#vorkath

[seakara]

Vorkath badges

[honeybee-osrs]

Forgot to post this yesterday but I joined the RuneScape Art Community Discord and did one of the Scapetober prompts because of it :D

Day 23: Boss

[evelynhenare1]

Got my 50th Vorkath Kill! Also got two Vorkath heads in a row!

[jessepinwheel]

fighting bosses in runescape is a really good way to test if you can do really complicated things like count to six. and find out the answer is no

[mahariel-s]

i am Once Again cooking karambwans . but in a gay slay way

[imunbreakabledude]

so, i'm nearing the dragon rank threshold on leagues, definitely can get it within a couple more days, i'm just like, trying to figure out which remaining tasks are quickest/least annoying for me to do rn...

so I figured, Vorkath combat achievements, that should be an easy 200, only one i don't already have easily is The Walk, which i knew would take some practice... but Leagues is the best time to practice it and transfer that skill to the maingame, since last stand lets me try it and have a safety net from having to walk back and pay 100k every time i fuck up.

but it's uh... really fucking hard? and I know this is at least partly a Skill Issue in my own timing but the thing is. i'm having really bad tick quality which is definitely not helping. tick quality is something i didn't even know about until earlier this year and once I did (and found a tip from someone to solve many issues with ticks, specifically on mac computers) it helped a lotttt with learning CG and also other PVM. the tick tracker plugin, which typically shows 65-70% of "good ticks" on my computer by default, would go up to 90-95% when i used some of these dedicated workarounds to improve the quality.

but i'm not sure when or why it happened but that... stopped working? or became way less effective. I now am capping out at ~75% good ticks even with these workarounds active. and i have no clue why. Maybe leagues worlds act differently? maybe my ISP is just giving shittier service lately? but either way it's making it really fucking hard not only to GET this combat achievement, but also to even tell how much of the issue is my own timing, versus inconsistent ticks fucking me over :/

it's a bummer because this really is a good chance to practice it but the practice feels useless when it's unclear if the failures are actually me or not. and i have very little hope of getting the clear even once for the CA, with 25% bad ticks, because you need to be tick-perfect for 24 ticks to get this achievement. That is possibly (i am not a GM or even master CA person so may be wrong) the most stringent stretch of tick-perfect execution that is hard-required for any CA. i know you only have to do it once but i'm like damn, why do i not hear more people having issues with this one? is it really just my own skill being incapable of compensating for bad ticks? or do very few players have this issue with tick quality???

[moonclanmadness]

I think it would be really very cool if "The Dragon Slayer" was the player character's title after doing DS2 just like World Guardian is for RS3

[davidsunrise]

Damn boy are you vorkath cause I want pity head from you.

[legy]

things i am really normal about: characters that make major splashes in one fork of runescape show up in the other fork

vorkath is in rs3 now :)

[seakara]

Happy Year of the Dragon peeps~! :D

[rallis-fatalis]

Normally when a Fremennik sees a dragon flying overhead, especially one as notable as the Vorkath of Ungael, one is tempted to panic. But for Olaf, gazing upon the sight brings a smile to his face and warms his heart knowing Rallis is on yet another adventure and paying a visit.

[tinswag]

Mesmerized by that one pic of Zemmy riding Vorkath because my brain keeps interpreting it as him wearing pants

[evelynhenare1]

Haven't posted anything in a while but I'm still vibing and still playing lots of OSRS. Have gotten into Vorkath recently and just got 3 kills without leaving for the first time!!! Still learning how to woox walk properly but getting there!

[osrs-stonks]

OSRS Stocks: Ensouled Chaos Druid Heads

Old-school Runescape has a mechanic where some enemy mobs drop ensouled heads when you defeat them. Usually enemies will drop some standard items like bones, ashes, coins and/or meat, and then have a small chance of dropping some other stuff like weapons, ammunition, armour or runes. The ensouled head is an occasional drop that - as you've probably guessed - gives you their head with a little bit of their soul inside of it.

The purpose of this mechanic is to help you train your prayer skill. Prayers are basically just buffs, and the higher you make your prayer skill, the more prayers you unlock. You also get an extra prayer point per level so your buffs last longer. Before ensouled heads were added to the game, the primary way to train your prayer skill was to bury bones; you had regular bones, big bones, monkey bones, dragon bones etc. that would grant you higher amounts of prayer experience when you buried them. Other remains came a bit later.

Unfortunately, burying bones is a very tedious task with a very middling XP reward. The lowest class of bones grants you 4.5 prayer experience, and the highest class - superior dragon bones - only grant 150 XP. There are ways to amplify the payoff, but you're still looking at a maximum of 600 XP per pile of bones.

Ensouled heads can be resurrected at an altar, summoning an astral body to be refought so you can gain prayer and combat experience. The "worst" ensouled head, the goblin one, grants 130 experience - again, the bog-standard bones that just about everything drops only grants you 4.5 XP per pile. The best head - a dragon head - gives you a massive 1,560 prayer XP.

