No posts?

I haven’t had much to write about, to be honest. Work has me all over the place, so does the new house. I’m finding time to play, but mainly sedentary tasks.

I didn’t level for a long time. What was I doing? I bought 25k grimy irits. I cleaned them and stuffed them in vials. Riveting… I needed the downtime though, also when you rely on spotty hotel wireless for 2 straight weeks, it doesn’t really give you the opportunity to do anything daring. I

I made 15k super attacks which got me from 83 to 88 herblore. At that point I had 10k unfinished irit pots. That would be enough to get me to 90, but leaving me with 25k super attacks which sell for 700gp each. I decided to sell all the unfs, for about 3.1k each and bought 5k avantoe to make my super attacks into extremes. This would actually get more experience (1.1M opposed to 1M), as well as had some cash left over including extremes I can use later to make into overloads.

I’ve reached 89 herblore so far, with more than enough to get 90 in the bank. After that, I’ll assess the cash situation and see where we stand. My goal is to make 5k of each potion needed for overloads, letting the leveling come along with that. I just want to make a ton of potions I can use later, that should I reach the level, make into overloads that way I have a decent level, plus a stockpile of potions to use. I figure 5k overloads would keep me content for trips for a good amount of time.

I always say it, but when motivation strikes, you really have to run with it. I’m content to be sitting at W39 Castle Wars mixing potions for the time being. A few steps closer to all levels 90 (my year end goal). I should achieve 90 by the end of the day or tomorrow, depending on how much rl work/life I need to attend to.

It’s August 2nd, I’ve been waiting for the treasure trail updates all week. I’d think with the dungeoneering update, this one would be pretty basic. A few new items, a few new spots and boom, done. Maybe there’s more to it than I think. That or maybe the other updates took more attention than planned. Either way, I’m still looking forward to it.

Sitting in the waiting room ahhhaa...

"I am a patient boy... I wait, I wait, I wait..." for my Con rocks... "Be-cause I can't get up..."

Now that Mining week is over for the Jagex Cup, I’ve had a little time to sit back and relax. I went from 85-87 Mining during the number of sessions I had down in the Living Rock Caverns.

Mining and banking gold ore is great xp and brings in a decent amount of cash (or smithing xp if you use the ores yourself), but in order to get the most xp out of the hour long sessions, it actually cost a good bit of money. Sounds weird right? A resource skill actually costing money…

I averaged around 65k/hr (62k/hr on the ones where you get a random) using a D-Pick and Lava Titan. I’d love to figure out how much xp I’d get using the Varrock 3 or Stealing Creation pick, which weren’t legal for the Jagex Cup. Since for the hour long sessions, the majority of your xp had to be in that particular skill, low alching the ore was the way to go. Mining a gold ore is 65xp, the same amount as casting the high alch spell, which would have then nullified the session. By low alching the ore you only gain 31xp (or is it 33? Whatever, its low 30s) meaning the majority of your xp is the mining. This cost about 250k gp/session in using the nats, since the gold ore only alchs for 60gp. I know, what a waste of ore, but come on, this is competition!

Next week starts the 2hour Fishing/Cooking combined sessions where you’re not allowed to bank your resources before cooking them. 2 hours is a little long of a requirement, they should have stuck with the 1hr sessions. Also, I’d love for some sort of update regarding the competition in general. What do they have down for my average xp/hr and does it match up with what I recorded? Were all of my sessions allowed? Just a simple indication of where the clan stands in the overall ranks would be nice. They seem to be really lacking in that aspect. It does change the way you look at it. I thought 65k/hr is really good, however if I find out there’s a clan that’s pulling 90k/hr and is around the same skill level, something in my method needs to be recalculated.

On to Fishing and Cooking I guess, two skill I don’t need xp in, but I always like Fishing, so it doesn’t really matter to me. I can’t imagine my rage when I log about 1:55 session and my internet’s going to crap out on me nullifying the entire thing. With Mining I was at least leveling.

Sold my d-pick, stars and sc pick’s will be alright for now on. With climbing boots getting their value re-adjusted, jester boots are the way to go if you want a cheap shoe with good stats at Corp Beast.

I think I’m going to work on Herblore a bit this weekend. I want overloads and I have some cash laying around. I won’t get close to 96, but might as well put that money to work. Making Harrlander Tar works well and usually sells pretty quick. It just takes a bit for the swamp tar to initially buy.

Still no splits at corp, gotta keep trying. One day that “7-7-7” jackpot green line will appear. Other than that, its just fun to kill.

