TruthScape.com - Making Super Weapon Poison

Super strength weapon poison (weapon poison++) is the highest-level regular potion in Herblore, requiring level 82 in the skill to make. It’s also somewhat of an oddball, because it is the only widely-used potion that has an untradeable primary ingredient: cave nightshade. You must get nightshade yourself to make this potion; the inability of players to buy it makes the economics of this potion quite different from most others. It is the only potion with which you can consistently make money—provided you are willing to invest the time necessary to make it.

There are only two ways to get nightshade: grow it using the Farming skill, or pick it up at a spawn in a cave in Gu’Tanoth. Both options are rather slow and tedious.

You can make super weapon poison by gathering nightshade, banking it and then making the poisons later. The waiting time between spawns, however, means you can save some time by bringing with supplies and actually making some of the poisons at the cave. Here’s my basic method.

Start off by putting on weight-reducing clothes, then bank at either Castle Wars or Yanille. Withdraw your skavid map and light source, 13 coconut milk and 13 poison ivy berries. Be sure you are in a world that is nearly full.

Run around the eastern wall of Yanille and then west until you get to the path that leads up to Gu’Tanoth. Instead of continuing west in the way you would go to get to the blue dragons, go south until you reach a gate. Go through it, continue south and then go west over a bridge spanning some lava. Click the cave entrance to go in (ignore the warning about the tinderbox).

In this cave you will find a single cave nightshade spawn on the ground. Temporarily drop a coconut milk, then pick up the nightshade. Use it on a coconut milk and then use a poison ivy on the unfinished potion to make weapon poison++. Then pick up the coconut milk you dropped.

Watch for the respawn, and each time the nightshade appears, pick it up and make another super weapon poison using one of the poison ivy berries (Figure 164). Do this a total of 13 times until all of the coconut milk and poison ivy berries are used up. Then wait for 13 more respawns to fill your inventory.

**Figure 164: Making Super Weapon Poison**
Rather than just getting 26 cave nightshade and hauling them back to the bank, save time by taking with coconut milk and poison ivy berries, so you can make 13 of the weapon poisons while waiting for the nightshade to respawn.

In the northeast corner of the cave is a hole; enter it and poof, you will find yourself near the hops patch in the northern part of Yanille. Run to the bank, deposit the weapon poison++ and withdraw 13 coconut milk. Combine with the 13 nightshade still in your inventory, then withdraw 13 more poison ivy berries to make 13 more weapon poison++.

Total time required is about 16 minutes to make 26 super weapon poisons, which works out to 97.5 per hour.

Tip: If you have at least level 65 Firemaking, you can get, light and wear a mining helmet. This frees up one extra inventory space so you can take home an additional nightshade!

I also devised a modification to the technique that reduces the amount of running and banking required, by taking advantage of the ability of ranged ammunition to stack. Most of the time, the difference in price between dragon arrows and dragon arrows++ is around 1/5th of the cost of a super weapon poison, since each treats five arrows. Check if that’s the case when you want to try this method, by buying five arrows and one weapon++, treating the arrows and seeing if you can sell them without losing any (or at least much) money—they may not sell immediately but usually will go fairly quickly if you sell near the median price. If it works, you can try this modification.

Prepare as before, but put 65 dragon arrows in your quiver. Run to the cave, make your first weapon poison++, then wait for the respawn and make a second. Remove the arrows from your quiver and use the two super weapon poisons on the arrows to make 10 dragon arrows++. Continue, making 11 more weapon poison++ and treating 55 more arrows (Figure 165). When done, put the 65 dragon arrows++ back in your quiver.

**Figure 165: Making Super Poisoned Dragon Arrows**
If market conditions permit, you can make the process of getting nightshade and making super poison even more efficient by making super poisoned dragon arrows right in the cave. This lets you make and use 13 super poisons and bank 26 additional nightshade each trip.

Now, wait for 26 more spawns, picking up one every 30 seconds, then go through the hole as before. At the bank, make 26 more weapon poison++ potions from these. Then sell the dragon arrows++ and potions, unless you want to keep them for your own use.

This method requires around 23 minutes 15 seconds to make the equivalent of 39 super weapon poisons, which is 100.5 potions per hour.

Having to wait 30 seconds between spawns is a nuisance, but it doesn’t have to be entirely wasted. You can use that time to read the forums, chat with friends or participate on a chat channel. This is also a good “background activity” to do when engaging in some sort of other online work (just don’t leave your PC!)

Another option is to do some alching: wield a fire staff and bring with a stack of items to alch and nature runes. This will obviously cost you a couple of inventory slots.

Finally, you can consider using a familiar that generates items, such as a macaw. Again, any herbs generated that you want to keep will cost you some inventory space, but if you keep only the good ones it can be worthwhile.

So, what do we get for our effort? Well, that depends entirely on how much super weapon poison is going for when you read this. Once upon a time, it was easy to sell super weapon poison for 8k or even 10k a piece in bulk, and 15k to 20k in smaller quantities, but those times are now past. As I write this, the value of weapon poison++ is only around 3k. However, given that nearly every potion has dropped, and most other methods lose tons of money, that’s not really so bad.

Using my basic method, I yield 26 weapon poison++, which I sold for 80,782 gp, an average of 3,107 gp each. I already had coconut milk and poison ivy berries, but the cost to buy them at this time would have been 931 for the milk and 469 for the berries, or a total of exactly 1,400. So the profit per potion is 1,707 gp.

With the dragon arrow variation, the calculations are somewhat different, of course. My costs were 39 coconut milk and poison ivy berries, at 1,400 per set, and 65 dragon arrows which cost 390,780. My proceeds were 26 weapon poison++ at 3,107, plus 65 dragon arrow++ which sold for 428,935. Here are the calculations:

We make less money per XP, mainly because the profit on the dragon arrows at this time was less than selling the poisons outright. But the overall profit per hour is about the same and the XP/hr is 3% better, so it’s worth doing. Just make sure you check the arrow prices first!

Obviously, making 166 k per hour on a potion is rather different than losing 400k to 2 million an hour. On the other hand, this is also much slower training than making conventional potions. So it’s really a trade-off, and one must weigh the money made/saved against the time saved by faster leveling using conventional potions.

Suppose we compare this to making super restore potions, which have an SAV of -8.9, SAS of 159,600 and SAP of -1,421. To figure out if making these instead of super poisons is worthwhile, we calculate the TVE:

Now in English: it takes 8.6 hours of making super poisons to earn the 159,600 XP you can get from one hour of super restores. But in that 8.6 hours you earn 1.43 million with super poisons, where you lose 1.42 million with super restores. The difference is 2.85 million, which is what you have to earn in the 7.6 hours the super restores save you for the activities to be equivalent. That comes to around 374 k per hour that the faster method costs you.

If you can make more than that, then it makes more sense, strictly speaking, to do the super restores. But if 374k per hour sounds like pretty decent earnings to you, then the weapon poisons are the better choice.

Of course, the boredom factor is a reason to consider not doing the super poison. On the other hand, if you can alch while waiting for the respawns, that’s a point in their favor. Choices, choices…