Switching protection between alternating attack styles

To switch protection between two alternating attack styles, the new protection has to be up on the tick the attack is checked. Your switch click therefore belongs in the 0.6-second window just before that tick: earlier and it may knock out the protection you still need, later and the attack is already through. The switch itself is not the expensive part. Turning one protection on turns the other off, and the tick you turn it on costs nothing, so a perfectly timed switch is free. What makes it hard is reading the next style early enough to click in the right window, every time.

This page works through that tick by tick with Microgrind's Ward Flicking drill, where two Sentinels fire Ember and Frost bolts and you answer with the matching ward. Every diagram and table below is produced by running the drill's own code.

The rule: the right protection on the firing tick

Three rules decide every switch in Ward Flicking, and each one is part of the drill's tested rules:

1. Protection is checked on the firing tick. A Sentinel's bolt is blocked if the matching ward is up on the tick it fires, after that tick's inputs are applied. When the bolt visibly arrives makes no difference.
2. Only one ward can be up. Raising Frost drops Ember in the same tick, and the other way round. There is no moment where both are up, and no gap where neither is.
3. The tick you raise a ward is free. A ward drains one energy for every tick it stays up, except the tick it was raised. That includes a ward raised by switching, so the switch costs nothing on its own.

The game behaves the same way on the second point: the OSRS Wiki lists the protection prayers as conflicting, so switching one on switches the other off (Prayer, OSRS Wiki). The first and third points are covered in detail, drain and all, in Prayer flicking explained tick by tick. This page is about what happens when the next attack is a different style.

From the tell to the firing tick

Every Sentinel shot has a tell: a charge-up that starts a fixed number of ticks before it fires. In Ward Flicking 5: Two Colours the tell is 2 ticks long. The diagram below follows an Ember shot on tick 3, a Frost shot on tick 4 and Ember again on tick 7, and shows the clicks that cover all three for 0 energy.

Read it from left to right, one tick at a time:

• Tick 1: Ember's tell starts. You now know Ember fires on tick 3. Nothing to press yet.
• Tick 2: Frost's tell starts, so Frost fires on tick 4, straight after Ember. Press 1 before tick 3 arrives, and it is applied on tick 3.
• Tick 3: Ember is checked and blocked. Raising it cost nothing. Press 2 before tick 4.
• Tick 4: the switch is applied before Frost is checked, so Frost is blocked and Ember is already down. Switching cost nothing either.
• Tick 5: press 2 again before this tick to drop Frost; otherwise tick 5 drains one point. Then wait for Ember's next tell.

The tell length sets how much time you have to recognise the style and click. From the moment a tell starts to the end of the last window that still catches the shot is exactly tell × 600 ms:

On Ward Flicking 6: Onslaught the tell is a single tick: the charge-up appears at the very start of the only window that still works, so you have one tick to see the colour and press the key. That is why it is the last level on the ladder.

What a switch one tick early or late does

Because only one ward can be up, a switch is not just "Frost on". It is also "Ember off". That makes landing it a tick early far more costly when the two shots are back to back. The table runs both cases: Ember fires on one tick, Frost either on the next tick or three ticks later, and the switch to Frost lands one tick early, on time or one tick late.

• Back to back, early: the switch lands on Ember's own firing tick, drops Ember before the check and lets the Ember shot through. Frost is then up a tick early and drains for it.
• With a gap, early: both shots are blocked, and the only cost is one tick of drain. Early is the safe side to miss on.
• Late, either way: the Frost shot has already been checked when the switch lands. Nothing a tick later can undo it.

Lazy flicking through a switch

A lazy flick raises the ward for the firing tick and drops it on the next one, so it never pays drain. With two styles there is a tempting shortcut: never drop anything, and just switch when the colour changes. Here is what that costs on the same three shots:

Holding the old ward until the switch costs one energy for every tick between the two shots, minus one. The switch never costs anything; the waiting does. How much that adds up to depends on how often each gap comes up, so the table also counts the gaps in 200 generated runs of each two-style level:

In Two Colours every shot is the other colour from the one before, because each style has one Sentinel and a Sentinel never fires twice in a row. In Onslaught two of the three Sentinels share a style, so 33% of its gaps are the same style twice (0% in Two Colours). When that same-style pair is on back-to-back ticks, a lazy flick has nothing to switch to and has to hold for a tick, unless you 1-tick flick it: toggle the ward off and on inside one window, so it counts as freshly raised.

Over a whole run, the three approaches come out like this (200 seeded runs per level, played by scripted inputs that never mistime a click):

Holding is not just expensive. On Two Colours it uses an average of 27.4 of the 30 energy you start with, so in 92 of 200 runs the ward runs dry before the end and shots get through. Lazy flicking every shot and switching on the firing tick earns gold in 200 of 200 Two Colours runs and 189 of 200 Onslaught runs; the Onslaught runs it misses are the ones with back-to-back shots of the same colour, where only the 1-tick flick avoids the drain.

Bosses that switch styles

In Old School RuneScape this is the skill behind fights such as TzTok-Jad, which uses both magic and ranged attacks and gives each its own wind-up animation, so you switch once you recognise which one is coming (TzTok-Jad, OSRS Wiki). Microgrind does not recreate any boss. Its Sentinels are a mechanic remix: a tell, a firing tick and a style, so you can practise turning "I saw the tell" into "the switch lands on the right tick" without the rest of a fight in the way.

Being honest about the limits: Microgrind will not teach you what a boss's animations look like. Watching the fight, or a slowed-down video of it, does that better. What the drill isolates is the timing: one switch per window, landed on the check tick, with nothing wasted while you wait.

How to practise it

1. Ward Flicking 4: Crossfire has one style but shots on back-to-back ticks. It builds the "one press per window" habit and the 1-tick flick you need for same-colour doubles.
2. Ward Flicking 5: Two Colours adds the second style: 1 for Ember, 2 for Frost (tap the matching orb on a phone). Gold asks for every shot warded and 4 energy or less.
3. Ward Flicking 6: Onslaught shortens the tell to one tick, adds a third Sentinel and takes the metronome away. Gold asks for every shot warded and 4 energy or less.

If the switches keep slipping, slow the tick down with the practice aids first (slowed runs do not rank), and read why clicking right on the beat is the riskiest moment. The levels before these, from the first lazy flick up, are laid out in the prayer flick trainer guide.

Quick answers

Does switching protection cost prayer?

Not in Microgrind: the tick a ward is raised, by switching or otherwise, is free. Drain comes from leaving a ward up on the ticks after that.

When exactly should I click the switch?

In the 0.6-second window just before the tick the attack is checked. For two attacks on back-to-back ticks, that means one click in each of two consecutive windows.

Is it better to switch early or late?

Early, when there is a gap: a tick early costs one point of drain, a tick late lets the attack through. With attacks on back-to-back ticks, neither is safe, because an early switch drops the protection the first attack needs.