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Ultimate Power Barrows Guide - Combat Equipment Analysis and Selection Ultimate Power Barrows Guide - Useful Tips and Tricks

Completing a round at The Barrows is very easy and simple if you want to do it inefficiently—you can just “brute force” all of the brothers using prayer and food. Power Barrows, though, requires brains as much as brawn. That means finding smart ways of fighting, and making use of special combat techniques that let you make the most of the weaknesses of the Barrows brothers and their surroundings.

On this page I will share some of these secrets and tricks, which are mainstays of experienced Barrowers. Some I learned from others, and some I developed or refined myself, but all will come in handy for you as you strive to complete your runs quickly and safely.

This is actually not so much a “special technique” as a fundamental of The Barrows, but I include it here because it is not really obvious to those who have not been there before. Basically, “tank maging” refers to fighting the Barrows melee brothers with magic while wearing full melee armor, even though it results in a negative mage attack. It is the way you will normally be maging in The Barrows using my techniques.

The reason this works is rather simple: the Barrows melee brothers have truly terrible magic defence. It is just so bad that if you have a reasonably high Magic skill level and you keep your mage attack above, say, -20 or so, you will splash very infrequently.

Tank maging is essential, because it lets you mage Torag and Guthan without prayer, counting on your armor to protect you from their attacks, as seen in Figure 430. It is also useful in maging Verac, if you do him without a safe spot. In addition, this method means you do not have to drag with mage robes and then swap into and out of them constantly.

Sidestepping is a technique that makes use of quirks in the RuneScape game engine to allow you to “take a break” while in combat with one of the brothers. You can use this pause to heal up if you are taking heavy damage, take a prayer potion dose if your prayer has run out, and so forth. It is used mainly in the crypts, not the tunnels, except sometimes at the chest. The exact technique used depends on whether you are fighting a melee brother or Ahrim/Karil.

For the melee brothers, what you do is position yourself so that you are standing at the corner of the sarcophagus while fighting. You want the brother to be adjacent to the coffin and your character to be just beyond it. If you then take a step to the side so that you are next to a different side of the coffin, the brother won’t follow you; he’ll just stand there until you move back. This is a bit tricky to describe in words; see the animation in Figure 431, which here is worth more than a thousand words. At the chest in the tunnels, you can do the same thing using the chest itself or the torch standards.

This technique won’t work for Ahrim or Karil since they can attack from a distance. For them, you must orient yourself so that you are on opposite sides of the coffin from the brother. You can then slide to the side, away from the coffin, when ready to attack, and retreat back behind it when you need to pause. This can be especially useful if your brother is poisoned and almost dead (see the discussion of poison later on.)

Of course, while you are standing around, your prayer (if any) continues to drain. This is one reason why, while I include this method here for your information, I rarely actually use sidestepping myself. If you follow my methods properly you should be able to aim for the ideal case of getting into the crypt, killing the ghost quickly, and then getting out.

Safe spots are places where you can attack one of the brothers but they cannot attack you in return; they generally work by putting an obstacle of some sort between you and the brother you are fighting. These locations are found only in the tunnels, and are typically used to kill melee brothers using magic attacks. (You can’t use a safe spot on Ahrim or Karil, since they can attack over obstacles just like you can!)

While some Barrowers consider the use of safe spots “cheesy”, my personal view on this is that Jagex put them in there, so you might as well use them! They allow you to kill dangerous brothers, especially Dharok and Verac, without wasting food, prayer pots or time. Figure 432 shows where the safe spots are.

There are three types of safe spots in the tunnels, the use of which is illustrated in Figure 433:

• Rockpile in the Northeast Corner Room: This is the most obvious safe spot: a big pile of rocks right in the middle of the room. It’s probably the easiest to use (middle right panel in Figure 433).
  
  
• Rockpiles in Outer Tunnels: There are six safe spots in the long tunnels that connect the corner rooms to each other. They are located at the eastern end of the tunnels that run west to east, and at both ends of the tunnels that go north to south. These are small rockpiles that you can use to trap your brother (upper two panels in Figure 433). Note that the piles of fallen bricks you may find in the tunnels cannot be used as safe spots.)
  
