Xarpus Best in Slot Gear & Strategy Guide

Xarpus is the penultimate room of the Theatre of Blood, fought after the Maiden, Bloat, Nylocas and Sotetseg rooms and before the final Verzik Vitur encounter. You do not access him directly — getting to his room means progressing through the raid, so “requirements” for Xarpus really means the requirements to run ToB at all and to survive the rooms before him. The only hard requirement to enter the Theatre of Blood is completing the Priest in Peril quest, which unlocks access to Morytania; everything else is gear, stats and team coordination rather than a quest gate.

The encounter is wholly mechanical. Xarpus has almost no offensive Defence-bypassing power early on; the danger is self-inflicted — standing in his poison, or attacking him at the wrong moment in the final phase. Treat the room as a discipline test: positioning and timing matter far more than raw Strength here.

Xarpus has a flat 50% elemental weakness to wind spells (added 25 June 2025), but in practice he is most commonly killed with Ranged in a standard Theatre of Blood setup, because Ranged lets your team hold position and pick safe attack angles in the final phase. His Magic defence (220 in normal mode) is much higher than his Ranged defence (100), which is one reason teams lean on ranged or chinning damage rather than spellbook casting despite the wind weakness.

Bring the ToB-standard ranged gear for your account — high-tier ranged weapon, void or proper armour, and the best ammo you can run. Rather than memorise a fixed list, plug your stats into our Boss Gear Finder above to see what your account can actually equip for this room. A high Prayer level to run protection and offensive prayers throughout the raid is assumed.

Because Xarpus is poison-heavy and his damage scales up in phase 3, the supplies that matter most are healing food, Saradomin brews/restores, and a clear head for movement. Note that Xarpus is fully poison and venom resistant (100% resistance to both), so you cannot poison or envenom him — bring damage, not poison weapons, for the kill itself.

• Plenty of food and brews — his poison floor chips you constantly if you misstep, and the phase-3 counter can hit very hard.
• Your best ranged or chinning loadout and ammo for the damage phase.
• The same restore/prayer-supply mix you carry for the rest of the raid — you are mid-ToB, not on a fresh inventory.

Xarpus starts the fight severely weakened and does not attack. Instead he tries to harvest energy from exhumed remains in the ground to restore the remaining 25% of his missing health. Each exhumed he successfully absorbs not only heals him but also buffs his later damage — both the phase-2 poison and the phase-3 counter scale up based on how many exhumed he soaks.

You stop this by standing on top of the exhumed remains, which temporarily halts that absorption. Spreading the team across the exhumed to intercept as many as possible keeps Xarpus weaker and, critically, keeps his later attacks from being scaled into one-shot territory. This is the most important phase to play well — sloppy phase 1 makes the whole fight harder.

After enough time has passed in phase 1, Xarpus begins attacking, starting from the health total he had at the start of phase 1. He launches poison at players, lightly damaging anyone in a 3x3 grid centred on the player he is focusing. That poison then occupies the tile for the rest of the fight.

Standing on or crossing a poisoned tile deals 4–8 base damage each tick, scaled up by how many exhumed Xarpus absorbed in phase 1. Standing directly under Xarpus deals light damage every tick as well. Skipping (running) over a poisoned tile delivers a delayed hit rather than letting you escape it. His underlying attack is typeless ranged poison on a 4-tick attack speed with a max hit of 11 in normal mode (6 in entry, 11 in hard). The play here is simple to say and hard to do: keep moving onto clean tiles, never park in poison, and don’t hug the boss.

Once Xarpus is healed and then lowered below 25% of his health, he screeches and stops launching poison around the arena. Instead he stares intently at one quadrant of the room at a time. This is the signature mechanic: if you attack him from the quadrant he is looking at, he retaliates with a poison attack of 50–75 base damage per hit — then scaled up by a percentage equal to 40% of how much his stats were boosted by the exhumed in phase 1. A well-fed phase 1 can turn this counter into a near-instant death.

The rule is therefore: only attack Xarpus while he is looking away from your quadrant. Watch his gaze, hold your attacks when he turns to face you, and resume when he looks elsewhere. In hard mode he immediately turns to look at whichever direction last hit him, so coordinated teams attack from different quadrants to force his rotation and override his natural reaction time — but this also means everyone must track the gaze tightly.

Put together, a clean Xarpus looks like this:

• Phase 1: Spread out and stand on exhumed to block as many absorptions as possible. Minimise his heal and his damage scaling.
• Phase 2: When he starts attacking, DPS him down while constantly stepping onto fresh, un-poisoned tiles. Avoid standing under him and never linger in the spreading poison.
• Phase 3: Below 25% he screeches and begins staring. Attack only when he looks away from you; freeze your attacks the instant he faces your quadrant. Finish him off in the windows he isn’t watching you.

In hard mode, the fight opens with Xarpus splattering poison over the two outermost layers of the arena (sparing six entrance tiles), which clusters the exhumed closer together and actually makes them easier to intercept — and his Defence drops from 250 to 200 as a trade-off for that opening splatter.

Xarpus himself drops only The wild hunt, a book that is always given and is no longer dropped once you have read it — it is lore, not loot. The actual valuable rewards from clearing the Theatre of Blood are rolled from the raid’s reward chest after the final encounter, not from Xarpus directly, so they are not listed on his own page. Use the drop table above for the verified, sourced loot rather than any figure quoted from memory.

• Ignoring phase 1. Letting Xarpus absorb exhumed both heals him and scales up his phase-2 poison and phase-3 counter. A lazy phase 1 is why a later hit suddenly deletes someone.
• Standing in poison or under the boss. Poisoned tiles persist for the whole fight at 4–8 (scaled) damage per tick, and standing under Xarpus chips you every tick too.
• Running over poison to “dodge” it. Skipping a poisoned tile still lands a delayed hit — route around it, don’t sprint through.
• Attacking into his gaze in phase 3. Hitting him from the quadrant he is watching invites a 50–75 (scaled) counter that can one-shot. Hold attacks until he looks away.
• Bringing poison/venom weapons for the kill. He is 100% resistant to both — that damage is wasted.