Anyone check DIGG daily?

This was dugg today and make the front page, and I though it was too funny to pass up.

The Enchanted Lyre

I had a buddy ask me about these, and though I might throw up a section from an old guide I made on tip.it.

Enchanted Lyres are made using the fletching skill to attach a golden string to an unstrung lyre

Unstrung Lyres are made by cutting a branch from the swaying tree just to the east of Rellekka (see the mini map in my pic, it is the area with many rabbits and Doogle Leaf spawns). Just equip your axe and go chop as many branches as you need. You will get 'branch', use a knife on these to make unstrung lyre, it is almost a musical instrument. Bring a Cammy teletab to speed up the collection process. With the teletab you can collect 27 branches in one trip.



Golden Wool is made by buying golden fleece from Lalli the troll to the east of the rare tree and using the fleece on a spinning wheel to make golden wool. During the quest fleeses are free and you can get as many as you need by talking to Lalli and dropping them, but after the quest you will need to buy them for 1k each. Bring an air staff (your hands will be free this time) and a law or a Cammy teletab here as well to speed up the process. Bring 27,000 gp and you can grab 27 strings in one trip.



Lyres are also a very rare drop from the Fremmenik. If you need some combat XP and have nothing better to do then this is an option for you, but it is an inefficient use of time.

Turbo Tip:

You can cut out some time by using the agility shortcut above the Sinclair Mansion. 48 Agility Required.

Cheap Shards Today!

A while ago I found an interesting tip on the Truth Scape forums. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a pouch exchange until then. Checking todays losers in price on the GE, the bunyip pouch came up as having lost 31.5% of its value over the past month. A quick bit of calculation:


Pouch cost: 1,701
# of shards to make: 110
# of shards from pouch exchange: 77 (you get 70% back)
Shard cost: 25
Shard cost when exchanged: 22 (1701gp divided by 77 shards)


It might not look like much, but it is a 12% discount on your shard prices. Over the long haul this is a significant savings for almost no effort.

**D'OH!**

After digging a bit further, you need to be at least 1 level over the required level to make the pouch you are exchanging, so not a lot of people will be able to exchange bunyips. It does look like this holds true for most other pouches though.

A new record

Hey all. Sorry for the recent dearth of posts. I have been running like a mad man trying to get a few more investors on board for my next RL project. Today's post is just a quick one about a new farming personal record I got today. I didn't even think it was possible, but I got 16 toadflax from one patch this morning!

I wish I had been using snapdragons.

Sell your high level herbs? Yes you should.

I mentioned a while back that you should sell the herbs you can't use and use the GP form those sales to buy herbs you can use. I still think that advice is pretty good, although others don't quite see eye to eye with me on that point. I commented on Marlaine's blog about it, and though I would expand on it here.

Unids made it far more economically reasonable to sell your higher herbs, because you could buy unids rannars and above for 2k each then use what you needed and the pots paid for the herbs. Higher levels would buy the higher herbs for more, and you could continue to train endlessly
making money. Herb prices were also far less liquid than they are now, and the demand for potions much greater.


Why sell the high level herbs you can't use? They are over priced. Bottom line. They can only go down from here. Herblore is such a money loser at this point that people are giving up training it in droves. Go check the high scores. There is far less movement on it relative to pre-ge herblore, or to the other skills. This was an unintended consequence of a combination of 4 things:

1. The Grand Exchange
2. No more UNIDS
3. Easy price manipulation on the GE
4. The end of PKing


#1 and 2 are easy to understand. No need to keep things simple with 1k or 2k herbs. They are actually sold at a 'market price' now. #3 is a bit harder, but anyone with a few mil can corner most of the potion markets easily. Just continue to buy. There are not that many Torstols on the market, so if you constantly buy them all, you can sit on them and only sell for max, driving up the price. Done with 2 people it is even more efficient. One sells at max, one buys at mid +1gp, and he buys them all. Then they switch positions the next day. This was done last week by a group of players with over 700mil between them. They bought up every single p pot all week.

I have inadvertently done it with super restore pots. At any one time there are only 350-400 of them on the market (try it for yourself, only takes about 3mil). If you don't have 3mil, buy up 28-3 dose pots at median, combine and sell the 4 dose at max. Do this 15 times, and you will not only make money, but also see that what I am saying is true.

