Guides -> Skills -> Magic Guide
By Avalon
Magic is a very versatile skill that can do anything from take you to a different locale, turn items into coins, help you fight monsters or even turn bones into bananas. But today I bring to you a comprehensive guide to the entire free-to-play version of the skill, with training tips and the best and fastest way to get 99. So let’s get started!
Magic at lower levels is very combat-oriented; not until higher levels (namely, 25+) do the spells become more useful outside of combat. Here’s an overview of the different types of spells and what runes you will always need to cast them.
Types of spells:
Combat spells: These spells are used to fight enemies and have a base XP amount, with higher base XP the higher level Magic you need to cast it. They also give XP with the damage done, so for example a spell with 20 base XP would give 32 XP if you hit a 3 with the spell. Crumble Undead is a good way to train Magic because it can hit up to 15 regularly and has a lot of base XP; the spell requires chaos runes to cast. There are three types of combat spell: Strike, bolt and blast. Strike spells always require mind runes, with chaos and death runes required for bolt and blast spells, respectively.
Teleport spells: These spells are used to teleport you all across RuneScape. In free-to-play, there are three different locations you can teleport to: Varrock, Falador and Lumbridge. The most basic teleport spell, Lumbridge Home Teleport, teleports you to Lumbridge with no requirements and no runes needed; however, the same teleport can be accessed at level 31 Magic but using runes. All teleport spells use law runes and are good XP for those with a lot of money because teleports take not much longer than two seconds to cast. Also, Teleport Block, the highest level free-to-play spell in the game at level 85 Magic, is very useful in PvP worlds to make sure a fight doesn’t end with an opponent teleporting away.
Alchemy spells: Alchemy spells are spells that, when cast, have an effect on an item in your inventory or nearby. The most popular spell in this category for training is High Level Alchemy, which is accessible at level 55 Magic. Other spells in this category include Low Level Alchemy, Superheat Item and Bones to Bananas. All alchemy spells require nature runes.
Curse spells: These spells are like combat spells but give no Hitpoints XP at all. They have adverse effects on your character like the lowering of your Attack, Strength and Defense and the inability to move. A popular way to train Magic at low costs and high XP is to buy runes for the Curse spell and perform it on magic dummies in Lumbridge. Other spells like Bind are useful as well in PvP worlds or minigames to hold your opponent in place; however, they only last for 5 seconds at a time. Spells that lower combat stats require body runes; freezing spells require nature runes.
Enchanting Spells: These spells require cosmic runes and are used to give a piece of jewellery special abilities, with an example being enchanting a ruby amulet into an amulet of strength with a Magic level of 49. Amulets of magic, power, defense and strength can be made from sapphire, diamond, emerald and ruby strung amulets and water, air, earth and fire runes, all respectively.
Elemental runes:
Knowing the spells is one thing; knowing the runes is another. Air runes are used in almost every combat spell in existence along with all teleport spells, making them highly traded on the Grand Exchange. Water runes and used mainly only for water-type combat spells but are also used in some curse spells. Earth runes are used in a lot of curse spells as well as for earth-type elemental spells and fire runes are used for most alchemy spells and fire-type combat spells. Also, each rune except for air has a respective teleport spell it is used for: water for Falador, fire for Varrock and earth for Lumbridge.
Uses:
Magic is very useful when training other skills because of the abilities to teleport close to banks and deposit items. However, alchemy spells can also save banking time by converting items into coins without having to sell them; just be sure that the alchemy price is higher than the cost of a nature rune, something that can be easily determined from information from various websites. Drops from monsters like lesser demons, moss giants and greater demons are often alched because these monsters can be far away from banks and as a result it is easier to alch them than bank them and sell later.
Another example of this is mining and superheating. Casting Superheat Item to create a bar results in profit in all bars except bronze bars, assuming that all ores and coal are mined and not bought. If the ores are all bought a loss will occur most of the time.
