Splashing

Splashing is the act of purposely wearing items with bonuses that total -64 Magic attack bonus or lower and attacking a weak opponent, in order to gain Magic experience by casting spells whilst staying in combat for an extended time without risk. The term is sometimes used for spells missing in general, as it comes from the visual effect.

A sufficiently low Magic attack bonus can be gained by wearing a combination of melee and range armour (such as full plate armour with d'hide vambraces, or full plate armour and a cursed goblin staff). It is advisable to attack enemies in single-combat zone that cannot be interacted with by other players, such as any NPC that can be pickpocketed or rats, which can be killed by cats. Simply bring enough runes, and turn auto cast and Auto Retaliate on.

The player will stop attacking after 20 minutes of inactivity, but interacting with the client will resume splashing, provided that Auto Retaliate is on. Prior to a hidden update implemented on 10 September 2015, this limitation did not exist, allowing players to splash for up to six hours without player input.

It is considered a cheap and easy but slow way of training Magic, especially through low levels. As no damage is dealt to your target, splashing will not give you any Hitpoints experience, making it a decent source of training for Magic pures who wish to keep their Hitpoints level low.

Splashing was once a very popular way to train Magic after an update, which made random events optional, allowed for players to leave their game unattended for six hours while splashing on an NPC or another player in a safe minigame (such as Clan Wars) before the game client forced them to log out. With just Fire Strike, players could get 82,800 Magic experience without interacting with the game at all (for example overnight or at work), making it a controversial method of training; some even considered it cheating, although it was not against the game rules.

Such mechanics, which were an unintentional consequence of making random events optional, prompted Jagex to release the Old School Game Integrity Survey poll, in which they raised multiple issues about content or activities where players believe such activities are undermining the integrity of the game, including splashing. The results were addressed officially in a followup:

This only further escalated the controversy, as players resort to splashing on PvP worlds or in safe minigames where random events do not occur. During the team's weekly Q&A sessions, Mod Mat K had stated that Mod Ian Gower (one of RuneScape's original founders) was constructing a virtual data warehouse in which he will be able to assess such issues and make an informed decision based on the given statistics.

On 10 September 2015, twenty-six days after the data warehouse started operating, and approximately ten minutes before the team's weekly Q&A sessions, Jagex implemented a hidden update in which players who do not interact with the client for twenty minutes will not retaliate, forcing players to tend to their accounts much more frequently.

On 11 July 2019, Jagex made it so players could no longer gain Magic experience for casting spells in most parts of Lumbridge if their Magic accuracy is too low to deal damage, and they have a Magic level of 10 or higher. This was done because the large amount of players splashing on rats looked odd to new players.

v t e Combat Mechanics
Combat	Attack range Attack speed Auto Retaliate Autocast Combat triangle Special attacks Hitsplat Tanking Magical melee Magical ranged Ranged magic Ranged melee Typeless
Maximum hit	Maximum magic hit Maximum melee hit Maximum ranged hit Monster maximum hit
Damage per second	Damage per second/Melee Damage per second/Ranged Damage per second/Magic
Mechanics	Aggressiveness Buffs Elemental weakness Flinching Hit delay Retaliation Retreat Safespot Spawning Successful hit Maximum damage cap Flat armour Tolerance Wander radius PJ timer Red-X Line of sight
Other	Single-way combat Multicombat area Singles-plus combat Player killing