Slayer

Slayer is CraftScape's kill-list skill. A master hands you a monster and a number, and you go and kill that many. Only kills that count towards a task pay slayer experience, and slayer levels open a long roster of monsters that will not let you attack them otherwise. Points from finished tasks buy the gear that makes the next task easier.

How a task works

Right-click any master and you get three offers at once: a small task, a medium one and a large one, worth one, two and three points. Small tasks run five to fifteen kills, medium fifteen to thirty, large thirty to fifty. The three are locked in once generated, so backing out of the menu will not reroll them. Take one and it stays your task with that master until you finish it or cancel it.

You hold one task per master at a time, which means up to eight running at once. When a monster sits on more than one of your lists, a single kill counts against every one of them and pays slayer experience for each. Monsters that carry no slayer requirement pay reduced experience unless they are bosses, and everything pays more while you are inside a PvP area. Any kill that ticks a task down can also, very rarely, turn up Larran's key.

Cancelling or extending costs one slayer token, sold four at a time in the reward shop. Extending adds a second helping of kills from the same band and can only be done once per task. Cancelling clears the task so you can ask for a fresh set of three. Typing /task lists every task you are carrying along with your point totals. A slayer cape always hands you the midpoint of a band instead of a random roll.

Picking a master

Turael is the fallback: he stands in Burthorpe, Lumbridge, Al Kharid, Port Sarim, Seers' Village, Burgh de Rott and Shilo Village, so one is usually near you. His list is by far the longest, running from rats and goblins up to blue and red dragons, mountain trolls and skeletal wyverns. Spria in the Lumbridge catacombs is a starter master only. Vannaka in the Edgeville dungeon and Raff in the Taverley dungeon cover the middle of the game, and Achtryn and Catolax are the high-level pair.

Two rules shape what you are offered. Monsters with a slayer requirement appear only once your slayer level meets it. Monsters without one appear once your combat level reaches theirs minus five, so a master's list quietly grows as you train rather than shrinking. If a master has nothing left that fits you, he tells you to come back later instead of handing out a task. A slayer cape lets you reach every master except Spria and Sumona from anywhere.

Slayer points and the reward shop

Finishing a task pays one, two or three points depending on the size you took. Every ordinary master opens the same shop straight from their task menu. The cheap end is consumables: runes in stacks of five hundred, arrows and bolts in stacks of two hundred and fifty, mithril and adamant crossbows, and cooked monkfish at four to a point. Mithril arrows want Fletching 50 and rune arrows Fletching 90. Slayer tokens sit here too, four for twenty points.

The rest is equipment. The face mask and ear muffs are fifty points each, the mirror shield fifty, the spiny helmet a hundred and fifty, the nose peg two hundred and fifty. The mirror shield is worth carrying on cockatrice tasks for the large armour bonus it gives against them. Leaf-bladed swords and spears are seventy-five each, and a leaf-bladed weapon is the only thing that will damage kurasks and turoths. The bonecrusher necklace at a hundred points turns bones into prayer experience where they drop, and nine hundred more upgrades it to the full amount. A rune pouch is five hundred.

Two big-ticket entries are worth saving for. The cursed dragon weapons, the cursed apocalypse wand and the cursed abyssal whip sit at seventy-five and eighty-two points and hit hard, but each carries limited durability and stops working once it runs out. The boss slayer unlock at seven hundred and fifty points opens the whole second half of the skill, and most players go for it once the helmet is finished.

The slayer helmet chain

Four of the five parts come straight from the reward shop: the face mask needs Slayer 10, the ear muffs Slayer 20, the nose peg Slayer 60, and the spiny helmet only Defence 5. The fifth is the black mask, a very rare drop from cave horrors. They want Slayer 58 before you can attack them, and the mask itself needs Defence 15 to wear. Worn alone the parts are narrow: the spiny helmet and nose peg add armour against your task monster, the ear muffs help only against banshees and the face mask only against dust devils.

With all five in your bag and Crafting 55, hold the black mask and right-click a crafting table. That consumes the set, pays a solid chunk of crafting experience and produces the slayer helmet, which needs Slayer 60 and Defence 15 to wear. It folds the whole set together: the black mask's melee damage boost against anything on task, seventy armour points against your assigned monster, and a hundred against banshees and dust devils.

The last step is the upgraded slayer helmet, bought for forty boss slayer points and consuming the ordinary one. It needs Slayer 75. The difference is that the damage boost stops being melee-only and applies to ranged and magic too, which makes it the helmet to want for anyone who kills tasks with a bow or a staff.

Krystilia and Wilderness tasks

Krystilia stands in Edgeville and hands out Wilderness work exclusively. Her list is what lives out there: black, red and green dragons, hellhounds, fire giants, greater demons, ankous, chaos druids, dark warriors, ents, mammoths, rogues, bandits, pirates and a long tail of skeletons, giants and spiders. Her tasks arrive with triple the kill count and triple the points, so a large task from her is worth nine points rather than three. The points per kill are unchanged, but you make far fewer trips back to a master.

The catch is that kills only count while you are actually inside the Wilderness. Take her task, find the same monster somewhere safe, and nothing ticks down. In exchange, slayer experience is higher inside PvP areas. Larran's key, which any slayer task kill can drop, opens Larran's chest out in the Wilderness. One opening pays coins, noted ores, logs, food, herbs, gems or rune essence, sometimes arrows, and rarely rune armour.

Boss slayer and Sumona

Sumona stands in the Warriors' Guild, and she will not speak to you until you have bought the boss slayer unlock from the ordinary reward shop for seven hundred and fifty points. After that she works like any other master, with two differences: her three offers are always three different bosses, and the boss you most recently finished will not turn up in the next set.

Boss tasks are short. Four to eight kills for a small, eight to sixteen for a medium, sixteen to fifty for a large. What she offers is filtered by your combat level. Below combat 76 you see the low end: Obor, Ahrim, Dad, the Giant Mole, Bryophyta and the Evil Chicken. Past combat 121 the pool is the heavy end, the Kalphite Queen, the King Black Dragon and the four God Wars generals. The middle bands cover everything between, Dagannoth Rex and the Kraken among them.

She only has three tasks in her per hour, counted from the moment you take the first. Take the third and she loses interest until the timer resets. Boss tasks pay boss slayer points instead of ordinary ones, and those spend only in her own shop: boss slayer tokens for cancelling and extending, holy sandals, a rune pouch upgrade taking it from five rune types to eight, the upgraded slayer helmet, imbued Fremennik rings, and the dragontooth necklace, which wants an upgraded bonecrusher necklace to buy and gives back a prayer point with each bone it crushes.