OSRS 1V1 PVP Guide

Old School Runescape is a simple game on the surface but when you start going deep inside the game you quickly realise that it is immensely complicated and the skill cap is seemingly infinite. PVP is a minigame where players fight each other, and over the years the skill required to properly enjoy this mini game got bigger and bigger. Nowadays a new player can get overwhelmed just by looking at it and give up on even trying to PK. This is further amplified by the fact that you lose GP everytime you die. The main reason for this is due to the fact that there are no explanations in the game that actually explains how the game works to the player, and the player has to figure it out either by themselves or by reading a guide online like you are doing right now! This guide will teach you all of the nuances about vengeance PKing. There are other forms of PKing as well but that is a topic for another day. Even if you want to learn the other styles of PKing the mechanics used for them are the same as vengeance PKing, so you will greatly benefit from this guide either way.

This guide is split into different sections, if you know all about the mechanics, gears and account builds, please just skip to the last section to learn how to utilise everything you know to get a kill.

Mechanics of PVP

There is quite a lot that goes into PVP, here are the core mechanics that you need to take note off:

Ticks

OSRS uses a system called "Tick System". This system is essentially a time frame for the game to process information. Everything you do in the game requires a certain amount of ticks to take place. Every tick is equal to 0.6 seconds. In PVP there is one reason why this is important and that is weapons. Each weapon has a weapon attack cycle made out of ticks. You can think of it as a cooldown for your weapon and everytime the cooldown is over you can attack again. It is essential to manipulate this mechanic to get kills in PVP, you have probably heard of the term 1-ticking. This is a term used for switching to your K.O weapon and immediately attacking your opponent giving them little to no time to react. If you do not know your weapons attack cycles you won't be able to 1-tick your special attack weapon and you probably won't be able to kill your opponent.

1-Tick Distance

This term might seem weird to you but it will make sense in a second. If you have watched any PVP videos you would have definitely seen people using a ranged weapon, then switching to a melee weapon to K.O their opponent. To do this correctly they should stay close to their opponent otherwise they can't 1-tick their weapon. The maximum distance that the game allows for 1-ticking is 3 tiles, anything above that will take more ticks for you to hit your opponent.

Pid

Pid is a very important mechanic in PVP. It decides how you should act in a fight and who has the advantage in a fight. Pid is basically priority. The game randomly assigns numbers to each player and depending on your number you will have priority over your opponent.

In the picture above both characters are attacking each other at the same time but as you can see the hit of the player on the right appears first. This is because the player on the right has pid. If you have pid in a fight your hits will appear first and you will be able to control the fight because of it. Identifying pid is one of the key elements of PKing. Keep in mind that pid can swap randomly so always keep a lookout for it. Pid can also swap on a special attack which usually leads to an unpreventable death no matter how good a player is.

Pid Uses

If you have pid you can play more aggressively since any damage your opponent deals will appear a tick later, this gives you enough time to eat food and survive any type of damage. Even if you 1-tick your weapon perfectly, if you do not have pid your opponent will have time to react but if you have pid your opponent will have no time to react.

If you don't have pid you should always play more defensively and always hover over your food to eat it if need be.

With vengeance if you have pid you can wait for your opponent to attack then cast vengeance and it will be exactly on their hit but if you don't have pid you must predict their attack to cast vengeance.

Because of the reasons listed above, having pid will make you 50% stronger.

Double & Triple Eating

Being able to eat food at the right time is what separates good PKers from average ones. In OSRS there are different types of consumables and although you can't consume two of the same type of consumables together at the same time, you can still consume different types of consumables together in the same tick. There are specific ways to do this.

Double Eat

First type of this is called double eating. You can do this three ways:

First way is to eat a piece of food (that is not a karambwan) and drink a potion immediately afterward.

Second way is to drink a potion and eat a karambwan right afterwards. Only karambwans can be eaten right after a potion.

Third way of double eating is by eating a regular piece of food with a karambwan.

Triple Eat

This is the ultimate way of healing in this game. This is your emergency healing move, whenever your opponent is comboing you or special attacking you, you should triple eat. Triple eating is done by eating a regular piece of food then drinking a potion and finally eating a karambwan right afterwards. All of these actions can be done on the same tick and will heal you 56 hitpoints if you have 99 Hitpoints.

You can do this with any potion so if you need to boost your stats do it with a combat potion, if you need to restore your prayer do it with a prayer potion.

