Throughout Old School RuneScape’s history, players have always sought to obtain the best gear, often prioritizing weapons and armour above everything else.
While saving gp for full Torva or a Twisted Bow is normally what is on players’ minds, sometimes making minor upgrades to the smaller portions of your gear makes the difference in PvM or PvP combat.
Recommended Read: How to Change Name in Old School RuneScape
Gloves in OSRS are a great example of this, as the dozens of available options across all combat styles can provide a few extra offensive and defensive bonuses that can make or break your gear.
But from the dozens to choose, which ones should you reach for and which should you not even bother with? Here, we are going to discuss the best gloves in Old School RuneScape to keep you on the right track with investing gp in the right equipment!
The best gloves to use in OSRS are Ferocious Gloves, Zenyte Vambraces, the Tormented Bracelet, Barrows Gloves, the Regen Bracelet, Holy Wraps, the Family Crest Gauntlets, the Karamja Gloves, or the Combat Bracelet.
Table of Contents
What Are the Best Gloves to Use in OSRS?
Similar to when we covered the best shields in Old School RuneScape, these gloves will not be listed in any particular order.
Instead, we will go through the best ones you can obtain while describing the benefits of each one.
Gloves, and the glove slot in general, are fantastic for providing additional bonuses for stats you may be lacking.
Having a balanced gear setup and compensating for your weaknesses is great for getting the upper hand in combat, whether for high-level bossing or PvP combat.
With this out of the way, let’s get started with talking about some of the best gloves in OSRS.
Ferocious Gloves
Starting off with a melee-based item, Ferocious Gloves result from using a piece of Hydra Leather on a set of Barrows Gloves.
But unlike its younger counterpart, Ferocious Gloves are purely offensive, providing some devastating stats.
Requiring 80 Attack and Defense to wear, these gloves provide +16 offensive bonuses to stab, slash, and crush damage and a +14 strength bonus, drastically increasing your maximum hit.
These stats put this item at the top of anyone’s gear list, as it is the best-in-slot gloves for melee combat.
Hydra Leather can either be bought from the Grand Exchange for around 12m or obtained as a drop from the Alchemical Hydra, which requires 95 Slayer to kill.
Barrows Gloves (which will be mentioned later in this article) can be bought after the “Recipe for Disaster” quest is completed.
Zaryte Vambraces
Switching gears to Ranged combat, we have the most recent addition to this gear list: Zaryte Vambraces.
Requiring 80 Ranged and 45 Defense to wear, they give +18 Ranged Attack, +2% Ranged Strength, and other mild defensive bonuses. They also offer a +1 bonus to Prayer, making them one of the only gloves to do so.
With Zaryte Vambraces offering the best-in-slot Ranged Attack in Old School RuneScape, getting a pair won’t be easy, as they are currently being sold for 150m on the Grand Exchange.
Alternatively, if you want to get a pair naturally (or if you’re an Ironman account and have no choice), they are dropped by Nex at a 1/172 drop rate.
Tormented Bracelet
To ensure we cover all three combat styles, the Tormented Bracelet is the best offensive magic glove.
While it is technically not considered “gloves,” it is still worn in the gloves slot in your equipment tab.
The Tormented Bracelet, which requires 75 Hitpoints to wear as part of the Zenyte category, provides a +10 Magic Attack bonus and a +5% Magic Strength bonus.
While it does not provide any other stats, increasing the damage for your spells is paramount to expanding your magic setup to its maximum potential.
Unsurprisingly, the Tormented Bracelet, along with all Zenyte jewelry, goes for quite a bit of gp on the Grand Exchange, currently being sold for around 10m.
In order to make one from scratch, you first need to obtain an Onyx and Zenyte shard and combine them at the Wall of Flame at Ape Atoll.
With your Uncut Zenyte, you can go through the same smithing process to make a Zenyte Bracelet, further enchanting it with the Lvl-7 Enchant spell.
The entire process requires both 95 Crafting and 93 Magic to complete.
Barrows Gloves
Out of all the gloves on our list, Barrows Gloves are by far the most iconic.
Not only do they come from one of the most infamous quests in Old School RuneScape, but their bonuses speak for themselves.
Unsurprisingly, obtaining Barrows Gloves is considered a major milestone for account progression, as they can be used with virtually any setup.
They provide a +12 bonus to all offensive and defensive stats (besides Magic, which is a +6), and also give the player a +12 Strength bonus.
If you are entering a combat situation where you can’t decide whether to lean towards melee, ranged, or magic, sometimes being a jack-of-all-trades is the best option.
This is especially true if you need to equip a hybrid/tribrid setup for bosses like Dagannoth Kings or Raids.
With these gloves constantly in demand by players, we have created a guide solely on how to get Barrows Gloves, but the simple answer is that they can be bought from the Culinaromancer’s Chest for 130k after completing the “Recipe for Disaster” quest.
For a set of gloves that have the best all-around stats to help you save on inventory space/prevent bringing more gloves for gear switches, completing a quest and spending 130k gp isn’t that high of a price at all.
Regen Bracelet
Taking a slight step back from choosing gloves based on combat, there are other glove-slot items in the game that take more unique approaches to aid players.
One such case is the Regen Bracelet, the onyx-tier bracelet that is a step behind the Tormented Bracelet.
