Pest Control/Strategies

There are many possible ways to win a game of Pest Control, this article lists some of the more effective and common strategies.

Defend Knight
There are several ways to defend the knight. Fundamental strategies are:
 * A few players stay near the knight and kill shifters who attack.
 * Close the gates! Most monsters cannot attack through closed undamaged East and West gates.
 * A couple players defend the South wall as monsters can attack from outside this wall only.
 * Gang the portals and destroy them quickly. Ends game faster, and heals Void Knight.
 * Attack and kill anything attacking the Void Knight.
 * Some people use the brawlers as walls to prevent themselves or the knight from being harmed, so DO NOT kill the brawlers that people are using!
 * Some people also use splatters to damage the monsters attacking the Knight greatly.

Portal attack
Each portal is weak against one or more attack style.


 * South east Portal/Yellow - Slash
 * South west Portal/Red - Crush or Stab
 * West Portal/Purple - Range
 * East Portal/Blue - Magic

Changes to Portals
On 17 July 2007, as part of their update to the game, Jagex introduced a shield on the portals. Players are not able to attack portals while the portal's shield is up; all portals start with shields up, with the first portal's shield disabled by the Void Knight 15 seconds into the game. Every 30 seconds, another shield is disabled until all portals can be attacked 1 minute and 45 seconds into the game. This was introduced to counter the ability of high levels to play 30 second games and gain massive amounts of experience. Most games are still finished in under three minutes (any boat landing).

Defensive measures

 * Keep the gates closed. In the spaces immediately outside the gates, Defilers and Torchers cannot attack the Void Knight. Instead, they will all line up outside the gate, waiting patiently for it to be opened or until they are killed. The defilers and torchers on either side will still attack through the air, but keeping the gates shut will completely stop those lined up directly outside of the gate. If a player really needs to get back outside the fort, check the East gate first, as it has a barricade that often protects the gate from attack for a longer time.


 * The gates can all be broken by ravagers or splatters. When the gates are damaged, they can become unmovable until repaired. At the East and West gates, the pests only fire if the gate is breached or open. East/West side pests do not shoot at the Void Knight from the sides of the gate. This is why it is important to attack the South portals first whenever possible. South side portals are the portals that spawn the pests that kill the Knight quickly. As long as the East and West gates are kept repaired and closed, no damage to the Knight occurs from the sides.


 * A common reason for losing a game is a spinner getting trapped in front of the portal, and one or more Brawlers blocking access to the spinner. When this happens, attack the Brawler until it changes its focus from the player who caused this problem to you. Once the brawler is facing you, walk backwards and the brawler will chase you. When the brawler does this, the logjam will free up and people can then deal with the spinner. If there are multiple brawlers, repeat until the problem is resolved. This usually happens on the Purple portal when someone keeps pushing the monsters toward the portal rather than killing them closer to the gate.


 * Rangers and mages are particularly useful for drawing spinners away from portals as spinners will follow but only if there is nothing blocking them from the attacking ranger or mage.


 * If you want to be on defence, there are four places you should look at. They are set in order of importance.
 * On the platform with the Void Knight. This is a good place for lower level players. You are within easy range of the lander in case you die, and there are always plenty of Shifters attacking the Void Knight.
 * Outside the South gate. From here, you can close the doors after all those people who refuse to close the gate. You can also kill all the defilers and torchers that are firing over the walls. Do not waste your time on those who are stuck outside of the gate and cannot fire unless there are no other tasks that need your attention. The South Gate is always more important to defend than the east or west gates because the pests from both the south-east and south-west portals will attack from there. Their magic and range attacks can fire over the wall and kill your knight if not dealt with.
 * The East or West gate, if it is broken and you did not bring an axe and hammer to repair the gate. Stand just at the gate on the South square. You will block the Defilers and Torchers entering the area. The rest will line up in a polite little line waiting for you to kill them. If you stand in the right place, only the one in the front will be able to attack. If someone is standing in front of the line, hit each other monster in the line so they all start attacking you. Then when the first in line dies, all the rest are attacking you instead of the Void Knight. Make sure to kill all splatters and ravagers as soon as they show up, or they will damage the gate and make your job a lot harder!