Safing

Safing is an unspoken rule in 1v1 PVP worlds and bounty hunters world fights. To put it simply, depending on the fight you shouldn't eat above a certain hitpoint. Nowadays this is kind of useless in most scenarios. So here is how it works:

• Your health should always be above someone's max hit. So in a regular zerker fight let's say my opponent's max hit with an AGS is 73, my health should always be above 73. Let's say this person is using a magic short bow as well, my health should be around 85. These numbers change depending on the fight and depending on your opponents potential to deal damage.
• If my opponent is out of special attack (with the same setup) then I can stay at 60-70 HP, since there is no way they can hit that.
• There is no such thing as safing on a special attack so when you see your opponent swinging, eat to full.
• There is no such thing as safing in pure and high risk fights as well so eat to your heart's content.
• You should bring a pineapple pizza and a guthix rest to prevent yourself from safing while keeping your health high. Example: Lets say your health is at 70 and you need to heal up since your opponent can hit that. If you eat an angler in this situation it will put your health to 92 which safing so instead you can eat a pineapple pizza to heal to 81 which is not safing.
• Pid is important as well. For example, if you have pid you can let your health linger a little bit lower than usual since you can eat any special attack that comes your way.

This rule is important since in some fights safing will piss off your opponents and they will not want to fight you again or they might special attack and tab you.

Damage Stacking

Generally speaking you will need to stack damage in a fight to kill your opponent. There are few ways to do this:

• Magic/Ranged to melee: One of the most broken combos in PvP is the ranged to melee combo. This is the easiest way to stack damage. You can use any number of weapons for this, ranging from a ballista to the newly added atlatl. Idea is to wait for a big hit with your ranged weapon and then switch to your melee weapon to hit your opponent on the same tick making the damage stack. Magic works with the same logic, but to make it work flawlessly you will need a nightmare staff with an harmonised orb so it is risky and expensive.

• Vengeance: If you have it, you can use vengeance to reflect your opponents damage back at him and use your K.O weapon at the same time to kill them.
• Recoil: Rings of recoil will reflect small amounts of damage back to your opponent which in some scenarios is what allows you to get the kill.
• Granite Maul: Big daddy of combo weapons is the granite maul. You can use literally any weapon in the game and stack it with a granite maul special attack.
• Dragon Thrownaxe: If you are using a ranged setup, you can use dragon thrownaxe's special attack to combo your opponent.

Taste Vengeance

Vengeance is a spell that requires level 94 magic on the Lunar spellbook. This spell is an essential requirement for PKing if your account is a zerker or above. The spell, as mentioned before, reflects 75% of the damage you receive back to your opponent and has a 30 second cooldown. Using this spell on the right time will increase your chances of getting kills so use it wisely and always watch out for your opponents vengeance.

Inventory Setup

Inventory setup is an essential part of PVP. Although everyone has their own preference when it comes to this, you can still, min-max your inventory. Here is what I use for PVP:

The only difference between the two is teleport tabs since you can only teleport on PVP worlds and not in BH worlds. There are few important parts to this setup and the rest is up to personal preference.

1. First is the brew, generally speaking you will always want to have your brew (your main source of combo eat) in the middle of the inventory. This is because you would want to minimise the distance your mouse has to travel between your food and your brew. If you place your brew on the top row of your inventory for example, you will have a hard time to triple or double eat, if you are not ready for it. Also during a fight you will be constantly consuming your food so lets say the only anglerfish you have is at the bottom of your inventory it is still close to your brew, whereas if your brew was on the top row, it would probably take you an extra tick to double eat, or even worse it might make you misclick!
2. Second is the placement of the special attack weapons. They are positioned where they are because, if you go to your combat options you will see that they are right on top of the special attack bar so you can easily one tick without moving your mouse. If you are using rigour and piety, they are exactly at that spot on your prayer book as well and If you set up your magic book right your vengeance spell is right on that corner where the Armadyl God Sword is.

F Keys & UI Setup

As we already established PVP is an extremely fast minigame, so you would want to do every action as fast as possible, this is where your F key and your UI setup comes in. For PVP you will need to have 5 f keys:

• Inventory
• Combat options
• Prayer book
• Spell book
• Equipment

Equipment is more advanced so for now setup the other 4. We are doing this because we don't want to manually hover our mouse over to an interface to open it, that would take too long. Also you can right click anything within these interfaces and change the interface with an F key. This will allow you to hold the right click option. For example, you can right click vengeance and switch to your inventory using your F keys, this will allow you to cast vengeance from your inventory.

You can't use the same resizable UI you use for PVP, you will have a hard time. To get the most out of your screen you must use "Fixed Classic Layout". Playing on fixed will make everything bigger so it will allow you to click things better and faster. Some people like to play on the original small screen but if you are using Runelite (which you should), you can turn on the plugin called "Stretched Mode" which will scale your fixed layout. You can also turn on the option that says "keep aspect ratio" to get a better visual.

For vengeance users go to your spellbook and click filter and turn-off utility spells, this will make it so that your vengeance will be on the bottom left corner where your spec bar and weapons are. It should look like this:

As a side note I highly recommend using the Plugin called GPU and the plugin called customisable xp drops. First one will get rid of pixelation and will allow your game to run much smoother. The second one will allow you to see the damage you dealt, rather than the exp drop of the damage.

