Magic

Magic is a versatile skill that uses elemental energy released from runes for a variety of subjects such as combat, enchantments for certain items, teleporting, and to turn items into money via alchemy spells. While it is possible to play the game without being skilled in Magic, it is a considerable advantage to be able to use many spells, especially high level alchemy and various teleports. Magic can also be used by many different monsters in the game.



Players who employ the tactics of Magic as their primary arsenal are often referred to as "Magicians" or more commonly, "Mages"(proper "magi"). Once skilled, they will be able to access the Wizards' Guild that is located in Yanille.

As with all guides in the Skills section, members-only items are in italics.

Spells
Magic is used almost exclusively through casting spells on another player or non-player character, on oneself (reflexively), or on an item.

There are three kinds of Magic in RuneScape: standard (commonly called "modern" or "regular"), Ancient Magicks, and Lunar Spells. Each has a different spellbook and typically only one can be used at once (for an exception to this rule, see Spell Book Swap). The special spellbooks are only available on member worlds, with the completion of their respective quests.

To cast a spell, a player must choose the wanted spell from their spellbook. To access the activated spellbook, click on the spellbook icon in the game's interface.



Ancient Magicks
The Ancient Magicks contain some of the most dangerous offensive spells. These spells can only be used after completing the fiendish and long Desert Treasure quest. These consist of the following types of spells: Ice, Smoke, Blood, Shadow, Miasmic, and Teleportation.

Ancient Magick spells are capable of bringing in some of the best experience for Magic; however, the high price of runes used in Ancient Magick spells makes this a very expensive way to train. This is comparable to using Chinchompas for Ranged.



Lunar spells
The Lunar Spells are useful for training your noncombat skills or assisting other players, for example in PvP situations (with the exceptions of Vengeance and Vengeance Other), and require the Lunar Diplomacy quest before being usable. A spellbook extension becomes available after completion of the Dream Mentor quest.

Many of these spells make other skills easier to train; for example, the Plank Make spell provides an alternate, faster way of making planks rather than using the sawmill.

Standard spells
The standard spells are activated on any new character's account and they are available on all worlds. There is no prerequisite to using the standard spellbook, although some spells are only available on member worlds and others require completion of certain quests or tasks. As with other skills, new capabilities require higher skill levels.

All spells yield their associated amount of experience when cast; combat spells give additional experience directly related to the amount of damage caused to the opponent(s).

In the standard spellbook, spells fall into one of several categories: combat, curse, teleportation, alchemy, and enchantment.

Teleportation spells
Teleportation spells are divided into two categories: the Teleother and personal Teleport spells. The latter is most popular with all players, free and member alike, as teleportation spells save lots of time when travelling around the world.

Combat spells
The maximum hit using a combat spell in the standard spellbook is 820 (with Fire Surge used in conjunction with Extreme magic potion or Overload potion, the Staff of light, a Fire Cape and a Hexcrest or Full slayer helmet against an Ice Strykewyrm).

Combat spells will occasionally splash upon contact with a target (i.e. they will do no damage). When splashing, the caster will receive only the base experience for that spell and no additional experience. As a result, there is no physical difference between splashing with a spell and hitting a 0 with the same spell. The splash rate depends on eight things:
 * The caster's Magic level
 * The Magic attack bonus of the equipment the caster is wearing
 * Any Magic prayers the caster has activated.
 * The target's Magic level
 * The target's Defence level
 * The Magic defence bonus of the equipment the target is wearing
 * Any Magic prayers the target has activated (including Protect from Magic)
 * Any Defence prayers the target has activated.

Curses
A curse spell is any spell that causes a negative effect to its target other than damage, usually reducing a stat.

Alchemy
All alchemy spells use nature runes to transform items into coins, or ores into bars. Particularly note High Alchemy in this section, as it is probably the most widely used spell in the game, but is usually considered a somewhat expensive training method at higher levels because of the accumulated money lost. Low Alchemy can be done for free 30 times each day if the player has an Explorer's Ring 3, and will still get experience.

Enchantments
All Enchantment spells uses Cosmic Runes to improve an items abilities.

Standard spellbook
On the 27 January 2009, the way you could order your spells was altered. You could have teleportation spells first, combat spells, or just the normal level orders. The way you could change the order was by clicking on one of the three icons in the bottom right corner of the spellbook .

