OSRS 1–99 Prayer Guide

Prayer is trained by offering remains — burying or sacrificing bones, or scattering ashes — and every bone gives a fixed amount of experience. Burying a plain Bones gives 4.5 XP, Big bones 15, Dragon bones 72, and Superior dragon bones 150. An altar or spell then multiplies that base number, which is the entire reason altars exist: the bone is the same, the multiplier is what you are buying.

The levels that matter for most players are 43 (unlocks Protect from Melee, Missiles and Magic — the overhead protection prayers, plus Eagle Eye and Mystic Might), 60 (Chivalry, with 65 Defence), 70 (Piety, with 70 Defence and the Knight Waves training ground done), 74 (Rigour, once you have read a torn prayer scroll), and 77 (Augury, with 70 Defence and an arcane prayer scroll). Rigour and Augury are the ranged and magic damage prayers endgame accounts care most about. Many players stop at 43, 70, 74 or 77 rather than grinding the full distance — so decide your real target before you buy a single bone, because the cost climbs sharply in the final stretch.

Prayer also feeds your account in two quieter ways. It raises your combat level: roughly one combat level for every 8 Prayer levels, so 99 Prayer is about +12 combat over level 1. And a higher Prayer level means each Prayer potion(4) or Super restore(4) restores more points (a Prayer potion gives back 25% of your Prayer level plus 7). On top of that, Prayer bonus from gear slows how fast your points drain — every +30 Prayer bonus halves the drain rate, so prayers last twice as long. That is why a proper prayer set-up matters for bossing; the pieces are covered in our Prayer gear guide.

Prayer does not have an XP-percentage outfit like the Lumberjack or Prospector sets. Its equivalent is Zealot's robes, a four-piece set that saves materials instead of boosting XP — which, on a pay-per-bone skill, comes to the same thing. Each piece gives a 1.25% chance to not consume a remains, so the full set (Zealot's helm, Zealot's robe top, Zealot's robe bottom and Zealot's boots) is a 5% save — roughly a 5% cut to your total bone cost on the way to any goal.

The set is looted from gold chests in the Shade Catacombs beneath Mort'ton, opened with gold shade keys, so it takes some Shades of Mort'ton grinding to assemble. It is worth it for anyone training Prayer seriously, because the save applies almost everywhere: burying bones, offering at a gilded altar, offering at the Chaos Temple, the Ectofuntus, ensouled heads, and blessed bone shards. The standout combination is wearing it at the Chaos Temple: the robe save stacks on top of the altar's own 50% bone-save, pushing your chance to keep a bone to 52.5% — meaning each bone is, on average, sacrificed about 2.1 times. The one place it does nothing is the offering spells, which consume their remains outright. Always train Prayer in the full set if you own it.

Before the detail, here is the whole menu on one page. As a main account you have six broad ways to train Prayer, and they line up almost perfectly along a cost-versus-speed axis.

Gilded altar — the fast standard. 350% XP per bone in a player-owned house, the highest sustained XP per hour, the highest cost. Chaos Temple — the cheap standard. Same 350% but a 50% bone-save roughly halves the bill, at the price of Wilderness risk and a little speed. Blessed bone shards — the modern Varlamore method, enormous headline XP per hour at the libation bowl but front-loaded with a blessing-and-chiselling grind. Ensouled heads — cheaper than the altar with free Magic XP, a touch slower. Offering spells — the right home for ashes specifically, not bones. The Ectofuntus — the highest guaranteed per-bone bonus but the slowest, a niche budget pick.

Layered on top are the passive methods (Bonecrusher, Ash sanctifier and friends) that drip XP while you do other content, and a separate free-to-play reality where none of the multipliers exist. The sections below take each in turn; if you only read two, read the gilded altar and the Chaos Temple, because between them they cover the ‘I want it fast’ and ‘I want it cheap’ players who make up most of the skill.

The bone you choose sets both your XP rate and your bill, because the multiplier from any altar is the same regardless of bone — pricier bones simply carry more base XP. Here is the practical ladder of buried (base) XP per bone: Bones 4.5, Big bones 15, Babydragon bones 30, Wyrm bones 50, Dragon bones 72, Wyvern bones 72, Lava dragon bones 85, Fayrg bones 84, Raurg bones 96, Dagannoth bones 125, Ourg bones 140, and Superior dragon bones 150 (the only one needing a level requirement — 70 Prayer to use).

