The Nightmare Zone is a combat minigame where you can afk up to 20 minutes and train your combat skills in a very low effort manner, while also earning some points for imbuing stuff like your slayer helm or Berse ring, or even getting the herb boxes, unless you’re an iron of course. And with the current GE value of most herbs, if you still need to train your combat those herb boxes are a real grab, especially that it’s something really afk.
Since I’ve leveled my account the slowest route and the lowest effort route wherever possible, I’m a real specialist in all the afk methods. The idea for this guide came from a clanmate who wanted to struggle with bosses with pretty low combat skills and didn’t know about this really simple and low effort method. That happened to me a thousand times, and I had so many moments in Old School RuneScape where someone told me or I somehow found out that I was doing something completely wrong. My latest example is the pot block, which I found out about while watching a PK guide, but which is so useful for PvM as well. Always eat food then pot so they get consumed in the same tick.
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Requirements
But we’re going a bit off topic, so back to the nightmare zone. To unlock the minigame you will need to have completed at least five quests from a list of 38 quests. The quests that you should aim for specifically for the nightmare zone (because these bosses are safe to pick from the list) are the following 12 quests, and best case scenario all of them since you will get more points. These are the quests you should aim for if going for normal rumble:
- The Ascent of Arceuus
- Vampyre Slayer
- The depths of despair
- What Lies below
- Mountain daughter
- Lunar Diplomacy
- In search of the Myreque
- Lost City
- Tree Gnome Village
- Holy Grail
- Fight Arena
- Grand tree
For hard rumble you should add two more quests to your list:
- The Fremennik Isles
- Monkey Madness 1
You will also need to have completed either:
- Recipe for Disaster, Freeing the Mountain Dwarf section, or
- Dragon Slayer 2
This is because you will need to use either of the quest items:
- Dwarven rock cake from RFD, or
- Locator orb from DS2
Other requirements:
Combat gear, combat pots, some GP, 43 prayer, a minimum combat level of 45 or 50 would be nice to start off.
Starting out
After you’ve completed most of these quests (or all of these quests for maximum efficiency), make sure you have some GP at hand and get your best prayer bonus gear on along with some combat and some prayer pots. Take a decent melee weapon like a dragon scimitar if you’re a mid HCIM account (and yes this is safe for HCIMs).
Head to the nightmare zone. You can simply use the minigame teleport since you’ll most likely be in there for longer than 20 minutes and you have a bank nearby. Alternatively, if your minigame teleport is on cooldown you could use fairy ring cls, or watchtower teleport (which can be moved even closer as a Yannile teleport if you completed hard Ardougne diary… and speaking of simple things we learn accidentally, I found out you can move your watchtower teleport to Yannile some one year after I completed the hard Ardougne diary).
Deposit some coins in the coffer (you’ll need 22k for each normal rumble round or 26k for each hard rumble round, and if you own your quest cape it ill be 10k less for each). Speak to Dominic to start a dream and select rumble or hard rumble depending on your combat level (normal if your combat level is below 70, and hard if your combat level is above 70). Click to drink from the potion and select only the following bosses:
- Trapped Soul
- Count Draynor
- Sand Snake
- King Roald
- The Kendal
- Me
- Skeleton Hellhound
- Tree Spirit
- Khazard Warlord
- Black Knight Titan
- Bouncer
- Black Demon
- Ice troll king (just for hard rumble)
- Jungle demon (just for hard rumble)
Click accept. As soon as the instance loads turn on protect from melee and feel free to afk. Here’s a prayer drain calculator so you can check how long you can afk for with your current gear and prayer level. Your goal is to get 100k points. Roughly, at 43 prayer you should be able to afk for a bit over 3 minutes with just the bonus from the Proselyte armor. Optionally, you can from time to time click on the power ups.
Absorption pots
After you get your first 50k to 100k Nightmare Zone (nmz) points then head towards the rewards chest, and buy as many absorbtion doses as you can from the benefits tab.
Go to Yannile bank and swap to your best melee / range / magic gear and grab also grab the following:
- 4-5 Super combat or super attack and super strength /ranging pot/ imbued heart according to your combat style
- Dwarven rock cake/ locator orb to lower your HP
- Optionally you can bring a Bonecrusher and an Ash sanctifier for some passive Prayer XP
Go to the barrel with Absorption potions and fill the rest of your inventory with absorption pots, then click on the dream potion. The bosses from the previous round should automatically be selected. However, if you have completed more quests in between rounds double check that you have only the above-mentioned bosses. Once you start doing hard rumble add the final two bosses to maximize the amount of points you get.
As soon as the instance loads consume some absorption potions and then click on either the dwarven rock cake or locator orb to bring down your hp and move to the middle of the arena. You can drink up to 1000 absorption points. Make sure you bring your hp to 1 and that you have some absorption points protecting you when doing so. This is because the bosses can’t hit you for more than your current HP and each hit will consume the number of absorption points equal to the damage the potion absorbed to protect you. So if a boss hits you for 10, your absorption count will go down by 10, if it only hits you for 1,you’ll only lose 1 absorption point.
You can afk for up to 20 minutes, but if you want to gain more points or waste less absorption you should click more often than that to make sure you bring back down your hp to 1 and sometimes click the power ups.
Rewards
Doing the Nightmare Zone can be very rewarding because it will help you get some pretty decent rewards, besides being a low effort way of levelling up your combat skills. On short these are some of the reasons why the NMZ is great:
- AFK combat XP
- imbues for must have gear (eg. slayer helm, Dagannoth rings, salve amulet)
- herb boxes (extra GP for non iron accounts)
- redirect scrolls
- safe way to train combat for HCIM
