TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore - Training Techniques and Strategies                 9  Strategies and Methods for Efficient Training with Potions

Choosing Cost-Effective Potions for Training The Pros and Cons of Combining Three-Dose Potions into Four Doses

Potions are most often made from clean herbs, for two main reasons: most players immediately clean herbs that they get from drops or from Farming patches, and there is a much higher volume of trade in clean herbs than grimy ones. Players rarely consider making potions using grimy herbs—but they should. Not only are grimy herbs sometimes cheaper to buy than clean ones, but as we’ll see, they can actually be more cost effective even if you buy them for the same price.

Making potions with grimy herbs is exactly the same as making them with clean herbs, except of course that you have to clean them first. To illustrate the utility of doing this, I will assess the impact of starting with grimy herbs on both the amount of XP you get per hour, and the cost of getting that experience.

Starting with grimy herbs means you get extra XP from cleaning them—but that takes time, so you make fewer potions per hour. The big question, obviously, is which of these factors is dominant.

We already know that it normally takes 45 seconds to make 14 potions using the two-step method. In my tests, I found that adding a step to clean 14 herbs first adds 7 seconds to that process. (Note that this is less than half the time needed to do only grimy herb cleaning, because there’s no extra banking involved.) So, instead of being able to make 1,120 potions per hour, we can make about 970.

This means we lose the equivalent XP of 150 potions per hour, but gain the XP of cleaning 970 herbs per hour. Since 970/150 is about 6.5, what this means is that “breakeven” would occur if the XP from a potion were equal to 6.5 times the XP from cleaning that potion’s herb. In practice, though, the ratio is always higher than this, which means that starting with grimy herbs slows down the hourly XP for making potions.

Table 28 shows the same recommended potions for leveling as Table 27, but this time I’ve shown the SAS values both for starting with clean herbs and with grimy herbs, so you can compare them.

As you can see, there isn’t a lot of difference here: the method using grimy herbs is generally around 5-6% slower for XP. The Saradomin brew is an outlier, because it’s a high-level potion that uses a low-level herb.

The impact of using grimy herbs on the cost of making potions depends on any differences that might exist between the cost of a grimy and clean herb of the same type. But even when they are the same, it turns out that using grimy herbs is cheaper. The reason is that you lose money with every potion you make, but once you have a grimy herb, cleaning it is money-neutral. As such, since a portion of the XP from making potions from grimy herbs comes from cleaning, it is more cost-effective overall.

As an example, consider super restore potions. The loss for each potion using the figures from the last topic is 1,269 gp; divide that by 142.5 XP per potion and the SAV value is -8.9 gp/XP, as we saw before. But if making them from grimy herbs, we have a loss of 1,269 for each potion as before, but we are getting not 142.5 XP per potion but rather 154.3, because of the extra XP for herb cleaning. And this comes to only -8.2 gp/XP.

Table 29 shows the SAV figures for these potions, along with the SAS figures and also the SAP numbers calculated from them. Since making potions from clean herbs is clearly a straight “faster XP at greater cost” situation, I’ve also shown the TVE of making from clean compared to making from grimy.

The numbers in the far right column tell the tale: their high values reflect the fact that making potions using clean herbs is only slightly faster than making them from grimy herbs (about 6%), but much more expensive (around 15%). The TVE numbers show that you’d have to earn the equivalent of 850 to 2,000 k/hr in the small amount of time you save.

Of course, this comparison is based entirely on the assumption that grimy herbs cost the same as clean herbs, which is not always the case. In my experience, though, it is usually only low-level herbs that cost more in their grimy state than their clean one. It is usually possible to buy grimy high-level herbs for the same price as clean ones, or even for less. The main reason is that many players get these as drops but don’t have the Herblore level to clean them, so they sell them, as I discuss in the topic on cleaning grimy herbs for training.

We could calculate the break-even point where a grimy herb would be no better than a clean herb for various potions, but at that point I think the mathematics gets to be a little much even for this overblown guide. J I’ll just say in general that I found that the advantage of using grimy herbs seems to diminish rather quickly for every 10 gp that a grimy herb costs more than a clean herb. For most potions above level 30 or so, if the cost of a grimy herb gets to be more than 80 gp above that of a clean herb, it’s probably no longer worthwhile.

The results may be surprising, even shocking to some, but if you care about getting the best bang for your buck, then buying grimy herbs to make potions is the way to go. It’s a bit slower, but as long as you can get grimy herbs for the same price or no more than about 80 gp extra compared to clean ones, you’ll save a lot of money for the XP you get.

Another nice aspect of this is that even though cleaning grimy herbs requires a lot of clicking, using them with potions spaces the clicking out—you clean 14 herbs but then wait for about 45 seconds while the game makes the potions. This is far less likely to cause repetitive stress injuries than clicking non-stop for long periods of time.

Note that this advice applies primarily to purchasing herbs for making potions, or storing herbs you get in bulk from the Kingdom of Miscellania. It still makes sense to just clean herbs “on the fly” when you get them in small quantities from Farming or combat.

Choosing Cost-Effective Potions for Training The Pros and Cons of Combining Three-Dose Potions into Four Doses