For the vast majority of trainers the meta is simple: Dragon bones are the cheap-per-XP workhorse because dragons are killed in huge numbers and the bones flood the Grand Exchange. Superior dragon bones give the fastest XP per hour but cost the most. Wyrm bones, Lava dragon bones and Dagannoth bones are sometimes cheaper per XP than dragon bones depending on the week — always price-check before a big buy. Wyvern bones give the same XP as dragon bones, so they slot in as a like-for-like substitute when they happen to be cheaper.

Ashes are the ashes-only cousin of bones — Vile ashes, Infernal ashes and the rest are scattered rather than buried, and they cannot be used on an altar. Their natural home is the Demonic Offering spell or the Ash sanctifier, both covered later. Because so much depends on live prices, treat every number here as the XP side only and let the price tracker tell you the cost side.

The gilded altar is the standard fast method. Built in a player-owned house, with both incense burners lit it gives 350% experience per bone (3.5× the buried value) — so a dragon bone that gives 72 XP buried gives 252 XP at the altar. That multiplier, applied to a steady stream of bones, is what produces the high hourly rates in the table below: around 250,000 XP/hr with dragon bones and roughly 380,000 XP/hr with superior dragon bones at a normal click pace.

You do not need your own house. The simplest route is to use a public hosting world (World 330 is the traditional one): right-click the house portal, view the advertisements, and pick any house listed with a lit gilded altar so a host keeps both burners going for you. The burners themselves take a Marrentill herb and a Tinderbox to light, which is why a host who lights them saves you the hassle. If you want your own altar, it needs 75 Construction to build — worth it for Ironmen, rarely worth it for a main who can borrow one.

The flow is: withdraw bones noted plus a Rimmington teleport and some coins, un-note the bones at the nearby Phials in the general store, enter a hosted house, and use bones on the altar. Your character auto-uses a stack, but the fastest possible rate comes from 1-ticking — manually clicking every single bone onto the altar, which is about three times faster than letting it auto-run. The trick is to set your client to resizable modern, hold Alt to drag your inventory over the altar, then hammer your inventory hotkey and left-click repeatedly so each bone fires on its own tick. RuneLite's menu-entry-swapper plugin (to swap the left-click on bones from Bury to Use) and the entity-hider plugin (to stop other players' models getting in the way) make this far less fiddly.

Once an inventory is gone, you leave by the portal, un-note more bones at the general store, and re-enter the same house with the ‘visit last’ right-click option so you do not have to re-browse the adverts. Going for the outright record rate means a bone runner — a second account that ferries bones to you while you never stop clicking — paired with superior dragon bones and 1-ticking. For nearly everyone that is overkill: the altar is already the expensive-but-fast lane, and the bone bill, not the click speed, is what actually limits most players. If you want a no-setup run, just auto-use dragon bones at a hosted altar and accept the slightly lower rate — it is still a quarter-million XP an hour.

The Chaos Temple — the small altar hut in the Wilderness, often called the Wilderness altar — gives the same 350% per bone as a gilded altar, but with a crucial twist: it has a 50% chance not to consume the bone. On average that halves your bone bill, which works out to roughly 700% effective experience per bone you actually buy. That makes it the cheapest per XP of the altar methods by a wide margin — the natural pick when money, not time, is your constraint.

The catch is location: it sits in the Wilderness, so other players can attack you. The safe way to train there is to carry only bones and a teleport (a Burning amulet to the Lava Maze, or a Ghorrock teleport) and nothing worth dropping. Use your whole inventory of bones on the altar — 1-ticking is strongly recommended here too, to burn through them before a PKer arrives — then deliberately kill yourself to bank instantly. The cleanest tool for that is the Enchanted symbol from the Mage Arena II miniquest, which you spam-click to die; without it you can click the nearby wine jugs to drop your health, or run into the Chaos Fanatic. Each death drops you at your respawn point with an empty inventory, ready to re-stock bones and teleport back.

There is a faster, far riskier variant where you bring noted bones and un-note them just outside the altar — about as quick as a bone runner at a gilded altar — but it leaves you carrying a fortune in remains in a PvP zone, and the Chaos Temple is a well-known PKer hotspot. Unless you genuinely enjoy the risk, stick to the safe single-inventory loop. Wearing Zealot's robes here is close to mandatory: their save stacks with the altar's, lifting your effective bone-save to 52.5%. Because the altar trades a little raw speed for that big cost saving (one inventory per teleport, plus the death to bank), think of the Chaos Temple as the value lane and the gilded altar as the speed lane — same 350% multiplier, very different bills.