Ok, Breathe

XP weekend is over. I'm not sure if we'll get to see another one based off of the overwhelmingly negative response on RSOF. I think it was a pretty fun time. The real key to this weekend really was in the planning.

Tweaking my tree checking route with a few dry runs allowed me to check all 12 of my trees with the 2.7xp bonus, tagging the last one about a second before it dropped to 2.5. All after completing the circus as well.

The end results:



I'm close to a Magic and Ranged level. Went from 82-84 Farming, 80-86 Summoning (so close to that unicorn, but so blasted far as well) and 76-81 Herblore. I managed to get everything done in the time I figured it would (tree run and circus going MUCH faster than I guessed) and I used my last gold charm just as the counter hit 1.2. It was pretty insane seeing 950,000 bonus xp in just an hour. I didn't even stop to read the level up messages, just kept going because I didn't want to waste any time.

I was pretty burned out by then. I didn't use much of the 1.2 or 1.1 bonus like I thought I would. Did a few Runecrafting runs, but nothing major. Lots of real life things got in the way most of Saturday and Sunday. I'm glad I got the majority of it Friday night.

New F2P quest released today. I think I might actually hop to a F2P world to do it. Should be interesting.

The Great Freakout of 2010

XP weekend is pretty much all anyone is talking about. Godswords and expensive armor are crashing in price as people frantically sell what they have to buy up herbs, pots and seconds as well as other skill necessities in the GE.

I'm guilty of this as well. I haven't sold anything, I like my armor, but that stockpile of cash I've been hoarding is going to be put to good use. Since so much is virtually sold out of the GE, its making trading one item for another kind of fun among friends. It's also making me herb farm as quickly as possible.

I think I've got my plans in order. I have over 7k pure ess, so that should tide me over for the Runecrafting. At least until my sanity gives out.

Everyone has the same variation of skills they want to train, from what I've gathered on others. Summoning and Herblore seem to be the top two. Can't say I'm any different. Two skills that don't really have any other way of boosting xp other than Penguin Points. No clay vials or pouches to use from Stealing Creation.

It's interesting to me to see that everyone seems to be doing nothing but skilling that weekend. Its kind of cool, to be honest. I want to see the bounceback price changes that happen after that weekend.

This is going to be a big push for levels, and I love it. I feel like after all this gathering cactus, filling vials, etc, I'm going to be disappointed in what Herblore level I end up. I dream big, but I think I'm going to get maybe 2 levels max. That even seems pretty high. Oh well, motivation is motivation.

This goes right TCA's survivor competition. Basically everyone races skills over weeks to lose their minds. I'm not sure I'm fully recovered from the last one.

This has had me spending some time back at Stealing Creation. It's been a while since I've played this. I realized I missed it a lot, the skill only version. The clanchat has changed a lot since the last time I played. It seems some let the little rank next to them in clan chat go to their heads. Its fine though, I usually just ignore whatever's going on and focus on getting my clay and making what I need.

Olympics are over, sadly. 35 days until the first baseball game of the regular season. Seems like forever, but it'll pass soon enough. Until then, I'll continue prepping for D-Weekend :)

Back to work...

Back home after a week vacation at the beach. I did sneak in a little RS here and there (mainly stave runs), but for the most part it was good times, good meals, drinks and friends. Its good to take a little break every now and then.

It’s interesting just how profitable GWD can be if you go with a stable set of friends. Zammy boss seems to be the easiest. We’ve been taking many trips with 6-7 people and can usually stay an hour or two before people have to go or run out of supplies. Trips usually get a split of a Zamorak Spear or a hilt. The last trip I took came in at over 5.8M gross due to getting one of each as well as various other drops. It’s still amusing to see a Dragon Dagger split though. Kril drops 19k gp a lot to a person, but splits a 30k drop between 6 people?

It’s weird to say, but I had reached a point where I had more money than I ever had in the game. I had kept it stashed away for a bit, but that’s doing me no good. I decided to take some out and get a few levels. I looked on forums for an open guilded altar and over a few days got 74-77 Prayer. Antifire potions seem to be the cheapest/best xp to make at my level so I went 72-74 Herblore. I’m only about 50k from 75. For some reason Prayer Potions are up over 15k each now. I made a few of those and they easily sold at max price in GE. Which is ridiculous because Sara Brews require a much higher level, more difficult to obtain second and are about a third of the price.

