Melee

Intro
Melee combat is divided into three main areas: Attack, Strength and Defence. Attack will determine your accuracy when fighting and will increase your consistency when hitting opponents. Strength will determine how hard you hit your opponent. Finally, Defence relates to how resilient you are to attacks and how often your opponent will hit you. The higher your Defence, the more likely the opponent is to miss.

To train the three skills requires you to fight the numerous and various monsters in RuneScape.

Wielding a weapon will display the training styles available and what combat skills you can train with that weapon.

This screen shows the weapon you are wielding and the combat options for that weapon. To find out more about each style, move your mouse over the icon.

=Attack= To train Attack, you will need to select 'Accurate' attack styles from the combat menu (to find out which style is which, scroll your mouse over the icons). Having a higher Attack level not only means you will hit the opponent more often, but it will also enable you able to train with stronger/better weapons.

Strength
Strength ultimately determines the amount of damage you can deal to an opponent. With a strong weapon and a high Strength level, you will find yourself able to deal a significant amount of damage to a monster or player!

To train Strength, you would use the 'Aggressive' options from the combat sub-menu (to find out which style is which, scroll your mouse over the icons). These will purely train your Strength, making you able to gain Strength levels quicker.

Defence
Defence refers to the chance you have of being hit. A higher Defence level makes you a tougher warrior, giving you the ability to last longer against any foe.

To train Defence, you should select the 'Defensive' option from the combat side interface (to find out which style is which, scroll your mouse over the icons). You can also train your Defence by selecting defensive casting from the bottom-left of your magic spellbook.

A large part of Defence is armour. Having more resilient armour, combined with a good Defence level, will minimise the chances of being hit. As with Attack, there is a variety of choices depending on your Defence level.

Experiance
The amount of experience you get from hitting an opponent is based upon a number of things.

The experience you receive will vary, depending on the combat level of the monster you are fighting. You are in control of what experience you receive as you can choose your fighting style, therefore controlling how your experience is distributed.

When training, it may be worth considering your opponents' (player or monster) weaknesses. Certain armours are weak to different styles of attack. The main Attack styles include stab, slash and crush attacks.

For example if your opponent is wearing a light robe material, a slashing weapon such as a scimitar should have no problem tearing through the armour.

Similarly, investigate whether a puncturing 'Stab' attack could deal the most damage, or if an aggressive crush attack to smash through armour is necessary.