It was time to farm for my dragon defender. This was a long time in the making goal. As soon as I hit the requirements, I went to the warrior's guild to start grinding for my new offhand item.
To be able to even do this I needed to have my strength and attack equal to 130 total. This meant getting them both to level 65. I have been slowly working towards this goal for quite some time.
I also attempted to get the easy combat achievement done. As it would have helped speed things up a little bit. I however failed to do so. It also became quite clear the amount of time I was looking to save by having would not have made it worthwhile.
To be able to get a Dragon Defender I need to go through the process of farming all the defenders up to Dragon. That means I'm going to need to get bronze, iron, steel, black, mithril, adamant, and rune defenders. Before the final one Dragon defenders can drop.
As far as what I'll need to be farming those are cyclopes in the warrior's guild. The lower-level cyclopes on the third-floor drop bronze to adamant. Once I have the adamant defender, I'll be permitted in the basement to face the higher-level cyclopes to farm for a dragon defender.
There are however some catches to all of this. I can’t get the next tier-up defender without first acquiring the lower-tier one. This means I can’t just get lucky and have an adamant defender drop let alone the lower ones when I did not even have the bronze defender yet.
Once I get the next defender, I have to leave the area and show Kamfreena what I have acquired. She then allows the next tier of defenders to drop in the rooms I'll be farming in.
All of this is not the biggest thing, however. To even be able to go into the third floor or the basement of the warrior's guild on top of needing that combined 130 strength and attack. I’ll also be needing Warrior Guild tokens. For every minute I spend on either of those floors ten tokens get consumed. I also need a minimum of 100 tokens just to enter either of those places as well.
This is why in part I wanted to get the easy combat achievement done. This would have given me double the Warrior token drop rate. With even higher drop rates if I had the higher combat achievement tiers.
As far as getting the tokens. I’ll be needing to do one of many mini-games in the warrior's guild. I decided to go with the animation room since it seemed to be the easier and more constant of the games I could play.
In the animation room is a magical animator. I need to bring a set of armor to that machine which will then use that armor to summon a creature for me to fight. The higher the level of armor the tougher the creature and the more tokens that drop.
If I use too low of an armor set, I'll still get a spawn to fight. There is however a high chance I'll not get the set of armor to drop after killing it. Due to that fact, I decided I'd be going with a set of black armor since it would summon level 69 which would not require me to use lots of food to heal while farming them.
Each kill would get me 20 tokens when fighting the black armor variant. The next thing I needed to work out was how many tokens I wanted to farm up to before grinding out getting each of the defenders.
While 20 tokens might sound like a lot. That only gives me two minutes on either the third or basement floor. I also did not want to over farm these tokens and end up with way more than I'll ever need.
I can tell you now that was not going to happen. I was quite unlucky and would go long amounts of time without a single defender drop. So, I'd end up down on the base floor playing this mini-game farming tokens a couple of times.
To start I ended up farming 2k warrior tokens. That would give me a little over three hours of being able to farm defenders before I'd run out of tokens. I then went up to the third floor and spoke with Kamfreena to get started.
I then started the long process of farming cyclopes for the first defender drop. I would end up seeing quite a few players come and go. Many times, people would farm up just a few hundred tokens at a time then need to leave and go farm more before showing up again. I guess they were hoping to get lucky.
At first, I was hoping to be getting a drop maybe every half an hour. That to me seemed reasonable. I also seemed to be getting a bit lucky and getting quite a few weapons drops that were supposed to have similar drop rates to the defenders. This left me quite optimistic that perhaps I'll be getting my first drop a lot sooner than I was expecting.
After half an hour I was down 300 tokens. Still no drop yet. I felt maybe I was just having a little bit of bad luck. Any moment I'd be getting the first drop.
I did not get the bronze defender drop till almost an hour in. This is when it started to set in that I was going to be here for quite a while. Even more so since I still had another seven defenders to farm. It was also clear the over 2k warrior tokens I had farmed were not going to be enough. With many hours grinding further tokens as well in my future at some point.
So, I ended up leaving the room so I could reset it for the next tier to drop. I also went down to the first floor of the warrior's guild. Thankfully on that floor was a bank. I used that time to restock on food and to deposit a bunch of bones and other items I had looted during my time farming for my first defender drop.
