Runescape journal
What I think about the game, what I do,what I will do, etc.

Note that I am not a profesional reviewer, I'm just expressing what I think about the different skills in runescape. Also, I am a non-member, so I will be expressing my views on non-member skills only. I will rate each skill depending on usefulness(acording to me) 1 means it's useless, 10 means you can't live without it. Now that the explinations are out of the way, on to the review:

Woodcutting: One of the (said) most pointless skills in the game, woodcutting is a skill that requires no more than a tree and an ax. It's a good way to make a small amount of money, though, and it goes hand in hand with firemaking. Both skills should be trained at the same time. Personally, I find woodcutting fairly addicting. You just keep chopping, and chopping, AND CHOPPING! Next thing you know it's 1 in the morning (never happened to me, but it's very possible). Good woodcutting spots are hard to find. A good willow tree spot I found is just west of the potatoe patch south of Varrock. Yew trees are the hardest to find, and go for alot of cash. a commonly sed spot are the couple of trees behing the varrock castle, east of the grand exchange. Always use the best ax you can get when woodcutting. It gets you logs faster than if you just stay with your original bronze ax. I recomend mythril or adamant, unless you're wiling to splurge for a rune ax. Ax's themselves are not good weapons, but they're better than just your fists! Careful though! If you try chopping down an Ent, it'll break your ax. So pay attention when your woodcutting! But watching your character woodcut isn't very entertaining, so it's not a skill you should max out all at once. level it over a period of time, like if you pass a willow tree on your way to varrock, cut some logs and sell them at the store for pocket change. but most players can't be bothered.   Rating: 6

Fire making: A bit more useful than woodcutting, fire making is mostly viewed outside banks where players make long lines of fire. Very annoying because sometimes players drop items around banks, and you can't tell the items from the ashes unless you go to investigate. This skill is best used to cook food when there is no range in close by, although there's a greater chance of burning the food. You should train both woodcutting and firemaking at the same time, but fire making levels up faster than woodcutting. Fire making requires logs and a tinder box, available at your local general store.  Rating: 5

Fishing: One of the best ways to get food to cook, fishing is mostly leveled to be able to catch high-healing lobsters. Good skill to get food if you're going into a dangerous place. Not many places to fish for certain fish, so you should know where all the good fishing spots are. Flyfishing is best done in barbarian village, bait fishing near port sarim, net fishing in draynor or lumbridge, and harpoon and lobster cage fishing are only available on karamja. I do not recomend bait fishing unless you have a good sum of money with you. Fly fishing is a good way to get fish because the feathers needed can be obtained from killing a chicken, which also gets you some combat experience!  Rating: 5

Cooking: If you don't level up this skill, you must be very brave or very stupid. Cooking is one of he most useful skills in the game, right up there with combat. Cooking let's you take raw meat or ingredients and make them into edible healing food items. Fish are probably the food most cooked, because it's just catch and cook, but if you're willing to go to the trouble, you could cook chocolate cake or anchovy pizza if your fishing isn't that high. the worst food is anchovies, which is surprising for the fishing level required to catch them. Pie and cake are odd food items because they don't heal you for all the hp they can. Instead, they heal in little chunks. Good if you battle a bit and you don't want to carry a bunch of food on you.  Rating: 9

Ranging: The second type of combat, ranging let's you attack enemies from afar or behind obstacales wher they can't reach you. Good for annoying the heck out of melee fighters if you hide behind walls you can shoot over. Ranger's weapons are either a bow and arrow or a cross bow and bolts. Crossbows are good if you want to have a sheild equiped. Sheilds aren't good for rangers though because they hinder their abilities. But a ranger is nothing if they don't have any arrows, or at least only 4 or 5. So being a ranger is a bit expencive for the arrows, but you can reuse arrows that don't break on impact when they hit the target. Rating: 6

Mining: I could go on and on about this, so I will. Mining is very useful. It's used to get ore that can be turned into bars that can become armor or weapons or jewlery. Some ores also go for alot of cash, like runite. Oh, runite! The rarist of ores! Runite is used to make the best (and most expencive) armor and weapons. The ore itself goes for 11.9k on the grand exchange. But it requires the most coal ore to be made into bars. and there's only 2 runite rocks that you can get it from. The mining skill can also be used to mine rune essence that becomes runes which are useful in magic, considering you can't cast spells without them! Rating: 7 

