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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Beastopedia - RuneScape Monster Data, Combat Guide and Drop Logs       >  The RuneScoop Beastopedia - Understanding the Beastopedia            >  The RuneScoop Beastopedia - Understanding Source Lists and Resource Tables

The Beastopedia Herbs Resource Table RuneScoop Monster Secrets

The newest skill in RuneScape, Summoning, is trained by creating Summoning pouches. Each pouch requires a Summoning charm, and these are obtained nearly exclusively via combat. Because of this, it’s extremely important to know which monsters are the best sources of charms—in fact, many players decide what monsters to fight primarily based on their charm drops, with other drops being secondary.

The problem is that figuring out which are the best monsters for charms isn’t as easy as it sounds. I’ll explain some of the issues here, and the system I devised to give a better picture of this situation via the Charms Resource Table.

The Difficulty in Assessing the Value of Summoning Charms

If you consider other key skill materials, it’s pretty easy to determine which are the best sources. For example, most monsters drop the same herbs in the same proportions, so the best critters are the ones that give you the most herbs per hour. Similarly, if you want to train other skills, the Good Sources List can tell you which monsters will give you the most of items such as seeds for Farming, pure essence for Runecrafting, raw fish for Cooking and so forth.

Now, I could easily have just shown approximate figures for each of the four charm colors for each monster, based on my combat tests. The problem is figuring out how to compare monsters that have wildly different drop rates for the various charms, because they aren’t all of the same value. A blue charm is generally considered to be worth more than a crimson charm, for example, but by how much? How about a green charm versus a gold charm?

These aren’t simple questions to answer, but I decided to take a stab at it—otherwise there is no objective way to compare monsters and figure out which are the best sources for charms. In thinking the matter over, I realized that there are really two different ways that the value of a charm can be assessed: experience point value and cost efficiency. These reflect the fact that Summoning is both a slow skill to train (because you need to get the charms, mainly) and also an expensive one (because of the need to use up spirit shards and secondary ingredients).

The first factor turns out to be relatively straight-forward: Jagex has assigned XP values for most Summoning pouches based on the level of the pouch times a fixed number for each charm type. The factors are as shown in Table 171.

For example, consider Evil Turnip pouches: they are level 42, use crimson charms, and provide 184.8 Summoning XP each. Well, if you multiply 42 by the crimson charm factor of 4.4, you get 184.8. This same calculation applies for most pouches (there a some exceptions, but very few.)

The second factor, cost efficiency, is equally important to many players, but much harder to figure out. The difficulty arises because every pouch uses a different number of spirit shards, as well as secondary ingredients that vary in value by large amounts. Even worse, the relationships change by Summoning level: at some levels it may be cheaper to make a pouch with a crimson charm than a green charm, and at others the opposite may be true.

To figure out this part of the equation, I spent a considerable amount of time examining spirit shard costs for all the pouches, and looking at the typical cost of secondary ingredients for pouches for each charm color at various Summoning levels. I weighted my analysis towards the higher levels, since you need to make many more pouches at level 80 than at level 40, for example.

Based on my analysis, I came up with the cost efficiency factors shown in Table 172.

What this table shows is that crimson and gold charms are roughly equivalent in terms of how cost-effectively you can train with them, green charms are worse than gold charms (because they require far more spirit shards) and blue pouches are by far the best. The high value for blue charms may seem strange, since those pouches require easily the most spirit shards, and also some of the priciest secondary ingredients. Most of the small number of pouches that are in demand by players, however, use blue charms, their rarity being part of the reason. So blue charms are the only one that really allow you to make pouches and sell them for a profit, raising their efficiency rating significantly.

How Charm Ratings are Computed

I use the XP factors and efficiency factors explained above to calculate an Efficiency Rating and XP Rating for each monster. This is done by estimating the number of each charm that can be obtained per hour from a given monster (or set of monsters) and method, then multiplying each by the relevant factor and adding the figures up. The resulting ratings give a pretty good indication of which monsters provide the best overall value in charms, looking either at XP or cost effectiveness.

As an example of how the ratings are calculated, suppose for simplicity we have two monsters: the Jabber drops 40 gold, 5 green, 10 crimson and 7 blue charms per hour, and the Wocky drops 5 gold, 40 green, 7 crimson and 10 blue charms per hour. Which is a better charm dropper? Let’s find out.

The Jabber’s ratings would be as follows:

• Jabber XP Rating = 40*1.3 + 5*1.75 + 7*4.4 + 10*8.8 = 166
  
  
• Jabber Efficiency Rating = 40*2.5 + 5*1.7 + 7*3 + 10*7 = 188

The Wocky’s ratings would be:

• Wocky XP Rating = 5*1.3 + 40*1.75 + 7*4.4 + 10*8.8 = 195
  
  
• Wocky Efficiency Rating = 5*2.5 + 40*1.7 + 7*3 + 10*7 = 172

So the Jabber is more cost efficient, but the Wocky provides more XP; in this case there is pretty much a straight trade-off between the two,

I wanted to combine these two ratings into an Overall Charms Rating, so I chose a weighted average with XP worth 1.5 times efficiency. This represents my impression that players view getting maximum XP value of charms per hour as being more important than cost efficient training. The Overall Charms Rating of the Jabber in the example above is 437, while the Wocky’s is 465.

Using the Charms Resource Table

The Charms Resource Table shows all of the monsters in the Beastopedia that drop charms. There are individual columns for each of the four “base” colored charms, plus columns for the three charms ratings defined above: XP, Efficiency and Overall. Of course, there are also columns for monster name (with the names clickable) and combat level.

This table is sortable as long as you have Javascript enabled, and by default shows all of the monsters sorted by Overall Charms Rating, from best to worst. If you consider XP of primary importance you can click on that column to sort the rows based on that rating, or do the same for the Efficiency Rating if you wish. Of course, if you are after a specific charm type, you can see the monsters sorted by how many of that color they drop, by clicking the appropriate column.

Note that special charms—such as abyssal charms and obsidian charms—are not tracked in this table, because they are used only in conjunction with one of the color charms. Thus they are actually treated as secondary items in the Summoning skill.

The Beastopedia Herbs Resource Table RuneScoop Monster Secrets