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Dark Beast Slaying Guide - Common, Uncommon and Rare Drops Dark Beast Slaying Guide - Location, Access, World Selection and Positioning

Dark beasts, like all high-level monsters, can certainly hit pretty hard, and they do have a lot of hitpoints. That said, they are not all that difficult if you are only interested in killing a few. Where they become more of a challenge is when you want to kill as many of them as possible in a single trip, and to do so as efficiently as possible.

In this topic I’ll explore some of the issues involved in fighting dark beasts, and share with you the reasoning that went into my guides for killing them.

Dark beasts have both a melee and magic attack, as mentioned in my general description. If you fight them in close quarters they will use nearly entirely their melee attack, only occasionally tossing a magic spell into the mix to “keep you honest”. This makes them reasonably manageable as long as you stick to melee.

If you try to range or mage dark beasts, they will shoot their “fire blast” attack continuously, doing up to 8 damage each time, and usually hitting well even if you are in good anti-magic armor. This means that you must use Protection from Magic pretty much continuously. Mages and rangers get a lot of their attack bonuses from their robes, which don’t provide good prayer bonuses, so you end up using a lot of prayer potions, ammunition and/or runes to fight them.

In my tests, killing the dark beasts with ranged attacks took at least 50% longer than meleeing. Maging the dark beasts is similarly ineffective, and they seem to have pretty high magic defence as well. Thus, overall, I recommend sticking with melee.

Since dark beasts hit so hard, most players usually fight them with the Protection from Melee prayer enabled all the time. In fact, these monsters have developed a reputation as ones where protection prayers are mandatory, much as is the case when meleeing monsters like iron and steel dragons.

I considered the claim that one could not fight dark beasts without prayer to be a personal challenge to find a way to do it. J And I was successful, but only to a point. As we’ll see later in the guide I found a way to fight them mostly without prayer, though I still use it to a certain extent.

There are trade-offs to be made in considering which method to use. The main advantage of fighting without prayer is that you can save significantly on supply costs; even though prayer potions are cheaper now than they once were, they are still about 5k a piece. The drawback of fighting without prayer is that the method is more complicated, somewhat riskier, and you generally cannot stay as long on each trip.

Dark beasts can be poisoned, and since they do have 220 hitpoints, some players like to use a dragon dagger (p++) to speed up kills. The problem with this, unfortunately, is that the beasts have high defence and you will often miss. You also can’t tell when the monster is poisoned until you see the green “splat”, so it can take a while to be sure that it has taken effect.

I have found that in most cases, the extra damage from the poison during the course of the kill is less than the damage I give up by fighting with a weak dagger instead of a whip or godsword. For that reason, I do not bother with trying to poison dark beasts. The only situation in which I might recommend it is if you are fighting with a whip (which has a useless special attack). You can start with the dagger and unload a few specials into the dark beast; once the specs are used up, switch back to the whip, whether or not the poison took hold. If it did, great, you get a faster kill; if not, you don’t waste too much time trying to poke the monster with a dagger.

There are no great conundrums when it comes to primary weapons, fortunately. The favorite “general purpose” weapon of most high-level players is the abyssal whip, and dark beasts seem particularly weak to it. This will be the weapon most people will use to fight them.

If using a whip, you have three decent options for the shield slot: a rune defender, dragonfire shield or unholy book. The rune defender is normally the best choice because of its extra attack bonuses; it’s my general recommendation. A dragonfire shield sacrifices attack bonuses in favor of far superior defence; it can help you last longer in combat, but it also means kills take longer, and it’s obviously only of value if fighting without prayer. The unholy book is an interesting choice for prayer combat; it gives a much lower attack benefit than the rune defender, but a useful +5 prayer bonus to help prayer potions last longer.

The only weapon I would consider other than a whip would be a godsword. In my tests, I actually found that the godsword was about the same speed as the whip+defender combination, but that doesn’t take into account the possible combat benefits of godsword specials, which can make the godsword much preferable to a whip at the dark beasts.

The Saradomin godsword is particularly helpful because of its ability to heal and restore prayer points. Using those restored points can allow you to extend your trips by 10% or more (Figure 465). The Armadyl version will do extra damage, and if you get lucky with your specs, that can make back the 3% speed difference easily. The Bandos variant can drop the defence on a dark beast making for a faster kill, while the Zamorak godsword’s special is not too useful here.

Godswords also have a +8 prayer bonus where the whip has none, so you can stay in the dungeon longer in using it, whether you fight mainly with prayer or not. Alternately, you can stay for the same amount of time and use some of your extra prayer potions to enable enhancement prayers to speed up kills.

If you decide to proceed with the non-prayer-based combat method, one of your biggest problems is going to be “staying healthy”, because the dark beasts hit hard even with good defensive armor. Adding to this challenge is the fact that you have to waste so many inventory slots to bring with the mourners’ robes necessary to access the mourners’ HQ building. Since you also need to bring with super attack and super strength potions, you’ll suddenly find yourself short on inventory space, making healing a real challenge.

In my experiments, I found that there are two basic approaches to healing that work well: Saradomin brew potions or Bones to Peaches tablets.

Sara brews are now very cheap, and for high-level players, they pack as much as 64 points of healing into a single inventory slot. They also provide another useful benefit for the non-prayer combatant, in terms of a Defence boost. The problem with them, however, is that they drop your Attack and Strength stats, so you must use them in combination with restore or super restore potions. The latter is the obvious choice, and the reason why you will still use some prayer even when fighting without prayer.