  When using the one at the north end of the north-south tunnel at the western edge of The Barrows, the brother will not be opposite you but next to the rock pile, as shown in the middle left panel of Figure 433; don’t worry, it still works.
  
  
• Ladder and Invisible Ladders: The ladder that you came down to enter the tunnels can be used as a safe spot obstacle (lower left of Figure 433). Oddly, so can the spots in the other three corner rooms where a ladder could have been if one of them had been your entry room (lower right of Figure 433)! Yes, you can mage across this invisible obstacle, because it’s a square you cannot step on. Just look for the circular pattern on the ground that marks it.
  

  Figure 433: Using Barrows Safe Spots

  Six examples of using safe spots at The Barrows: regular rockpiles (upper left and upper right); the rockpile in the outer tunnel near the northwest corner room, where the brother is trapped at the side (middle left); the large rockpile in the northeast room (middle right); using a ladder (lower left) and a spot where a ladder would have appeared had that been the entrance room (lower right).

  
  

Note that there are a couple of other less-used spots too, but they’re more difficult to use and you don’t really need them anyway.

While the safe spots make life easy, getting the brothers to spawn in the right places can be considerably more difficult. Sometimes you’ll get lucky, opening a door and finding that a brother has spawned right near a safe spot. You can then move into the right place, watch him settle in opposite the obstacle, and you’re in business. Other times, though, the brothers won’t be so cooperative.

In this case, I suggest using a technique that I call flushing. No, this has nothing to do with toilets! J I am using the word in the sense that hunters do, where it refers to driving game out from behind cover so you can get at it. Here, what we do is open doors to try to get the brother we want to show up in the right place so we can mage him.

Flushing is really quite simple. There are six doors that lie between corner rooms and corridor entrances that both have safe spots. Simply open that door over and over until the brother spawns, and then maneuver him into the right place so he can be maged. Each time you open the door there is a chance he’ll show up; if he doesn’t, then a rat, bloodworm or skeleton will emerge instead. Just ignore them and keep opening doors.

One complication is that the game limits how many monsters can spawn from a door in a given period of time. If you find that opening the door has stopped spawning monsters, switch to another door. (World hopping works too, but that really slows you down.)

Flushing brothers into safe spots is very hit or miss, because how long it takes is random. If the ghost pops out quickly, it’s wonderful, but sometimes you go back and forth through those doors and Verac just refuses to show up (Figure 434). This is part of the tradeoff between fighting Verac in his crypt or in the tunnels, and also why I don’t use a safe spot for Torag or Guthan (though if either shows up where there’s a safe spot already, I will certainly take advantage of it.)

The usual methods of fighting the brothers change when they are in the tunnels, for two main reasons: the opportunity to use safe spots, and the fact that prayer drains incredibly quickly. You will have to adapt your technique based on who your tunnel brother is and what overall method you’re using.

Here’s a brief summary of how I recommend normally dealing with various brothers in the tunnels:

• Dharok: Always mage him using a safe spot.
  
  
• Verac: Always use a safe spot, unless you have tons of food you need to get rid of to make space for rewards on the first run, or are on your last run and have leftover food you don’t need. In those cases you can mage him wherever he shows up, or at the chest.
  
  
• Ahrim: Try to get him at the chest, if possible, so you can prepare. Take a prayer potion, use DDS specs and try to finish him off before prayer runs out. Also see the next subsection for another idea, and the subsection below on the special Saradomin godsword technique.
  
  
• Karil: High level players can generally melee him without prayer if they have lots of health and food; otherwise, use the same method as for Ahrim. Again, you are better off fighting him at the chest if you can, rather than having him surprise you. The subsections below on poison and the Saradomin godsword also apply.
  
  
• Torag and Guthan: Tank mage without prayer, unless they spawn in a room or tunnel with a safe spot.

Bear in mind that if you are avoiding Verac’s crypt, you will likely have to deal with two brothers in the tunnels: Verac plus your tunnel brother. If the latter is Ahrim or Karil, watch out for them while trying to flush Verac into a safe spot. If your tunnel brother is Torag or Guthan, then use the safe spot for them if they show up. If your tunnel brother is Dharok, then you want to flush both him and Verac anyway.

