Benadryl's Vardorvis guide

[benadryl]

Vardorvis is one of the four new Desert Treasure 2 bosses on Vulcan, he drops the best in slot Virtus mage set as well as a upgrade for the berserker ring to make it a best in slot, and one of four pieces of the new Soulreaper Axe. You can also get the Blood Quartz which can be attached to an ancient sceptre obtained from Muspah, augmenting your blood ancient prayers to be more powerful.

The fight is fairly straightforward once you understand the rotation of the fight; 

Vardorvis will attack with a melee attack that reaches further than the standard 1 tile range. During this fight we will do our best to stay next to him at all times once he is in place in the corner as shown in the video below.
 

 

 

Axes                    

One of the main mechanics in this fight are the axes which Vard can summon in the corners, they will always travel to the opposite side and will hit through prayer and give you a small damage over time if hit by them. The best way to time axe skipping in my opinion is by using sound. In the video you can hear that the axe makes two spinning sounds and then i click the lower marked tile if it is in the corner next to me, this is always timed perfectly to skip it. 
For the axe coming from the far corner, you will want to start on the lower marked tile and click the higher tile when the axe is just above you. I will show all the information for marking the axes etc at the bottom of this post.

Spikes                 

Vard will spawn spikes under/around your tile which erupt after a short time, dealing damage if you are still stood there. This is dealt with very easily by simply running to the lower tile and back once it is safe.
Spikes can also spawn overlapped with axes and sometimes the prayer head attack, if you take some damage don't worry - that's what you have food for.

Prayer Heads                 

Throughout the fight, Vard will spawn a head from the floor near the middle of the room, you can see this highlighted by the red square in the video above. The projectile fired at you will cause your overhead prayers to stop working for a few seconds and some prayer to be drained if you are not praying ranged when it hits you. Simply pray ranged until you see it visually hit you then swap back to melee. This was the trickiest mechanic for me when first learning this boss, I've found if you stand on the higher marked tile when this is shot at you, you can flick your prayer perfectly without Vard meleeing you just after. This was probably the most useful thing I learnt for getting more clean and consistent kills.

 

 

Plugins

 

Better NPC Highlights      

This plugin is incredibly helpful and will allow you to highlight the axes and prayer heads in the Vard fight, simply download the plugin and enter "12225, 12227, 12220, 12226," in the True Tile IDs section.

Menu Entry Swapper       

After my second claw spec in the video you may notice I yellow click through the boss, it is possible to make your shift clicks always click through NPC's when you need to move, if you download this plugin and enable the Shift click walk here option in the NPC Swaps tab you can do this too, very useful in a lot of other places too.

Blindfold                              

I found that the floor spike attacks blended pretty well with the ground, so by using Blindfold I was able to hide the bright floor making the spikes much more obvious. You can download the plugin and untick the "Enable Terrain" box if you would like this.

this plugin only works with GPU, not 117 HD.

Ground Object Hider        

Same as above, you are able to hide the small rocks etc on the arena making it much easier to see and deal with the fights mechanics, simply download and enable "Hide All"

 

I hope this guide is helpful to anyone looking to start fighting/farming Vardorvis, gl. 🙂

 

Edited October 17, 2023 by benadryl

[Jerre]

That kill looked clean af, will have to try it during the weekend if I can find the time

[benadryl]

haha cheers. the ruinous prayers and claws def speed it up but fang on slash is also more than enough for vard 🙂