While I could wear the bronze Defender. It would be quite a downgrade compared to my shield. While the dragon defender would not have as great defenses as my current shield. The main reason to get the defender is at the higher tiers it starts getting a bonus to strength and melee combat stats.
I ended up farming for well over an hour not getting the next tier of defender to drop. At this point, I decided to change something big. I had a high enough attack level to get a slightly better weapon than what I was using.
So, I ran down to the grand exchange and spent 550k or so gold. I was quite lucky that the current weapon I had ended up selling for around 500k gold. So, in exchange for getting a better weapon, I was just about 50k or so.
While the amount of damage I would be doing was not a massive increase. Getting a couple more points of damage over many hours would more than help speed things up. I decided before farming up more warrior tokens I'd use up the ones I had and just hope to get the next drop before that happened.
With just about half an hour of tokens remaining, I got the Iron Defender drop. As soon as I looted it I darted out of the room and back in. I thought I might as well try my luck with the last half an hour of tokens I had. Then I'd go down and farm up a bunch more to keep trying.
Needless to say, I did not have any luck. So, I went downstairs and started farming further warrior tokens. This time around I farmed around 1,200 of them before I was getting rather bored of things. I felt I might as well just keep switching it up between farming for tokens and farming for the defenders. I now at least had enough tokens to stay up there for a while.
At the very least I was getting some decent experience. Before I knew it, I had taken my level 65 strength to level 69. Once I got to level 70, I'd switch over to training up attack till that was 70 as well.
With just 18 minutes of tokens remaining, I finally got the Steel Defender drop. It was a bit shocking just how long this one ended up taking. At this point, I figured I was going to be spending half a week here farming to finish this thing.
I also started to make sense why I would see some players up here grinding for about an hour and then they would log out. Hours later I'd still be grinding away and those same players would return to keep at it.
Since I did not have many tokens left, I decided to head back down to the first floor and farm up even more warrior tokens. At around 1,500 tokens I was ready to start grinding for the next defender tier.
I almost felt lucky this time getting the black defender to drop. As it only took around forty minutes. That somehow felt short compared to some of the other defenders.
As I have done in the past, I left the room so I could reset it for the next tier to drop. I also went down to restock on food and to drop off what I had looted.
My luck was about to change for the better. In what seemed like a blink of the eye the mithril defender ended up dropping. This was shortly after I had hit level 70 strength and was now training for a level 66 attack.
Just a short time later I ended up also getting the adamant defender to drop as well. At this point, I could not believe my luck. I had just one more defender I could get left that dropped from the third floor.
Just a couple of Cyclops kills later I noticed some blue text on the ground. I thought maybe a higher-valued item had dropped. It turned out to be the rune defender. This is also the highest-tier defender I can get while up on the third floor of the warrior guild.
I was in total shock. I went from it taking forever to get my first couple of defenders to drop to a bunch of them dropping in a short amount of time. It seems the RNG gods were starting to smile at me somewhat. I no longer felt cursed.
I went down to the basement and showed the person down there I had the rune defender and they allowed me access to the higher-level cyclopes. The higher-level cyclopes on the third floor had 100 health. The cyclopes in the basement had 150 health. Not only did they have a decent chunk more health they hit a bit harder as well.
I had a feeling the 730 Warrior tokens I had remaining were not going to be enough. I however felt I might as well use them up and if needed then I could farm more tokens. The last thing I wanted to do was to spend hours farming for a bunch of tokens that would end up going to waste.
I ended up running out of food before Warrior tokens. On one of those trips back up. I decided I might as well just farm for a few more warrior tokens while I was at it. At this point, I was just looking to break up the grind between the two different activities.
In under two hours of being in the warrior guild’s basement the last defender I'd be needing for quite some time dropped. While there is a way to upgrade this one that is more end-game stuff. I’m so far away from doing so. This dragon defender is going to last me quite a long time.
Final Thoughts
At last, the dragon defender was mine. It looks like I'm holding a dagger in my off-hand. While I don’t attack with it. It gives me a much-needed damage boost. One that I would more than be taking advantage of soon along with a few other upgrades I've acquired up to this point.
This was one of those things I was hoping would not take as long to acquire the dragon defender as it did. I also do feel I got super lucky with quite a few of them dropping after a long drought. Bad luck could have kept going with each one taking over an hour or double that. I’m just glad I'm still not in the warrior’s basement grinding away for that final drop.
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Old School RuneScape.
