OSRS 1–99 Magic Guide

Every spell you cast consumes runes and grants a fixed amount of experience — the same number every time, win or miss. That is the crucial detail for training: because most fast methods (alchemy, enchanting, superheating, plank make) are non-combat spells that always succeed, your XP per hour is decided purely by how quickly you can click, not by your accuracy or the enemy's defence. A High Alchemy cast, for instance, always pays out its 65 XP whether you are level 55 or level 99, so the only variable is how fast you fire the casts. This is why Magic is so heavily about clicking speed and tick efficiency rather than gear, and why people happily train it while watching something on a second screen.

For combat spells, things work differently. Your Magic level affects both offence and defence: a higher level makes you more accurate and unlocks higher-tier spells with bigger max hits. Your magic defence is calculated as 70% of your Magic level and 30% of your Defence level, so pushing Magic up protects you against other mages in both PvM and PvP — a genuinely important reason to level it even on a pure combat account. Jagex's rebalance also reshaped the early game by adding elemental weaknesses. Many monsters now take bonus damage from a specific element — the giant mole, for example, has a 50% weakness to water, so a 20-damage water spell becomes a 30 on the mole. All same-tier elemental spells (air, water, earth and fire strike) now deal identical damage, so instead of memorising which spell is strongest you simply pick the element your target is weak to and let your Magic level scale the hit.

Two stats drive combat output, and it pays to understand the split. Your magic attack bonus comes from gear and raises your accuracy — the chance a spell lands rather than splashes. Your magic strength bonus also comes mostly from gear (and a few capes and accessories) and raises your max hit. When you reach the fast combat methods later in this guide, stacking magic strength is what pushes your XP rates to the top of the band, because every extra point of damage you land on a stacked pile of monsters is more XP per cast. For the non-combat methods, neither stat matters at all — you just need the runes and the level.

Magic is worth levelling even if you never plan to mage a boss. Teleports save real time across every other skill — cutting out walking and bank trips on farm runs, agility, and skilling in general — while alchemy and enchanting double as reliable money-makers you can run in the background. On the combat side, a long list of bosses are weak to magic, including the Leviathan and the Nightmare, and much of the hardest endgame content (the journey to an infernal cape or quiver, for example) leans on a strong Magic level. There are also concrete content gates worth aiming for: the highest Magic requirement of any quest is Dragon Slayer II, you need 75 Magic for the Quest Cape, and 96 Magic for the Achievement Diary Cape. The level-99 Magic cape itself carries a perk — it lets you swap spellbooks up to five times a day, the fastest swap method in the game and a real convenience once you are juggling Ancient, Lunar and Standard books.

There are four spellbooks, and which ones you have unlocked decides which training methods are open to you, so this is worth getting straight early. The Standard book is what every account starts with and holds combat strikes, teleports and the bread-and-butter utility spells: alchemy, enchanting, superheat and bolt enchanting all live here, which means a brand-new account can already train Magic profitably. The Arceuus book is free to every members' account — you switch to it at the dark altar in the Arceuus region — and offers combat-assisting and utility spells. The Ancient book, unlocked after the Desert Treasure I quest, holds the powerful bursting and barraging spells that provide the fastest combat XP in the skill, so completing that quest is a priority if you want a fast 99. The Lunar book, unlocked after Lunar Diplomacy, is mostly utility, and it is the home of tan leather, plank make, string jewellery and bake pie — several of the best AFK and profit methods covered later. Many players cycle through all four over an account's lifetime, which is exactly why the Magic cape's quick-swap perk is so handy.

Here is the good news for trainers: most Magic XP is gained without a weapon. Utility spells — alchemy, enchanting, superheat, plank make, tan leather — are cast straight from your inventory of runes, so for the bulk of your 1–99 grind you will not equip a staff at all. Weapons only matter when you are casting combat spells, which is the splash/burst/barrage side of training and your eventual bossing setup.

For combat, the cheapest tier is the basic elemental staves. The Staff of fire and its siblings give unlimited runes of one element, which removes the rune cost for that element entirely — a big saving over a long grind. The Mystic fire staff (40 Attack and 40 Magic) adds melee and magic stat bonuses on top of the free runes. The standout budget pick, though, is the Smoke battlestaff: it provides unlimited air and fire runes and a flat +10% magic accuracy and damage bonus on standard-spellbook spells. Crucially, that bonus also applies to the curse spell used in tele-curse-alch training, making it one of the best low-cost upgrades in the early game.