Training:
1-13: At these very low levels of Magic, the only option to train is by using combat spells. These start, obviously, with wind strike, which requires air and mind runes to cast. These can be bought off of the Grand Exchange or various rune stores in Port Sarim or Varrock or obtained for free from the Magic Tutor in Lumbridge. However, she only supplies 30 of each rune per half hour and will not give you any if you already have those runes in your inventory, bank or if there are some on the ground nearby. You should attack goblins or chickens around Lumbridge, or use the magic dummies to gain only base XP. An alternative would be to use curse spells. Purchase a wizard’s mind bomb from the Grand Exchange or the pub in Falador and stock up on body, water and earth runes. Teleport to Lumbridge and head north to the combat tutors’ building. Drink the mind bomb and repeatedly cast Weaken on the magic dummies until your Magic level is 3 anyways, and then repeat until level 13.
13-39: Fire strike is only slightly more expensive than air strike and gives very good XP. Its maximum damage is 8, four times as high as air strike, so targets can be killed much more easily. Targets that can be used are the magic dummies, the caged lesser demon in the Wizard’s Tower or guards in Falador or Varrock, though Edgeville guards are the best XP at these levels because of the high respawn rate and the 100% effective safe spot. Or, just continue casting Weaken until level 19, at which point the spell Curse should be used on the same targets.
39-55: At this level by far the best XP is the spell Crumble Undead. It can hit up to 15 fairly often and has high base XP. The best places to cast this spell are in the Varrock Sewers as the sewage river provides safe spots for attacking skeletons, ghosts and zombies. However, drops cannot be collected while casting Crumble Undead here.
55+: High Level Alchemy is arguably the best XP in free-to-play, giving 65 XP per spell cast. However, the value of the alched item has no effect on the XP. If a player has lots of money he/she can buy nature runes and other items low in price, like bronze arrows or feathers, and not waste time repeatedly buying expensive items buy lose a lot of money in the process. The best items to alch are green dragonhide bodies, rune maces, rune square shields and adamant platebodies.
37+: If you have the money, purchase law runes in bulk and cast Falador Teleport repeatedly. This will result in major loss but fast XP for the player.
Making money using Magic:
Making money using Magic is not as easy to profit off of as skills like Woodcutting or Mining but is effective if you know what you’re doing. One of the best ways to make money with Magic (and probably one of the best ways to make money in all of F2P) is by telegrabbing Zamorak wines. They are located in the Chaos Temple on the very northwest corner of non-Wilderness free-to-play RuneScape. In your inventory, bring 28 law runes and wield a staff of air. Run northwest of Edgeville, around the border of the Black Knight’s Fortress and then past the Goblin Village and Monastery. I would recommend logging into crowded worlds such as worlds 1, 3, 20 or other worlds that happen to be crowded at the time. If there’s someone else there, stay at the temple. If you manage to steal a few of their wines they’ll get irritated and most likely leave. Remember that you can still waste a law rune if you cast the spell at the same time as your opponent and they get the wine. The wines sell for about 800-900 GP apiece, so about 500 GP profit is made per law rune bought and 43 Magic XP is gained per cast.
Another way to make money that can involve Magic is Fist of Guthix. Magic is very useful to use while hunting your opponent to freeze them, weaken them and, of course, attack them. If you use your tokens on rune gauntlets, which is the best way to spend them, the exchange rate is about 100 GP per token, which means that you can be earning upwards of 1 to 2k GP per game. All in all, Magic is a pretty cool and fun skill that has easy-to-reap rewards at higher levels. It’s a nice skill to have high levels in and is also very useful in combat, so check back to this guide whenever you need to know something about free-to-play Magic.
Using Magic for PKing:
Now for the part my friend from Twitter, Linkbuilder, suggested – PKing! Using Magic for PKing can be very effective, but not if using only Magic armor. Rangers are very powerful against mages, but that doesn’t mean you should wear plate armor. A green dragonhide body and chaps should be worn along with either an amulet of power, defense or a holy symbol. Even better, have all three in your inventory for different situations; the amulet of power should be used against rangers for higher defense and magical strength, the amulet of defense for melee fighters and other mages. The holy symbol is especially useful is your Prayer level is 43+ for each of the Protect From prayers to help them last a lot longer. This is also very useful if you’re PKing near an altar, like in Lumbridge or Varrock because there are altars very close to banks and other non-PvP zones.
