How to Kill the Spider in Hunt: Showdown

Build around explosive ammunition

Spider takes x5 from explosive ammunition — the highest single multiplier against any boss in the game. Shrapnel is also excellent at x3, and incendiary rounds are strong at x3, so fire genuinely is a correct answer here, unlike against the Butcher. Note the usual trap, though: thrown dynamite and similar ordnance sit at x1 — no bonus at all. Her explosion multipliers apply to blast-type ammunition, not to whatever you can lob. Building your plan around sticky bombs specifically is the mistake; building it around explosive and incendiary ammunition is the correct read of the same data.

What is actively wasted

Poison. This is her defining rule and it is near-total: poison bullets come in at roughly x0.1, and she is immune to poison bolts and poison clouds. Every poison item you carry into a Spider lair is dead inventory. Do not confuse this with her own spit, which is poisonous even though she takes essentially nothing from poison herself.

Reading her attacks

Everything is audible. She screeches immediately before pouncing, and that screech is your cue to create distance, because the pounce is what kills people. On the ceiling or a roof she can spit. She enters a frenzy state like the others — she will often hold still and cry out first, which is your cleanest window to commit damage, since several guides report she takes reduced damage while frenzied. Chasing her around a room while she roams is how teams burn minutes and invite a third party; keep the sequence short as described in the solo route guide.

After the health bar

Sound decides survivability here more than aim. Audio mistakes are what get teams killed at a lair they believed they controlled, and positioning is what turns a won boss fight into an actual extract. Multipliers are community-measured and shift with patches — verify in-game.