Clue scrolls – Are they a waste of time or a good way to break up the monotony of training? This article focuses on level 3 clues only as there’s a significant difference between level 3 clues and the others.
There has been a lot of debate recently on whether clue scrolls are worth doing or if you’re better off just dumping them in the bank and maybe doing them a few weeks or even months time. This time last year the answer would have been an obvious “Yes, what are you waiting for?” however one update has changed it; that update happened in the middle of April when construction items were added to clue scroll rewards and torn pages which before were very common and added value to the rewards were arguably taken out.
These construction items varying from rune nails to a new wardrobe are useless. They’re next to the impossible to sell on the grand exchange and believe it or not there are only so many shiny things you can put in your house before you’re stuck with a bunch of useless pieces of furniture. It wouldn’t have been too bad if these items were rare or uncommon but they’re not, if you do five clues you’re likely to get at least one piece of furniture if not more. These “junk” items take away from the otherwise semi useful rewards you can get from a clue, while there were a few bogey items before (firelighters for example) they were few and far between. Now it appears that you get at least one item of junk a clue scroll.
Thanks to Summoning and Smoking Kills, Slayer has become more popular which in turn has led to more clues being dropped and thus in theory more clues being done. This hasn’t helped with the value of the rewards either.
Along with the mid April update the number of parts that clues could have was also changed. Before for a level 3 clue it was somewhere between 4 and 6 parts long and for each part of the clue you did you got a “reward” so it was actually a good thing to have a long clue as you have two extra chances of a good item. However this is no longer the case. I don’t believe it’s possible to have a clue as short as 4 clues long however the maximum now appears to be 8, or maybe even higher. This would be fine except that the rewards are capped at 6. Meaning no matter how many more parts you do you will never receive more than 6 rewards from one clue scroll (super sets count as one reward =D ). On top of this you are more likely to receive the same clue twice in a row or magical casket-in-a-casket-in-a-casket clues instead of getting another clue or your reward; this very rarely happened prior to the update and while it speeds up some clues, it makes me ask the question – Are clue scrolls broken?
Despite these setbacks you’re pretty much guaranteed 20k for a clue which isn’t too bad, although with the additional clue length you’re now looking at 20 minutes for a clue instead of the usual 15 for an experienced treasure hunter, a lot longer for those that aren’t so experienced especially with puzzle boxes you are now more likely to get than ever before.
A lot of people complain about never getting anything good from clue scrolls; however when I ask them how often they do them the most common reply is “maybe one or two a week”. Well if you don’t do clues very often how can you expect to get anything good? You can’t kill one abyssal demon a week then complain that you’ve not had a whip in a year when you’ve only killed 52! As with a lot of things in Runescape, yes you can get lucky and get 3rd age from your first ever clue but more likely than not if you want something enough to feel you can complain about it then you’ll actually have to put work in. If you do 3 clues a day for a week and haven’t gotten even the most worthless rare items and are getting nothing but firelighters then you have every reason to complain that you’re having a bad run of luck and question if clue scrolls are even worth doing but if you don’t do clue scrolls often you can’t expect to get something good every other time, probability doesn’t work that way.
Overall I think clue scrolls are still worth doing, maybe not as much as before and even if you don’t do them as soon as you get them, maybe try and do one every 3 slayer tasks or so if you’re doing slayer instead of after each one. Abandoning them altogether is not really a wise thing to do for something that takes all of 20 minutes to do and with the chance of earning millions. Clue scrolls remain on par with Barrows as a mini-game that’s useful if you want a bit of cash quickly and it will remain this way for a long time to come. Thanks to the new PvP worlds, rune items are now in demand more than before and thus the prices of those have increased dramatically. This makes clues more worthwhile then before; if you get one pair of rune legs every other clue that’s reasonable. It's an extra amount of you’d otherwise not have had if you just left a clue in your bank or sitting on the ground to rot.
Did You Know...
... the new Dagon'hai robes are the best mage robes that offer a prayer bonus. The top and bottom offer 20 and 15 mage bonuses (equal to mystic robes), but also have a +2 prayer bonus each. Requires 40 magic to wear. (Thanks to wyvren2000!)
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