Runes
All spells (except Home Teleport) require the use of runes as a consumed resource. Runes are commonly traded stackable items which are obtained by various methods. For hints on obtaining runes, see Runes: Obtaining runes.

Elemental staves
The required elemental runes of one type for a spell can be fulfilled if the player wields an Elemental staff corresponding to the required elemental rune. As an example, wielding a Fire staff allows a player to cast High Level Alchemy using only one Nature rune.

Players who are lucky enough may obtain a combination staff. This is a staff with more than one rune's power. So far, the only existing combination staffs are the lava battlestaff (which is fire and earth), mud battlestaff (which is water and earth), and the steam battlestaff (which is water and fire), and their mystic counterparts.

Various magical staves are available in RuneScape. In the list below are all the free-to-play staves, which can all be obtained at Zaff's Superior Staffs! store in Varrock. The main effect of a staff or magic staff is to boost magic attack and defence, while elemental staves provide unlimited amounts of their elementary rune in addition to the boosts provided by a magic staff. There are many members-only staves such as battlestaves, mystic staves, the Slayer staff, the Lunar staff, the Ancient staff, and God staves.

Some members magic staves can increase the power of combat spells by 10% if they are wielding it. The staves which fall into this category are: Ahrim's staff, Ancient staff, Master wand, Void Knight Mace, Zuriel's staff and Corrupt Zuriel's staff.

The Staff of Light goes further, providing a hefty 15% power bonus towards magical attacks.

Robes and armour
Main article: Armour

Most mages wear robes, although some light armour is available that is made from special material and does not hinder the wearer's ability to perform magic attacks. For the different sets of armour and detailed information on each piece, see the Armour: Magic armour article.

A player's maximum magic attack bonus is +152, and the maximum magic defence bonus is +196.

How to successfully fight as a mage
A player who is a mage is weak against Ranged and strong against Melee fighters. When attacking others, a mage should use a combination of curse spells (Bind, Snare, Entangle, Ice spells in Ancient Magicks) and highly damaging combat spells such as Fire Surge, the Mage Arena spells or spells from the Ancient Magicks spell book. Curses tend to be underused, but do not underestimate them. The -10% curse spells (Vulnerability, Enfeeble and Stun) and Shadow Barrage can unpot any warrior and the spell can be casted again if the warrior takes another sip of his (super) attack, strength or defence potion. Another useful tactic to fight meleers is to time your attacks so you know when your opponent will be able to move again. Magic combat spells take 3 seconds to cast. For example: you freeze a meleer with Entangle. Entangle freezes your opponent for 15 seconds. Entangle takes 3 seconds to cast, leaving you with 12 seconds to cast spells. 12/3 is 4, so you can cast 4 spells until your opponent can move again. When this happens, run in the opposite direction of where your opponent is standing (so if your opponent is standing north of you, run south) and cast Entangle again. Rinse and repeat until your opponent is dead. When fighting monsters, using battle tactics helps, such as staying in a safe spot. Most undead creatures and demons are weak to magic attacks. This will provide an advantage over these creatures. One should take note of a monster's weakness to a particular element (wind, water, earth, or fire).

A little known fact about Magic is that as a player's Magic skill level increases, so does their defence against magical attacks. Magical defence is calculated from 70% of a player's Magic level and 30% of their defence level. Thus, even if a player doesn't care to use Magic too often, having a high Magic skill can help to protect them.

Training magic
Generally, the fastest way to obtain runes is to buy them. If a player can not afford them, it is recommended that a player uses the Runecrafting skill to make runes for magic training. Alternatively, a player can play Fist of Guthix minigame for free runes, although these cannot be taken from the arena. Using magic this way is the cheapest way to gain magic levels, while also gaining the Fist of Guthix tokens to purchase items. Players have an option to make teleport tablets with the tokens, gaining money and experience at the same time.

Certain locations, such as the prison in Port Sarim, and the demon's cage atop the Wizards' Tower, can prove to be useful when training magic because of the safe spot: this leaves enemies unable to retaliate.

Finishing the beginner and easy tasks of the Lumbridge and Draynor achievement diary gives as a reward an Explorer's ring, which allows 30 Low level alchemy casts per day for free. This allows low level mages to level up their magic very quickly. The easiest but not the most profitable way to level magic up using this method is to head to a field of crops (ex. potatoes, cabbage), pick up 28 of them, and then using the ring, low-level alchemy them all. Each cast is 31 experience, so for one day, 930 experience can be gained in a few minutes.

