We are moving!

Due to the unexpected success of this blog, and the new updates in RS, we are moving from blogger to out own domain name. You can now find us at www.rseconomist.com.

I was also feeling that RS investor didn't accurately describe my blog, so I upgraded that as well. I am now the RS Economist.

The new blog can be found here.

I am still working out the bugs here and should be upgrading the RSS feed over the next few days (but it should work alright as it is). If yours doesn't go automatically, then please click the above link and update in manually.

-Turbo

Pot your way to faster leveling – Part 2

Pot your way to faster leveling ? Part 2

Turbo from the RS Investor blog here posting again for the Runescape Blog with my second installment in the series. Today I will focus on some of the lesser known aspects of potting for training. In the first section, I talked about the potions you should be using, and can probably make yourself. Here I will go over some of the ones that you might need help with.

Magic Potions ? Drink Me!

Should you use these while training mage? Absolutely (well, unless you are casting high alch over and over again...). At today's cost of 235gp a sip, these are a bargain as well. They increase your mage by +4, significantly increasing not only the chances that you will hit more often, but also that you will do more damage.

I know that some readers are thinking, hmmm, “My inventory slots are more important than having a potion.” I agree to an extent, but you have to be aware that a potion's effects don't wear off instantly. I wouldn't carry one along to a blue dragon task, but I would sure have a sip every time I banked hides and bones. The stat bonus carries me through the entire time.

Can't make magic potions? I don't know any high level herblorist who would turn down free herblore XP. I certainly wouldn't. Today Lants are 1,163 and potato cactus is 965. That is 2128 per potion or 709gp per dose. Is it worth it for a +4 mage bonus? I think so.

The non-combat uses are also worth mentioning here. At level 70, I trained using teleother to Lumbridge with magic potions. On a crowded server, people beg to be teleported, and it is some of the fastest magic XP in the game. (at 71, you should switch from magic pots to Wizard Mind Bombs though).

Ranging Potions ? Shoot this!

With Pking gone, these have lost the majority of their value, but are still very worthwhile potions. Today they are 431 a dose. Range potions give a 4-13 (10%+3) level boost. At 60 range that will boost you up to nearly 70. Starting with 70 range will get you up to 80. This is a pretty hefty increase, and will significantly decrease your kill times, saving you arrows (darts, knives, cballs, charges), time, and increasing the rate at which you level up.

In conclusion...

It really is worth it to use what ever stat increasing items and tools you can while training. With the potion market being what it is, they are well worth the investment. With both range and magic potions, it is more expensive to buy the ingredients and get assisted, but still not unreasonable, especially if you happen to have a few lants and dwarf weeds sitting in the bank. The seconds for both are about 1k each, and many people will assist you. Just call it out in the GE, and you should get offers.

Stay tuned until next week when I will outline some of the highest potions in the game and some uses for them that you probably haven't even though about.

Life is a Bitch?

The new tipit Times article prompted me to write this post. I had been kicking the idea around for quite some time, but the glaring duality in the newest Times sucked it out of me.

I recently had some t-shirts made up for my RL pizza shop. In the process of developing the design, I came across a shirt with the old phrase, “Life is a Bitch, Then you die”. This is one of the phrases that at first glance sounds pretty true.

Ranting about Runescape has been covered to death. Just look at the rants section of the official forums. Nearly 700k posts, (compared to the compliments of just over 100k). That people complain is not really trying to get across here. You will never satisfy all of the players all of the time.

Looking closer at the actual phrase brings out the contradiction in this line of thinking. We can all agree that life is a bitch some of the time, but is it true all the time? If life really was so bad, wouldn’t dieing be a welcome relief? I assume most of you aren’t searching for the nearest tall bridge or cliff to jump off, so don’t let this overlooked contradiction poison your thinking. It does have a very observable though. The root of that phrase is something along the lines of telling Jagex: “Why bother trying, your updates won’t matter anyway”.

Now, I am sure that most of you readers couldn’t care less about the morale of anyone at Jagex (a few of you might even be actively thinking of ways to screw with it), but really if you are going to complain, then COMPLAIN! Don’t make some lame article that rants about updates, then finished with: “All in all, I can’t wait until the graphics come out, but please don’t continue to improve them”.

First of all, Jagex is out to make a profit. To do that they need to sell subscriptions and advertising, and in order to do that, they need to generate new customers. I am pretty sure they are actually happier when older players leave the game. The older toons are the ones skilled at emergent gaming, who pked well, merchanted well, and the ones who took advantage of every loophole there was. Old Paul in his Ivory Tower doesn’t like it when people don’t play the game the game the way he meant it to be played, and hence Jagex goes out of it’s way to stop it.

Back to the article though. Das ripps on Castle Wars. Well, I miss the point there as well. The goal of the game is to gain combat XP, with the secondary goal of getting some fairly noobish looking Armour. The higher level amours only tell others that you have spent hundreds of hours at Castle Wars, something that others might attach some status to, but I sure don’t. He more players there to kill, the more XP you get per game! The more the merrier, and if you don’t like the terrain, there is always FOG, Bounty Hunter, and Clan Wars.

You don’t need the wisdom of Solomon to write an effective complaint, so please. Take a stand, hold your ground, make a decent argument. Don’t make lame attempts and snide comments like, “is variety not the spice of life?“ Either complain about updates or shut the hell up.

Pot your way to faster leveling - Part I

Hi readers. I want to start by saying thanks for your views, yesterday I had the highest hits in a single day since starting this blog.

