Melee Combat

Melee combat is divided into 3 main areas, Attack, Strength and Defence. Attack will determine your accuracy when fighting and will increase your consistency when hitting opponents. Strength will determine how hard you can hit your opponent. Finally, Defence relates to how resilient you are to attacks and how often your opponent will hit you. The higher the defence, the more likely the opponent is to miss.

To train the 3 skills requires you to fight the numerous and various monsters in RuneScape world.

Wielding a weapon will display the training styles available and what combat skills you can train with that weapon.





This screen shows the weapon you are wielding and the combat options for that weapon. The information in brackets such as ‘Accurate’, ‘Aggressive’ and ‘Defensive’ gives you an insight into the skill they will train if selected.

To train attack, you will need to select ‘Accurate’ attack styles from the combat menu, for example:

Having a higher attack level not only means you will hit the opponent more often, but it will also enable you able to train with stronger/better weapons.

To read more about attack and weapon types, see the Combat: Weapon Types page.

To see what you can wield with your attack level, see the Low, Medium or High Level Melee equipment pages.

Strength ultimately determines the amount of damage you can deal with a hit to an opponent. With a strong hitting weapon and a high strength level, you will find yourself able to deal a significant amount of damage to a monster or player!

To train strength, you would use the ‘Aggressive’ options from the combat sub-menu. These will purely train your strength, making you able to gain strength levels quicker.

To find out what you can wield with your strength level, see the Melee subcategories.

Defence refers to the chance you have of being hit from attacks. A higher Defence level would make you a tougher warrior, giving you the ability to last a lot longer against any foe.

To train Defence, you should select the ‘Defensive’ option from the Attack style screen:

A large part of Defence is armour. Having more resilient armour, combined with a good defence level, will minimise the chances of being hit. As with attack, there is a variety of choices dependant on your Defence level.

To read more about defence and armour types, see the Combat: Defence Armour Types page.

To see a tabled listing what you can wield with your defence level, see the Low, Medium or High Level Melee equipment pages.

Training controlled will boost all of the the levels (Attack, Strength, Defence and Hitpoints) together equally, this will mean that the experience that you gain is divided up amongst the skills. Although this may seem slower to some players, it means that you are increasing all 4 skills at one time.

To train controlled, just select the option in the combat screen, if applicable for the weapon you are using:

The amount of experience you get from hitting an opponent is based upon a number of things.

The experience you receive will vary, dependant on the combat level of the monster you are fighting. You are in control of what experience you receive as you can choose your fighting style, therefore experience to that particular combat skill.

When training it maybe worth considering your opponents (player or monster) weaknesses. Certain armours are weak to different styles of attacks. The main attack styles include Stab, Slash and Crush attacks.

For example if your opponent is wearing a light robe material, a Slashing weapon such as a scimitar should have no problem tearing through the armour.

Similarly to this, investigate whether a puncturing ‘Stab’ attack could deal the most damage, or an aggressive crush attack to smash through armour is necessary.

Happy training!