 Smithing: The brother of mining, smithing is used to turn ore into bars that an be turned into weapons or armor or jewlery. Slow to level up , and higher level items require more ore than lower level ones. Coal is very useful to smithers because it's needed to make most bars. As a result, mining levels up faster than smithing, much like the woodcutting-fire making combo. Not a good skill if you like to level up skills fast. Good skill to train if you don't have money. Most players just buy their armor. Smithers are the ones who make that armor. Smithing, dispite the amount of time it takes, should be leveled up, because if you're one to die alot, you can just make new armor to replace your lost armor without having to delve into your stash of gp. Rating: 7

Crafting: The cousin of smithing, crafting is used to make jewlery, potery and leather armor. Good for rangers and cooks. You need gold bars to make most of the jewlery available, which is why mining and smithing are so important. Also, most of the jewlery can be enchanted, so a good magic level is also good, but not needed. Gems are hard to come by though, so it might be difficult to get that piece for that  amulet you were making. All jewlery making requires a mold of some sort, so you might have to have some money on you. Potery requires clay. That's it: clay. But not just any clay, no it needs soft clay, obtained from taking a bucket/jug/bowl of water and mixing it with the clay. Then you have to take the soft clay to a potery wheel, wich are not abundant. After forming the basis of what you want to make, you fire it in the potery oven, which can be found very close to the potery wheel. There's a small chance of the item cracking and becoming unusable when being fired, but that hardly ever happens. Leather working is the fastest way to get crafting experiance, so if you see people in cow feilds asking for free cowhides, don't be surprised. Rating: 5

Runecrafting: This skill is either useful or useless, depending on how you fight. Runecrafting needs rune essence, obtained using the mining skill, and an elemental talisman. But rune essence can't be found just anywhere. It can only be found in a special mine that only two NPCs can teleport you. But before they do, you must do a little errand for them. I will not say names, but the start of the quest is in Lumbridge castle. Runecrafting is usefull to those who use a good amount of magic spells, because it lets you make the runes yourself rather than buying them. Saves alot of cash in the long run. If you get it high enough, you can craft multiple runes per essence. Rating: varies

Magic: The third kind of combat, magic is probably the most expencive skill because of the runes you need to cast spells. Mages are also annoying, like rangers, because they can cast from behind obsticals and cast spells that effect your combat stats or stun you. Can be used to teleport, turn items into money, or enchant jewlery. If you have the cash, this is a good skill. Mages use stafs to help with their spell casting. Some can be used to replace certain elemental runes required for spells. You'd probably see players with air or fire staffs  more often than water or earth staffs, probably because air runes are need to cast many spells and you use up fire runes at a good click. Staffs can also be used to auto cast spells. Fighters are most vunerable to magic attacks for plate armor cunducts magic. Rating: 7

Prayer: Useful no matter what your fighting style is, prayer can be used to do a ton of things, usually increasing your stats temporarily. Bad thing is that you don't get experiance from using the skill, instead you get exp from burying bones from defeated enemies. Not a problem if you fight alot, but it's only 4 exp per bone buried (if you don't find any big bones or special bones like that). At high enough levels, you can repair or bless other player's gravestones, if you feel like it.  Rating: 8

Combat: I saved the best for last, combat is the fravorite skill to many a player, for what reason is unknown to me. Combat is made up of the skills defence, strength, attack, and hitpoints. Defence decreases your chances of getting hit, strength increases the amount of damage you can do, attack increases your chances of hitting your opponent, and hitpoints are how much damage you can take before you die. Most people, if they're leading a group, would pay most attention to what your combat level is, rather than what your cooking or smithing is at. Even if you don't fight alot, I suggest that you at least get your overall combat level to somewhere like 40, so you can defend yourself from most enemies. A fighter is nothing without a good weapon, which is where there develops a small problem. Some weapons strike faster than others, but usually the faster a weapon the less damage it's capable of doing. While slow weapons do more damage than fast weapons, your oponent will most likely attack you twice for every one hit that you do. As a result of this delema, most players choose either a scimitar or a 2 handed sword. Scimitars are the best rounded weapons, a fair amount of damage at a fair speed, while 2 handed swords are the slowest weapons in the game, they do the most damage (and they sure look like it too). Rating: 10

That's my view on the non-member skills of runescape. if you oppose any of my oppinions, please keep them to yourself, or make your own review. If I missed anything, let me know. REMEMBER: I'm not a profesional. I just felt like putting up a blog post and came up with this.