Zamorak · Phase 7

What this drills. Not reaction — allocation. The whole sequence is fixed and every defensive is a single use, so the question is never can you press it in time but which hit did you spend it on. There are two melee slams and two large chaos hits in a full cycle and you cannot cover all four properly, which is the entire lesson.

The script

Nothing at all happens until the second rune dies — in the live fight you can stand there indefinitely. Once it dies the clock starts and never pauses:

• +9 ticks — melee slam. Devotion, through Deflect Melee.
• +14 — large chaos. Typeless, 50% defence piercing, lands around each player.
• +20, +24, +28, +32 — four small chaos hits. No piercing. Zamorak goes immune on the fourth.
• +35 — second melee slam. Devotion is gone; this is what Divert is for.
• +40 — second large chaos. Immortality.

Why Devotion is the trap

Devotion runs 16 ticks and raises your prayer's reduction to 100%. Cast on the melee at +9 it is still visibly active at +14 and +20 — but chaos damage is typeless, and no prayer defends typeless, so it does nothing there. A learner watching the buff timer will believe they are covered. It also means the earliest you can pre-cast it is exactly +9 − 16 + 1 = 6 ticks before the melee, which lands while the second rune is still dying. Pre-casting is correct; it frees the whole gap to attack in.

Stacking

Mitigation is multiplicative. Every defensive you have up is its own step, so Reflect and Debilitate together on the large chaos give 44% rather than the 25% either manages alone, and Disruption Shield plus Reflect plus Debilitate reaches 72%. On the melee slam, where nothing is pierced, Deflect Melee with Reflect and Debilitate blocks 88%.

Devotion is the exception to the pattern rather than to the rule: it does not add a step of its own, it raises the prayer's step from 50% to 100%, which is why it does nothing at all without a prayer that defends the incoming hit.

Defence piercing

Zamorak pierces defensives, so almost nothing behaves as its tooltip claims. Using the published formula, at 50% piercing on the large chaos: full-block defensives (Resonance, Divert, Disruption Shield, Barricade) drop to 50%, and half-block ones (Reflect, Debilitate) drop to 25%. Two consequences the sim will show you rather than tell you:

• Barricade is a trap. It blocks the same 50% that Disruption Shield blocks for free, while costing your entire adrenaline bar. Its tooltip promises immunity to all typeless damage and it is simply wrong here.
• Reflect is a real downgrade, not a substitute. Without Disruption Shield you take 1.5× as much from the large chaos.

The small chaos hits have no piercing, so defensives are worth double there — which is why they are the cheapest place to spend one, even though they are also the safest to ignore.

The scene

The island is the real capture from the game, laid over rock geometry built by sweeping its traced outline downward in six shrinking, wandering rings to a keel 23 tiles below — so it is an actual floating chunk of Infernus rather than a decal, with loose rock clinging to the rim, lava far beneath and embers drifting up past it. Zamorak is the real model, baked from 14.1 MB down to 2.4 MB (welding duplicate vertices did most of that: 369,592 down to 118,496). The demon is deliberately low-poly — it only has to say "a demon is here and your teammate is dealing with it", and the real model cost 2.5 MB for the privilege.

Nothing marks which runes were called except the telegraph sigils that fly to Zamorak, which is the only tell the real fight gives you — a killed rune simply goes, with no colour cue beyond its absence.

The runes are built as geometry, not textured: E is a stick tapered to points at both ends, B is an upright stem with two bowls, H is three bars crossed through one centre to make an asterisk, V is a stick with two prongs off the same side curving upward, plus a short spike floating in the gap between the stick and the inner prong — four peaks in all, which is what makes it read as a fork. A is the E stick with a single diagonal leg branching just below centre and running down-left, traced off the reference image rather than guessed — 0.916 long at 139.6 degrees, ending short of the stem's own bottom point. Each floats upright, turns slowly, and carries its own point light. An earlier version used the wiki PNGs as alpha masks, which threw away all the interior detail and left them nearly unreadable; this also means nothing external is fetched at runtime.

Telegraphs

• Magic autos and small chaos — a red smoky ball with a lagging trail, launched three ticks before it lands.
• Melee slam — Zamorak bends forward and drives into the ground twice, with impact rings and a camera shake. The model has no rig once baked, so this is driven from the holder transform.
• Large chaos — a solid 3×3 square riding the floor, opaque, turned so it leads with a flat edge, trailing about three tiles of motes behind it so the whole thing reads as a 3×6 rectangle in motion. It spawns 1.2s after the melee and travels for 1.8s, which is 2 + 3 ticks, landing exactly on the scripted hit at +14 — your two independent measurements agree to the tick. It re-reads your position every frame, so it always arrives on time and running away only makes it come at you faster.

