After completing a couple of quests, it became apparent how many I needed to do and that I needed to focus on moving around the map faster. I decided the first thing I would do was increase my agility level with a focus on getting Marks of Grace.
One nice perk of raising your agility level is it increases the rate at which you generate energy. This will be quite important for running around the map as that uses energy. Walking just feels far too slow in this game, and I hate it.
The other thing, a higher agility level grants you access to different shortcuts throughout the map. This benefit I feel I won’t get a lot of use out for quite some time. It requires quite the game to know where shortcuts are and have any other required items to use them. I'm just hoping to have a high enough agility level for any random shortcut I find. It was more dumb luck that I got to save some time while getting around than anything else.
As far as how high do I intend to level up agility? The goal is not 99. Gaining the most experience per hour is also not the goal. Ideally, I want at least level to run the pyramid at some point. It’s just not my main goal currently.
What is however is getting 260 Marks of Grace for the full set of Graceful. Each piece of the set reduces my total weight and grants me an increase in energy regain. With a whole set of six pieces giving me a decent bonus.
The nice thing about having a lower weight is I'll have an even higher regen speed for my energy. The more weight you have the faster it drains. The set, however, weighs a little bit itself.
There is however a bigger downside. I’ll need to wear the set in the first place to get any of the benefits. Which means six slots of my inventory being eaten by a second set of gear. While grinding crafting or gathering skills I'll care more about the inventory space. While out running quests it seems I won’t mind losing some space in exchange for getting to where I need to be quicker.
The graceful set also lacks any other stats. So, wearing something like this in a place where I'm expected to take some damage getting through will also be a bit of a downside.
The way I'm going to go about getting the marks is by running rooftop agility courses. I’ll simply be running them till I have 260 for the set and a couple of extra. Whatever level of agility I end up reaching will just be a nice bonus.
This was going to end up being one of my longer grinds so far in OSRS (Old School RuneScape). I was able to do this over a couple of days and I felt it was not that bad really. I even rather enjoyed it till I got down to the last 50 or so marks I needed.
I ended up going out to the first rooftop course lacking any agility skill allowed me to be at. This one ended up being in Draynor Village and I ended up staying longer than I was expecting.
This course ended up being a lot more useful than I was expecting. At the time I did not know you could fail courses while you were running them. Since the biggest experience gain is at the end of each one once you complete it. Failing a run leaves you with some experience you gained for each success stage you completed. It is, however, not a lot when compared to finishing the entire thing.
This first one is also quite easy. I was mostly able to run it as well without running out of energy. It did, however, happen on occasion. My goal was not to run it as many times as I could in an hour. I was multitasking at the time.
I was multi-tasking at the time. I tried to keep my guy running to each area in the course while I was reading, enjoying movies, and a few other tasks. As a result, my character would sometimes idle for long enough to get auto-logged out.
That was rather fine with me, however. As it appears marks are on somewhat of a timer anyway. While some courses have a higher chance of getting a mark, others have a lower chance. I felt mostly that as long as I was running a lap at least once a minute or two; I was not in bad shape. More times than not I was doing much better than that.
Occasionally as I was slowly leveling up the game would remind me that I've unlocked some shortcuts. It appears anything in the local area I should have some kind of access to. It’s doubtful I'll remember to look at such shortcuts while planning out a route. It’s however nice to see I was unlocking quite a few of them while working on my main goal of getting enough marks for the set.
Somewhere around the 40 laps mark of this course, I reached level 20. That seems to be quite fast. I was told I had to unlock another course. I decided I'd stick around for a bit longer on this first one. I did not want to lose lots of time trying to find where the next one was. I also had this one locked down quite well i barely had to look at the screen to move the mouse around to click on the next spot I needed to move my character to anyway.
I ended up doing 112 laps of the Draynor Village Rooftop course before deciding to check out another location. The next place I discovered was a rooftop course where I learned the required skills to run in Al Kharid.
This course I'd discover quite quickly not only could you fail it. When you fail you fall and must start all over again. Along with taking damage in the fall. Along with that I just did not like this course either.
Many times, after failing and falling I'd have to move my view around a bit just to find the course starting locations to run to. I was also running out of running energy quite a bit. So, getting back to the start was slower than I would have liked.
At the very least after doing my first lap of the course I ended up getting a diary achievement for the area. Since I plan to work on those as well. I at least got something out of being here.
I did end up getting a couple of marks, but I was not on this course for long. I left long before I even hit 20 laps. I ended up instead going over to Varrock where there was a rooftop course to run. I wanted to check in on my items on auction, so this ended up working out.
While it was tempting to go back to Draynor Village as I could not fail that course and would not have to keep finding where I had to run back to whatever spot I fell back to at the start. I ended up sticking with Varrock.
I ended up staying in Varrock for 81 or so laps. I had also collected and had 48 marks in my inventory. While I had a couple sitting in the bank as well. I still had quite a long way to go to reach my goal of at least 260 marks.
At the very least this got me to level 40 in agility. While I was super stocked to hit the next rooftop I unlocked it. As I've been told for a lower level it’s one of the better places to gather marks. It turns out you can’t just walk on in.
I had to do a bit of a quest first to unlock the area the rooftop was in. At this point, I did not mind a bit of a break from running around, mostly a circle on top of rooftops. So, I went and worked on the quest Priest in Peril.
This mission required killing some level 30+ creatures, freeing someone from jail, and turning in 50 runes. Which required two trips to the bank since I don’t have a pouch to hold runes in. Along with a trip to the auction house to buy the runes. Thankfully they only cost me two gold each. I decided to buy instead of farming the runes.
Once that was all done to my surprise, I ended up getting some prayer experience and a dagger. Along with access to Morytania. Where the next rooftop course was at. One I'd end up farming since it has a higher mark rate than other rooftop courses, I've run till I had enough.
You always know when you are at the right place. While many of the other courses I had been on were sometimes empty or just a couple of players. This one felt a bit crowded. There would sometimes be about a dozen players on a realm that maybe at the time I was grinding this out had less than two hundred players on it.
To keep myself somewhat sane I ended up writing down how many marks each piece required. Then every time I had enough in my inventory for another piece, I'd go drop that amount off at the bank.
As if running over 300 laps on this thing did not already feel long enough. I would end up more than doubling that to 656 laps before I ended with 261 marks in total. It was now time to run off and find the venter to exchange for the set.
It was also interesting to see this many marks were worth 2.1 million gold. Not that I would have sold them for that. They are each worth quite a bit more than anything I tend to farm.
It took a little bit of effort to find the Rogue’s Den located in Burthorpe. Burthorpe looks like it has some interesting quests to run as well. It, however, was not time to get sidetracked I went down into the cave of the Rouge’s Den and located the vendor to exchange 260 marks for six pieces of a set.
Before I put the set on, I had 38 carrying weight with a run time of 53 seconds. After I put the set on, I had a weight of 9 and a run time of 1 minute and 19 seconds. A decent little improvement all on its own. Then you must add in a 30% increase in energy regen rate plus whatever 56 levels of agility give me.
This will help me out a bit as I look for even better ways to get somewhere quicker. The best part is if one day I decide I no longer am using the set and don’t want it. I can always exchange the pieces for marks. There is a little bit of a loss for doing so it’s at least nice knowing there is that option.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Old School RuneScape
