Alternatively just take 2 steps away from it to stop getting hit.
Dagannoth Kings:(click to show/hide)These bosses require you to trybrid (switch between the 3 combat styles) in order to do them well. If you put the spawn on normal you will have plenty of time to kill them one by one. There is nothing special about these bosses, though it might be difficult for a bit when you enter and all 3 are attacking you.
Mid tier bossing:(click to show/hide)At this point you should try to upgrade to level 80 gear (such as Nex and GWD2 Armour), as well as t85 weapons (GWD2).
This will allow you to do all bosses in the game (though some will be pretty difficult until you upgrade more).
If you are on the verge of entering this stage and can only afford one set, I highly recommend going for magic first as it can be used efficiently for most bosses.
In this stage bosses will start having mechanics you have to deal with, so I will order them here in order of easiest mechanics to hardest:
Heart of Gielinor:(click to show/hide)The heart of Gielinor (also known as GWD2) requires various t80 stats in order to fight the bosses (Ranged, Attack, Magic and Prayer). They are fairly easy as they don't hit very hard, but have some mechanics to deal with.
Twin furies:(click to show/hide)This one focuses a lot on movement and where to stand, avarys's attack makes you dodge some surges, Nymora's makes you stand under her, and their combined attack makes you run away from their special at the right moment. Over all a very easy boss and a good entry to GWD2.
Vindicta:(click to show/hide)Vindicta can teach you 2 things I find very important in this game: pray switching and shield swapping. The first half of the boss is very straight forward, Vindicta just attacks the player closest to her with melee attacks until she reaches 100k health, after which she summons her dragon. At this point her rotation is the following:
-2 Melee attacks
-1 Ranged attack
-1 Melee attack
-Dragonbreath
-Repeat
The ranged hit can deal quite some damage, so it is recommended to either turn pray ranged on, or switch to your shield and resonance the hit to heal yourself. Being able to do this will help you a lot in staying there for more kills, and this boss is a good way to learn it.
Helwyr:(click to show/hide)Helwyr is easier than Vindicta in my opinion, at least once you are familiar with his attack rotation:
-Mushrooms (don't stand in them)
-2 attacks
-You will bleed
-2 attacks
-Jumping around like a mad dog
-2 attacks
-Summon budies
-2 attacks
-repeat
The only comment on this that I have: keep protect melee on. Try to resonance the You will bleed (turn of protect melee to get healed more, turn back on afterwards). Use freedom after the jumping around to clear your bleed.
Gregorovic:(click to show/hide)I will be very honest about this: I don't like this boss, his mechanics are poorly made in comparison to the other 3 bosses. He hits high consistently without a good way to regen health during the fight with resonance or soul split. His poison hits pretty high as well. I do not recommend doing this one until you have invention unlocked and a venomblood perk on your gear. Antipoison++ will work but it depletes very fast, so it does not last 12 minutes like it usually would.
If you have some friends to do this boss together with however, it can be fun and very good profit.
Queen Black Dragon:(click to show/hide)This is a very easy boss, and in my opinion a fun one. The only reason why it is this far down on the list is because you should avoid it until you have access to super antifire potions which require 85 herblore. Apart from that it can be very enjoyable, and this is also considerably faster and more profitable when you have a black slayer task.
Legiones:(click to show/hide)Unlike what some people believe: legiones are profitable. You will need ascension keys to kill this boss so you will need at least 80m (on average) to see a return on your investment. This can be very frustrating if you go dry for a very long time. So sometimes you do lose money on a crossbow, but on average you will make profit. To see how much profit you could make on average, you can have a look on the rs wiki since this changes due to the crossbow and key prices.
High Level Bossing(click to show/hide)At this point you should have access to the following:
-Overloads (96 herblore)
-Excalibur (elite seers village tasks)
-Adrenaline potions
-T95 prayers (& soulsplit)
-96 Summoning (pack yak) or 87 summoning (nihils)
The Magister:(click to show/hide)Probably one of the most boring and hated bosses in the game. In short the keys cost a lot and you accuracy is pretty bad on it even with the highest gear. You will need to invest over 200m to see a return in profit and you should only do this boss when you can use a berserker aura (berserk, reckless, maniacle). Best way to do this is to wait until you have a lot of money already, and then do the boss on slayer tasks.
Araxxor:(click to show/hide)Araxxor is the first mechanic heavy boss you will probably encounter. With this I mean he has quite a few and you need to pay attention to them (ignoring will likely get you killed). This boss is great to learn rotations and the workings of different abilities. Also you can see progress in how good you are getting at this boss much more easily than with other bosses. As in your killtime improves, you can do higher enrage, you need less food and can start bringing nihils etc. In my opinion this is the best boss to learn high level pvm at.
