New Slayer Boss - The Araxyte (Update)

Article-Link: New Slayer Boss - The Araxyte
25 June 2024


Arachnophobes beware... our latest boss has eight legs and a whole lot of scares to share!




Blog Update - Tuesday, June 25th

Needless to say, many of you were pleasantly surprised by having Araxxor dropped on you out of nowhere last week, and it's exceedingly rare for giant spiders to be a welcome surprise...


Hundreds of thousands of you checked out the newspost and almost 20,000 of you filled out the survey, which gave us a clear set of candidates for tweaks to make ahead of polling next week. We'll try to keep it brief so that you can get back to amassing Slayer points in anticipation!


Amulet of Rancor


While an upgrade to the Amulet of Torture was a welcome proposal for many of you, there were two topics that stood out as leaving some room for improvement:

• The Amulet of Rancor could stand to be a little stronger so that weighing it up against the Amulet of Blood Fury is a tougher call.
• Players don't want to see the Amulet of Torture left dead and buried, or feel like their grind to 93 Crafting was in vain.

On the first point, we're looking to bump up the Melee accuracy stats on the Amulet of Rancor to give it a little extra power against enemies with higher Defence. We'll also be adding some negative bonuses for Ranged and Magic since these shouldn't impact the its intended use-cases and come with the added bonus of keeping the Eclipse Atlatl in check. For the updated stats, check out the image below!



Now let's talk Crafting requirements. Many of you felt that an item which improves on the Amulet of Torture in every way but has a lower Crafting requirement feels a little 'off'. We had a lot of back and forth on this point because there were so many options put forward by all of you!


We saw a handful of suggestions for lowering the Amulet of Torture's Crafting requirement to make some room for the Amulet of Rancor. While we're not opposed to this in principle, we don't believe that lowering or shifting requirements to make room for one specific piece of content is a viable long-term solution. This doesn't rule out the potential for us to perhaps rebalance requirements in the future as a more far-reaching and dedicated project, but at this time we're not wanting to set a precedent for doing this on a case-by-case basis for specific rewards.


In this case, we believe the simplest path forward is to make the associated untradeable Araxxor drop attach to the Amulet of Torture to create the tradeable Amulet of Rancor. This attachment process requires a Crafting level somewhere in the 80s, meaning Main accounts will need the Crafting requirement to effectively sell the drop (similar to vestiges from the Desert Treasure II bosses) but Irons will still require an Amulet of Torture in the first place, effectively requiring 98 Crafting. Mains can still just buy the Amulet outright, so won't need a Crafting level to use the powerful new offering!


We want to be clear that we don't think 'upgradescape' or 'componentscape' should be the approach we take to every upgrade and sometimes we do just want to offer up items that are outright better than an existing item. In this specific instance, the Amulet of Torture's whopping Crafting level requirement makes this trickier to do in a way that makes sense for players, but we want to re-iterate that this isn't the approach we're going to take to every future reward, lest we wind up with component trees and crafting recipes rivalling indie survival games...


Noxious Halberd


A halberd that's viable as a mainhand weapon? After all these years? It's true!


The Noxious Halberd is the first of its kind in Old School's history, a Melee weapon with extra range that can hold its own against high-tier weaponry. While most of our weapons focused on dealing damage and upkeeping high DPS boast weak Special Attacks (or don't have one in the first place), many of you felt that the Noxious Halberd's Special Attack was too weak even as a utility offering.


With that in mind, we're adjusting the Special Attack as follows:

• Energy cost reduced from 60% to 50%.
• Increases your minimum hit on your next attack with the Noxious Halberd by however much you were poisoned for. Meaning if you were about to be dealt 16 damage by poison, using this Special Attack would cure you and your next hit would roll between 16 and your maximum.

We're not looking to go overboard here, the likes of the Scythe of Vitur, Blade of Saeldor or Tentacle Whip don't have useable or noteworthy Special Attacks and we don't think they need to. We're hopeful that reducing the cost of this particular Special Attack might make it more appealing for some niche utility, but we're not looking to create an all-in-one weapon that excels as a damage dealer and sports a powerful Special Attack.


Aranea Boots


These webbed-up walkers were largely intended to be a thematic addition to Araxxor's loot table that wouldn't make huge waves in the later stages of your journey as a player.


That said, many of you wanted to see them get a little bit of a boost, so we're giving them another +2 Strength bonus, totalling +4.



With this added Strength bonus, the Aranea Boots rival the Dragon Boots in offensive potential but lose out to the Primordial Boots, though they have no defensive bonuses whatsoever. We think this puts them in a more interesting spot, since obtaining them for yourself requires a higher Slayer level than both Spiritual Mages and Cerberus, as well as a more challenging encounter than the three-headed Hellhound.


We believe this makes them a more viable 'tribrid' boot for players looking to cut down on switches, but they're still outcompeted by Primordials, Pegasians and Eternals for people looking to get the most bang for their buck!


Extended Anti-venom+


We've not got much to say here beyond "we've made up our minds about the Herblore requirement!"


We're keeping the requirement for these at 94 Herblore just like the Anti-venom+. There's been a fair bit of chatter around Anti-venoms in general and their associated Herblore requirements compared to their 'value' for players, which we've made note of but aren't looking to change at this time for the same reasons we outlined when talking about the Amulet of Rancor's Crafting requirement.


That's all we've got for feedback tweaks! We've included another very short survey just below (or you can click here instead) to gauge your thoughts on these proposed tweaks, so make sure to fill it out if you can spare a couple of minutes.