Ensouled heads are a cheaper-per-XP alternative to altars that trains Magic at the same time. You cast a reanimation spell from the Arceuus spellbook on a head, a monster spawns, and you kill it for a chunk of Prayer XP. The headline number is the Ensouled dragon head, which uses the level 90 Magic spell Master Reanimation and grants 1,560 Prayer XP per head once the reanimated dragon is killed. Lower heads give less and need lower Magic — the Ensouled hellhound head and Ensouled abyssal head are common mid-tier picks.

Favour was removed from the game, so you can switch to the Arceuus spellbook straight away by talking to Tyss — the only real requirement is the Magic level for the spell you want to cast. Each cast needs the matching runes; the dragon head, for example, uses Soul runes, Blood runes and Nature runes. The usual set-up is a full inventory of heads taken to the Dark Altar in Arceuus (an Arceuus Library teleport or the C-I-S fairy ring gets you close), with combat gear to kill the spawns. A dwarf multicannon speeds the kills up a lot. Overall this method is cheaper than altar training but a little slower in XP per hour, and it is buy-overnight friendly because head trade volumes are thin — leave your buy offers at market price rather than overpaying.

A couple of mechanics make this method smoother. The reanimated monsters can hit back, and the reanimated dragon in particular breathes fire, so bring dragonfire protection or use a safespot. A dwarf multicannon set up at the Dark Altar shreds the spawns and keeps your Prayer XP per hour up. And because the heads also reanimate Magic-side, you are effectively training two skills at once — handy if you also want the Magic levels. One nuance worth knowing: an ensouled head you get as a drop can be reanimated on the spot, anywhere within about 15 tiles of where it fell, without travelling to the Dark Altar at all — which is what turns ensouled heads into a passive Slayer bonus, covered below.

These two methods give the highest per-bone bonuses in the game, but both bury their value behind a preparation grind — you trade clicks-before-offering for XP-per-bone.

The blessed bone shards method arrived with Varlamore and is the modern high-throughput option, capable of well over a million Prayer XP per hour at the click cap if you ignore the time spent gathering inputs. It requires 30 Prayer and the Children of the Sun quest to reach Varlamore; Twilight's Promise speeds it up and Perilous Moons lets you mine shards directly. The loop has two halves. First you make inputs: bless bones at the temple in Ralo's Rise, then chisel the Blessed bone shards out of them (better bones give more shards — Superior dragon bones give the most), and bless jugs of wine, optionally upgrading them to Jug of blessed sunfire wine with Sunfire splinters for extra XP. Then, with shards and blessed wine in your inventory, you offer them at the libation bowl in Ralo's Rise — AFK-clickable, or spam-clicked for the top rate. The honest caveat is that once you count the blessing, chiselling and gathering, the realistic rate is far lower than the headline; it shines for Ironmen who want a safe, bankable use for their bones.

The Ectofuntus, north of Port Phasmatys, gives the highest guaranteed per-bone bonus in the game at 400% experience (4× the buried value). On paper that beats a gilded altar's 350%, but it is slower and barely cheaper, which is why most mains skip it.

The reason it is slow is the preparation. You cannot just hand over a bone — each bone must first be ground into bonemeal (for example Dragon bonemeal) at the grinder upstairs, and every offering also needs a matching Bucket of slime collected from the pool below. That two-part gather-and-grind cycle is the bottleneck. The saving grace is the Morytania diaries: their daily rewards cut the number of trips considerably. The Ectofuntus earns its keep mainly as a safe, very cheap way for low-level or self-sufficient accounts to burn through a backlog of bones — not as a route a main chasing fast 99 would choose.

It is worth putting the multipliers side by side, because they explain why each method exists. Burying is the 100% baseline. The offering spells give 300%. The gilded altar and the Chaos Temple both give 350% per offering — but the Chaos Temple's 50% bone-save makes its effective XP per bone purchased roughly 700%, which is why it is the cheapest altar. The Ectofuntus gives a flat, guaranteed 400%, the second-highest per-bone bonus in the game, and the blessed bone shards method matches or beats that depending on the wine used. So the Ectofuntus and bone shards are technically more XP per bone than a gilded altar — the gilded altar simply wins on speed, because there is no grinding, no slime, and no blessing step between you and the next offering.

After the A Kingdom Divided quest you unlock two Arceuus offering spells. Sinister Offering (level 92 Magic) consumes 3 bones per cast for 3× their buried XP, and Demonic Offering (level 84 Magic) does the same for 3 ashes. Each cast eats three remains and then has an 8-tick (4.8-second) cooldown, so you alternate casting with other clicks.

