Hardest Skill Capes

An eternal question: which skill cape is the hardest to obtain? And, of course, there is no clear answer. Actually, I don't think the answer exists at all, because you can train every skill in so many different ways and with completely different attitudes and approaches.

But, there is a definite answer to the question which capes are less (or more) common comparing to others. Thanks to Ham, here is a link to Tip.it discussion about it with exact numbers from the highscores. Not many surprises, Runecrafting is where it is supposed to be, but I expected Cooking cape to be the most common, while apparently it is not. Also #11 Thieving was a surprise, I thought it'd be much higher.

Edited: Thank to Mat, here is link to Runescape Wikia page with very detailed info and very latest list.

Buying Runescape Capes

Yet another passionate article about players not getting deserved respect for Skill Capes in "buyable" skills.

I just want to reiterate my view on this topic: there are NO "lowly" 99th in Runescape, every one requires enormous amount of work and dedication put into it. As for how much work, it depends. Some players make a lot of easy money (for instance, by merchanting) and thus able to speed up training of "buyable" skills significantly, but many others train these skills without buying expensive supplies (or spend a lot of time earning money) and for them levels in these skills have the same degree of difficulty as levels in "non-buyable" skills.

As for "deserving respect", skill capes don't make their owner more respectable - players earn respect by other means. You know what I mean.

99 Farming. 99 Firemaking. 99 Cooking.

Well, it was a long way, but the journey is over now. Today I reached lvl 99 in Farming, Firemaking and Cooking skills. It took me about 15 seconds to do: harvest sweet corn, make a fire and cook it - easy enough. Here is the video.

But, of course, it took much longer to get there.
1. Cooking - I actually made money on my journey to 99. If you remember, back in Dec 2007 sharks were dirt cheap, so I bought a bunch, kept cooking them little by little for about 5 months and then sold for profit.
2. Firemaking - took me about 4 months of relaxed leveling and about 35M RSGP, as I was burning exclusively magic logs. My merchanting paid for it, what can I say...
3. Farming - well, Farming took 5 broken spades and several years of playing the game. Never bought a seed and thoroughly enjoyed the skill.

Do you really need to go to 99?

Interesting perspective on getting to 99. I have one 99 skill myself, but I actually agree with the author that 99s are not that important. It is much better just to PLAY the game and have fun in the process. I would rather have all my skills 60+ or 70+ than 2 of them at 99.