All that aside though, I believe that Jagex did not intend for herblore to be such an expensive skill to raise. That being said it is due for an update. Some mini-game, or an easier way to train or get herbs. Nothing in the neighborhood of nerfing the skill, no need for that at all, but something to correct what they broke in the process of creating the GE and eliminating PKing. Just look at RC. They keep adding tools and options to make that training go faster, mainly because it was slow and tedious to train.

If and when that update comes, the bottom will fall out of the herb market, and prices will be brought back in line.

Prayer Potions

If you have them, start selling while they are high. Prayer pots are up almost 15% this month, and are over priced. Snapdragon seeds and super restores when through the same curve last month, and started trending down over the last 4-5 days, so P pots should be soon to follow.

Tiaras, tiaras, tiaras, tiaras, and more tiaras.

Looking back over my posts, I can see that the runecrafting ones have a grand total of zero comments, so I will assume they weren't that popular. This one will be the last for a bit. I was browsing the prices on the GE and the talismans kept coming up, so I searched talisman. Body talismans are about the same price as air talismans.

Now that bumps up the best low level rc XP. You can abyss it or go to the body alter with these (they are about the same distance from Edge bank).

For below 50s: 2 pouches 13 tiaras, 13 talismans and 1 rune ess.
Total XP: 563 per trip

Now that is not bad RC XP at all, it is the best in f2p, and the best for below 75 on members. In order to get that without making tiaras, you would need to be at least 75 RC, using all 4 pouches, and making blood runes.

(With or without 62 summoning, you still need 75 RC).

Hot Keys

A while back I took a few month break from Runescape. During that time there was a pretty cool update I had no clue about until last week when I was playing and accidentally hit the F12 key, and my interface jumped to the song list. That is how I learned about hot keys.

I asked some of my buddies in game about them and surprisingly no one really seemed to use, or even care bout them. After a bit of digging, I found the Game Engine Update from June 29, 2007. There is nothing about it in the KB either, and that is the first place I searched.

Here they are:

Esc - Inventory
F1 - Combat options
F2 - Your statistics
F3 - Quest Journal
F4 - Equipped interface
F5 - Prayer
F6 - Spellbook
F8 - Friends list
F9 - Ignore list
F10 - Options interface
F11 - Emotes
F12 - Music Player

Although some of those hot keys are useless, (who needs to open up the music player quickly?) F1, F4, and F5 make game play much faster. I used F1 to get through that first fight in 'Legacy of Seergaze' recently, and it made things quite a bit easier. Although I haven't tried it, I am sure it will help speed things up when trying to kill Jad in the fight caves.

Do you use the hot keys?

Rune Mysteries Part II

I have been chatting up my air talisman low cost RC experience, and one of my clan mates pointed out that it really wasn't so hit after all. I will give him the point that at his level, it is actually slower than crafting runes with all the available additions he has access to, so I though I would quantify myself a bit more and give a numerical break down.

First, you lose money crafting air tiaras at any level, so you are buying XP. Why would this be a viable option when you can craft runes and have something for your work? Well... you might be like me and really not like RC, and are only looking for XP at any price, or you might have a goal (or quest req) that you want regardless of the cost. If you don't want to lose money then craft airs until you can do double cosmics.

One other thing, I don't have RC gloves, so I will leave them out.

When crafting tiaras, you really should bring your pouches filled with ess. I carry 10 tiaras, 10 talismans, 3 pouches, and 6 rune ess. (I wear one of the tiaras if you were wondering why that ads up to 29 items). One trip gets me 250 XP from tiaras and 120 from making air runes for a total of 330 a trip.

This is the fastest RC XP in the game not including the abyss. Fairy rings to the nature alter do come close, and are actually faster if you have 62 summoning though.

Now if you are using the abyss for example, at level 44 RC you can only get 315 XP per trip, with 2 pouches and 26 ess. You need to hit 50 to be able to use that third pouch to make abyss RCing beat air tiaras.

With 25-49 RC, making air tiaras would look like this: 2 pouches, 13 tiaras, 13 talismans and a rune ess. You would get 325xp from tiaras, and 50xp form making the runes, for a total of 375.

In my book that is still pretty good, but I have to concede the point if you have at least 77 RC, and 62 summoning, you can blow those numbers away with 661.5 XP per trip to the blood alter.

