Vanguard Best in Slot Gear & Strategy Guide

The Vanguard are a members-only encounter that exists only inside the Chambers of Xeric. They were added on 5 January 2017 alongside the raid itself, with a Challenge Mode variant following on 17 May 2018. You do not fight them anywhere else and there is no separate quest or Slayer requirement to face them — the only requirement is being able to enter and progress through CoX.

The three Vanguards have the xerician attribute and are size 3. They are aggressive: once a player steps near one of the three spawn holes, all three erupt from the ground and engage. Because they appear inside a scaled raid, the Wiki notes their displayed combat stats vary with the highest-level player present and are shown scaled for maxed combat stats, so treat the numbers below as the maxed-team baseline.

Reading which Vanguard is which is the whole game here, because you must hit each one with the style it is weak to. The Wiki gives clear visual tells:

• The ranged Vanguard is weak to Melee and is identified by the rocks gathered beneath its tentacles.
• The melee Vanguard is weak to Magic and is identified by its tentacles raised up in front of it.
• The mage Vanguard is weak to Ranged and is identified by the lack of tentacles.

In normal mode each Vanguard has 180 Hitpoints; in Challenge Mode this rises to 280. All three attack at speed 4. Learn the three silhouettes before your first serious raid so you can assign the right style on sight rather than guessing mid-fight. If you want to brush up on the underlying styles, see our Ranged guide and Magic guide.

Every Vanguard performs its attack in a burst of three hits rather than one. The magic and ranged Vanguards use AoE attacks — one hit always lands on the main target while the other two are launched elsewhere — so positioning your team matters. The melee Vanguard simply hits its target three times per attack.

In normal mode the magic Vanguard hits up to 22, the ranged Vanguard hits up to 22, and the melee Vanguard hits up to 18. Challenge Mode raises these to 33, 33 and 27 respectively. Protection prayers do not nullify their damage, but they reduce it by a significant amount, so keeping the right overhead up still matters a great deal. Our Prayer guide covers the overheads if you need a refresher.

This is the defining rule of the room: to harm the Vanguards, damage must be spread equally across all three. If one Vanguard is heavily damaged while the others sit much higher — a difference of 40% in groups of four or fewer, or 33.3% in groups of five or more — all three immediately shuffle and restore to full health. As a warning, a swirling mass of energy appears around them and brightens in colour the closer they are to a forced heal.

To avoid this, their health must be within a similar range of each other by the time they shuffle positions. On their own the Vanguards shuffle every 20 to 36 ticks. They cannot be attacked while in their shell, but any damage dealt just before they shuffle still counts. When they shuffle they lose aggression on their current target. One important detail: if a hit would be fatal but lands after the Vanguard enters its shell, it survives and restores 1 health — so the kill blows want to land while they are exposed.

Because uncontrolled high damage is the thing that triggers the heal, the counter-intuitive advice is to throttle your output. The Wiki specifically recommends low damage-per-hit weapons such as the toxic blowpipe, since lots of small hits are far easier to keep balanced than a few large ones. It can also be worth not activating damage-boosting prayers and unequipping damage-boosting gear when there is a risk of overshooting one target, and knowing the maximum hit of every weapon you bring is genuinely useful for staying under the threshold.

Avoid stat-draining specials as your plan — the Vanguards restore all drained stats when they retreat into their shell, so drains are wasted. Damaging specials are the better use of a spec when you need to top up one Vanguard that is lagging behind. For picking your loadout per style, use our Boss Gear Finder rather than hard-coding a single set, since the right answer depends on which styles your team is covering.

The clean approach is to assign players or styles so each Vanguard is being chipped by the style it is weak to, then keep the three health bars level. Identify them on spawn by their tells (rocks beneath tentacles = ranged, tentacles raised in front = melee, no tentacles = mage), apply Melee to the ranged one, Magic to the melee one, and Ranged to the mage one. Watch the swirling energy: if it brightens around any Vanguard, ease off whichever is lowest and bring the others up to match before the next shuffle so nobody crosses the 40% (or 33.3% in larger groups) gap.

Once all three reach the threshold together, push them down in the same window so the final hits land before they shell. When all three die, the room is complete and the supply drops appear.

The Vanguard room is a supply room, not a gear-unique room — there are no rare weapon or armour drops here. On the first clear all three together drop the Vanguard judgement, a one-time lore book (it is no longer dropped once read). Each Vanguard then drops a guaranteed batch of raid potions tied to its combat style — including Xeric's aid, plus elder, twisted, kodai, revitalisation and prayer-enhance potions — and the room guarantees at least one Overload (+)(4), dropped at a rate of 1/3 up to a maximum of three per room. These supplies feed the rest of your raid, so don't skip looting them.

• Tunnelling one Vanguard. The instinct to focus-fire is exactly what triggers the full heal. Spread damage and watch the swirling warning.
• Bringing only high-hitting weapons. A big max hit makes the health bars hard to balance; pack a low-per-hit option like the blowpipe for fine control.
• Leaving damage prayers and damage gear on. When one Vanguard is close to the others' health, extra damage can shove it past the threshold — drop the boosts when you risk overshooting.
• Relying on stat-drain specials. Drains are undone the moment they retreat into the shell; use damaging specials instead.
• Hitting the wrong style. Each Vanguard resists everything except its weakness, so mis-assigning a style wastes time and unbalances the room.