 * Consider wearing dragonhide armour to the game. It blocks magic, melee, and range in good amounts. This is useful since all three styles of combat are seen in Pest Control.


 * An effective strategy to reduce the damage on the knight is to deliberately distract every monster you can. If you can hit the pest before it "sees" the Void Knight and starts firing, the monster will shift its attention to you - which means it is ignoring the Knight. Protecting the Knight is the objective, not protecting yourself from dying. Meleers covering the south east and south west portals should attack ranger pests before they start firing at the knight, if done right, they will attack the meleer instead of the knight.This is helpful if you are defending the knight from shifters.


 * Try different attack styles on each type and strength of monster. Most of the monsters are much weaker to the defence style than to attack or strength.


 * Turn off auto-retaliate in your attack options. If the option is on, your character will run around randomly responding to being hit through the air. This makes your character much harder to control, should several monsters attack from different directions.


 * You can use a brawler to block ranger attacks. By attacking a brawler and making it follow you, you can lure it over to the knight, once it is in place, put on protect from melee and make sure no one attacks it. The brawler will automatically stop shifter teleportations over it, and will stop all the rangers attacking the knight on the side that the brawler is blocking. Just make sure no one attacks it or else your plan is foiled. This strategy alone can save the game, especially if there is a large amount of rangers attacking the knight.

Offensive measures

 * When attacking a portal, stand in front of it but one step to either side of the exact centre between the portal and the Void Knight. As enemies spawn, they will cluster around the portal unless they have a clear path towards the fort. If a player is anywhere but at this location, they will not be able to fight their way there to attack any Spinners that appear. Even if the player manages to kill surrounding monsters blocking their way, there will be half a dozen others that have spawned while the player was fighting that will swarm into the open space. The player will then just watch helplessly as the Spinner(s) heal the portal and the player's Void Knight's health gradually deteriorates. Standing on the centre square hides the spinner from the other players, and the player will be unable to attack the spinner unless there is an open square next to them. Standing behind the portal is effective at protecting the player, as long as another player is properly positioned in front and does not die.
 * Use prayer bonuses appropriate to the style of combat used. In an offensive game, it helps to equip gear that increases offensive capabilities at the expense of defence.
 * Use the special effect energy. The Dragon Battle Axe (in combination with a restore potion), Dragon Dagger, Dragon Halberd, Dragon Two-Handed Sword, the Magic Composite Bow, and the Magic Shortbow all have special effects that can be of helpful use in offensive PC games ( The Dragon Two-Handed Sword's special attack can hit surrounding "pests", making it quite effective). Special attacks also often help to quickly destroy the portals.
 * Spinners will quickly heal the LP of a portal, and must be dealt with as fast as possible. It is not necessary to kill the Spinners - only get them to shift their focus to attacking players instead of healing the portal (remember that any spinners on a portal that is destroyed will explode and poison nearby players). If the portal is regaining health, it means there is a Spinner that has not been dealt with yet. Spinners also make a specific sound with healing the portal, even if there is no spinner in sight. Use Right Click menus to pick the spinners out of the hordes of monsters that often accumulate in front of the portal.
 * Ancient Magicks are very useful, since you can target multiple enemies with some of the spells. This is particularly useful in situations where Spinners are out of reach from melee players. However, the runes required are very expensive, and you only get half the normal amount of experience during Pest Control.
 * Ranging with Chinchompas is very effective at Pest Control as it hits multiple targets in multiple squares. Like Ancient Magicks, this is very effective in dealing with Portals with piles of enemies. Also like Ancient Magicks, the high cost of obtaining them and the reduced experience you get from pests make this a tactic only for the very rich player.
 * The towers are rarely used in this game, but the ideal team will have 6 high level mages or rangers in the towers to pick off unreachable spinners or brawlers. Also a thing to do is to get a mage to kill a splatter that is near a monster to kill them both (make sure no players are around), have 3 high level melee players with the Void Knight, and the rest of players attacking a portal (attack them all together).
 * Being a monster itself, each portal has a weakness which makes attack easier. The blue (East) portal is weak to Magic attacks. The purple (West) is weak to ranged attacks. The yellow (south-east) portal is weak to melee slash. The red (south-west) portal is weak to melee crush.
 * In an offensive PC game, monitor your hits and keep an eye on the other portals. The main point is to reach 50 hits before the game is over. When large numbers of high level players attack the portal, switching to another enemy may produce enough hits to reach 500, without adversely impacting the time to close the portal.
 * The Void Knight will weaken the shields of the portals in one of six possible orders. They are:
 * 1) Blue-Red-Yellow-Purple
 * 2) Blue-Purple-Red-Yellow
 * 3) Purple-Blue-Yellow-Red
 * 4) Purple-Yellow-Blue-Red
 * 5) Yellow-Purple-Red-Blue
 * 6) Yellow-Red-Purple-Blue
 * Note that if the first portal dropped is purple, then the red portal will be dropped last, and same for yellow and blue portals. Also, the red portal is never dropped first. Knowing what portal(s) to head to after the previous one helps reduce both time and energy wasted going back and forth.