Account Builds

There are a lot of different account builds for PVP. All of these builds are made around a certain combo or item(s). So you must know how to build that specific account and what to use with it. We already have plenty of guides on account builds on our website, so you should check them out if you are curious. To give a quick list:

• Low level Defence pure
• Obby maul/Dragon/Statius warhammer pure
• Dark Bow pure
• Magic pure
• Granite maul rusher
• 50/60/75 Attack pures
• Corrupted statius pure
• Soulreaper axe pure
• Voider 42 def
• 50 attack Zerker
• Range tanks
• Zerker 60/75 attack
• Med levels
• Max levels

Creating these accounts takes a huge amount of time and gold, especially some of these accounts may take up to thousands of hours. If you just want to get into PKing without making the effort consider buying already made accounts from our website.

Gear & Quests

To optimise your PVP experience you must know what to use. Obviously the higher your account level is more options you will have in terms of gear and spells but here is a list of items & spells that you might need for your account: (roughly separated into builds)

Pures

• God book - Obtained after completing the quest "Horror from the Deep".
• Decorative ranged top - Reward from castle wars
• God Halo - Reward from castle wars
• Colossal blade - Reward from the Giant's Foundry
• Barrelchest anchor - Obtained after completing the quest "The Great Brain Robbery"
• Climbing boots - Obtained after completing the quest "Death Plateau"
• Ava's attractor/accumulator - Obtained after completing the quest "Animal Magnetism".
• Dragon dagger - Usable after completing the quest "Lost City".
• Mithril gloves - Obtained after partially completing the quest "Recipe for Disaster".
• Ancient magicks - Obtained after completing the quest "Desert Treasure".
• Greater corruption - Obtained after completing the quest "A Kingdom Divided".

Zerkers/Rangers/Med levels

• Dragon scimitar - Obtained after completing the quest "Monkey Madness".
• Heavy ballista - Usable after completing the quest "Monkey Madness 2".
• Fire cape - Reward from beating Jad in Fight Caves.
• Infernal cape - Reward from beating Zuk in Inferno.
• Vengeance - Obtained after completing the quest "Lunar Diplomacy".
• Dragon dagger - Obtained by killing cyclops in the Warrior's Guild.
• Full void - Reward from playing Pest Control. (Especially required for Rangers.)
• Elite void - Upgraded version of void. Unlocked after completing the hard Western Provinces diary.
• Imbued berserker/warrior/seer/archer rings - Can be imbued with mini game points. (Nightmare zone, PvP Arena, Soul wars)
• Fighter torso - Reward from playing Barbarian Assault.
• Ava's assembler - Obtainable after completing the quest "Dragon Slayer 2".
• Berserk helmet - Usable after completing the quest "The Fremennik Trials".
• Helm of Neitiznot - Usable after completing the quest "The Fremennik Isles".
• Neitiznot faceguard - Usable after completing the quest "The Fremennik Exiles".
• Barrows gloves - Obtained after completing the quest "Recipe for Disaster"
• Piety - Requires the completion of both the quest "King's Ransom" and miniquest "Knight Waves Training Grounds".
• Rigour - Usable after using a Dexterous prayer scroll.
• Augury - Usable after using an Arcane prayer scroll.
• Ferocious gloves - Usable after completing the quest "Dragon Slayer 2".
• Ultor/Bellator/Magus/Venator Rings - Usable after completing the quest "Desert Treasure 2".

Aside from all of these, it is a good investment to get 83 Construction and build "Ornate rejuvenation pool, Altar of the occult and a Ornate jewellery box" in your house. You won't need these in Bounty Hunter but you will need them to quickly restore your stats and special attack in between fights in PVP worlds.

How to get Kills

Now that you have a general understanding of the mechanics of PVP and what to use, let's talk about how to use these things to your advantage and kill your foes.

Before a Fight

Before each fight when you are still in the safe zone, eat an anglerfish to overheal your character. Make sure your ring of recoil is fully charged, you can do this by right-clicking a recoil and clicking on "check". Maximum charges a recoil can have is 40 if you see anything less than that get another recoil, right click and select "break" option. When you break a ring of recoil it will reset the charges. This will help you be more on the safe side when a fight starts or in the case that you are rushed. Remember that the anglerfish can only overheal you outside combat, if you want to overheal during combat use either a brew or a guthix rest. To keep your overheal at maximum before a fight starts, flash your "rapid heal" prayer, doing this will reset your regen timer thus allowing you to keep your maximum overheal. After eating an angler enable your protect item prayer. We are pre-enabling this prayer in the case of an unexpected death or a disconnection. When you are done and ready, head into the dangerous zone.