The ensouled chaos druid head nets you 584 prayer experience, just shy of the superior dragon bones.

Superior dragon bones - which I might make a post on in the future, because there was a massive dip in value in 2022 - cost 7,861 gold pieces to buy on the GE at the time of writing. These bones are only dropped by a story-relevant boss named Vorkath which has a minimum combat level of 392 (compared to the player character's maximum combat level of 127).

Ensouled chaos druid heads cost 404 gold pieces, and the mob that drops this item seems to only exist at level 13.

The low value of ensouled chaos druid heads has interested me for a while. In this post, I'm going to go deeper into the value of other ensouled heads and speculate as to why the ensouled chaos druid head is the second cheapest head to buy on the Grand Exchange.

---

The value chart for the ensouled chaos druid head is interesting, in that the peak of its value is when the item was launched on OSRS:

After which it dipped significantly, and stayed mostly in the same ballpark.

You can see that there was a brief boom in 2020, where the price almost hit 1,700 gold pieces:

After which it hit its lowest value of 352 gold pieces per head:

The ensouled chaos druid head is the second cheapest ensouled head you can buy on the GE, compared to the ensouled goblin head which only offers 130 prayer experience. And sure, it's no ensouled dragon head with its 1,560 prayer XP, but the next best option is the ensouled giant head at 650 XP, and that head is almost twice as expensive as the chaos druid head.

I'm starting to believe that the price for this head is so cheap because of the daily volume of ensouled chaos druid heads being sold on the GE.

Like - unicorns are rare and kind of a pain in the ass to farm for heads. According to the wiki at the time of writing, the daily volume of ensouled unicorn heads being sold on the GE is like 170. Ensouled dog heads only drop from two hostile dog mobs ranging between combat level 44 and 63, and the daily volume of that item is 117.

The daily volume of ensouled chaos druid heads - again, the DAILY volume - is just shy of 6,000:

So case closed, right?

Well, maybe not.

Ensouled chaos druid heads grant 584 prayer experience when you resurrect them at the Dark Altar in Arceuus. They're preceded by ensouled dog heads which grant 520 prayer XP when resurrected and defeated, and they're succeeded by ensouled giant heads which grant 650 prayer XP when defeated.

Over 26,000 ensouled giant heads go through the Grand Exchange every day, and the price is almost double what ensouled chaos druid heads are worth:

And I think I might have an answer for why the figures are the way they are.

Chaos druids are kind of common. There are five or six outposts of them in the entire game, and they're only ever at combat level 13, so they're easy enough to mow down and farm heads. Low combat level, easy to farm, common enough mob compared to dogs and unicorns. I'd imagine they're also a lower level slayer task.

Giants are fucking EVERYWHERE.

You've got hill giants, moss giants, ice giants, fire giants and cyclopes. They're a common slayer task, and they're often a reasonable option to train your combat skills and farm key drops to take on Obor and Bryophyta.

Giant heads might be the single most common ensouled head you can get in the game. And because of that and the slightly superior XP gain, giant heads are always moving through the GE and are always fairly valuable.

In my opinion, chaos druid heads are fairly common compared to its contemporaries, so it faces a sort of mundanity that keeps the value low and the daily volume high. Giant heads are plentiful and popular, so the value remains much higher than that of the ensouled chaos druid head despite not being all that different. Chaos druid heads are mundane, like toilet paper. Giant heads are popular, like McDonalds.

Other heads that grant less XP are more valuable than the chaos druid head only due to not being as common of a drop, presumably due to their mobs not being as common in the game world or not being a popular mob to grind. Like who's out there grinding scorpion mobs? They barely drop anything. Low daily volume, low item reserves, higher price. You can say the same for pretty much every mob with an ensouled head prior to the chaos druids, except for the common goblin.

I like ensouled giant heads well enough, but ever since learning about the ensouled chaos druid head I've come to feel kind of sorry for it. It's not much worse than the ensouled giant head, but it's not nearly as popular and it's extremely cheap on the Grand Exchange. I love an underdog, and honestly using chaos druid heads to train your prayer is probably the best coin-to-XP value due to its reduced value compared to giant heads.

So the next time you're considering training your prayer level, consider the humble ensouled chaos druid head. They're not quite as good as giant heads, but you're not missing out on much and you're getting a fantastic bargain.

[ewiniarz]

What's the hardest boss you've ever encountered in any game?

Currently, I've been playing Runescape 3 and our version of Vorkath (namely on hard mode) has been a closed casket special. Shout out to Zuk as well, I just can't seem to put it together.

the Owlcat Pathfinder games also have some big beatdowns, I remember Deskari was a pain in the ass, and just the tail end of the game in general where the "trash fights" get ridiculous.