Ahrim and Karil can be extremely annoying in the tunnels, because your prayer will be drained away—even if you take a prayer pot dose, it will probably be gone before you finish the brother off. Well, that’s where your trusty DDS comes in.

The method is simple. As soon as you see Ahrim or Karil show up, take a prayer potion dose and then slap on the appropriate protection prayer. Use as many specials as you can, then keep fighting until your prayer runs out and you start to take damage. Then, retreat! J If your brother appeared after opening a door, then open the door again to get away from him. If you got Ahrim or Karil at the chest, then run around to the other side so he can’t get at you. Then just wait until the poison finishes him off.

Like sidestepping, I don’t do this very much any more, because I can usually melee either Ahrim or Karil pretty quickly, and I don’t like standing around waiting for the poison. It’s good to know that this is an option, though, if you need it.

One warning: if you do this using a door, watch out for twin brothers popping up. Don’t wait until you are nearly dead to go back out the door, or you may find yourself standing in Lumbridge!

If you are lucky enough—or rich enough—to own a Saradomin godsword, then you are in for a real treat when you take it to The Barrows. Note that I am referring to the godsword with the Saradomin hilt, here, not the “Saradomin sword” which is a different item.

The Saradomin godsword (SGS) has a special attack that restores your Hitpoints by 50% of the damage dealt and your Prayer by 25% of the damage dealt. The minimum restored is 10 Hitpoints and 5 Prayer points, as long as at least 1 damage is done on your opponent. Each special takes 50% of the special attack bar.

As useful as this is under normal circumstances, it is truly phenomenal at The Barrows, because of the fact that your prayer drains constantly there. In many situations you will need a small number of prayer points to kill one of the brothers, but a whole prayer potion dose will be overkill. The SGS allows you to quickly get a few prayer points and heal a bit of health at the same time, letting you kill certain enemies without using prayer potions at all.

I call this the “spec and pray” technique. Suppose you just started a run on a multi-run trip. You took your Sara brews, super restore and super attack potions, fought Dharok using the prayer from the super restore, and then finished off Karil with the leftover prayer points. You still have 112 hitpoints (over maximum from the brew) and now want to get Ahrim. Here’s what you do:

1. Enter Ahrim’s crypt and click on his coffin to start fighting. Do your best to damage him as much as possible.
   
   
2. If he gets you down at least 10 hitpoints from your normal maximum hitpoints, click the special bar to activate it, then switch to your prayer interface.
   
   
3. After the special goes off, see if you got any prayer points. (You will unless you hit a zero, in which case sometimes you will and sometimes you won’t.)
   
   
4. If prayer points show up, then turn on Protection from Magic and keep attacking him. If they don’t, try the spec again. If the spec fails a second time (rare) you probably will have to fall back on a prayer potion dose.
   
   
5. If your prayer runs out and Ahrim still has a lot of health, repeat steps 2 through 4 a second time.

Note: Don’t do both specs at once if the first succeeded, because every fifteen seconds your prayer drains and it will take away the points from both specials.

I’ve tried this many times and it works well if you have reasonably high skill levels. It is of course more risky than using prayer potions, but on average, I can save up to 10 prayer potion doses when doing a trip of nine runs to the chest using my SGS, which really adds up. Another nice benefit of this trick is that if it turns out that Ahrim is your tunnel brother, you haven’t wasted a prayer potion dose that you didn’t really need. (Yeah, you could use it on another brother, but it wasn’t strictly necessary.) You can then save your godsword specials and do the same trick on Ahrim (or Karil) in the tunnels.

You can also do the same thing if Ahrim is your tunnel brother, as shown in Figure 435.

Figure 435: The Saradomin Godsword “Spec and Pray” Technique

I hit Ahrim with my SGS special, and will now put on Protection from Magic and try to kill him off. As you can see, I can still do one more spec if I need it.

Ultimate Power Barrows Guide - Combat Equipment Analysis and Selection Ultimate Power Barrows Guide - Useful Tips and Tricks

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