Slayer

Slayer is the ordinary skill: a master gives you a monster and a number, you go and kill that many, and you get paid in experience and points. It runs entirely separately from Blood Slayer, which is a boss track with its own task slot, its own points and its own rewards.

Nieve

She stands in Edgeville, one tile north of Blood Krystilia, and she is not attackable. Her right-click carries Assignment and Rewards; talking to her does the same through the conversation.

Ask for an assignment and she names a monster category, a count and where to find them. Kill the count and come back. She will tell you how you are doing, where to look, and how many points you have banked, and she will cancel a task for 30 points if you have gone off it - your streak survives that, so a cancel costs points and nothing else.

She will not trade. The slayer counter is Krystilia's, and the two tracks share one rewards screen.

Where the monsters are

Twenty-seven dungeons are populated for this: the Slayer Tower, the Smoke Devil Dungeon, the Karuulm Slayer Dungeon, the Fremennik Slayer Dungeon, Mos Le'Harmless caves and the rest. If you are not sure where a task lives, ask Nieve - "Where should I look?" names the dungeon her own spawns are standing in, so it can never send you somewhere empty.

Getting there is the Slayer tab of ::teles. Your task sits at the top of it and goes wherever she sent you; below it is one row per category, so you can go and look at a dungeon you are not on task for. Every row lands you in the middle of that camp's own monsters. There is no other route - none of the ladders or cave entrances into these dungeons are wired, so the window is the door.

Bosses are not Slayer tasks here. They are Blood Krystilia's job, and every boss is struck out of the ordinary pool - including the phase forms the wiki files as ordinary monsters.

What a task pays

• Slayer experience, per kill, against the monster she named. Off-task kills pay nothing.
• Slayer points, per completed task, growing with your streak.
• The drops. This is most of the reason to go: twenty-seven dungeons that had nothing standing in them now have their full drop tables live, from herbs and runes up to the leaf-bladed weapons, the occult necklace, the granite legs and the black mask.

Finishing the skill takes about 35 hours and roughly 47 tasks, and pays out around 1,900 points along the way.

The rewards screen

Her Rewards option opens the same Old School screen Krystilia uses, on Nieve's own set of unlocks: the task extensions, the quality-of-life unlocks, and the bigger perks at the top. The extensions are the cheap column and are worth buying early - the whole extend ladder costs less than any one of the three perks above it.

Gear worth having

A black mask, or the slayer helmet built from it, pays a large melee bonus against whatever you are currently assigned - and the mask itself now drops from the cave horrors, so it is something you can go and earn rather than hope for out of a box. Upgrades has the rest of the chains.