OSRS Should You Get Dragon Defender?

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Created - 12.02.2025 Updated - 18.03.2025

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OSRS Should You Get Dragon Defender?

There are two types of melee weapon in the game:

• Two-handed weapons
• One-Handed weapons

Whenever you use a one-handed weapon, you can equip something in your shield slot alongside it. There are many different options for a player to choose from regarding this shield slot. Today we are going to talk about the iconic dragon defender. It is an untradable melee off-hand which requires a significant amount of grinding to obtain. Today we are going to answer whether or not this grind to get a dragon defender on Old School Runescape is worth it or not, and the short answer is yes, let's talk about why.

Shield Slot Stats

First, let's talk about the stats you can observe after equipping a shield item.

Attack Bonuses

These bonuses include; stab, slash, crush, magic, and range attack bonuses. Equipping an item can give these bonuses but they are rare for a shield-slot item. These bonuses increase your character's accuracy using that style of combat. For example, if you equip a shield that provides slash attack bonus, you will be way more accurate with your abyssal whip.

This makes these stats the second most important stats that you need to look for in an off-hand item.

Defensive Bonuses

There are also defensive bonuses for all of those styles explained above: stab, slash, crush, magic, and ranged. Instead of providing you with accuracy, these bonuses provide more protection for your character against those types of attacks. Unless you specifically need defensive bonuses, these stats are almost completely useless. This is due to how OSRS handles its defense. In this game defense does not reduce the incoming damage, it instead makes it harder to hit you overall. So if you have more defensive bonuses your enemy is more likely to hit you a 0 instead of any damage, but if they pass that initial accuracy check then you will get hit the full damage.

Defensive bonuses are important in two scenarios:

• PVP scenarios where you need to survive, like in deep Wilderness.
• PVM scenarios where you need to tank an enemy for your team.

Overall these are the least desired bonuses out of them all.

Strength Bonuses

These are the real deal. These bonuses are way more important than the other two categories: Melee, Ranged, and Magic strength bonuses and Prayer bonus. The strength bonuses flat-out increase your damage in that combat style, while the prayer bonus increases the amount of time needed for your Prayer points to drain when your prayers are active. This Prayer bonus is plenty useful in Slayer encounters where you just want to AFK for a long period. The strength bonuses is what you should look for first in an off-hand.

Here are the advantages of strength bonuses:

• Dealing more damage means monsters die faster.
• Dealing more damage means more experience.
• Dealing more damage means you are more accurate. You can think of hitting an enemy as rolling a 6-sided dice, if the dice roll on anything above a 1 you hit if it rolls on a 1 you miss but there is a chance for you to roll a 2 and still hit a 0, because 0 is also considered a hit. So by having more damage you are literally increasing your odds of not rolling on that 0.

So in conclusion whenever you equip an item check its melee strength bonuses to determine whether it is good or not.

Dragon Defender

Defenders are an iconic off-hand item series in OSRS. To get them you need to head over to the Warrior's Guild and defeat cyclopses until you receive your bronze defender. After that you need show your defender to the NPC found just outside the double doors and repeat this process. You will receive your defenders in order:

• Bronze defender
• Iron defender
• Steel defender
• Black defender
• Mithril defender
• Adamant defender
• Rune defender

After receiving the rune defender you can enter the basement of the guild where stronger cyclopses reside. From those high level cyclopses you can receive your dragon defender. Here are it's stats.

Book of War

Book of War is another untradable item that can be obtained after the completion of the quest "Horror From the Deep". Although it is easily accessible for normal accounts, it is close to impossible to have early on for your Ironman due to the Bandos pages. This book has 0 defensive and offensive bonuses but provides a +5 Prayer bonus alongside a +2 Strength bonus and is equivalent to a black defender.

Toktz-ket-xil

This tzhaar shield is a good option to use if you didn't grind your dragon defender yet. It is cheap and has good bonuses. It has no attack bonus.

As you can see it is quiet decent for only 434K gold. It requires level 60 Defence to wear and is equal to a rune defender in terms of its strength bonus but the defender has more accuracy bonuses.

Dragonfire Shield

Dragonfire shield in its charged form is the only contender to the defender family. This shield costs around 5M gold and provide dragon breath protection alongside the following stats:

This shield is a tank shield that provides defensive bonuses like plate armor. It can be preferred over the dragon defender if you have the coin for it but the dragon defender has one more use case which puts it above the rest.

Avernic Defender

Avernic Defender is the absolute best melee off-hand that Old School Runescape can offer. It costs 46M gold to get but here is the catch it is a direct upgrade to the dragon defender, meaning you can't get it without the dragon defender. So this makes the dragon defender quiet essential if you are looking to maximize your melee combat prowess.

Final Verdict

As you can clearly tell from the information provided above that the dragon defender is a must-get item for any account. It should be your priority to get once you have the levels for it as it provides incredible bonuses while being completely free.