For dedicated combat you can step up to charged staves that supply their own attack. The Warped sceptre is an excellent budget weapon for early bursting. The Trident of the seas autocasts a water spell, and the stronger Trident of the swamp raises the max hit further — both are charged with runes and coins rather than carried in your inventory. Above those sit the autocast wands: the level-60 Master wand can autocast Ancient, Arceuus and Standard spells, and the level-80 Kodai wand does the same while supplying free water runes, which makes it superb for barraging since barrage spells need water runes. At the very top is Tumeken's shadow (level 85), the strongest magic weapon in the game, which triples your magic damage bonuses but is reserved for high-end PvM. You will not need any charged staff to reach 99 by training utility spells, but the burst/barrage route benefits from the Smoke battlestaff or a wand, and the rest matter once you start maging bosses. The full progression and DPS comparison lives in our Magic gear guide.

Magic armour gives a magic accuracy bonus, sometimes a magic strength bonus, and generally weak melee and ranged defence. You only ever need it for the combat methods — never for casting alchemy or enchanting at a bank — but when you are bursting and barraging, the goal is to stack as much magic strength as you can, because a higher max hit on a pile of nine monsters is a direct XP gain. Starting out, a Blue wizard robe set or Zamorak robes give a cheap accuracy boost. By level 40 you can wear the full Mystic set (hat, top and bottoms), and the Elder chaos druid robes — also level 40 — are the cheapest set that adds magic strength, which is exactly what a burster wants. Between those, Xerician, Void and Infinity sets cover the first fifty levels.

From level 70 you move into proper high-level robes such as Ahrim's (the magic piece of the Barrows sets), Dagon'hai or Frostmoon robes. At level 75 you reach the best-in-slot Ancestral set, with the Virtus set edging ahead in the specific case of Ancient spells. Several accessories carry outsized value and are worth buying as soon as you can afford them. The Occult necklace (level 70 to wear) gives +5% magic damage and is the only amulet that boosts magic strength — note its bonus was reduced from 10% to 5% in a past update, so use the 5% figure. The Tormented bracelet is the second-best hand-slot item for magic, behind the Confliction gauntlets, adding both magic attack and another 5% damage. The imbued god capes come from the Mage Arena miniquests: Mage Arena I gives a +10 magic attack cape at level 60, and Mage Arena II gives the imbued versions at level 75 — the Imbued saradomin cape is the magic-strength option. In the shield slot, the Tome of fire (level 50) boosts fire spells and the Tome of water boosts water spells, including the water-based burst and barrage casts. None of these is needed to reach 99 by utility casting, but they sharply raise your burst/barrage rates and your bossing damage. Browse the whole progression in our Magic gear guide, and check live prices before buying on the GE price tracker.

The very first levels are best skipped with two short quests. Witch's Potion and Imp Catcher together give 1,200 Magic XP — enough to jump straight to level 10 — and neither has any requirements, so even a fresh account can knock them out in minutes. If you want to skip even more of the early grind, completing Fairytale I — Growing Pains or The Grand Tree, then Watchtower, plus the Lumbridge Guide subquest of Recipe for Disaster, can carry you up to level 34 on quest XP alone.

From there you have a choice between cheap and fast. The cheapest route is to cast strike and bolt spells on monsters weak to that element, using the elemental-weakness system to deal extra damage while you level for very little rune cost — fire spells on ice giants and ice warriors (100% fire weakness) are a classic example, and skeletons take bonus earth damage. This barely costs anything but is slow.

The faster route is to start alchemy and tele-alching as soon as the levels allow. Low Level Alchemy unlocks at level 21 and gives roughly 60k XP/hour if you click constantly — genuinely fast for that level — while costing only 3 fire and 1 nature rune per cast. Once you unlock your first teleport at level 25 you can interleave alch casts with teleports for nearly 100k XP/hour, and from level 37 you can tele-curse-alch: cast curse on a Falador guard, alch an item, then teleport and repeat, which pushes the rate toward 150k XP/hour. At higher levels the vulnerability, enfeeble and stun spells raise it further still, with Ardougne tele-stun-alching reaching over 200k XP/hour. The curse spell at the heart of this is also the basis of the splashing method below, costing only 1 body, 3 earth and 2 water runes per cast for around 15k XP/hour fully AFK on our table. Keep this alch-based phase running until level 55, when High Level Alchemy and the rest of the mid-game open up.

