Best Gear

About the Best Gear DPS calculator

Pick a monster, and this page searches the items already in your bank for the highest damage per second you can assemble, once for melee, once for ranged and once for magic. Built for Old School RuneScape ironmen, where the question is never what the best gear in the game is; it is what the best gear you own is.

What the result proves, and what it does not

For each style, the setup shown is the highest DPS setup that can be built from your bank, exactly, over the candidate space this tool enumerates and under the damage model it implements. Both halves of that sentence carry weight. The search is exhaustive rather than a sample: it does not try a few promising combinations and stop when they stop improving. But it is exhaustive with respect to this evaluator, so wherever the model and the game disagree, the answer follows the model. It is a proof about a calculation, not a promise about a fight.

Four things withdraw that claim, and each one is printed on the result it applies to rather than left for you to find here.

• The search hit its work limit and stopped part way through your weapons, so what is shown is the best it had found rather than a proven best.
• The search ran out of time and stopped part way through your weapons, with the same consequence.
• Every part of the search ran, but it could not show that none of the setups it put aside along the way would have beaten the winner. The figure itself is still exact.
• Your bank held an item this tool could not classify. It was kept in the search rather than thrown away, and the claim is withdrawn around it rather than the item being silently dropped.

A result that was stopped early carries a Stopped early badge, and only two of those four reasons put it there, because only they mean parts of your bank were never reached. The other two reasons are printed on the result itself.

Whether a search stops early depends on the device it runs on, not only on your bank. The work is cut into slices so it can be cancelled while you drag a slider, and slicing means the same bank against the same monster does not enumerate the same number of setups twice running. Driven against a simulated slow clock, a paste that finishes and claims exactness on a fast machine stops at 46 of 83 weapons on a slow one, under the same limit. So a stopped-early label describes that run on that device. Trying again, or opening the same bank on a faster machine, can genuinely change it.

What is not modelled

A missing effect does not just make one item read wrong. It makes the optimiser undervalue the items that carry it, so those items lose every comparison, never reach a result, and leave nothing for a warning to attach itself to. An absence cannot warn you about itself, which is why the families are named here instead.

• Karil's the Tainted's set effect. The second hitsplat it can add is not counted.
• Ahrim's the Blighted's set effect. Its chance to drain the target's Strength and hit harder is not counted.
• Torag's the Corrupted's set effect. It drains the target's run energy rather than adding damage, so it is outside this model entirely and is named here only so the absence is not a surprise.
• The Amulet of the damned. It changes what several Barrows sets do, and not one of those changes is modelled.
• The Blue moon set effect. Its spear procs are not modelled, so a full Blue moon set is scored as ordinary armour and will lose to gear it may beat in the game.
• The Sunfire fanatic set effect. It raises the minimum damage a fire spell can roll, and this evaluator does not apply it.
• Crystal armour from the Gauntlet. The basic, attuned and perfected tiers are scored on their bonuses alone; the damage and accuracy the Corrupted Gauntlet gives them is not applied.
• The crystal bow from the Gauntlet. Scored the same way, for the same reason.
• The Dark bow's bounty hunter and Deadman forms. A plain Dark bow fires two arrows and both are counted. The bounty hunter and Deadman versions of it are recognised by neither calculator as a Dark bow, so they are scored as ordinary bows firing once and will read about half of what they should.
• The enhanced Blisterwood sickle. The enhanced sickle is a vampyre bane weapon in the game and the reference calculator models nothing for it, so it is scored here as an ordinary slash sword and will read low against a vampyre. Its plain form is scored in full.
• The Bracelet of slaughter. It saves Slayer task kills rather than adding damage, so it never moves DPS and is scored as a plain ring slot item.
• The Expeditious bracelet. The same: it shortens a task rather than raising damage.
• The Keris partisan of corruption special attack. Scored as an ordinary weapon, with nothing added for the special.
• Statius's warhammer special attack. Scored as an ordinary weapon, with nothing added for the special.
• Echo boots. Their only effect is recoil damage, which is damage the monster takes when it attacks you rather than damage you deal, so no damage calculator counts it and these are scored on their bonuses alone.
• Emerald, sapphire, jade and topaz bolts (e). These four fire a status effect rather than damage, poison and a magic drain among them, and no damage calculator counts any of it. They are scored as plain bolts. The other six enchanted bolts, opal, pearl, diamond, dragonstone, onyx and ruby, do have their special hit counted here in full.

Only two special attacks are named above, and that is not the whole story: those are the two the engine carries an identifier for. The reference calculator leaves 25 special attacks unimplemented in total and this tool inherits every one of them, so a weapon whose value comes mostly from its special attack will read low here, and only those two will say so on a result.

Every one of those is left out by the OSRS Wiki's own DPS calculator, which this tool is built to agree with, and agreeing with it is deliberate: diverging would break the comparison that keeps every other number here honest. Four more are effects that calculator does model and this one has not caught up with yet.

