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My Favorite Skill

After becoming a member, I quickly took a liking to the Thieving skill, and soon afterwards it became my favorite skill in the game. I cannot really explain why I like it so much (perhaps because, through pickpocketing and looting chests, it is the only skill in the game that directly generates coins), but its appeal has never faded for me after all these years. East Ardougne thus became my favorite city, and I would often hang out at the marketplace in the city's east, stealing from the variety of stalls (even the gem stall!); pickpocketing (or killing) the guards, knights, paladins, and heroes; chatting casually with whatever other players were also present; and generally enjoying myself and forming fond memories.

I have known for many years that Thieving is not one of the more popular skills in RuneScape. On the one hand, this was a bit disappointing for me, as there were fewer players in the game with whom I could share and discuss my enthusiasm for the skill; on the other, it gave me a sense of pride and accomplishment over my abnormally high (when compared to most other players) Thieving level relative to my combat level. I can remember a handful of times when my Thieving level was, for example, in the 60s or 70s while my combat level was maybe in the 70s and 80s, and I met other players with a much higher combat level (in the 90s, 100s, or even higher) but who had a rather low Thieving level—oftentimes it would be at or slightly higher than level 53, which indicated that they trained it only to the point when they were permitted to start Desert Treasure, and then largely forgot about the skill afterwards.

Although it's been many years, I can still remember with some accuracy the stages of training I undertook for Thieving:

1. From levels 1 to 5, I pickpocketed men (obviously; there is no other option at those levels).
2. From levels 5 to 25 (or slightly higher), I stole from the cake stalls in East Ardougne.
3. From levels 25 (or slightly higher) to 40 (or slightly higher), I pickpocketed warriors; I recall that I alternated between the female warriors near the center of East Ardougne and the Al Kharid warriors whenever one of them got boring for me.
4. From levels 40 (or slightly higher) to around level 60, my memory gets somewhat hazy. For a time I pickpocketed the guards in East Ardougne, but I also remember a long session of accumulating grey wolf fur by stealing it from the fur stall in East Ardougne so that I could sell it to the fur trader in Varrock because, at the time, I thought it was a decent way to make money; I also remember doing the same type of thing with the silks from the silk stall in East Ardougne, and then finally selling all of it to the silk trader. Although my primary aim in both cases was to make money, they also resulted in a good amount of Thieving experience.
5. From around level 60 to probably the high 60s, I pickpocketed knights in East Ardougne.
6. From probably the high 60s to the low/mid-70s, I collected the summer sq'irks in the Sorceress's Garden mini-game, combined them into summer sq'irk juice, and gave the glasses to Osman for Thieving experience. I can still remember the day Jagex released the Sorceress's Garden mini-game, on 12 February 2007: when I discovered that it was a Thieving mini-game, I took a break from pickpocketing knights to give it try, and was delighted to learn that I already had the requisite Thieving level to enter the highest-level (i.e. the summer) garden. Soon I learned that each glass of summer sq'irk juice gave a pretty impressive amount of Thieving experience, and so I began collecting summer sq'irks in the Sorceress's Garden for a while in order to train my Thieving—it was certainly less frustrating than pickpocketing knights.
7. From the low/mid-70s to the high 70s, I returned to pickpocketing knights in East Ardougne, but I quickly grew tired of it and looked for a less frustrating alternative.
8. From the high 70s to level 99, I used the blackjack lure-and-knockout method on Menaphite thugs in Pollnivneach.

The last stage listed above I completed in one long marathon session, which lasted from about late March to late April 2010. My journey to maxing out Thieving was spread out over a roughly five-year period and interrupted with breaks, often very long ones; it began around the first few months of 2005 (when I first became a member) and ended on the afternoon of 25 April 2010, which is the last modified date of the two screenshots below which I took to commemorate my achieving level 99 in Thieving:

(You will perhaps notice in the above screenshots that, instead of being in Pollnivneach, I am instead in Lumbridge, where there are no Menaphite thugs. This is because when I was at level 98 Thieving and something like a few hundred experience points away from level 99, I thought it proper to leave Pollnivneach and return to Lumbridge so that I could complete my journey to 99 Thieving by the same method I started it: by pickpocketing men.)

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This page last modified on 2 May 2021.