When the Hunter skill was introduced, many players quickly grew bored with it. One frequent comment was that it was too tedious and not much fun to train, and there weren't many valuable rewards. One response from Jagex to this complaint was to create Impetuous Impulses, a Hunter-based minigame that aims to put some fun into training Hunter, along with providing some interesting rewards as well.
In a nutshell, the game involves running around a maze with changing walls, trying to catch small, flying beings called "implings" in special jars. You can then "loot" the jar, freeing the impling in exchange for one of the items it is carrying. Each impling carries items bearing a particular theme, with higher-level implings offering more valuable rewards.
One way to make money with this activity is to catch the implings and then immediately loot the jars, repeating until you have an inventory full of goodies. But the captured implings are tradeable, and in my estimation you can make more money by catching the better implings and then selling them. This is based on tests where I compare the value of the hundreds of impling jars to the items I looted from them.
Implings can be categorized into roughly four value categories. The lowest level implings (baby, young and gourmet) are worth barely more than the cost of a jar, and not worth catching. The mid-level implings (earth, essence, eclectic and nature) have a value of about 2 to 4 times the cost of a jar, and due to how common they are, form the bulk of what you'll catch. The magpie and ninja implings are worth over 20k each and are fairly rare, but you'll catch several per hour. And finally, there is the very valuable dragon impling -- worth about 400k at this writing. It is quite elusive and not something you should plan on seeing very often, but can give you a nice profit bump if you find one. You need to be very high level to catch dragon implings, and they constitute a big chunk of potential profit from this minigame, so it is really only at very high levels that Impetuous Impulses becomes lucrative. At level 70 Hunter you can still catch magpie implings, and you won't miss often when trying to catch nature, eclectic and essence implings, so I consider the activity worthwhile then as well. At mid levels and below, this is not a particularly worthwhile activity, especially since you also need a pretty good Agility level and Strength level to be effective.
Note that once you complete the quest Rocking Out, you gain the ability to also capture pirate implings. These are very rare and not particularly valuable, so I ignored them for the sake of simplicity.
Finally, I should point out that you cannot use Summoning familiars in the maze. |
All information based on Grand Exchange price data from: May 20, 2012. Note that the three-day delay in price updates is waived for RuneScoop members. 