Old School RuneScape
Holy fucking shit y'all, holy fucking shit. I managed to beat one of the hardest quests in the damn game. It took me probably at least TWENTY FIVE attempts to beat Vanstrom Klause (the final boss).
Like lemme just explain to y'all how difficult this boss fight is:
The quest Sins of the Father is officially classed as a Master-level quest in OSRS but Vanstrom's difficulty is
far beyond the normal difficulty for bosses in Master-level quests, he's basically a Grandmaster boss in a Master quest.
There are two stages to the final boss fight against Vanstrom:
In stage 1, Vanstrom has 750 hitpoints and uses a magic-based attack that has a maximum hit of 24 (for context - the maximum hitpoints you can have as a player without boosting is 99 - so he could hit you for a maximum of roughly 1/4th of your max HP if you had 99 HP).
Thankfully, if you use the Protect from Magic prayer during the fight, it does weaken his max hit by half and now his max hit is only 12 instead, so wear armor with strong magic defence bonuses and pray against magic and that will help.
Seems simple enough, right, what's so difficult here?
Well, he also has the ability to heal himself slightly by a few HP when he lands a hit on you (not every time) and an attack that will slightly lower your Attack level.
And then there are the special attacks, he has three of them:
1. My pets will feast on your corpse! - He'll summon an acidic bloodveld, which you must then quickly make a switch to a ranged weapon (as you have to use a melee weapon called the blisterwood flail in your fight against Vanstrom, as being a vampyre, he can only be damaged) to attack and kill the bloodvelt from a distance because if it reaches you, it will explode and hit you for 35-50 damage.
2. Blood will be my strength! - He'll summon a blood orb that
appears to just be 1x1 tiles in size but is actually 3x3. This increases the damage of his magic attacks, even with Protect from Magic. What you'll want to with this is walk
around the blood orb - remember that it is 3x3 and not 1x1 like it appears - and Vanstrom will walk into it to get near you, it'll explode and damage him - the highest damage I saw it do to him was 40 damage. If you accidentally walk into it yourself, you'll be damaged for over 47 hitpoints. (Or you can just wait for the blood orb to disappear if you're high enough level)
3. Stare into darkness! - He'll turn your screen dark and hit you for 40+ damage. To avoid this one, you must not be facing Vanstrom when he does this attack. Relying on reflex is possible (just quickly clicking away from him when you see the text above him) but too difficult, so the 'better' strategy is to always step away from him after you attack him and before he can do his attack.
These special attacks thankfully do have a pattern - while the first one can happen at any time during the fight, afterwards, he'll do 9-12 regular attacks and then one of his special attacks and he does not repeat the same special attack twice in a row (so for me, if his last special attack was Stare into darkness! I would not do the 'hit and then step away from him' strategy because I
knew that he would not do Stare into darkness! again for the next special attack).
Stage 1, honestly, is somewhat easy once you figure out the strategy involved. Not like 'Oh hahaha yeah it's actually so easy' but avoiding the special attacks and stuff is easy once you do a few tries.
Then comes stage 2.
In stage 2, he heals himself to 200 hitpoints and stops doing his special attacks and instead begins to summon waves of 10-15 randomly located lightning bolts every couple of seconds. These bolts can hit you for up to
40 damage and can be anticipated by watching the shadows on the floor and avoiding the tiles where the lighting will strike.
His regular attacks will now also hit with 100% accuracy and deal between 0 and 10 damage and are unaffected by protection prayers.
You absolutely have to be paying attention to multiple things during this second phase because it is
so fucking easy to either get whittled down by his hits or destroyed by lightning. You need to be sure you're constantly attacking him while avoiding the lighting bolts, keeping track of your health, healing up wihen it's safe. Like you can easily die in a few seconds basically if you fuck up.
I had literally
two hitpoints left and zero food when I got in the final hit against Vanstrom.
TWO HITPOINTS AND ZERO FOOD.
If I had not gotten that final hit against him, I would have died (again). Luckily you can get your items back (it just costs you 50K GP which is like...nothing to me, really) but still.
Goddamn,