Bones to Peaches takes advantage of the fact that dark beasts drop bones; the extra healing is extremely useful (see Figure 466). At the same time, realize that using B2P here is not like employing it to fight bloodvelds or other easy monsters. Dark beasts drop one set of bones, but can easily do far more than the 8 damage that those bones will heal once transformed, so you have to use Bones to Peaches in combination with other methods. Another factor is that inventory management becomes an issue when you need to start collecting bones from every kill; I discuss this in the next subsection.

Whether you primarily use brews or peaches for healing, you will have a few slots left for conventional food, and for these I recommend several full strawberry baskets (five strawberries each). Even though they are slow to use—you must take the strawberries out one at a time—you will get 30 healing from each basket. If you want something faster, use pineapple pizzas (22 healing in two bites).

If you have a Slayer level of 85 to 89, you can fight dark beasts using wild pies. A pie has two bites, each of which provides an initial bonus of +5 to Slayer, +4 to Ranged, and also heals 11 hitpoints. I had a Slayer level of 87 when the dark bow came out and so I did kill a few of them using wild pies, and I can say that it has its pluses and minuses.

The main benefit of using the pies is that, obviously, without them you can’t fight dark beasts at all below Slayer level 90. The drawbacks, though, are significant. First of all, you only get a few minutes of combat before the effect wears off; how long you can fight depends on your level. If you are exactly level 85, you will have less than a minute after each bite, which normally isn’t enough to get even a single kill. At level 87 each bite gives you between two and three minutes, so that’s the absolute minimum that I recommend. At level 89 you can fight for up to five minutes per bite—nearly ten minutes per pie—making this method far more practical.

The use of wild pies increases the cost of fighting dark beasts, since you must either buy the pies, or forego what you could have made by making them yourself and selling them. It also complicates an already difficult inventory management problem, since now you have to find room for the pies in addition to your combat gear, mourners’ robes and potions.

Finally, using the pies is a bit of a nuisance. You have to very carefully watch your Slayer level all the time, because any time it slips back below 90 the dark beast you are fighting will become immune to your attacks. Keep an eye out for any relevant messages and eat another bite as soon as you stop doing damage.

Those who wish to fight using wild pies will want to attempt the non-prayer method if at all possible, since they have to eat regularly anyway. If you fight exclusively with prayer, you will be effectively wasting all the healing that the pies provide, and you won’t have enough room for both the pies and prayer potions you’ll need.

One of the things that people hate about fighting dark beasts is that you have to wear a full set of mourners’ robes to access them. The robes have six pieces, and you also must have an empty neck, weapon and shield slot, so this means you effectively waste 8 slots if using a two-handed weapon, or 9 slots for a whip and shield slot item. Once you get into the dungeon you switch to your normal armor and weapon, freeing up a couple of inventory slots, but you still have those six mourner’s items to carry around.

There’s an option for dealing with this, fortunately, and it comes in the form of our old friend the imp. If you have at least level 71 Hunter, you can catch imps in magic boxes (though I recommend at least level 75 Hunter for imp hunting, as they can be very frustrating to catch for lower-level hunters.) Each imp will then bargain for its release by granting you the ability to send two items to the bank from nearly any location in the game.

What I sometimes do is to bring with three of these boxes. After getting past the mourners and changing into my combat gear, I use the three boxes to send the six mourners’ items back to my bank (first making sure that I have six free bank slots!) Then I alch the boxes, freeing up a total of nine extra inventory slots for drops or other uses (see Figure 467).

The value of doing this really depends on whether you can catch imps, and if so, whether you feel it is worth using them in this manner. The imps take a long time to catch, so some folks may not feel it is worth using them for dark beasts, when many times the beasts don’t drop enough items to fill all your slots in a trip anyway. Also, the three slots taken by the boxes could have been used for food or prayer potions. On the other hand, if you equip yourself for a long trip of 100+ kills, if you don’t use the boxes you are going to leave a lot of good drops on the floor.

One place where this is pretty much mandatory, though, is fighting without prayer using Bones to Peaches tablets. If you don’t get rid of the mourners’ robes, you won’t have enough room to collect bones and also the beasts’ desirable drops.

If you decide to keep the mourners’ robes on you, then you will have little space for juggling drops until you use up some of your potions and food. Just try to do your best to only pick up stackable drops (coins and runes) as well as single-slot valuable drops (herbs ranarr and above, high gems, addy bars and so forth). I should also point out that you don’t have to bring either zero or three imp boxes; sometimes I bring one or two.

One final note: you can store the mourners’ robes in the costume room of your player owned house. This is a way to save bank space if you fight dark beasts only infrequently.

In addition to the mourners’ robes, you need a “new key” to get past the door from the mourners’ HQ basement to the dark beasts. You don’t need to bring the key from your bank, though; you can get another by searching the desk in the head mourner’s office in the basement of the HQ building.

Traditionally, one had to leave inventory room for this key, wasting yet another slot, on top of the ones needed for the mourners’ gear. Fortunately, I found a trick around it. Go with a full inventory to the HQ, then drop a potion on the ground near the door to the dungeon. Grab a new key from the desk, open the door, then drop a second potion on the ground just past the door. Go back through the door to the basement, grab the first potion you dropped, and then open the door a third time to get back to the dungeon. Drop the new key on the ground and pick up the second potion.

Dark Beast Slaying Guide - Common, Uncommon and Rare Drops Dark Beast Slaying Guide - Location, Access, World Selection and Positioning