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Buying Grimy Herbs to Make Potions Making Super Weapon Poison

Vials have a four-dose capacity, but most potions have only three doses when they are made. It is possible to combine four 3-dose potions into three 4-dose potions, and there are both advantages and disadvantages to doing so. On the upside, combining potions makes them more useful and more attractive to buyers, because 4-dose versions let you make better use of space. It also allows some vials to be reused, saving money. On the downside, combining is rather tedious and time-consuming.

Is it worth doing? Let’s find out.

Using the best method I’ve devised so far, it takes around 45 seconds to convert 28 3-dose potions into 21 4-dose potions. It is possible to make 1,120 3-dose potions per hour using the two-step method, which comes to 40 batches of 28 completing potions. It will take a further 30 minutes to combine 1,120 potions, so a total of 90 minutes is required to make 1,120 3-dose potions and convert them to 840 4-dose potions. This works out to 560 4-dose potions per hour, equivalent to about 745 3-dose potions.

The bottom line, then, is that making 4-dose potions reduces the amount of XP you get from making potions by a full third: 33.3%. This is a very significant slowdown in productivity.

Making 4-dose potions can provide two potential benefits: recycling vials, and possibly selling 4-dose potions at a premium due to their greater utility.

First, combining 1,120 3-dose potions into 840 4-dose potions frees up 280 vials for reuse. At a cost of about 75 gp each, this has a market value of around 21k. This isn’t much, and it’s certainly not enough to justify combining just for the vials—even though many people do it for that reason, not realizing that the 30 minutes it takes means they are valuing their time at just 42k per hour.

Second, there’s the matter of selling 4-dose potions for a higher price per dose. You would think that this would be easy to do, yet it turns out that it isn’t. The Grand Exchange is set up so that a 4-dose potion is always 4/3 of the price of a 3-dose potion. It is sometimes possible to get a 5% premium by selling 4-dose potions at the high end of the range for a potion, but not always, and even then, that’s not much of a difference.

We can’t really blame the Grand Exchange for this situation, though. Even before the GE, it was common to find 4-dose potions selling for less per dose than 3-dose potions. I never understood why this happened, but it was quite common.

It is possible that you could find a buyer to give you a better price for 4-dose potions than you could get on the GE, but then you have to deal with the time and hassle associated with that.

If you are planning to resell your potions, do not make them into 4-dose versions. You will not get any premium for the potions, and the value of the recycling vials is minimal. The only situation where this could possibly be of benefit is if the potions are in a seller’s market and you can’t sell the 3-dose versions on the GE; I have sometimes found that in that case, 4-dose potions may be easier to move.

If, instead, you are making potions for your own use, and you want them to be 4-dose potions anyway, then combining all of them might be a sensible choice. On the other hand, some players find that it is less tedious to combine small numbers of potions at a time, when they are needed, rather than spending long sessions mixing hundreds of potions at once.

Buying Grimy Herbs to Make Potions Making Super Weapon Poison