The practical verdict is narrow but real: only use offerings for ashes. For bones you are strictly better off at a gilded altar, which gives 350% versus the spell's 300% and lets you 1-tick for far higher throughput. But ashes cannot be used on an altar, so the offering spell is their fastest home — Infernal ashes via Demonic Offering reach roughly 590,000 XP/hr at a cost per XP that undercuts dragon bones at a gilded altar. Keep the runes (Wrath, Soul, Blood and the rest depending on the spell) in a rune pouch and buy ashes at market value rather than chasing the offer.

Some of the best Prayer XP is the XP you never sit down to grind — it accumulates while you train Slayer or kill monsters. There are five passive tools worth knowing.

The Bonecrusher (from the hard Morytania diary) automatically crushes bones from monsters you kill and gives you half the normal Prayer XP for them — free progress across an entire Slayer grind. Combine it into the Bonecrusher necklace, or pair the Dragonbone necklace with it, to also restore Prayer points as bones crush — superb when chinning or bursting maniacal monkeys. The Ash sanctifier (hard Kourend diary) does the same trick for ashes, auto-scattering them for half XP, which adds up fast against demons. The Ectoplasmator (a Soul Wars reward) grants Prayer XP whenever you kill a spectral creature — aberrant spectres, ankous, the Barrows brothers and more — though it is rarely worth farming Soul Wars purely for it. Finally, if a monster drops an ensouled head you can reanimate it on the spot without travelling to the Dark Altar, and the occasional God egg from bird nests trades for 100 Prayer XP each at the Woodcutting Guild shrine. None of these will hit 99 alone, but together they can carry you tens of levels for essentially nothing.

The practical takeaway is to set the passive tools up before a long Slayer or boss grind, not after. A Bonecrusher (or its necklace) running through a full Slayer journey can quietly bank a huge amount of Prayer XP that you would otherwise have paid for in bones, and the Dragonbone-necklace point restore means fewer trips to recharge while you fight. Stacking the Ash sanctifier on top covers any ash-dropping tasks, so between the two you are passively training Prayer across almost everything you kill. For many accounts the honest plan is: let the passives carry you most of the way through Slayer, then top up the last stretch to 99 at an altar — you end up buying far fewer bones than a from-scratch altar grind would need.

Prayer is the one skill where you genuinely choose your price, so frame the decision as how much per XP am I willing to pay for speed? — then read it straight off the method table.

Fastest, most expensive: superior dragon bones at a gilded altar, 1-ticking, around 380,000 XP/hr — the route for players who value an evening over the gold. The balanced standard: dragon bones at a gilded altar, around 250,000 XP/hr, the most-used method because dragon bones are abundant and reasonably priced. Cheapest sensible: dragon bones at the Chaos Temple, where the 50% bone-save roughly halves the bill for only a small speed hit — the value pick. Cheaper still, slower: ensouled heads, which add Magic XP and cost less per Prayer XP than any altar once you price the heads and runes. Slow but only mildly cheaper: the Ectofuntus — its 400% bonus is high, but the slime-and-grind preparation means it ends up barely undercutting a gilded altar on cost while being far slower, so it is a niche pick. Rock-bottom budget: big bones, anywhere.

A clean way to plan it: open the Prayer calculator, set your current and goal levels, and compare the bone counts each method needs; then price those bones on the GE tracker. Because bone prices drift, the ‘cheapest’ method changes week to week — the wyrm / lava / dagannoth bones in particular swap places with dragon bones depending on supply. Always price before you bulk-buy.

One more factor worth weighing is your own attention. The altar methods, especially 1-ticking, are intensely click-heavy — you cannot AFK them, and an hour of 1-ticking is genuinely tiring. If you would rather train Prayer half-watching something, the auto-use altar, the bone shards libation bowl, or the passive Bonecrusher route are far gentler on your hands even though the headline rate is lower. There is no single ‘best’ method, only the best fit for your bank, your patience and how actively you want to play that session. A common pattern is to grind cheaply with the Chaos Temple or ensouled heads while gold is tight, then switch to a gilded altar for the last stretch when you just want it finished. Whatever you pick, the Prayer calculator turns it into a concrete bone count so there are no surprises at the till.

