Xarpus

Xarpus is the fifth encounter in the Theatre of Blood. The Yarasa King, Xarpus is the last of its kind, and was captured by Lord Lowerniel Vergidiyad Drakan to be used as a boss in the Theatre. Despite his connection to bats, Xarpus does not count for a bat Slayer task.

Xarpus has three phases:

• Recovery (Phase 1): Severely weakened, Xarpus will attempt to harvest energy from exhumed in the ground to restore the remaining 25% of his missing health. This can be temporarily halted by standing on top of the exhumed remains.
• Poison (Phase 2): Xarpus starts attacking the players after enough time has passed from phase 1 and starts off with the amount of health he had starting from phase 1. He will launch poison at players which lightly damages anyone in a 3x3 grid centred around the player Xarpus was focusing. This poison then occupies that tile for the rest of the fight and deals 4-8 base damage each tick a player stands on or crosses over it, which is further scaled up based on the number of exhumed that Xarpus was able to absorb. Standing under Xarpus will deal light damage every tick. Skipping over a poisoned tile will deal a delayed hit.^[1]
• Counter (Phase 3): Xarpus screeches once at 25% of his health after healing and stops launching poison around the arena, instead staring intently at one quadrant at a time. If a player attacks him from the area Xarpus is looking at, he will retaliate using a poison attack with a base damage of 50-75 per hit.^[2] The base damage is then scaled up by a percentage equal to 40% of the relative increase to Xarpus' stats brought about by absorbing the exhumed.^[3]

At the beginning of the fight, Xarpus will splatter poison at the two outermost layers of his arena, barring the six tiles (two rows of three) at the entrance. This results in the exhumed being more clustered and easier to intercept, while his Defence is lowered from 250 to 200 as a result.

Phase 2 is still the same as in normal mode.

In phase 3, Xarpus will immediately look at the direction from which he was attacked after being successfully hit. This can be used to a team's advantage by attacking from different quadrants, as this forced rotation overrides his natural reaction time.

• "Yarasa", the species that Xarpus is classified as, means "bat" in Turkish.
• When examined, the acidic miasma that Xarpus shoots at the players reads Tread softly because you tread on miasma. This is a reference to the poem "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by W. B. Yeats.
• The config name for the projectile shown when stepping under Xarpus is tob_xarpus_guano. Guano is the dried excrement of seabirds or bats. Although technically not guano, stepping under Xarpus will result in the player being defecated on.^[4]