Telos:(click to show/hide)Telos is the most profitable boss in the game if you can do it very well (up to 50m an hour). If you are not that good at it, it can still easily be 10m an hour. The goal of this boss is to streak. So there are 2 ways to go about this boss.
Either try to improve and push your highest enrage. This will involve dying (a lot probably). However this will make you better which will make you streaking much more profitable.
With streaking you just have to kill the boss over and over, without dying yourself. Each time you kill him, he gets stronger as well. The higher your killstreak (and enrage) is, the better the profit will be. I recommend not risking that much if you are still learning. So if you notice your last kill didnt go so well and you are struggling, claim your loot and start over (from 0 or 100%). This will make it the least frustrating, because trying to push yourself and seeing 25% or more of your loot disappear is not fun.
Group Bosses:(click to show/hide)I have put these in it's own catagory since these introduce a new function in bossing, which is different roles. These will have to be decided before going to the boss with your teammates, so it is important to do so.
The 3 categories of roles are: tank, Dps, and boss-dependent roles.
Elite dungeons:(click to show/hide)There are 3 elite dungeons in the game:
-Temple of Aminishi
-Dragonkin Laboratory
-Shadow Reef
These are raid like bosses. Each dungeon has 3 bosses and 4 or so minibosses. They are a great way to farm dungeoneering tokens (which can help you in many ways) and some money as well. The first dungeon is not that profitable (nor fun in my opinion), but the second are third are very good. You can do these either on your own or with 2-3 players. So these are very good to do with some friends, they take about 45 minutes to complete.
Nex:(click to show/hide)Nex is an easy one to start with, roles don't matter much but there is a slight difference in tank and dps which will be most notable on phase 4 (ice). The most annoying part of this boss however is getting to the entrance. You will need to have a frozen key in order to access this boss.
Kalphite King:(click to show/hide)Best done with 3 players this is a great boss to start group bossing with. I will not go into mechanics much but you need a tank, a voker, and a dpser. The tank has the ability incite on, which makes the kalphite king aggressive to him/her. The voker is there to save the tank during his (basically) instakill attack. And the dpser is there just to deal some extra damage.
Unfortunatly this is not a very profitable boss anymore and therefor it might be hard to find people to do this boss. However it can be fun with the right people.
Rise of the Six:(click to show/hide)Barrows hard mode is most of all a DPS check. This means that if you DPS is high enough, you will barely notice anything of the mechanics, and it is highly profitable (as well as very fun with friends). You fight this boss with 4 people, which are split in 2 groups of 2. In each group there will be a tank (which will be running around like a mad man), and a dps (which will be dealing damage like a mad man). Mechanics are various, but believe me: there is nothing more satisfying than seeing your friend get one shot by a lightning hit that deals 7k damage out of nowhere.
Vorago:(click to show/hide)Vorago would be the next step up. This boss is great profit with the current price of Tectonic Energies and thus worth doing. To learn this boss you would ideally have a group of 5-6 people. There are 4 roles in this boss:
-Main Tank (mt): stands in melee distance of vorago to take most of the damage.
-Bomb Tank (bt): stands furthest away from the boss, takes damage from the magic bombs sent his way
-Tl5: stands for Top Lure Voke 5. Needs some understanding of the boss to know what it means so won't go into that here.
-Dps: stands between the main tank and bomb tank (in distance from the boss, not literally). Deals most of the damage.
The boss is the first one that really introduces phases (I know Nex does this too, but Nex goes down so quickly that you barely notice). The normal mode has 5 phases and a kill takes about 15 minutes.
Raids:(click to show/hide)I will not go into detail here on how to do raids, maybe I will make a seperate guide on it. Honestly it is very difficult to get started with this: not because it is that hard or anything, especially not if you are just dpsing. However finding a team willing to take a new raider is much more difficult, and this is a trend you will see with many high level bosses unfortunatly.
Solak & AoD:(click to show/hide)This is the end for group bossing. These 2 bosses require 7 people to defeat (or 2 in duo mode for Solak). I don't do these bosses myself yet. I will update this guide once I have more experience with them.
What to work towards:(click to show/hide)There are various thigns you can do to make yourself better at pvming and make it more comfortable. Listed below are some things you can work towards so you can set goals:
Levels that will help:(click to show/hide)-99 in combat stats (obviously ;) )
-96 herblore (for overloads)
-96 summoning (for pack yaks)
-Unlocking invention (for various perks)
-92 Slayer (necessary for Legiones)
-115 Slayer (necessary for Magister)
Later on you can also go for 99 herblore (supreme overloads) and 99 summoning (steel titans). Level 120 invention will help getting some more difficult perks.