PKing using Magic against melee fighters involves two basic strategies: Safeing and bombarding. Safeing involves using Bind to keep opponents away from you, casting the spell at five-second intervals to make sure they stay within a range that allows you to not get hit. The spell that can be used in this strategy for the main fighting does not have to be very powerful, because your opponent cannot hit back. Fire strike and fire bolt are both cheap and effective in combat, but fire blast can be used as well.
Bombarding requires more food and has higher risk but is overall easier to do than safeing. This strategy will preferably have you wearing a rune full helm and/or rune kiteshield to minimize damage done by a melee fighter, along with the green dragonhide chaps and body. Spells like Curse and Weaken can also be helpful to lower your opponent’s attack and strength; lowering their defense may not be necessary because their plate armor is already very weak to magic attacks, though if they are not using plate armor a Defense-lowering spell can be used.
Fighting against rangers and other mages can be a bit trickier because they can fight back without needing to be in the square next to you. This means that higher the higher defense you have against those attacks the better. There isn’t really anything else to say about this because it’s basically attack and fight – there’s no point in binding opponents unless more XP is wanted. Wearing a green dragonhide body and chaps offers protection against both types of combat, so wear an amulet of magic if your defense level is 60+ and an amulet of defense if it isn’t. When attacking another distance fighter, try to stay as far away from them before attacking as possible and use any safespots so that they cannot retaliate as fast.
When PKing with Magic, your inventory should have an amulets of power, defense and a holy symbol, with one being worn already to gain more slots for food, which is what the rest of your inventory should be filled with, unless you want to bring teleport runes in the case of an emergency such as a food outage or a good drop is obtained and needs to be banked. The runes brought should be for Lumbridge teleport as it is in a safe zone and is relatively close to a bank. Your food should be at least tuna, preferably lobsters or even swordfish. You should also bring a rune full helm and/or kiteshield for “bombarding” melee fighters.
Happy spell casting!
By Avalon
Magic is a very versatile skill that can do anything from take you to a different locale, turn items into coins, help you fight monsters or even turn bones into bananas. But today I bring to you a comprehensive guide to the entire free-to-play version of the skill, with training tips and the best and fastest way to get 99. So let’s get started!
Magic at lower levels is very combat-oriented; not until higher levels (namely, 25+) do the spells become more useful outside of combat. Here’s an overview of the different types of spells and what runes you will always need to cast them.
Types of spells:
Combat spells: These spells are used to fight enemies and have a base XP amount, with higher base XP the higher level Magic you need to cast it. They also give XP with the damage done, so for example a spell with 20 base XP would give 32 XP if you hit a 3 with the spell. Crumble Undead is a good way to train Magic because it can hit up to 15 regularly and has a lot of base XP; the spell requires chaos runes to cast. There are three types of combat spell: Strike, bolt and blast. Strike spells always require mind runes, with chaos and death runes required for bolt and blast spells, respectively.
Teleport spells: These spells are used to teleport you all across RuneScape. In free-to-play, there are three different locations you can teleport to: Varrock, Falador and Lumbridge. The most basic teleport spell, Lumbridge Home Teleport, teleports you to Lumbridge with no requirements and no runes needed; however, the same teleport can be accessed at level 31 Magic but using runes. All teleport spells use law runes and are good XP for those with a lot of money because teleports take not much longer than two seconds to cast. Also, Teleport Block, the highest level free-to-play spell in the game at level 85 Magic, is very useful in PvP worlds to make sure a fight doesn’t end with an opponent teleporting away.
Alchemy spells: Alchemy spells are spells that, when cast, have an effect on an item in your inventory or nearby. The most popular spell in this category for training is High Level Alchemy, which is accessible at level 55 Magic. Other spells in this category include Low Level Alchemy, Superheat Item and Bones to Bananas. All alchemy spells require nature runes.