Splashing is the classic hands-off way to train Magic, and it is the method most new players hear about first. You deliberately equip gear with a negative magic attack bonus — low-level metal armour works — so that every spell misses, or "splashes," on its target. You then auto-cast a combat spell on a monster you cannot actually kill, and because each cast still grants its fixed experience, you keep levelling without ever defeating the enemy. The appeal is that you can set it running and walk away, clicking only every few minutes to keep it going. The catch is the rate. Splashing fire strike returns only around 13k XP/hour, and even fire bolt manages roughly 27k XP/hour at a real rune cost — so reaching 99 purely by splashing takes hundreds of hours and tens of millions in runes. It is best thought of as a way to make slow progress while you are at your desk doing something else, not as a serious route to 99.

For that reason, most players who want AFK combat XP train on aggressive monsters instead. Casting at crabs — rock crabs, the gemstone crab, or the best option, frost crabs — lets you AFK for up to ten minutes at a time at considerably better rates than splashing, because you are landing real hits and the crabs re-aggro on their own when you reset them. You still only need to interact occasionally, so it keeps the AFK appeal while roughly doubling the throughput. Either way, the splash and curse line on our table sits near 15k XP/hour, so treat both as background methods for when you want to do almost nothing — useful for chipping away at levels passively, but not where a fast 99 comes from. If you have a Slayer task running, casting on those monsters is a better AFK choice still, since you get drops on top of the Magic XP.

The very fastest experience in the skill comes from tick-manipulated bolt enchanting. By interrupting the cast animation at exactly the right moment — "1-ticking" — you fire enchant-crossbow-bolt casts at a blistering pace, far faster than the spell's normal speed. Ruby dragon bolts (e) can be enchanted from level 49 and diamond dragon bolts (e) from level 57, and because those bolts hold value, the method can break even or even turn a profit on the way to 99. The trade-offs are real, though: it demands perfect, constant tick-timing for hours, and it does not appear as a row in our method table, so treat its rate as meta knowledge rather than a number to line up against the listed methods. A common plan is to enchant the best bolts you can until level 62, then move to bursting.

Most players switch to bursting and barraging for the headline rates, and these are ranked on our table. Both are Ancient spells unlocked after the Desert Treasure I quest, and both hit up to nine stacked monsters at once, so a single cast can land nine separate XP hits — that is where the enormous throughput comes from. The first burst spell, Smoke Burst, opens at level 62; the strongest burst, Ice Burst, comes at level 70 for around 280k XP/hour on our SSOT, costing 4 chaos, 2 death and 4 water runes per cast. Barrage spells arrive later and hit harder: Ice Barrage at level 94 is the fastest listed Magic XP at roughly 400k XP/hour, using 2 blood, 4 death and 6 water runes per cast.

The technique is the same at every spot. You pull a group of monsters into aggression, then run back and forth along a corner wall so they pile onto a single tile, and burst or barrage the whole stack. The best location for pure speed is maniacal monkeys in the cave after Monkey Madness II, where the sheer density of monkeys keeps your casts landing on full stacks. If you would rather earn money back, Slayer monsters such as dust devils, nechryael and abyssal demons drop valuable items while you burst them, making this a strong "zero-time" way to level Magic during a Slayer grind. For the best rates, wear as much magic strength as you can afford — elder chaos at the low end up to Ancestral or Virtus — move up to the next burst or barrage spell as you unlock it, and carry a Rune pouch so you can hold all three or four rune types a single cast needs.

Beyond splashing and crabs, the Lunar spellbook offers several genuinely relaxed methods that let you click a full inventory and then sit back. Bake Pie (level 65) gives roughly 110k Magic XP/hour with about 48 seconds of AFK time per inventory, and it cooks up to 450k Cooking XP/hour at the same time — though some pie ingredients make it expensive, so check prices first. String Jewellery (same 48-second AFK interval) gives more Magic XP at around 150k/hour plus a little Crafting, and can be quite profitable: stringing topaz or dragonstone amulets earns the most, while gold amulets are the safe low-cost choice. Plank Make (level 86) is the most AFK Lunar option, with up to 90 seconds between clicks; on our table it lists at 166k XP/hour when cast actively, and it is steadily profitable. None of these spells appears as an item icon because spells have no inventory sprite — only the runes they consume and the finished Mahogany plank do, which is why the strip here shows runes and products rather than the spells themselves.

The single best AFK method, if you can meet the requirements, is casting on Kraken. With level 87 Slayer and a Kraken assignment, you stay in combat and earn the full experience for damaging it even while it is submerged, so you can AFK up to 20 minutes at a time and still pull well over 100k Magic XP/hour with only a few clicks across the whole hour. The high Slayer requirement is the only real barrier; if you have it, nothing else comes close for hands-off rates.