Gear upgrades:(click to show/hide)Gear will be mainly power focused, so tank gear will not be covered here.
Magic:
-Subjugation
-Virtus/Seren
-Tectonic
-Elite Tectonic (not really worth it atm)
Ranged:
-Armadyl
-Pernix/Zamorak
-Sirenic
-Elite Sirenic (not really worth it atm)
Melee:
-Bandos
-Torva/Zaros
-Masterwork
-Trimmed Masterwork (very worth it)
Weapon Upgrades:(click to show/hide)Magic:
-Crystal staff (70)
-Virtus wand/orb (80)
-Wand/orb of Crwys (85)
-Noxious Staff (90)
-Seismic Wand & Singularity (90)
-Staff of Sliske (92)
-Praesul wand/orb (92)
Ranged Weapons:
-Crystal bow (70)
-Zaryte bow (80)
-Shadow Glaives (85)
-Noxious Bow (90)
-Ascension Crossbows (90)
-Seren Godbow (92)
-Blightbound Crossbows (92)
-Eldritch Crossbow (92)
Melee Weapons:
-Crystal Halberd (70)
-Chaotic rapiers (80)
-Twin blades (avaryss and nymora) (85)
-Dragonrider Lance (85)
-Noxious Scythe (90)
-Drygores (90)
-Zaros Godsword (92)
-Khopeshes (92)
Other helpful items (always):(click to show/hide)-Guthix staff (60 magic, used to debuff the boss)
-Enhanced excalibur (elite seers tasks, healing over time)
-Ancient elven ritual shard (prayer regen over time)
-Tokhaar capes (Fight kiln)
-Max cape (max guild portal is lovely)
-Completionist cape (will be changed in the near future so ignore this unless you are very close)
Various Jewelry:(click to show/hide)-Asylum Surgeons Ring (Broken home quest)
-Luck of the Dwarves
-Ring of Death
-Sixth Age Circuit
-Ring of vigour
-Reaper Necklace (or)
-Amulet of Souls (or)
-Blood fury amulet (blood necklace shard + fury amulet)
-Dragonrider amulet (one of a kind)
-Deathtouch bracelet
Helpful quests:(click to show/hide)-Eadgar's Ruse (Teleport to trollheim, close to GWD1)
-The Mighty fall (Teleport to GWD1)
-Branches of Darkmeyer (Drakans Medallion, teleport to barrows)
-Summers End (necessary for corporeal beast)
-Curse of the Black Stone (10% less damage in elite dungeons)
-Song from the Depths (helps with QBD)
-World wakes (Sunshine, Death swiftness and other useful abilities)
Codexes:(click to show/hide)-Mazcab ability codex (x4) (various abilities like onslaught)
-Praesul codex (x3) (t99 prayers)
-Mutation codexes (various abilities)
-Reprisal codex (unlocks reprisal)
Other:(click to show/hide)-Abilities from Shattered Worlds
How to stay motivated:(click to show/hide)There are numerous ways to stay motivated by PvM, yet I see time and time again that people get demotivated and go back to afk fishing like they are Lilly or something.
So here are some suggestions I can give:
-Do a daily reaper task:(click to show/hide)This one is fairly simple and rarely takes much time. If you don't fancy group bosses you can even choose to only get solo tasks (though you will receive less points). You can also extend the tasks to get more points. This is a good way to do bosses you usually wouldn't do. If he assigns Araxxor and you aren't sure you can do it or not, you can try it. If it doesn't work out you can always ask for another task.
-Go for pets:(click to show/hide)Pets are a great way to show friends that you have done the boss a lot (unless you are very lucky). You can have him follow you and it is just fun to see.
-Go for titles:(click to show/hide)There are many titles you can get in this game, and many of these you get through pvm. They range from easier ones like the Reaper title (1 kill on each boss), to Final boss or even Insane Final Boss. If you don't want to do all bosses, try complete a collection log here and there. You will get some money, a pet and a title. And once you completed the log you can say you finished the boss ;).
But most importantly:(click to show/hide)Go bossing with friends, alone there is only so much you can do and it can start feeling very repetitive. You grow together and try new bosses together. If someone messes up it's no big deal ;). And if you want you can always screw each other over during bosses, like go play Omnipower Roulette at Vorago ;).
If there are any suggestions to make this guide better, or you disagree with any of the points, or I just forgot something (I would forget my arrows all the time at bossing if it wasn't for presets), just let me know and I will add it :)