Well, I ended up getting 99 firemaking.

You'd think that I'd feel more invested in a skill in which I collected thirteen million points of experience. I dunno. I don't think it's really a big deal. The way it happened was I needed 92 to get the inferno adze, right? For the Varrock Elite tasks. So I did some training in the Jadinko Lair with curly roots -- this was around when I was getting 99 farming, so it was worthwhile just for the vine herb seeds. And once I hit 92, which was in December of last year, I pretty much stopped there.

And then later, the Firemaker's Curse quest came out, so I started getting a boatload of xp every week from doing the new circus event and Char's little spiral-pattern activity. It turns out those things dish out a ton of xp even if you do nothing else. I got a few million xp just by dropping by once a week for about fifteen minutes at a time.

But then I was like, "Wait, why am I even bothering with this? Firemaking is useless. I'm wasting my time." And I pretty much gave up, because by this point I was already at 97 and able to do literally everything in the skill anyway.

Except then the daily challenges came out, and the firemaking challenges were all like, "Light 13 beacons! Light 13 beacons! Come on, we've got this whole minigame that nobody plays! Light 13 beacons!" Yeah, nobody does that because it sucks.

By this point the bonfire update had been out for a while, so firemaking was a lot easier to train. And so I was basically like, "Screw it, I'm practically there already, I'll just hunker down a couple hours and get 99 firemaking so I can turn off these stupid beacon challenges."

And I did. Took about four or five hours over the weekend. I watched a few videos and then I was done. Meh.

So yeah, I have 99 firemaking now. I guess the cape is kind of cool? I dunno, whatever.