Curse spells: These spells are like combat spells but give no Hitpoints XP at all. They have adverse effects on your character like the lowering of your Attack, Strength and Defense and the inability to move. A popular way to train Magic at low costs and high XP is to buy runes for the Curse spell and perform it on magic dummies in Lumbridge. Other spells like Bind are useful as well in PvP worlds or minigames to hold your opponent in place; however, they only last for 5 seconds at a time. Spells that lower combat stats require body runes; freezing spells require nature runes.
Enchanting Spells: These spells require cosmic runes and are used to give a piece of jewellery special abilities, with an example being enchanting a ruby amulet into an amulet of strength with a Magic level of 49. Amulets of magic, power, defense and strength can be made from sapphire, diamond, emerald and ruby strung amulets and water, air, earth and fire runes, all respectively.
Elemental runes:
Knowing the spells is one thing; knowing the runes is another. Air runes are used in almost every combat spell in existence along with all teleport spells, making them highly traded on the Grand Exchange. Water runes and used mainly only for water-type combat spells but are also used in some curse spells. Earth runes are used in a lot of curse spells as well as for earth-type elemental spells and fire runes are used for most alchemy spells and fire-type combat spells. Also, each rune except for air has a respective teleport spell it is used for: water for Falador, fire for Varrock and earth for Lumbridge.
Uses:
Magic is very useful when training other skills because of the abilities to teleport close to banks and deposit items. However, alchemy spells can also save banking time by converting items into coins without having to sell them; just be sure that the alchemy price is higher than the cost of a nature rune, something that can be easily determined from information from various websites. Drops from monsters like lesser demons, moss giants and greater demons are often alched because these monsters can be far away from banks and as a result it is easier to alch them than bank them and sell later.
Another example of this is mining and superheating. Casting Superheat Item to create a bar results in profit in all bars except bronze bars, assuming that all ores and coal are mined and not bought. If the ores are all bought a loss will occur most of the time.
Training:
1-13: At these very low levels of Magic, the only option to train is by using combat spells. These start, obviously, with wind strike, which requires air and mind runes to cast. These can be bought off of the Grand Exchange or various rune stores in Port Sarim or Varrock or obtained for free from the Magic Tutor in Lumbridge. However, she only supplies 30 of each rune per half hour and will not give you any if you already have those runes in your inventory, bank or if there are some on the ground nearby. You should attack goblins or chickens around Lumbridge, or use the magic dummies to gain only base XP. An alternative would be to use curse spells. Purchase a wizard’s mind bomb from the Grand Exchange or the pub in Falador and stock up on body, water and earth runes. Teleport to Lumbridge and head north to the combat tutors’ building. Drink the mind bomb and repeatedly cast Weaken on the magic dummies until your Magic level is 3 anyways, and then repeat until level 13.
13-39: Fire strike is only slightly more expensive than air strike and gives very good XP. Its maximum damage is 8, four times as high as air strike, so targets can be killed much more easily. Targets that can be used are the magic dummies, the caged lesser demon in the Wizard’s Tower or guards in Falador or Varrock, though Edgeville guards are the best XP at these levels because of the high respawn rate and the 100% effective safe spot. Or, just continue casting Weaken until level 19, at which point the spell Curse should be used on the same targets.
39-55: At this level by far the best XP is the spell Crumble Undead. It can hit up to 15 fairly often and has high base XP. The best places to cast this spell are in the Varrock Sewers as the sewage river provides safe spots for attacking skeletons, ghosts and zombies. However, drops cannot be collected while casting Crumble Undead here.
55+: High Level Alchemy is arguably the best XP in free-to-play, giving 65 XP per spell cast. However, the value of the alched item has no effect on the XP. If a player has lots of money he/she can buy nature runes and other items low in price, like bronze arrows or feathers, and not waste time repeatedly buying expensive items buy lose a lot of money in the process. The best items to alch are green dragonhide bodies, rune maces, rune square shields and adamant platebodies.
37+: If you have the money, purchase law runes in bulk and cast Falador Teleport repeatedly. This will result in major loss but fast XP for the player.
