My personal recommended bossing path with explanations Part 1: Beginnings

[My Wand]

Hello there, one of the scariest things in this game for newer players is introducing themselves to PvM, it's one of those hurdles that are extremely tall but at the same time extremely satisfying to finally climb over. I'm going to list where I'd personally start off if I were beginning my PvM journey with all the knowledge of what I need to learn in advance I'll be doing these in parts so I can go more in-depth than I would if I were listing out a full guide at once.

 

1) Arch Glacor

Arch Glacor for me is the swiss army knife of bosses, with mechanic scaling and infinite free deaths you can essentially hone your skills here risk free and make a bit of money while doing so! In order I'd recommend turning mechanics on this way

 

Flurry: Flurry teaches you one of the single most important skills in this entire game, Prayer Flicking. Prayer flicking throughout your RS journey will be increasingly necessary and it's that one extra way to really improve on all of your boss kills. If you can prayer flick at a high level you can essentially do any piece of content in the game 

 

Frost Cannon: This one is the most up for change one in my opinion but the reason I picked it is for learning Tick Timings. By this I mean timing a resonance on the exact tick you'd be taking damage from something, no earlier, no later. Your ideal way of handling this is by doing the ability "reflect" and allowing the first two hits to deal damage to you, reflecting back to the boss (while praying magic) and then turning off your magic prayer on the same tick you resonance in order to reflect a full 10,000 damage back to the boss and heal yourself to full.

 

I should probably explain what a "tick" is in this game. Every action you do in this game, and every action you have performed on you in this game (think boss monster hitting you) runs on a timer of game ticks. One game tick is a .6 second interval where all inputs entered in this interval are performed during that game tick. If you're late to this .6 second window you hit the next game tick. You can see this while switching gear, sometimes it'll take that little bit of extra time to equip, that's because you missed the tick interval! I know .6 seconds sounds intimidating but with enough practice you'll be performing tick perfect actions in no time! I like this mechanic because it helps you learn to perform actions on tick and to an extent teaches you about the tick system.

 

Exposed Core or "Hug": This mechanic is simply a DPS check. Deal enough DPS before it ends and you go back to the fight, but if you fail it, you die (Or in this case are kicked out of the instance, again there's no risk!) I like this for a very straight forward reason, it introduces you to DPS checks in a very gentle way. Try to see how quickly you can deal with this mechanic!

 

Pillars: The pillars mechanic is all about positioning and kiting, try to maintain as much dps uptime (time you're in the fight and damaging the boss) as possible while dodging the pillars. Tip: Once you get a route down that works perfect it and you'll be able to do this perfectly forever! I like this mechanic because it helps you learn to move around in a fight while still dealing damage.

 

Glacyte minions: For this one I highly, highly recommend enabling "target cycle" in your game settings, to do this go to Settings -> Combat & Action bar -> Targeting -> set target cycling settings to "Radial" and set yourself a keybind that's comfortable to you. Practice target cycling from the arch-glacor boss to a minion and burning them down with your AOE ablilities. I like this mechanic because it teaches you to juggle multiple targets and use AOE abilities effectively.

 

Alright, now you're a master of the Arch-Glacor! You have two options from here. Continue practicing it, you can even switch over to hardmode now, or move on to bigger and better things!

2) -optional- GWD2 Bosses 

Instead of just listing one boss here I think now is the point I'd list off four. Helwyr, The Twin Furies, Vindicta and Gorvek, and Gregorvic (you can ignore greg for now, he teaches you significantly less than the other bosses)

What do you learn from these bosses?

Twin Furies: For twin furies we're once again learning to manage AOE abilities with DPS checks. This is taken to a whole new level over the Arch-Glacor checks but are still manageable for a newer pvmer without high tier weapons/armor.

Helwyr: Helwyr will teach you two things, defensive useage and management and positioning. You have to negate the damage from his  "Rake special" and position yourself out of harms way when the mushroom special comes up!