Herblore

Ever read Truthscape? I have been poking around on that site for the past few days, and wanted to comment about something they had in the 'herblore secrets' section. I had planned another post about this, but I might as well get it over with here today. There is a section called: The Pros and Cons of Combining Three Dose Potions into Four, that I take some exception to. In general you can't make money off combining potions, but you can also make over a mil an hour doing this. Here is the data I put together in my post on the truthscape forums for super restores:

3 dose Super restores are 8155 (actually over priced today, but that is beside my point)
28 super restores are 228,340
These combine to make 21 4 dose potions
Sold at max that is 241,500

That is a 13,160 profit per inventory (28-3 dose or 21-4 dose). I am not a fan of XP-less money making, but using your numbers of 1,120 three dose to 840 four dose in 30 minutes, that is 1,052,800gp an hour. Do these potions sell? I have never had an auction last more than an hour, and 90% of the time the four dose potions sell instantly. Why? because the players using them are not interested in saving a few gp here and there. They want their potions and they want to get back to killing dagganoth kings, soloing the KQ, or whatever else they are using them on, and the profits outweigh the costs involved here. A mil an hour is nothing to scoff at and I just though it deserved a mention.

Combining super restores is a method I have used to regain some cash after losing everything a few months back. Like I said, I am not a fan of no XP money making, but this really is worth the time spent.

Compound Time

I am a huge fan of the book Four Hour Work Week, and somewhat a fan of the author Timothy Ferris, enough so that I read his blog whenever he updates it. Today Tim posted something that really got me thinking about in its relationship to gaming and RS in general. Today's post was titled "Compound Time" (wonder where I have seen that before).

The premise of the post is summed up well in this quote:

my conclusion is that the value of ones time could experience a significant gain, and perhaps a compounding effect over time, given an investment of [that present-state] time in knowledge, skill or other capacity, and a reinvestment of future gains (just like currency).

Now, that might not make much sense to many of you, but in reality, it it right on. The easiest example I can think of is melee stats. Think about if you only trained attack. No def and no str. This might be a good strategy for a lower level pure, but what good is it for? As you level up, your levels will come slower and slower. With high attack, you can hit more often, but with no strength, you will hit for lower damage on average, increasing your training time significantly.


This might have been a good strategy for an all or nothing pure back in the good old days of pvp wildy, although I don't think so, but with todays Runescape? There isn't much benefit.

The flip side here is training and using that to compound your future training. This is applicable to just about everything in the game. When doing slayer or training melee, you will get drops. What you do with those drops really had a huge effect on you other skills. The big ones are summoning, herblore and farming. Do you keep your seeds/herbs or charms? If not, then you should know that you will have to buy them back/or obtain them again at some point.

I think many people lose track of the goal when they do purely profit minded things, like picking flax to sell. At some point they will need that flax (or some other material) to train crafting. It might be good for the short term, but are you shooting your long term training goals in the foot? I think so, and that post on Tim's blog just re-enforces that.

What do you guys think?

Rune Mysteries?

I was doing some research on some of the best ways to get money as a noob low level account, and remembered an old trick I used to do to get unlimited supplies of air talismans. It only works of you haven't completed rune mysteries, so most people can't use it, but it is still worth mentioning. Basically y9oou start the quest and then just drop the talisman Duke Horatio gives you, much the same way you would get multiple anti-dragon fire shields.

Drop, get, drop, get, note, drop, get... That trick still works fine, but an interesting thing I came across was that the price of air talismans is down 32% for the week and 60% this month. I am not sure what is causing this price deflation, but it is a great opportunity to buy up air talismans to either use for RC XP or for when the price goes back up as it should next month.

I am going to grab an RC level while they are so cheap. Making tiaras is some incredible XP per hour. It takes 1 talisman, 1 tiara, and you get 25 XP for each one made. Wear a blans tiara, and bring another 9 along with 10 talismans. Fill the other 9 slots with rune essence/pouches, and you are good to go, and at a significantly higher XP per hour rate over making runes alone.

You can also sell the tiaras for 45 gp each, but I am not sure how well they sell. The shop price is 40gp, and you can sell them there instantly, so that is a batter option unless you want a hand full of tiaras taking up a slot in your GE auctions.

Back Office Stuff

Sorry for the dearth of posts this week. I had some problems with the RSS feed on my blog and that soaked up a bit of my time. I finally have it limping along, and hopefully it works. If you have problems let me know. I wouldn't have known if a Guild mate hadn't mentioned it.

I am also working on getting my blog it's own domain name! We will see how that goes, and I have my fingers crossed that if it happens the transition will go smoothly.

Now for the meat...

No RS tips today, but I came across this and though I should mention it. There is a company out there making bots that work for WOW and they are in a law suit with Blizzard. I do not support cheating or breaking the rules in any way, but this was interesting enough to mention.

