Retaliation

Retaliation refers to the behaviours of players and various monsters in Old School RuneScape when attacked by players or other monsters.

Monster retaliation

A player using a safespot to attack a blue dragon.

Almost all monsters will retaliate when attacked, so long as they are able to target and/or reach the player. If the player attacks a monster from a greater distance than the monster can attack from, then the monster may retreat. Usually, a monster has a distance check of a specific amount of tiles, or its roam range. That means if a player walks away by that number of tiles (starting at the tile the monster spawns), it would rather retreat when being attacked from that distance; likewise, if the player moves away by this same distance, then the monster may stop attacking altogether.

Safespots

Safespotting can limit or prevent monster retaliation in some cases. Since monsters lack the awareness to react to safespotting, players can utilise a safespot to safely attack certain monsters with Ranged, Magic, or a halberd. When implementing this tactic, however, players should be wary of hostility and wander radius.

Player retaliation

Players have an option in the Combat tab to select whether or not to enable Auto Retaliate. If it is enabled, and the attacking entity starts to walk or run away, then the player will follow and attack while chasing it. If it is disabled, then player characters will not retaliate at all.

Changes

Date	Changes
10 December 2015 (Update)	To prevent some unwanted behaviour where NPCs neither retaliate nor retreat, there has been a change to how NPCs decide whether they retreat or retaliate. In particular, this affects how monsters such as Callisto and Vet'ion will behave when lured to the limits of their wander range. This change applies to all monsters with long range attacks.
30 July 2015 (Update)	A game engine bug affecting the retaliation of ranging/maging NPCs has been fixed. In particular, this affects Venenatis and Vet'ion and their behaviour when they have moved far from their spawn points, so it will make certain safespots considerably less effective, and will have similar effects on other NPCs with long-range attacks.

v t e Combat Mechanics
Combat	Attack range Attack speed Auto Retaliate Autocast Combat triangle Special attacks Hitsplat Tanking Magical melee Magical ranged Ranged magic Ranged melee Typeless
Maximum hit	Maximum magic hit Maximum melee hit Maximum ranged hit Monster maximum hit
Damage per second	Damage per second/Melee Damage per second/Ranged Damage per second/Magic
Mechanics	Aggressiveness Buffs Elemental weakness Flinching Hit delay Retaliation Retreat Safespot Spawning Successful hit Maximum damage cap Flat armour Tolerance Wander radius PJ timer Red-X Line of sight
Other	Single-way combat Multicombat area Singles-plus combat Player killing