• Dharok's the Wretched's set effect. The damage it gains as your Hitpoints fall is not applied, so a Dharok's setup is scored at its plain bonuses and will read low.
• Chinchompa accuracy by distance. Chinchompas are scored without the accuracy change that comes from how far away you stand.
• Enchanted bolts against a monster with a damage rule of its own. About fifty monsters rewrite the damage they take, from the Corporeal Beast halving anything that is not a spear to the vampyre tiers refusing most weapons outright. Against one of those, an enchanted bolt's special hit is left out rather than being pushed through the monster's own rule, so a crossbow reads low there. Everywhere else the bolt is counted in full.
• Ammunition that answers a specific monster. Ice arrows at the Fire Warrior of Lesarkus, brutal arrows in a Comp ogre bow against the ogres, broad arrows and bolts against Turoth and Kurask, any arrow at Fareed, and Silver bolts against a vampyre are all counted when they are in your quiver. What this tool will not do is go looking for them: they lose the quiver slot to better ammunition long before they are scored, so if one of those is the answer you will have to put it on yourself in the manual editor.

The search does not read equipment level requirements. It will happily suggest a drop sitting in your bank that your levels cannot equip yet, and it will not tell you so. Treat the requirement as your own check.

What this tool counts and that calculator does not

Agreeing with the OSRS Wiki's calculator is the rule, and this is the exception to it. Where that calculator refuses to score an effect at all rather than scoring it differently, there is no number to disagree with, so counting it adds information instead of breaking the comparison. Each one is listed with what it had to assume, and any result it lands in says so on the result itself.

• The Eclipse moon set's burn. The Eclipse moon helm, chestplate and tassets worn with the Eclipse atlatl give every landed hit a one in five chance to set a burn worth 10 damage, which is about 1.11 extra damage per second on rapid at perfect accuracy. This tool counts it and the OSRS Wiki's calculator does not, which is the one place the two deliberately disagree; two changes implementing it are open on that calculator, so the disagreement should close rather than widen. Turning that into a single number assumes you are fighting one monster at a time, that the fight lasts long enough for each burn to finish ticking, that you never hold the maximum five burns at once, and that the monster does not reduce the burn the way a few reduce ordinary hits. Monsters immune to strong burns take none of it, TzKal-Zuk and the Moons of Peril among them, and none is counted for them.

What this tool does not answer

• Anything about cost.There is no budget, no gp figure and no notion of what is worth buying. It ranks what you already own, so the answer to "what should I get next" is not in here.
• Anything about staying alive. Defence bonuses, food, prayer drain and the monster's own damage are outside the model entirely. The highest DPS setup against a boss is frequently one you should not wear to it.
• Gear switching. One setup per style for the whole fight. Special attack switches, a swap between phases and a separate tank setup are all real answers to real fights, and none of them is modelled here.

What an inexact search costs, measured on your bank

Every comparable tool searches gear greedily: fill one slot at a time, always take whatever helps most right now, never go back. That is fast and it is usually close, and the whole reason this tool exists is that "usually close" is not the same as right. So rather than quote a figure from somewhere else, the same greedy climb is run here, on your bank, against your monster, with the same prayers, potions and spells the real search used. The only difference left between the two numbers is how the eleven slots were chosen.

The climb below is given more than the shipped tools give theirs: it sweeps its slots repeatedly instead of once, it re-picks the weapon and attack style each time against the armour it has already chosen, and it equips an item that ties rather than demanding an improvement. Every one of those makes it stronger and the gap smaller, which is the only safe direction for a number this page uses to argue for itself.

The measured difference appears here once a bank and a monster are chosen and the search has answered, including when it turns out to be nothing at all.

A GearScape user recorded 9.01 DPS at Tekton where 9.74 was reachable, 8.1 percent more damage than they were getting. That is the honest reference point: a real bank, a real fight, and a gap you would never see without something exact to compare against.

Where the data comes from

Monster and equipment data from the Old School RuneScape Wiki, used under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, trimmed and reformatted. The monster and equipment numbers come from the wiki's own DPS calculator project, under the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence. They are hardcoded into the site and refreshed with it, so this page makes no network requests and works offline.

That licence is non-commercial, and this tool stays inside it by being free and ad-free. The donation link is a voluntary thank you and buys nothing. Any of the following would cross the line, and are named here so that crossing it has to be a decision rather than a drift: carrying advertising of any kind, putting any feature behind a paid tier, taking sponsorship, presenting the donation link as payment for the tool rather than as a voluntary thank you.

Item and monster artwork is a separate question, with a separate answer. Item icons and monster artwork are the copyright of Jagex Ltd. They are not covered by the Creative Commons licence that covers the combat data on this page, and nothing here grants any licence to them. OSRS Iron is a free, non-commercial fan tool. These images are served from this site in good faith, in line with what comparable fan projects do, and only to identify the item or monster a result refers to. If you hold rights in that artwork, write to [email protected] and it will be taken down.