This Week In Melvor Idle: Entering the Volcanic Cave (2024)

Last week, I predicted that this week would be another round of preparing for the Volcanic Cave Dungeon and it almost was. That is until last night when I finished crafting the last of my Damage Reduction IV potions and decided to see how well I would fair in the dungeon with my setup

I completed all of my goals for the week which were:

• Gather materials for the Agility obstacles I want so I can gear the buffs towards combat.
• Get the Damage Reduction Potion to Mastery Rank 90 so I can create Damage Reduction Potion IV
• Gather enough materials to make a lot of Damage Reduction Potion IV
• Restock Food Supply

I knocked out a few of these easier Agility obstacles early in the week and chose ones more geared towards combat. The higher level ones require a fair bit of Slayer coins to purchase which I had used up last week when tuning the course for XP and leveling up Agility to 99.

I wasn’t originally planning on pursuing Slayer tasks this week but I’m glad I did. Not only did I acquire enough slayer coins to purchase some more Agility obstacles but I also looted a pair of Paladin Gloves which grant 4% damage reduction. The Dragon Gloves I was wearing offered no damage reduction but had a slight boost to damage stats. I figured I could take the a little hit in the damage department for a nice boost to damage reduction. This is what prompted me to try my luck at the Volcanic Cave to see if I was able to idle through it.

The Volcanic Cave Dungeon is the first of the Elite dungeons. The jump in the Highest Combat Level Monster between the previous dungeon, Dragons Den ( Highest Level 272), and the Volcanic Cave (Highest Level 677) is significant. Clearing the Volcanic Cave once awards a Fire Cape for every completion and unlocks 4 additional God Dungeons, Air, Walter, Earth, and Fire. I was surprised to find it also awards a lore book, A Tale of the Past, a future’s prophecy, which is 1 of 3 books. If you follow the wiki link you can see there’s a lot contained in that little book!

Clearing the Volcanic Dungeon 100 times unlocks the Infernal Stronghold Dungeon as well as spells form the Ancient Magicks spell book.

This dungeon is tough. With 35% damage reduction and 920 hp I was able to idle through and let auto eat heal me but just barely. The boss, Malcs, The Guardian of Melvor, has a max hit on one of its abilities that hits me for 338 health. Auto eat stops kicking in at 368 so I have very little damage reduction to spare. Malcs doesn’t have a normal attack (thank goodness because it would hit for 662!) but has two special attacks instead. There’s a 70% chance it will use Razor-Sharp claws which is that big attack that does 338 damage twice and it has a 30% chance to use Dragonbreath does 39×30 damage over 2.9 seconds. Dragonsbreath won’t out right kill me but it chews through my food supply like no other.

I was able to get away with doing this dungeon without using my Damage Reduction potions. Instead I opted for Melee Accuracy Potions so I could get more hits in and thus complete the dungeon quicker with melee. Even with the Accuracy potions, whetstones, melee prayers, and +12 attack level necklace, I only have a 53% chance to hit Malcs on every attack. As a result, this dungeon run uses up a massive amount of resources, Prayer Points and food in particular. With 100k prayer points I was only able to idle this dungeon for about 2 hours which resulted in 78 kills on Malcs and drained of 1k whales form my food supply. I’ll have to get the additional 22 kills this week to unlock the new dungeon and spells.

I opened the dungeon chests after my run last night instead of waiting until I get the pet to open all of the dungeon chests. I was hoping to get a piece of Ancient Armor to add to my melee setup. I lucked out and got an Ancient Shield which can be upgrade 3 times to the Dragon Fire Shield which offers more defense, damage reduction, +30 hitpoints, and 30% damage reduction from that pesky Dragonsbreath skill. That should make runs on the Volcanic Cave a bit easier.

Combat Skills

There was a ton of opportunities to level up combat this week. Resupplying the food stocks required Raw Chicken which can be obtained in large quantities by running the Chicken Coop Dungeon and opening the chests. I leveled up Defense this way while I collected my chests for chickens.

I did a bit of active Slayer where I changed my equipment set to match the weakness of my Slayer task monsters. Most of the monsters were Magic based so I eventually left the Ranged set on and collected some levels there.

I needed a ton of Long Horns to make Damage Reduction potions which required killing a lot of Raging Horned Elites in the Desolate Plains. I got most of my Attack levels here this week.

Non-Combat Skills

The question for this week was how to get enough mastery pool XP in Herblore to level up the Damage Reduction potion from 1-90 without using any resources to craft them. That’s because the resources are hard to come by and I didn’t want to waste them on the lower tiers of the Damage Reduction potion. I did this by first crafting enough Herblore Potions to get 99 mastery, then used those potions to craft enough Melee Accuracy potions to get 99 mastery on that item too. Once those were done, I had enough in the mastery pool to get the Damage Reduction potion up to 90 mastery and instantly start crafting tier IV potions. Thanks to 63% chance to reuse crafting materials and the Herblore Potions which have a 6% chance to produce a random tier of the potion your crafting I turned 1.500 long horns into 5,000 Damage Reduction Potion IVs.

Completion Log: 57.82% (+2.94%)

This week saw a huge gain of almost 3% overall completion. I must have fought more Slayer monsters I’ve never seen before than I thought. Also, the additional 8 monsters in the Volcanic Cave probably helped that as well. I’m guessing the item completion gains came from this as well. There was also a lot of levels gained this week across various skills.

Goals for Next Week

• Upgrade the Ancient Shield to the Dragon Fire Shield
• Complete the Volcanic Cave 22 more times to unlock additional spells and dungeon
• Acquire the pet for Volcanic Cave
• Check out the Air God Dungeon