Making money using Magic:
Making money using Magic is not as easy to profit off of as skills like Woodcutting or Mining but is effective if you know what you’re doing. One of the best ways to make money with Magic (and probably one of the best ways to make money in all of F2P) is by telegrabbing Zamorak wines. They are located in the Chaos Temple on the very northwest corner of non-Wilderness free-to-play RuneScape. In your inventory, bring 28 law runes and wield a staff of air. Run northwest of Edgeville, around the border of the Black Knight’s Fortress and then past the Goblin Village and Monastery. I would recommend logging into crowded worlds such as worlds 1, 3, 20 or other worlds that happen to be crowded at the time. If there’s someone else there, stay at the temple. If you manage to steal a few of their wines they’ll get irritated and most likely leave. Remember that you can still waste a law rune if you cast the spell at the same time as your opponent and they get the wine. The wines sell for about 800-900 GP apiece, so about 500 GP profit is made per law rune bought and 43 Magic XP is gained per cast.
Another way to make money that can involve Magic is Fist of Guthix. Magic is very useful to use while hunting your opponent to freeze them, weaken them and, of course, attack them. If you use your tokens on rune gauntlets, which is the best way to spend them, the exchange rate is about 100 GP per token, which means that you can be earning upwards of 1 to 2k GP per game. All in all, Magic is a pretty cool and fun skill that has easy-to-reap rewards at higher levels. It’s a nice skill to have high levels in and is also very useful in combat, so check back to this guide whenever you need to know something about free-to-play Magic.
Using Magic for PKing:
Now for the part my friend from Twitter, Linkbuilder, suggested – PKing! Using Magic for PKing can be very effective, but not if using only Magic armor. Rangers are very powerful against mages, but that doesn’t mean you should wear plate armor. A green dragonhide body and chaps should be worn along with either an amulet of power, defense or a holy symbol. Even better, have all three in your inventory for different situations; the amulet of power should be used against rangers for higher defense and magical strength, the amulet of defense for melee fighters and other mages. The holy symbol is especially useful is your Prayer level is 43+ for each of the Protect From prayers to help them last a lot longer. This is also very useful if you’re PKing near an altar, like in Lumbridge or Varrock because there are altars very close to banks and other non-PvP zones.
PKing using Magic against melee fighters involves two basic strategies: Safeing and bombarding. Safeing involves using Bind to keep opponents away from you, casting the spell at five-second intervals to make sure they stay within a range that allows you to not get hit. The spell that can be used in this strategy for the main fighting does not have to be very powerful, because your opponent cannot hit back. Fire strike and fire bolt are both cheap and effective in combat, but fire blast can be used as well.
Bombarding requires more food and has higher risk but is overall easier to do than safeing. This strategy will preferably have you wearing a rune full helm and/or rune kiteshield to minimize damage done by a melee fighter, along with the green dragonhide chaps and body. Spells like Curse and Weaken can also be helpful to lower your opponent’s attack and strength; lowering their defense may not be necessary because their plate armor is already very weak to magic attacks, though if they are not using plate armor a Defense-lowering spell can be used.
Fighting against rangers and other mages can be a bit trickier because they can fight back without needing to be in the square next to you. This means that higher the higher defense you have against those attacks the better. There isn’t really anything else to say about this because it’s basically attack and fight – there’s no point in binding opponents unless more XP is wanted. Wearing a green dragonhide body and chaps offers protection against both types of combat, so wear an amulet of magic if your defense level is 60+ and an amulet of defense if it isn’t. When attacking another distance fighter, try to stay as far away from them before attacking as possible and use any safespots so that they cannot retaliate as fast.
When PKing with Magic, your inventory should have an amulets of power, defense and a holy symbol, with one being worn already to gain more slots for food, which is what the rest of your inventory should be filled with, unless you want to bring teleport runes in the case of an emergency such as a food outage or a good drop is obtained and needs to be banked. The runes brought should be for Lumbridge teleport as it is in a safe zone and is relatively close to a bank. Your food should be at least tuna, preferably lobsters or even swordfish. You should also bring a rune full helm and/or kiteshield for “bombarding” melee fighters.
Happy spell casting!