The other well-known AFK venue is the Nightmare Zone, the boss-rush minigame north of Yanille. With absorption potions soaking up the bosses' damage and a flick of Rapid Heal prayer, you can autocast a combat spell and AFK for long stretches while racking up Magic XP. The important caveat is how the XP is calculated there: experience from casting spells with the minigame's own provided runes is heavily reduced, but the XP you earn from the damage your spells deal is full — so you bring your own runes and train off damage. You also cannot cast most non-combat spells inside the arena, so it is purely a combat-XP method. It is slower than Kraken but has far lower requirements, which makes it a popular low-effort option for mid-level accounts that also want the points for rewards like herb boxes.

Magic also shines at zero-time training — levelling the skill while you are doing something else entirely. Because alchemy, enchanting, bolt enchanting and magic imbue can all be cast on the move, you can fire them off while running Agility laps, questing, doing birdhouse runs, or covering the long distances of Zeah Runecrafting. Done this way, the Magic XP costs you no extra time on your account at all, which is arguably the most efficient way to reach 99. On the combat side, simply bursting every burstable Slayer task on the road from 1 to 99 Slayer yields over a million Magic XP by itself — enough to carry you from level 62 to 76 without a single dedicated Magic session.

Several Magic methods double as production skilling, which is why ironmen and profit-focused players lean on them so heavily. Superheat Item (level 43) is the standout: it smelts ore into a bar anywhere, with no furnace required, costing 4 fire and 1 nature rune per cast for around 97k Magic XP/hour on our table. Because it also grants the Smithing XP for the smelt, an ironman who mines their own ore trains two skills from a single action — and it conveniently skips the iron-bar failure chance that a normal furnace imposes. It is one of the most efficient mid-level methods in the game when you account for that double progress.

The Lunar spellbook adds two more production casts. Tan Leather (level 78, requires the hard Fremennik achievement diary) turns raw hides into leather for about 130k Magic XP/hour, using 2 astral, 5 fire and 1 nature rune per cast. Tanning black dragonhide is the most profitable variant, bringing in over a million gp per hour, so the full 78–99 grind can net upwards of a hundred million while you level. Plank Make (level 86, requires Dream Mentor) converts logs into planks at 166k Magic XP/hour on our table, costing 2 astral, 15 earth and 1 nature rune per cast. Making mahogany planks is the standout earner here, netting tens of millions on the road to 99 while supplying the planks every player burns through training Construction. All three of these methods use astral runes (Plank Make and Tan Leather) or nature runes as their catalyst, and all three are perfect for ironmen who can self-supply the ore, hides or logs from other skills.

High Level Alchemy (level 55) is the classic semi-AFK money method, and most accounts cast tens of thousands of these over their lifetime. It converts an item into coins at its high-alch value while giving about 78k Magic XP/hour on our table, costing 5 fire and 1 nature rune per cast (use a fire staff to drop the fire-rune cost). Whether you profit depends entirely on what you alch: battlestaves, yew and magic longbows are common low-cost staples with high buy limits, while a high-alch calculator can surface items — trimmed mithril platebodies, gold-trimmed climbing boots and the like — with much bigger margins. At the top end you can clear well over 500k gp/hour while still gaining nearly 80k Magic XP, and because it casts on the move it is also a perfect zero-time activity to layer over another grind.

Enchanting jewellery is the other big earner, and it splits into gold and silver. Gold jewellery is reliably profitable across the full 1–99 path — enchanting gold all the way to 99 currently profits tens of millions — and you can even let your character auto-enchant a full inventory, though manual casting is slightly faster. Silver jewellery is where the serious money is: opal necklaces and bracelets (enchantable from just level 7) are in constant demand for Thieving and Slayer and can net hundreds of millions over a full grind, while topaz amulets and bracelets earn a similar total at roughly triple the XP rate. Each enchant uses a cosmic rune plus element-specific runes. As with every casting method, only the runes appear as item icons here; the enchant spells themselves are described in the prose. Check our GE price tracker to see which alch items and jewellery are currently worth the most before you commit a few hours to them.

