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Leveling and Gaining Free XP with Serum 207 Training with Barbarian Mix Potions

If Serum 207 wasn’t enough of an oddball potion to consider using for training purposes, allow me to introduce you to an even stranger option: making unfinished Guthix balance potions. The completed potion is only used in the Temple Trekking and Burgh de Rott Rambling twin minigames, but like Serum 207, it has some unique properties that make it a viable supplemental training option for herblorists—especially when you choose not to complete it!

The Guthix balance potion is made by adding garlic and silver dust to a restore potion. Most people never make them, because they aren’t worthwhile in terms of time or money: silver dust requires running silver bars one at a time through the bone grinder at Port Phasmatys, and restore potions aren’t cost effective to make because they use expensive ingredients themselves. And you only get 50 XP for making one of these potions anyway.

There are four facts, however, that change matters a great deal:

• Unlike most potions where you only get XP when they are complete, Guthix balance potions give you 25 XP for adding the garlic and 25 XP for adding the silver dust.
  
  
• Garlic is dirt cheap.
  
  
• Restore potions are also dirt cheap.
  
  
• You get the same XP for adding garlic to a restore potion with any number of doses.

Add these up and you have an interesting training alternative: buying restore potions with 1, 2 or 3 doses, adding garlic to them and then just discarding them. At current market prices, this is the single cheapest way to get Herblore XP in the game, letting you earn up to 49k XP per hour with a loss as low as only 79k gp per hour.

Of course, there are a couple of strings attached. One has to do with getting ingredients, while the other is related to the mechanics of making these potions.

Regular restore potions are easy to buy in the Grand Exchange, and are quite inexpensive: at the time I wrote this article, 3-dose restore pots were only 85 gp each and could be bought in large quantities. You can save even more money by purchasing 2-dose or 1-dose restore potions, which right now sell for 63 gp and 32 gp respectively. The catch here is that they are low-volume items, so it takes time to buy them. You need to put in an order at the GE at the maximum price, and then wait to accumulate them over time.

Garlic is another item that you must buy slowly, but this time that it is due to both limited availability and GE restrictions. Garlic is not considered a skill material, so you can only buy 100 of it every few hours. Again, you should put in an order and allow them to be purchased slowly.

An alternative is to buy garlic from a store, but then you have to resort to the running-back-and-forth-between-store-and-bank routine. The closest shop to a bank is the spice seller in the Ardougne marketplace, where I was able to buy four loads of garlic (108 pieces) in 2 minutes 20 seconds. (The good news is that it is only 3 gp each in the store.) After four loads I was out of run energy, but I could use that garlic to make potions while waiting for it to recover.

Guthix balance potions are oddballs in many ways, including the fact that there is no “Make All” option for assembling them: you have to add the garlic to each super restore potion one at a time. Even worse, you have to click each garlic and potion individually—you can’t just repeatedly click on items in the bottom of your inventory as with, for example, making barbarian mix potions. All of this means more work, and the need for a special method.

After some experimentation, I have found that this is the best technique. Start at a one-click bank with a stack of restore potions and garlic near each other, and do the following:

1. Right-click your garlic and select “Withdraw 10”, then click the garlic in your bank two more times to withdraw a total of 12.
   
   
2. Right-click the restore potions and choose “Withdraw All”. You’ll take out 16, of which you’ll use 12; ignore the other four.
   
   
3. Go to the third row of your inventory, which contains the garlic just above a row of restore potions. Click each garlic and then the potion just below it (in the fourth row) to make four unfinished Guthix balance potions. Then go to the second row and add those garlics to the potions in the fifth row, followed by the garlics in the first row going into the potions in the sixth row (see Figure 166).
   
   
4. Bank the 12 unfinished Guthix balance potions and repeat.
   

   Figure 166: Making Unfinished Guthix Balance Potions

   There is no “Make X” option for these, but they’re still pretty easy to make if you do them one row at a time. Always click on the garlic first so you don’t drink the potions!

   
   

A bit of a nuisance, but this actually goes pretty quick once you get the hang of it. In my tests, it took me 3 minutes 40 seconds to do 10 loads of 12.

Since making these unfinished potions gives 25 XP each, at 3 minutes and 40 seconds to make 120 unfinished potions, this comes to 49,090 XP per hour. That compares quite favorably to the 56,000 XP per hour of making strength potions, but the cost here is much lower, which is why the method is attractive.

Three-dose restore potions are always rather easy to buy (since players make them to train), but two-dose and one-dose potions are more cost-effective, if you can get them. Table 31 shows the skill activity rating calculations for these three base potion options, one set considering just the time to make them and another also including the time to buy garlic in Ardougne. The latter option reduces the XP per hour dramatically, making it far less interesting.

The very high TVE figures for making these with GE-bought garlic show just how advantageous this is compared to making strength potions, otherwise a cost-effective way to get XP. If you make strength potions instead of these, you are effectively paying 1.8 to 2.7 million per hour in the time you save. If you have to spend time running garlic back and forth, however, the attractiveness of the option drops dramatically, as you get much less XP per hour, but it still may be worth doing.

The difficulty in getting large amounts of the ingredients needed makes unfinished Guthix balance potions inappropriate as a primary training method. Rather, they make an excellent supplemental method to do in addition to other techniques.

I recommend that you maintain standing orders in the GE to buy 1-dose and 2-dose restore potions, as well as garlic, and accumulate them over time. If you end up with more garlic than potions, buy some 3-dose restores so you have equal amounts of potions and garlic, then make some unfinished Guthix balance potions.

When done, you can try to sell them on the GE—don’t expect anything from that, though. Another option is to empty them out and reuse the vials. This is time-consuming, and not really worth the bother compared to just buying vials of water, but it’s an option some may prefer.

If you don’t sell them on the GE or reuse them, note the potions and sell them at a general store! You won’t get much for them (11 gp except for the first few), but hey, it’s better than nothing. J

Leveling and Gaining Free XP with Serum 207 Training with Barbarian Mix Potions