Today's focus is on effective training using potions. I am splitting this into 3 parts just because of the length and depth I will need to go into to really feel out the subject. Here we go:

Part I - The basics of using potions to speed up leveling and XP per hour

Any player regardless of how little money they have should, at a minimum, always be using normal Strength and Super Attack potions while training any combat related skill. (I will skip the making of potions, as I assume you already know how, you should be making all of the potions you use though.) Super attack potions are actually cheaper than normal attack potions, so there is no reason to go with normal ones unless you are really broke, then attack mixes are the cheapest thing on the market. This goes for free players as well in the case of strength potions, they are cheap and well worth it.

Super Attack Potions - What they do and why you should use them

These increase your attack by 20% for a 5-19 level increase. For example if you has an attack level of 80, one sip from a Super Attack would boost your attack level to 96. Not bad for 80 gold pieces, especially when you compare it to a slayer mask that only gives a 15% increase but costs nearly a mil. You could buy 12,300 Super Attack doses for the cost of that one mask, but since the bonuses stack, you really should use both while training slayer for a whopping 35% increase in attack.

Strength Potions - Drink this for Strength

Strength potions, or str pots, increase your strength by 12.5% for a 3-12 level increase. A sip of this boosts a strength of 80 to 90. This is especially useful in F2P, where str increases are few and far between. Increased str makes you to hit for higher damage, causing: faster kills, more XP per hour, and increased drop rate per hour (the more you kill the more drops you get).

Barbarian Mixes - Eat your pots

These are one of the greatest underutilized parts of the game. Cost wise they are pretty bad to make from scratch, but they are great to make if you already have the potions, especially if you are fighting monsters that occasionally hit you and do damage. To make a mix, you need a 2 dose potion and roe. You can decant 2-2dose potions using a 4 dose potion on an empty vial. adding the roe to either an attack or strength potion gives you attack mix(2) or strength mix(2) respectively, and turns the potion into food that heals 6 hp (3hp per dose). Roe is easy enoug to fish near the barbarian outpost, they even have a drop box 1 click away at the Barbarian Assault mini game, it is also very cheap, at only 35gp on the GE, so it is well worth buying, unless you want some fishing XP.

In Conclusion

Even if you are only killing a monster that just drops bones, it is worth it to use potions. Bones sell for 90gp. Super Attack and Str mixes sell for 80gp and 100 per dose, and easily last more than 2 kills. I am not recommending you stop training to bank normal bones by any means, but I wanted to illustrate how cheap it is to use potions for training. Some more examples are:

- 1 dose of each gives higher bonuses than an Amulet of Fury. Cost:3.2mil vs 180gp
- At lvl 99 str the bonus is 300% better than bandos chest str bonus costing about 15.1mil less
- At str level of 32 the bonus from a str pot is eqivalent to the bonus from a berserker ring for 1/36000 the price.

Happy Potting!

Reader Survey:

There is a weekly column on a WOW blog about different classes and effective training techniques that I really like and have been thinking of modifying for RS. Are any of you interested in seeing a weekly column of RS pure types? If you are leave a comment.

Nothing to do eith MMORPGs, but it does date me

I came across this earlier today, and it literally made my day. I remember when Thriller came out on Friday Night Videos, well before Youtube and the internet. It is well worth passing along.

A Life of Gratitude...

I am a big fan and avid reader of the Zen Habits blog. Today's blog post really hit a nerve in a good way. It made me thing back to my first days in RS, and some of the people who helped me along the way. Some I don't remember their names, line the girl who saw me wandering around the dwarf mine in bronze pl8 and took the time to make me a set of full iron. At the time, I though it was the coolest thing in the game, and that she was the coolest person for doing it.

Another player Oooorgle really stepped in and helped me out in my training and questing. He used to live in Fally 2 selling hallys. I remember buying my first one from him. I promptly took it to wildy and got pked the next day, and PMed him to buy another. From that point, he helped out a lot, from making me glories form d stones (free enchanting to boot) to general training advice. One of the high lights of my RS time was the guided trip through the Underground Pass. I had no clue about it until Oooorgle told me about Regicide and the hally shop. His cooked rabbits were a life saver on that quest as well. Thanks again for the good times Oooorgle.

I know it is clichet, but the olden days were the best days for RS. Clan chat is really doing a number on the community, but that is a topic for another post. Here is the post I am talking about on Zen Habits: Three Truths to Help You Create a Life of Gratitude, and:

The Zen Habits/RS Investor Gratefulness Challenge (paraphrased and adapted to RS from the Zen Habits Challenge)

Fellow readers of Zen Habits (RS Investor), I’d like to leave you with a challenge today. This is not a theoretical challenge–it’s designed to be quite practical.

Over the 30 days, I would like to challenge you to create your own in game life of gratitude in a way that is meaningful to you, and to begin practicing acts of gratefulness more than you have ever done before.

I’ll be doing it along with you, and so will a lot of other readers. It’s always good to be specific, so here are some ideas… but don’t let these limit you.

* Spend three minutes every morning writing down a few things you are grateful for that day
* Devote 15-20 minutes to your friends list and thinking of it as a gratefulness list. (One tip: think both about who you are grateful for knowing and also how you can show that gratitude)
* Make it a habit to encourage at least one person every day
* Review your finances to make sure they are in order and aligned with your values, basically re-evaluate how much that in game gold really means
* Plan something fun, like a trip to somewhere you’ve never been - There are some really cool forgotten places in RS, like the Fisher Kings castle.
* For one day (or more), say something positive to every person you interact with

The second part of the Zen Habits/RS Investor Gratefulness Challenge is for you to pass on the challenge to others.

If you blog, post on forums, or attend clan events, let others know. I know that there are a few people who helped me a lot who I probably didn't thank enough, but with a bit of practice we can all get better in this area, and hopefully make the game a little bit better place.

ps and a special thanks to Necro Brawler for the use of his pic.

A bit o real life

I have been busy with opening my latest restaurant these days, hence the lack of new content. Here are a few pics I threw together for your visual enjoyment.