For ironmen, Magic is trained largely as a by-product of everything else rather than in long dedicated sessions. High alchemy on looted gear, superheating self-mined ore into bars, plank making for Construction supplies, and the constant stream of enchanting, teleporting, bossing and Slayer casts all quietly stack up Magic XP across an account's life. Bursting and barraging are especially valuable to ironmen because they require only runes and no bought items at all — so a player who crafts their own runes can sustain them indefinitely on maniacal monkeys or Slayer tasks, making them the fastest realistic mid-to-late XP for an iron. Tan leather, plank make and superheat are also natural fits, since the hides, logs and ore can be self-supplied from other skills.

The main thing that changes for an ironman is rune supply, because they cannot simply buy stacks off the Grand Exchange. Elemental, chaos and death runes are bought from magic shops in Varrock, Port Sarim and the Void Knight Outpost; law, nature and cosmic runes come from the Mage Arena, Ali Morrisane, the Wizards' Guild, Baba Yaga or Prifddinas. Most ironmen also self-craft runes through the Runecrafting skill and carry several types at once in a Rune pouch. Along the way, Magic enables useful self-supply upgrades too — safespotting Zamorak warriors for a rune scimitar, safespotting blue dragons for bones, or farming twisted banshees and (in free-to-play) ogress warriors for drops. The methods that don't work for irons are the ones that depend on bulk-buying cheap GE items to alch or enchant, which rules out classic high-alch and low-alch fodder farming; irons simply lean harder on superheat, plank make, tan leather and combat casting instead.

Magic is fully trainable in free-to-play, it just works a little differently and takes longer. The fastest F2P route to 99 is tele-curse-alching to Falador: cast curse on a Falador guard, high-alch an item, then teleport to Falador and repeat. Spamming this loop takes a bit over 90 hours for the whole 1–99 path, which is slow by members' standards but is comfortably the best free option. As with members, F2P players should start by knocking out Witch's Potion and Imp Catcher for an instant jump to level 10, since both quests are quick and have no requirements.

The free game also has plenty of elemental weaknesses to exploit while you level. Ice giants and ice warriors carry a 100% weakness to fire, lesser demons take 40% extra from water, the Stronghold of Security spiders are 40–50% weak to fire, and skeletons take a 35% bonus from earth spells — all of which make cheap strike-and-bolt training noticeably faster early on. For lower-cost levelling that also earns money, F2P players can enchant jewellery: enchanting amulets up to diamond gives XP rates over 100k/hour and turns a tidy profit (diamond amulets currently net around 300k gp/hour), which is one realistic way for a free player to earn a bond. Plain teleport-spamming to Falador — the highest-level F2P teleport — is another low-effort option at nearly 70k XP/hour if you just want to click one button. The big caveats: bursting, barraging, every Ancient and Lunar method, superheat, the trident and tan leather are all members-only, so both the very fastest XP and the largest money methods sit behind a membership. F2P Magic is best treated as a steady, cheap grind rather than a speed run.

A handful of quests and miniquests unlock the methods this guide leans on, so it is worth doing them early rather than discovering you are locked out of the fast route at level 70. Desert Treasure I opens the Ancient spellbook for bursting and barraging — the single most important unlock for fast Magic XP, so prioritise it if speed is your goal. Lunar Diplomacy opens the Lunar book, and the follow-up Dream Mentor is required specifically for Plank Make; together they unlock tan leather, string jewellery, bake pie and plank make. The hard Fremennik achievement diary is required for Tan Leather, so factor that in before planning a black-dragonhide grind. The Mage Arena I and II miniquests, deep in the Wilderness, reward the god capes at level 60 and their imbued versions at level 75 — a significant magic strength upgrade for any combat method. As for a skilling pet: Magic is a combat skill, and unlike gathering skills it has no dedicated skilling pet, so do not expect one to drop. Your real milestone rewards are the quest and diary capes along the way and, at 99, the Magic cape with its five-a-day spellbook-swap perk.

A few habits save the most time across the whole grind. Buy a Rune pouch as early as you can afford one so you can carry three to four rune types at once — it is effectively mandatory for bursting and barraging, which need several runes per cast. Wherever possible, layer zero-time casting (alch, enchant, magic imbue) over other grinds when you are already running long distances, since that Magic XP then costs you nothing. Use an elemental staff or, better, the Smoke battlestaff to cut rune costs and add a damage bonus on combat methods. Move up to the next burst, barrage or alchemy spell the moment you unlock it rather than coasting on an older one. And before committing several hours to any method, run your current and target levels through our Magic calculator to see the exact number of casts, runes and cost involved, check live item values on the GE price tracker so your alch or enchant choice is actually profitable, and browse the wider OSRS guides hub for the gathering and production skills that pair naturally with Magic training.