The bar across the top

Styled after the game's: a grey track with gold chevron ends, the number reading over it, and a plaque at each shoulder for edicts and enrage. It starts red and begins charging once the second magic auto has landed, climbing until the last rune dies.

Whatever that number reaches is the hit. Not a fraction of it, not scaled — reach 100,000 and you tank 100,000. The bar caps there, but at 100% enrage a normal rune phase only builds it to about 7,000-8,000, which is where this lands. That is why the fill barely moves: an almost-empty bar is what a competent rune phase looks like, and the number rather than the fill is the thing to read. A slow clear pushes it up, and the hit grows with it.

The moment the second rune dies it flips green and shows Zamorak's real health — 200,000, being 100k per player for a duo at 100% mechanics.

The teammate

He travels to each target before working on it — 3s at touching distance up to 5s across the island, so he moves faster the further he has to go rather than plodding. Once the second rune dies he closes the gap to Zamorak in two ticks, which stands in for Surge and Bladed Dive. His HP bars appear over whatever he is currently attacking, so the rune's health is what you read to time your pre-Devotion.

Where you can stand

Movement is restricted to the tiles you can actually walk on, read off the unmarked map — one bit per tile, 74×39, packed into 484 characters. Clicking blocked ground snaps you to the nearest walkable tile rather than refusing the click, and a step into rock slides along whichever axis is still open instead of stopping dead. All nine key positions sit on walkable tiles, which is the check that the mask lines up with the layout.

The dark tiles no longer imply walkable ground. They existed on the reference map to show the island's shape, but in the fight the edge of the lit tiles is where you can actually go. The lit tiles are what the mask is built from; the darker rock is now only ever edge material.

The island edge

The walkable grid is square by nature, so using it directly for the silhouette gave hard axis-aligned corners. The visual island is now a separate, softened shape: the walkable mask grown by about 0.7 tiles, then closed and opened with circular kernels to round concave notches and shave convex corners, blurred, and finally given a low-frequency wobble so it does not read as machine-smoothed. Measured circularity went from 0.114 to 0.328 — near enough three times rounder — adding roughly a tile of visual rim all the way round. The alpha is feathered over that rim so the island crumbles off rather than ending on a line, and rock chunks are packed along the edge, pushed outward along each segment's normal, to build the corners out. Underneath runs a skirt: a vertical wall following the outline, topped level with the floor and dropping four tiles, inset slightly so it sits behind the feathered edge rather than poking through it. The floor is a flat plane and the rock hangs below it, which otherwise leaves a band you can see straight through from a low camera.

None of that is walkable. Movement still uses the tile mask exactly as before, and because the floor art keeps its own lit-versus-dark distinction you can still see at a glance which ground you can stand on.

The podium

Zamorak's end stands 1.25 tiles higher than the main island, and the pinch in the walkable tiles — columns 12 to 17, where the map narrows from 20-odd tiles to 8 — is the slope that walks you up to it. The rise uses a smoothstep so it eases in and out rather than being a wedge. The floor is a displaced mesh rather than a flat plane, and everything reads its height from the same function: characters, the rune pads, the chaos rug and its motes, the impact rings, and the top ring of the rock mass, so nothing floats or sinks at the transition.

Scale

Rebuilt off the tile-marked map. Zamorak's box is 138px for a 5×5 monster, giving 27.60 px/tile, and all six rune hitboxes measure exactly 5×5 at that scale, which is the check. Fitting the rune positions against the earlier capture showed it was squashed about 12% vertically, so every position derived from it was proportionally wrong. Rune offsets from Zamorak now come out as clean integers — B (3,13), H (5,−9), V (17,14), E (26,−14), A (30,16), E (37,11) — which is how you know the grid is right. The arena is 74×39 tiles. The floor is the tiled capture itself with the grid lines inpainted away and the colour lifted, rather than the prettier capture stretched to fit. Registering the other one meant a 30% vertical stretch and it showed — this way the art, the island outline underneath it and the tile grid are all read from a single image, so nothing can drift out of alignment.

Numbers

Timings are measured and verified. Damage values are placeholders at 100% enrage, sitting in the CFG block, and are the thing to replace first — they change the tuning but nothing about the structure.