 * When ranging a portal and using an Ava's device, to retrieve your arrows for certain portals stand on the south western sides to save time in not having to grab your arrows. If you so chose to pick your arrows up they can be grabbed from the south-western corner of all portals. This also allows for a player to be in a safe spot from monsters except for the eastern portal where one will be in the open and still be a target for monster attacks.


 * Ruby bolts (e) provide useful when ranging if there are no higher level players to help kill portals. These allow for a player with at least 46 range to achieve high hits such as 500 (400 when in the level 40 boat game) on a portal when it is at full health.

Pest Control clans

 * Pest Control clans are a group of players that play the mini-game as a group. The style of PC game depends on the offensive capabilities of the team, so PC clans tend to cluster around a certain range of combat levels.


 * When the balance of a PC clan is disturbed, such as when a group of lower levels wanting to play the game, the players of a clan tend to "hop" to another RuneScape world. Usually the clan uses a scout to select a world and all players migrate to the new world. Communication between clan members used to be very low to non-existent. In those cases, the private messages are turned to friends and even can be completely off when the Pest Control clan uses another communication channel (such as IRC) to announce world changes. Following the addition of clan chat this problem was fixed.

Communication

 * The landing boat lands on the North Side of the island, so new players are often confused and do not realise that South is in front of the boat, People are instructed to "Go East" or "Go West", then people go in the opposite direction. Telling people colours of portals is less likely to cause confusion.


 * Not all players are experienced in the game. Give them advice if they ask.


 * A lower combat player in a purely offensive game still can help by dealing with spinners around the portal. This can allow the attackers to concentrate on the portal.

Tips

 * It is important to note that since the update, experience is gained at half the usual rate in game (the bonus from wearing sacred clay items will cancel this penalty). Because of this loitering around portals killing monsters is no longer as effective in terms of XP gain. The experience gained from the reward usually beats the experience gained during the game from "portal hanging" therefore a player should play "for the win" rather than letting others deal with portals while Pest Control points gained.


 * Using Pest Control to gain experience in ranged, strength, magic, attack or defence can leave a player with less Constitution experience than usual. When considering gaining experience in any of these skills using Pest Control if you are planning to remain at a "normal" Constitution level you will need to use roughly 1 point on LP for every 3 used on any aforementioned Combat Skill.


 * If prayer is trained using Pest Control saving the money gained in game can supplement your prayer experience if buying Dragon bones with the money gained. This method can almost double experience gain for prayer provided that the player wins most games.
 * It is recommended to use potions for offensive combat stats along with prayers, in order to utilise the fact that there's no penalty for dying or using prayer, as it resets every death or new round. The money gained from playing may outweigh the cost of potions if winning frequently.
 * Often people will go to the area that is best suited to them (void knight area, outside gates, portal areas, towers) it is a good idea to go to places where players are sparse.
 * If the void knight is doing poorly, you can lure a brawler onto his tower, because they are impassable, the pests that attack the void knight will not be able to attack him from the side of him the brawler is on. IT IS CRITICAL that in this circumstance that any brawlers around the void knights tower or just outside the gates BE LEFT ALONE unless you will be using them as blockades.
 * Since Prayer Points refill at the end of a game, be sure to use Combat Enhancing prayers like 'Piety', 'Chivalry' etc.