Who's Got The Herb?

The quest filter threw me off a bit when it first came out. I had thought I was a lot closer last week than I actually did. Thankfully, some free time this weekend plus an additional snow day due to a crazy storm that had me shoveling for hours allowed me to knock out a few. Did the Tozl-Ket-Whatever, both parts of Rag & Bone Man, Kennith’s Concerns on Saturday-Sunday. Since yesterday was technically ’bonus time’ being that I didn’t plan on being able to play, I thought I’d take care of a few more. I started out with Mourning’s End 1, and followed it with Mourning’s End 2 (which isn’t as bad as a lot make it seem). I think I died close to 40 times doing Summer’s End and capped it off with an easy one in Meeting History.

Just 4 left. Forgettable Tale, Path of Glouphrie, Spirits of the Elid and WGS. I’ll probably get those over the weekend sadly and not before. Weeknights are a little pressed for time the next few days. This month’s skill is Herblore, ugh. Gathering seconds and filling vials… I’ve been trying to come up with a plan of how to go about it, and I can’t make it click properly in my head. I have been saving all the herbs I’ve gotten for drops the past few weeks, but there’s not many. I’ve grown all the seeds I’ve had in my inventory as well. Short of buying seeds and slowly growing them at about 30 per hour, maybe getting me 3500xp/hr in Herblore, I don’t see anyway to really dig in and train this without losing lots of cash.

Skills like Woodcutting are easy, want to train? Then you go cut. Herblore just has so many aspects that don’t give any xp, that unlike saying buying essence and crafting them into runes for a profit, you just lose on. I didn’t think it was that bad last night until I realized what I had been doing wrong. I was figuring 24k per Ranarr seed, 6.3k per Ranarr and 6.2k per ppot (based on RS Wiki’s numbers). I spent about a half hour with a friend on Lunar gathering 400 Snape Grass, so that was free. With buying 400 Ranarrs, making into 400 ppots, I was thinking great, only a 40k loss in gp. What I had forgot (and luckily realized before buying anything) was the decant aspect. You make a (3) while only the (4) sells for 6.2k. Instead of selling 400 pots, you sell 300, which brings you to a 180k+ loss in gp, all for gathering only 35k Herblore xp.

Goraks and Star Flowers are seemingly cheap xp. However, I average around 10 Gorak claws per trip using a Bunyip and a full inventory of sharks. Say you bring 27 sharks, that’s about 21.6k gp or about 15 or so minutes of fishing your own. Add a few minutes for gathering the Star Flowers as well. For me, killing that many Goraks takes about 25 minutes, so that’s 45 or so minutes (or 30-35 and 21.6k gp) to make 10 Magic essence for a total of 1.3k Herblore xp.

I’ve got over 700 nests stored up from my kingdom and WC, just waiting for me to get 81 Herblore. Its getting there from 67 that I’m having an issue with. I’ve got about 150 each of Grimy Dwarf Weed and Lantadyme saved up, which I can’t use yet. Is there some glaringly obvious aspect of this that I’m missing? I guess I could do Fleshcrawlers, but that’s still about 25 mins grabbing 27 herbs to make roughly 3k xp.

I’m going to use about 3 weeks of Penguin Points on this, but I hate doing that being that I like that saving me money in either Construction or Summoning or trips to the Abyss while Runcrafting. I wish there was a mini-game for this…