Also got 80 Slayer, 86 Crafting, 89 Strength (actually leveled this on Kril) and 121cb since my last update. They were all things I was pretty close to and just happened to level around the same time. I’m up to 1997 total levels. The year I graduated high school. Closing in on that 2k mark. If not tonight, I hope to get it tomorrow.

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…

Pain in the Adze

It took me roughly a month and a half, but I finally got to 92 Firemaking from 74. The xp flies by when you’re used to Runecrafting, Woodcutting, Fishing and other slow xp skills. I went on to get my Inferno Adze from the All Fired Up minigame and let me just say, it’s a lot more difficult than some guides make it out to be. I had already done the requirements for the first 10, so I figured the additional 4 wouldn’t be such a big deal. I went around to loading them all up, ended up dying twice, once at each the one near the temple in the Wilderness and the other on the Frozen Plateau (is that what its called? Near the Wildy Agility course). Realized then that even when you get back to your grave in time, you automatically lose the Fire Ring and Fire Gloves. I went around to lighting them and I wasn’t quick enough. I used Maples and thought I’d have plenty of time being that Runescape Wiki states that you can do it in about 9 minutes. Perhaps I’m just slow.

I got my Fire Ring and Gloves back but had to do it all again. Died again in the deep wildy, losing the ring & gloves again. Will I never learn? This time I just really wanted it so I actually broke down and bought some Magic Logs. Normally, I’d just go get them myself, but I just wanted this over with. I bought 200 of them and just used them for the first 8 beacons and used my stock of Maples for the remainder. Died lighting them, but managed to get them lit. Got my Adze, finally, but it kills me that I missed out on so much xp by not having the gloves & ring when lighting. If you take anything from this, just know to put them in the bank while filling the beacons and only wear when you’re ready to go on lighting them. I’m super protective of the Adze knowing that I lose it when I die and I don’t want to go through that again. If the Wildy stars come, I might just take a Rune Pickaxe instead.

I didn’t realize how competitive Hiscores is. In the past week I’ve gotten 6 levels, yet have moved up 409 spots. Its almost as if every level has me just barely clinging to the inside 50,000 mark.

I feel like I’ve only been Firemaking lately so I wanted to get a few levels in other things yesterday. I got about 120 tears which led me very close to a Herblore level. I really need to train this more as I’m sick of my tears going to that when they would be better suited saving me money on Construction or just time Runecrafting. I had 14 Gorak claws in the bank so I stopped over to the Cosmic Being’s place to pick some Starflowers. That was enough to get me to 64 Herblore. This leaves me at just an Herb and a Con level from 65+.

I was also close to a Slayer level so I grabbed my Bones to Peaches runes and headed down to Hellhounds. Sunday must be Slayer day because I had to hop worlds a disgusting amount of time. Got my level, got a clue then got out of there before finishing my task. I have to go back, but Hellhounds can be incredibly boring if you don’t break it up by doing a clue when you get one. 5 Rune Platebodies, Rune Axe and 50 Nature Runes. Whatever, I’ll take it. No puzzleboxes, 1 Wildy location, no co-ordinates, not bad for about 10 minutes of teleports.

I did some quests. Did As a First Resort and with the unlimited run, decided it was a good time to bang out Between a Rock… After that I completed Elemental Workshop II, all were relatively easy and I really liked the puzzle pool thing in As a First Resort. I have no reason for not completing these quests earlier. This leaves me with… 12(?) quests left to go. I need to do the Phoenix one as well as I’m all for daily xp rewards.

As a First Resort’s Hunting xp reward got me close to a level so I decided to set out on my first trip to get Red Chins. That didn’t last too long at all. Every world had a lot of people competing for a spot. When I finally got one (after about 30 hops), I saw how slow they were. Lots of clicking, very few catches and slow xp. I decided I had enough and went to Red Salamanders where I leveled within about 15 minutes.

Not sure what to work on next. Tonight I’ll go pingu hunting. I like to do this at the last possible time I can in the week. I can’t play on Tuesday nights so this leaves Mondays. The reason being is that I like to see how many of these little things I can stumble upon while just playing. The sound is pretty distinctive so they’re easy to find if you’re near one. I’ve gotten 4 this week and some weeks I get the majority just doing stars, farming runs, etc. It saves time when you go out to look for them, only needing a few and, to be honest, its kind of fun just randomly finding one.

The Eagles bowed down to The Buzzsaw that is the Arizona Cardinals yesterday. What can I say, they were just outplayed. Good luck to them in the Super Bowl. Pitchers and catchers report in 27 days. Bring on the warm weather and the Fightins!