With no stat requirements to equip, this bracelet doesn’t offer much stat-wise, ranging from +3 to +8 offensive and defensive bonuses across all combat styles.
However, the Regen Bracelet has the capability to double the regeneration rate of your Hitpoints.
It is worth noting that this effect stacks with other Hitpoint-regeneration effects, such as the Hitpoints skillcape.
Therefore, if you are doing activities where you passively take a low amount of damage over time (i.e., thieving, agility, some skilling bosses, fighting poisonous monsters.), wearing a Regen Bracelet could allow you to not worry about food to save inventory spaces.
This, paired with the +7 Melee Strength bonus, makes it a pretty effective item to use if survival is your priority.
Holy Wraps
Following the theme of our previous entry, Holy Wraps are another type of gloves that don’t provide a whole lot of offensive or defensive bonuses, but still make up for it in other areas.
Holy Wraps is a glove-slot item that can be obtained either through Elite Treasure Trail caskets or bought from the Grand Exchange for around 1m a pair. Despite the high cost, they only require 31 Prayer to equip.
Going back to their stats, they have no offensive or defensive bonuses at all but instead provide a +3 Prayer bonus, making them the best-in-slot gloves for Prayer (beating even the Tormented Bracelet, which only gives +2 Prayer).
Additionally, Holy Wraps fall under the Saradomin category of items, so they can be used in god-based activities such as the God Wars Dungeon to prevent being attacked by Saradomin monsters.
Family Crest Gauntlets (Cooking, Goldsmith, Chaos)
If you don’t want to spend millions of gp for one pair of gloves, or maybe you want gloves with a bit of versatility at a cheap price, consider looking into the gauntlets received after completing the “Family Crest” quest.
At a core level, these gauntlets offer a little bit of offensive and defensive stats: a calm +2 to Offensive Melee and +8, +9, and +7 to Defensive Melee, respectively. These gauntlets also give a modest +2 Melee Strength.
These gauntlets (called “Steel Gauntlets” at their lowest form) have three other versions that can be converted to when talking to one of the brothers from the “Family Crest” quest.
Turning them into one of the sub-variants will provide additional benefits to a specific activity.
- Cooking Gauntlets (Caleb): Decreases burn rate when cooking Lobsters, Swordfish, Monkfish, Sharks, or Anglerfish.
- Goldsmith Gauntlets (Avan): Multiples the experience gained when smithing gold bars by 2.5.
- Chaos Gauntlets (Johnathan): Max hit of bolt spells is increased by 3.
While you can only have one set of gloves at a time, once you complete the “Family Pest” quest, you will be able to have each set of gloves simultaneously.
Karamja Gloves
For players who like exploring most of the game, Old School RuneScape has multiple achievement diaries that you can complete, with each major region of the game having its own list of tasks to complete.
One of these regions, Karamja, will reward you with Karamja Gloves, the gloves-slot item for the Achievement Diary armour set.
Karamja Gloves come in four tiers, with you being able to unlock each one when you complete a tier of the Karamja Achievement Diary.
However, each of the gloves offers the same +1 to all Offensive and Defensive stats, including a +1 to Prayer.
The main benefit to these gloves is the diary unlocks that come with them:
Karamja Gloves 1
- Boat trips that typically cost 30gp will only cost 15gp (i.e., Port Sarim to Musa Point).
- Shops on Karamja will sell you items for approximately 13% cheaper.
Karamja Gloves 2
- Previous benefits from Karamja Gloves 1.
- Earn 10% more experience when turning in Agility tickets and clearing obstacles in the Brimhaven Agility Arena.
Karamja Gloves 3
- Previous benefits from Karamja Gloves 1 and 2.
- Unlimited teleports to the Gem Mine in Shilo Village.
- Able to access the underground portion of the Gem Mine in Shilo Village.
- Improved prices from the general store in Tai Bwo Wannai.
Karamja Gloves 4
- Previous benefits from Karamja Gloves 1, 2, and 3.
- Unlimited teleports to Duradel, the Slayer Master in Shilo Village.
Combat Bracelet
When skill requirements are too high and completing endless tasks and quests for gloves is too much, you can always rely on the Combat Bracelet.
Combat Bracelets are the enchanted dragonstone equivalent to the Regen Bracelet and Tormented Bracelet. They require no stats to equip yet provide a useful mix of combat bonuses and utility benefits.
Providing +7 and +5 to Offensive and Defensive stats (besides Magic, which is a +3 for both) and a +6 Melee Strength bonus, the Combat Bracelet is a suitable glove-slot item for players who don’t want to invest a crazy amount of gp or time into one item but still want decent bonuses.
It is currently selling on the Grand Exchange for around 13k or can be made by enchanting a dragonstone bracelet (which requires 68 Magic).
Other than this, a charged Combat Bracelet allows a player to teleport to either the Champion’s Guild, the Warrior’s Guild, the Ranging Guild, or the Edgeville Monastery.
Depending on where the Combat Bracelet was charged, a player can use its teleport function up to 6 times (6 if it was charged at the Fountain of Rune in the Wilderness or 4 if it was charged anywhere else).
Those are the best gloves to use in Old School RuneScape!
Do you have any input or suggestions for this article? Let us know in the comment section below.