With the recent drop in the relative price on fires and mind runes versus air runes, fire spells are strongly recommended in conjunction with a staff of air.

The bandits west of the Grand Exchange can be killed from behind the safety of the small stone wall there. The Dark Wizards by Varrock's south entrance can also be killed with the chance of rune drops. Beware, low level players: the Dark Wizards are potentially fatal.

At the moment, for low-level mages, Curse splashing is a good technique to use for levelling magic, as it is cheap and fast (29 base exp points per cast).

Defensive casting
When this option in the Magic interface is selected, it gives the player 1.33 Magic experience and 1 Defence experience for every damage, as well as the usual 1.33 Constitution experience and base magic experience that is earned for each cast.

This was previously available as an attack style when one wielded a staff.

Temporary boosts



 * Magic potion - This temporarily boosts a player's magic level by 2 or 3. . Alternatively, a Magic essence potion boosts Magic by 3.
 * Prayers - Mystic Will, Mystic Lore, Mystic Might, and Augury boost a player's magic accuracy (not damage) by 5%, 10%, 15%, or 20% respectively.
 * Ancient Curses - Leech Magic boosts a player's magic by 5%, increasing to 10% over time.
 * Wizard's mind bomb is a type of beer that increases magic by 3. It increases the magic level by 2 if the players magic level is below 50..
 * Red spicy stew can has the potential to give between +6 and -6 Magic boost..
 * An extreme magic potion boosts the magic stat by 7, and is untradeable.
 * The Wolpertinger special scroll 'Magic Focus' can boost your Magic level by +7.
 * The Magic cape's Boost option allows the player to temporarily boost his or her magic level to 100/99, though you must have 99 magic and a magic cape to use this boost.

Trivia

 * The Magic Skill Cape is the only skill cape to have gold under the shoulder pads and on the back. On all the rest of the skill capes, they are coloured grey.
 * The word Magic is the shortest name of any skill so far, having only 5 letters.
 * Magic in RuneScape Classic was very different from its current incarnation:
 * There were two magic skills, Good Magic and Evil Magic. When the current Magic system was released, the player's Magic level was set as whatever his or her highest old magic level was.
 * Prior to the introduction of RuneScape 2, in the 2-D game, spells were universally represented by a simple, flying blue star, which proved difficult to distinguish from arrows, which were green stars.
 * Melee armour offered no Magic attack penalties, leading to a massive imbalance in favour of high-level mages.
 * Spells gave the fixed experience using the formula 2 * spell level + 20. Jagex claims that the reduction of Magic experience in RuneScape 2 was due to the fact that runes were easier to obtain on the new version, because Runecrafting (2004) and the Grand Exchange (2008) were added to the game.
 * Spells were sometimes failed, which did not use any runes, but stopped players from using any magic for 20 seconds.
 * Combat spells cast on Dummies do not give Constitution experience.
 * It is possible to achieve 99 Magic without raising one's combat level (although it is highly unrecommended). A player would first have to use experience lamps to gain enough experience to cast a teleport spell, then use teleport spells to raise their magic level to 99. This requires millions of gold, and would take much longer to train to 99 without the use of combat spells.
 * Ever since RuneScape HD's release, failed spells will sometimes fly straight up instead of splashing and disappearing as usual.
 * If a player is far enough from their opponent, their spells will take longer to reach their opponent than an attack cycle, leading them to fire another spell before the first spell hit. This sometimes leads to a spell being in the air when the opponent dies.
 * Projectile spells will change directions to hit players that teleport.
 * Before the Autocast update on 9 September 2009, spells could only be autocast if wielding staves, and even then only certain spells could be autocasted.
 * During an update on 17 November 2009 Jagex changed the Magic potion to give a stat bonus of +5 instead of the earlier +4. However, Magic potions made in Stealing Creation still give a +4 bonus. This has yet to be fixed.
 * Some of the more potent and ancient magical races shown in the game, such as the Mahjarrat of Freneskae or the Fairies of Zanaris do not require runes to use their magic, though most other races, such as the Humans, Dwarves and even the Elves, do utilise Guthix's runestones to cast spells.
 * The black and white magic system was thought to be a reference to Final Fantasy which there was black magic.