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Dark Beast Slaying Guide - Introduction, Benefits, Drawbacks and Prerequisites Dark Beast Slaying Guide - Common, Uncommon and Rare Drops

Now it’s time to meet our enemy: the dark beast. Below I will tell you what this monster looks like, describe how it behaves, and tell you its statistics. More importantly, I’ll explain how it fights and the most important things you need to know in order to combat it effectively.

The dark beast looks somewhat like an evil cross between a brown bear and a unicorn. It is a large, broad-shouldered, brownish monster with gray claws, and has a menacing face with a long horn surrounded by a collar of spikes (Figure 463). There are seven of them in a room just north of the door from the mourners’ HQ basement, which Jagex added when it introduced the dark bow (smartly figuring that more people would want to kill them now.) There are also several more in the tunnels leading from there towards the Temple of Light, along with a couple of other rooms off those tunnels. Dark beasts are the only monsters in their area.

Here is a summary of their key stats:

• Name: Dark beast.
  
  
• Examine Description: “From a darker dimension”.
  
  
• Level: 182.
  
  
• Hitpoints: 220.
  
  
• Number of spawns: About 15.
  
  
• Respawn Speed: Slow (30 seconds).
  
  
• Aggressive: Yes (permanently aggressive).
  
  
• Attacks: Melee and magic.
  
  
• Maximum Attack Damage: 17 (melee); 8 (magic).
  
  
• Immunities: None, but high defence.
  
  
• Special or Unique Drops: Death talisman, dark bow.

As high-level monsters, dark beasts are rather dangerous, with a maximum hit of 17 and a large number of hitpoints. They are also not only aggressive, but are one of the few monsters in the game that never lose their aggressiveness. This means you will be constantly under attack if you stay within melee range of the beasts, and one will always try to attack you even as the one you just killed is “fading away” before its drop.

In addition to their strong melee attacks, dark beasts can also shoot a magic spell that looks something like a fire blast, but appears to only do up to 8 damage. This magic attack is very strong, and will frequently hit unless Protection from Magic is employed—even if you have high Magic and are wearing good protective gear. The good news about this attack is that the beasts will only very rarely use it if you stay in melee range. Also, if you move out of range they will attempt to close on you to melee, not stand their ground and mage you from a distance. They also will not initiate combat using their magic attack if you are out of melee range. The only time you will see this magic attack more than once in a while is if you try to fight them using magic or ranging attacks.

Dark beasts do something else that, while clearly not a special attack, is worth noting: they will frequently “tag team” if you move while in combat. They nearly always crowd around all trying to get to you as you fight. If you stop while in combat to go get a drop, the one you were fighting will try to follow; if it cannot, a different one may then attack you. Fortunately this does not happen if you just stay in the same spot and eat or take potions.

Dark beasts do not have any particularly special defensive attributes—they just have high defence and a lot of hitpoints. They appear to be weak to slash attacks, and in particular, the abyssal whip seems to hit better on these than I expected, which is good news since most players use the whip as their primary weapon. Despite that, though, I can only average a little better than one kill per minute using my best methods.

You can poison dark beasts to help speed up kills, but there’s an essential trade-off here: their high defence means that a dragon dagger will often not hit. Because of this, I usually do not bother—I find the time I waste trying to get them poisoned is better spent just hitting with a proper weapon. I discuss this more in the topic on strategy.

Dark beasts can be maged or ranged, but very few people do, because it can be very slow and expensive. Again, see the discussion of strategy issues for more.

Dark Beast Slaying Guide - Introduction, Benefits, Drawbacks and Prerequisites Dark Beast Slaying Guide - Common, Uncommon and Rare Drops