Interest group speaks up against Blizzard on Glider case

One thing that WOW has and supports are (some) add ons. I do wish that RS would allow some non-Jagex coded software to be used in game. I liken the example of selling Lindens in Second Life. Is it bad to do it there? No it is perfectly acceptable behavior. Using a tool or a money to get ahead is not inherently bad. For every college kid who is low on money and high on time, there is a 35 year old guy who values his 1 hour of gaming a night and has the cash to pay for the better things. A well regulated gold trade run by Jagex itself would eliminate all of the bad associations with gold traders.

Back on the point though, I would like to be able to pull down a menu, and click once for a certain task. For example, bank, take out 14 herbs and 14 vials in one click, or cast bind and fire bolt in succession in one click. Even the ability to map certain things to certain keys. Keyboard mouse is great and perfectly legal, but it has limitations. The game is moving in that direction with cook X, crush X, and so on and so forth, so why not make it a bit more open and see what kinds of emergent game play develop?

Grrr! My rant about Grind X.

Hi all, kind of in a ranty mood today. I checked out this month's updates and at the bottom there is a blurb about the new introduction of grind X. I am pretty much 100% against this change. With 84 herblore, I do a lot of sara brews, and need tons of nests. It is very fast to grind them manually, bank, grab more and repeat.

It is much the same as fletching and herblore used to be, where you were limited in speed only by how fast you could click. The new 'make X' options artificially slow down production. Cook X wasn't so bad because of the wait time in there to actually cook the food, but there was no wait time between stringing 2 bows or adding 2 herbs to vials (or seconds for that matter).

With the invent of the GE (don't get my wrong, I love it), the herb market went into the shitter. Potions are now much cheaper than the herbs and seconds that make them, and training herblore has become one of the most expensive skills in the game to train. Why make it any slower Jagex?

Anyone think the same? Post here and let me know.

Other gaming blogs

I follow a few other blogs, and today when I powered up my Google reader (if you don't have it, bet it and subscribe to my blog first thing). Two very interesting posts that kind of apply to RS were out there, and a third that has nothing to do with RS, but I just felt how stupid it was and wanted to comment about it.


1. The first one is Some Remarks about drop rates form wow insider. I find that a lot of scapers don't have the slightest idea of how drop rates relate to them. The drop rate itself (like 1 in 1600 kills for a d chain drop from dusties) is not the only part of the equation. For example, I some times see lvl 60s wielding rune halberds from a save spot killing the black demons in the Edgeville dungeon when I run past to charge air orbs. Why they are killing them is obvious, the drops are better when you kill high level monsters. The problem with this is that you take forever to kill one. Killing something just because you can is no reason at all.

Another example is the dolt who came to experiments when I was there to train range. He was level 1 range, and hit constant zeros. It took 30 minutes to convince him that he got zero XP every time he hit a zero and should be training on chickens, cows, or anything that had a def level low enough for him to get some range XP. Again, just because you can is no justification for
doing something.

2. The 10 commandments of Altitis from Waaagh!. This was an interesting read, and I for one have a pure mage alt, and I know a lot of others do too. One of the commandments that stood out was #5. I know that my guildmates have a ton of alts, and when they log into clan chat I never know who they really are. No need to be kama 1, kama 2, and kama 3, but you can do what a buddy of mine did. His main was posman, and he had posranger, a range pure, that he used frequently. It was always easy to know it was him.

#6 was also a good one. Doing the shield of Arrav for the other side was a pretty interesting experience, and I had always wanted to go in there. ANd the following quote is great:

Just grin, emoticon a grin so they know you’re grinning, and embrace the fun and joy of being diagnosed with one of the most enjoyable diseases an MMO gamer can have!

3. The last part of this post is from a blog i subscribe to called unclutterer. The entire thing is dedicated to reducing clutter, and the blog posts are great. Lately though, they keep making these stupid posts titled 'a year ago on unclutterer'. They are two liners with no writing at all, only links to year old crusty posts.

Why do I have such a problem with this? BECAUSE THEY CLUTTER MY READER! They waste my time, cause me to click more, and aren't wanted. I mentioned that ion a comment and the author had the nerve to email me back telling me that she had more readers of the older posts than the new ones. Duh! Then she said, "I hope you find the A Year Ago This Week posts to be less offensive." What the heck is that supposed to mean? I wasn't offended at all, but now I am.

If you have a blog called unclutterer, then don't create clutter. Bottom line there. Thats all for today folks.