Ironmen cannot buy bones, so Prayer flips from a money problem into a gathering problem — almost all your effort goes into collecting remains, not offering them. The smart early move is questing: The Restless Ghost and Priest in Peril have tiny requirements and give chunks of Prayer XP, and a handful of low-level quests can carry a fresh account from 1 to around 30 Prayer before you bury a single bone.

After that, the low-level Ironman toolkit is bone shards, the Chaos Temple, the Forthos Dungeon altar and the Ectofuntus — Blessed bone shards are the safe, bankable choice, the Chaos Temple is the fast-but-risky one, Forthos suits ultimate Ironmen, and the Ectofuntus is a safe way to clear a bone backlog. For a steady supply, blue dragons in the Taverley Dungeon are safe-spottable for Dragon bones early on; Dagannoth bones come free while hunting Dagannoth Kings gear; Big bones drop in bulk from giants; and Superior dragon bones come from adult metal and rune dragons later. At higher levels, build your own gilded altar with 75 Construction so you stop relying on hosts. Ironmen can also use the offering spells, topping up runes at the Fountain of Rune if needed.

The mindset shift for Ironmen is that Prayer stops being a thing you sit down and grind and becomes a by-product of everything else you do. Every dragon task, every Dagannoth Kings trip and every giant you kill is quietly stockpiling bones, so the efficient play is to bank those remains as you go and offer them in batches rather than farming bones specifically for Prayer. Pairing a Bonecrusher with your Slayer grind (covered in the passive section) means a large share of your Prayer XP arrives for free while you chase Slayer drops. By the time you have the combat stats for higher-end content, you will usually have enough banked bones to push the last stretch to your target level at your own altar — which is why most Ironmen reach a comfortable Prayer level almost incidentally, then top up to 70 or 77 deliberately when a boss demands it.

Prayer is widely considered the hardest skill to train in free-to-play — there are no altars, no multipliers and no offering spells, so you pay full price in clicks and coins for low XP. Everything you gain comes from burying bones and scattering ashes at base rates, and buying enough remains off the Grand Exchange to reach 99 runs into the hundreds of millions of coins.

The one efficiency trick is that burying and scattering are separate actions, so you can power-bury big bones while scattering vile ashes in the same trip, which lands around 100,000 XP/hr — high for F2P, but expensive. Early on, The Restless Ghost quest is a free starting boost, and killing monsters for their bones (rather than buying) stretches a small budget. Wilderness bone yards and the F2P side of the Chaos Temple offer cheap bones if you are willing to risk PKers. For most free players the honest advice is to bank a target level, buy bones in one bulk order priced on the GE tracker, and grind it in sittings — or to consider that this is exactly the skill a bond and a few members' methods transform overnight.

A few quests and diaries are worth doing before a serious Prayer grind, because they either give free levels or unlock the tools that make training cheaper. The Restless Ghost and Priest in Peril are near-requirement-free Prayer XP and the natural starting points, especially on a new account or Ironman. Rum Deal rewards the Holy wrench, which makes your Prayer potions restore more points — a small but permanent quality-of-life win for bossing.

On the unlock side, the hard Morytania diary grants the Bonecrusher for passive Slayer XP, the hard Kourend diary grants the Ash sanctifier for passive ash XP, and the Mage Arena II miniquest gives the Enchanted symbol that makes safe Chaos Temple banking trivial. For the offering spells you need A Kingdom Divided, and for the bone-shards method you need Children of the Sun (plus optionally Twilight's Promise and Perilous Moons). None of these are strictly required to hit 99, but each one removes a real cost or click from the grind.

A few closing tips that save real gold and time. 1-ticking is the single biggest speed lever at any altar — manually using each bone roughly triples your rate over letting the game auto-run, so the RuneLite plugin set-up is worth it even if it feels fiddly at first. Always price your bones before buying: the cheapest bone per XP rotates between dragon, wyrm, lava dragon and dagannoth bones depending on the week, and a quick check on the GE tracker can save millions on a 99 grind. Unlike many skills, Prayer has no skilling pet — there is no chance drop while burying bones, so do not chase one; your visible reward at 99 is the Prayer cape and its emote. Finally, remember why you are training: the protection prayers at 43, Piety at 70 and Rigour and Augury at 74 and 77 are what make the levels pay off in combat, so it is fine to stop at one of those breakpoints rather than grinding the full distance to 99. When you put the prayers to work, get the drain-rate and restore-bonus gear right with our Prayer gear guide, keep a Super restore(4) handy since it tops up Prayer alongside your other stats, and browse the full toolset in the OSRS guides hub.