OSRS Barrows Guide

Theoatrix
25 minutes ago
5 min read

The idea of Barrows is that you defeat the 6 Barrows brothers, which are found underneath burial mounds. One of the chambers will lead to a crypt, where you navigate through the crypt to claim your reward.

Guide Outline

If you would prefer to watch a video-version of this guide, I have linked that below. Otherwise, continue scrolling to read the written-version of this guide.

Requirements

To be able to partake in Barrows, you do need to complete the Priest in Peril quest. This gives access to the Morytania region, where Barrows is located.

It’s not 100 percent required, but you're going to want to have at least level 43 prayer for protect from melee, since without it you will take a lot of damage.

How To Get There

Barrows is located to the east of Morton and to the west of Meiryditch, and the absolute fastest way to get there is by using a Barrows teleport.

You can use the spell on the Arceuus spellbook with 83 magic, or anyone can buy the teleport tablet version off the Grand Exchange and use it without any magic requirements. These are currently worth 2.5k on the Grand Exchange, whereas casting the spell from the Arceuus spellbook is only 1.2k GP.

The second fastest way to barrows is using a Morton teleport scroll and running to the east. Or you could also use Morytania legs 3 and above to teleport to Burg de Rot and run east as well.

Another way to get there which has fairly low requirements is to use the BIP fairy ring teleport, then run east.

Or otherwise, you’re going to have to run all the way from Canafis, which takes a long time, and is generally not recommended, so get some of those teleports.

Barrows Mechanics

Now lets go through the mechanics of Barrows, and most of the damage at Barrows can be negated with the protection prayers.

Dharok, Guthan, Torag and Verac all use melee, and their attacks are all safe with protection prayers, except for Verac, who has a 1 in 4 chance of hitting through protection prayers, so if you have low hitpoints, watch out for Verac.

The Ahrim barrows brother uses magic, and all of his damage can be protected against.

And the final brother is Karil, who uses ranged, and using protect from ranged will lead to no damage.

Complete Walkthrough

So to partake in Barrows, you make your way to the mounds, and using a spade, you dig at the top of each mound, which leads you to a certain brothers grave.

The idea is to defeat 5 of the brothers this way, and one of the brothers chamber will lead to a crypt, which you should leave for last, meaning you should kill the other 5 brothers first.

While fighting a barrows brother, you can use freezing spells to set them in place, and you can fight them safely from a distance, although do keep track of time, especially against Dharok.

Also, while underground, if you haven't done the medium combat achievements, a face will appear on the screen and will drain your prayer.. So every time this pops up, its important to check your prayer points…

Once you've killed the remaining 5 brothers, you can enter the crypt, and in here, the goal is to get reward potential and make your way to the center chest.

Reward potential contributes to the number of regular drops you get as a reward at the end of your barrows run, not the unique rewards. Essentially, if you just want the unique items from barrows and don't care about the runes as much, you should just make your way straight to the centre chest and kill the last brother there.

But if you want the most profit, you should aim to get around 88 percent loot potential, which is obtained by defeating the monsters within the crypts.

If you're going for reward potential, you can bring a salve amulet and fight skeletons until you reach that 88% loot potential.

Then, to make your way to the center chest, only certain doors will be available. So you need to navigate through until you can enter the center room.

Sometimes while you're opening doors, a barrows brother can spawn, which you can defeat, and you could also spam open the doors to force a brother to spawn.

Within each outer room, there are invisible ladders you can use to safespot the final brother in the crypt, but that only works if the brother spawns in one of those rooms.

One way to access the center chest more quickly is to use a strange lockpick item, which allows you to open any door within barrows, even if its not showing an open option. To put it into perspective, with the cost of strange lockpicks, you essentially pay about 50k in GP to save roughly 15 minutes of time, so its very worthwhile.

Then once you reach the center chest, if the final brother hasn't spawned yet, you will spawn the brother when you open the chest. You should then defeat the brother, and then you can loot the chest to get your reward.

Overall, its a 1 in 15 chance to get a unique drop from barrows, and any specific unique piece is around 1 in 350.

Also, if you speak to the strange old man wandering around Barrows, you can start a miniquest which requires you to complete a barrows run. Once you finish the run, you get 20 thousand prayer XP.

Gear & Inventory

Now lets go through the gear and inventory setups for Barrows.

Here’s an example low level setup for barrows, including the Ibans staff with a magic shortbow for Ahrim. In your inventory you'll want a bit of food, some prayer potions, some stat boosting potions, as well as a weapon to get reward potential.

And this is the absolute maximum setup for barrows in case you're interested.. The new eye of Ayak is the best against the magic weak brothers, then a blowpipe for Ahrim.