 

Vindicta and Gorvek: This boss is all about DPS rotations and learning to count boss attacks. One recurring theme in boss fights is their tendency to do x amount of auto attacks into x special attack. You'll be watching for Vindicta and Gorvek to change their combat style after x attacks and switching your prayer to match their off-style attack. Miss it and take big damage, hit it and save your hp. Try to be prayer flicking this entire fight and if you need to pull out your shield and resonance the high damage ranged attack! Vindicta and Gorvek will also spawn a line of dragonfire on the ground after doing a jump, your goal is to stay out of it or take rapid damage.

 

Gregorvic: I don't think this boss is the best for learning, I'd recommend ignoring it and going elsewhere.

 

3) Araxxor

We're going to take everything we learned at the Arch-Glacor and GWD2 and push it to a whole new level. In this fight you'll be performing on-tick resonances, dealing with minions, positioning the boss, positioning yourself, and prayer flicking while maintaining DPS. I know this all sounds scary but I promise we'll get through it.

 

By now, you're a DPSing machine. You should have a solid core understanding of PvM fundamentals (Prayer flicking, dodging mechanics, positioning) and we're going to put it to a true test. 

 

Araxxor will continue building on your previously learned fundamentals and pushing them further than you've gone before.

 

Araxxor's cleave: The cleave mechanic can be avoided in two ways, you either anticipate/freedom to prevent yourself from being pulled in or you get pulled in and step out of the attack before it hits you. Once you get the timing down this mechanic will be a breeze, remember Araxxor does his special attacks on a set pattern of auto attacks and don't forget to count them out! 

 

Araxxor's caccoon: This is one of the most important uses of the anticipate/freedom abilities in the fight. Araxxor will wrap you in his web and deal damage to you per tick increasing with his enrage mechanic. Rapidly click to escape it.

 

Araxxor's web shield: This will be your former introduction to reflect mechanics. One of the most horrifying mechanics to have somebody fail in group bosses, we're learning this now so you can get a feel for slowing down your DPS and timing abilities properly without risking death. For this mechanic Araxxor will reflect all damage done to him back at you with a multiplier based on enrage. Use a slow ability like snipe, quake, or a stalled dragonbreath and resonance the hit for some extra hp back!

 

Now I'm sure you noticed me use that term, stalled dragonbreath. Let me explain to you what exactly that is. In runescape you can "stall" an ability in many ways, one of the easiest ways is by running out of the max range of your weapon and pressing an ability, click the ground below you as you go to fire it off and that ability will be "stalled"; next time you go to attack the boss do not press any abilities, the one you queued will fire off and you'll be able to use another ability (in this case resonance) instantly!

 

Araxxor is a boss with multiple phases, 4 to be exact. However there are different "rotations" for the paths you can go down, there's path 1: The minion path, path 2: The acid path, and path 3: the darkness path per rotation you'll be dealing with 2 of these mechanics at a time, and the beast tab will tell you which path is closed at any given time. The rotations are referred to as 1-2, 1-3, and 2-3. 

I'd highly recommend watching a guide for this boss before you begin it, explaining the entire fight in detail here would take me quite awhile. 

 

Why do I like this boss? 

It expands on everything you've already learned, in phase 1 you're counting attacks, phase 2 you're dynamically doing mechanics depending on the path you've taken but you're learning to deal with minions including special ones with bonus effects on phase 1, positioning the boss and learning to watch for something special coming out (danger spider, do not boop), and positioning yourself in the safety circles of path 3. On top of that you're learning to prayer flick in path 4 while dealing with all of those mechanics and then some. This is the first boss you will have real trouble with. I personally took over 20 tries way back in the day to get my first kill but it was one of the most rewarding feelings in the world when I finally conquered it.

 

And that's all for now, If there is interest I'll list out some more bosses I'd personally recommend doing, modern runescape boss development is making outstanding strides towards creating bosses that teach you the incredibly important building blocks to your PvM journey.

 

If you have any questions or feel like you want any guidance on where to go from wherever you are feel free to message me in-game, and I'll point you in a good direction!