New Player Guide: Combat

The game runs on what we like to call ticks. Every 0.6 seconds information is sent between you and our servers, keeping your character up to date on what you're doing.

This is the core of understanding Old School from your early levels all the way to end game and while not essential to grasp straight away, it's a good thing to keep in mind when starting your journey.

While you can do most things within a tick, sometimes if your mouse clicks are fast enough, you can perform multiple actions in just one, single tick!

And, sometimes you'll find you can't perform a certain action straight after another, and that'll mean that particular action has a cooldown behind it.

We're going to be giving you the top-level details of how combat works here, but if you want any more information - you can delve through the wonderful OSRS Wiki.

At it's very core, behind-the-scenes you're rolling invisible dice just like D&D, to see how much damage your going to do to an enemy. But this is dependant on a few of things:

	Your Accuracy Type (i.e. Slash Accuracy)	VS		NPC Defence Stat (i.e. Slash Defence)
	Your Total Strength (+ Max Hit)		Active Prayers (both Yours + NPCs)
	Any Vulnerabilities (i.e. Elemental Weakness)		Any Immunities (i.e Poison Resistance)

All of these factor into how much damage or if you're going to do any damage at all, with the most important being Accuracy (how likely you are to hit) and Strength (how hard you can hit).

The main point to note for combat is that the higher numbers you have against your enemy, the more likely you are to not only hit, but hit hard.

Here's some notable ways damage is shown:

Regular Damage	No Damage	Poison Damage	Venom Damage	Disease Damage	Shield Damage	Burn Damage

As an added tip, if you venture to a player-owned house with a Combat Dummy inside, hitting it will automatically show your Max Hit!

Let's take a look at how each of your Combat Skills affects combat:

Attack		Hit more accurately with Melee	+	Wield stronger Melee weapons
Strength		Increases Melee damage*	+	Sometimes needed to wield Melee weapons
Defence		Increased chance to avoid damage against ALL styles	+	Wear stronger armour
Ranged		Increases your Ranged accuracy	+	Equip stronger Ranged weapons & armour
Magic		Unlock combat & utility spells	+	Increases your chance to avoid Magic attacks**
Hitpoints		Gives you more Health/HP	+	Some food heals more the higher your Hitpoints level
Prayer		Unlock temporary combat aids	+	Total Prayer Points based on your Skill level

* i.e. Max Hits
**This uses both your Magic and Defence levels (70% / 30% respectively)