Granite Maul

Let's talk a little bit about the granite maul first. Granite maul is a "0-tick" weapon, meaning you can attack with it anytime you want as long as you are using its special attack. This item is also very buggy and it is the only item in the game that doesn't require you to click on your opponent (if you are melee distance) to special attack. Here is how you use this weapon:

• After a hit or a special attack you can switch to your maul and click the special attack once. This will trigger a single special attack without requiring you to click on your opponent. Again only when you are in melee distance. This single spec move can be used in combination with an Armadyl god sword, Korasi, Dragon claws special attack.
• If you spam click your granite maul special attack more than 3 times, your granite maul will actually use both its attacks. This can be used but generally speaking will have a delay between two attacks that makes it imperfect.
• To perfectly use double maul you must only click your special attack bar twice then click on your opponent. Clicking on your special attack bar twice will not instantly special attack, giving you time to see your prior hit. This is best used in combination with a strong regular melee hit.

Right Time to Spec

First and foremost, as we have talked before, always 1-tick your special attack. Here is a few examples on how you can use your special attack:

• If you are using a ranged weapon, always look for a big experience drop before going for a special attack. Let's say your opponent's life is at 99, wait for two big back to back arrow hits then go for a special attack to stack the damage. Let's say your opponent is at 70-80 go for a special attack after a big arrow.
• If you have pid and a granite maul, you can randomly 1-tick special attack anytime you want to catch your opponent off guard. Never do this without pid it will not work.
• If you have high melee stats and are using a melee weapon you can double maul with a granite maul right after a big hit. You can do this both by utilising your main hand weapons damage and your heavy weapons damage (like an AGS).

• If you have access to vengeance, you should always try to utilise it before going for a special attack. If you have pid wait for your opponent's attack animation then cast vengeance and go for a special attack. If you do not have pid, you have to predict your opponent's incoming hit and venge before it then go for a special attack. If you are fast enough you can take off your armour a tick before and venge afterwards to maximise your chances of your opponent hitting. If you are a beginner and this is all confusing to you, as a rule of thumb, venge before going for a special attack and hope for the best.
• If you are getting comboed, let your recoil do a little bit of damage then when you are comfortable and at low health act like you are eating with a potion or a guthix rest and go for a one tick special attack. Drinking a potion will actually hide what you are holding for a second so you might catch people off guard.
• You most of the time don't want to double special attack unless you are sure to kill or chance them. Most of the time any decent PKer will know how to eat a double special attack since it is not one tick.
• Do not special attack when you are aware that your opponent is already eating food.
• If you notice your opponent drinking a potion, go for a special attack. They will be pot blocked and won't be able to eat food.
• If you are comfortable with it you can bait your opponent by keeping a little bit of low health. A player's biggest weakness comes from focusing too much on the offensive. So if you successfully bait them, you can anti-stack them. Doing this requires fast and precise clicks since you are probably gonna need to triple or double eat at the same time as you are doing this.
• If your opponent is venged, you can use this to your advantage. Since they are venged they will be waiting for your hit to potentially go for a special attack. You can counter this by baiting them. Take out your spec weapon like you are going to special attack, wait for them and venge then go for a special attack. You must triple eat as you do this to ensure safety.

Vengeance

Here is a quick guideline on using vengeance:

• Never spam your vengeance, always time it to reflect your opponent's attack back at them, preferably their special attack.
• If you are on pid, wait for their animation to venge if not predict it.
• You can make your vengeance invisible to catch opponents off guard. You can do this by hiding it behind an animation. Most common way to do this is by special attacking and venging in the same tick.
• After your opponent uses vengeance, roughly count to 30 to know when they have it back.

Flow of the Fight

As mentioned before pid generally decides who controls the flow of a fight. If you are on pid be more aggressive and if you are off-pid be more on the defensive and hover over your food.

If you are on-pid you can click under yourself to stop attacking. You do this to completely control the fight. Since your opponent needs to predict your attack to vengeance or do anything while being safe, clicking under yourself takes these things away from them. You can also use this to be more safe when you are off-pid. By changing the attack cycle you can position yourself to always attack a little bit later than your opponent to prevent him from stacking you with a vengeance on the same tick.

Remember PVP is mostly about outplaying your opponent and RNG, you can't do much about RNG but always use tricks to outplay your opponent to increase your chances of getting a kill.

Goodluck

Well there you have it, everything you need to know to get into PVP, rest is just experience and practice. The more you PVP the more comfortable you will be in fights and you will also be able to read your opponent better allowing you to predict them. Everybody dies a lot when they first start PKing so don't be discouraged by it and move at your own pace. Even the best PKers in this game die from time to time and make mistakes so allow yourself to fail. Goodluck out there.

PVP accounts and items can be costly at times, if you want to be comfortable and don't want to worry about gold and just enjoy PKing consider buying from our website here.