Herblore is what is considered an expensive skill in Old School RuneScape because most of the efficient training methods are expensive and the profitable ones are extremely slow. However, there is one training method that is both fast and very profitable and it doesn’t even appear on the wiki. I accidentally found this method while looking at the herblore calculator and ordering the list for most XP gained per action!
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XP per pot
Weapon poison++ gives 190 XP, so it is the absolute top when considering how many pots you need to make to reach 99, or how much XP per hour you can gain. This is even better XP than Sara brews, and almost double compared to the AFK stamina pots.
Profits
So I had to dig deeper… The calculator didn’t show any profits, however, when I went to the wiki page expecting some minuses I found out that the profit per potion averages to over 5k per pot. Weapon poison sells for around 5,400 gp and the only tradeable ingredients you will need are poison ivy berryies which you can buy for under 100 gp each and coconut milk which you can buy for under 200 gp each, giving you a profit of over 5k per pot.
Requirements
Digging even further I found that you’ll need 63 Farming and 82 Herblore for this method because you will need to plant your own belladonna seeds since the cave nightshade or nightshade are the non-tradeable ingredients. To harvest the plant you will need gloves and the yield varies based on your farming level.
Helpful additions
Since Draynor manor teleport tablets are expensive and would cut down your profits you should add a Draynor manor teleport to your portal chamber or portal Nexus, so a minimum level 50 Construction will benefit you greatly to integrate belladonnas in your herb runs. the spell from the Arceuus spellbook only takes level 17 to cast. Keep in mind that belladonnas take 5 hours and 20 minutes to grow, so you won’t go here for every herb run.
Further calculations
To go from 82 to 99 Herblore you will need to make a total of 55,860 weapon poison++ doses, but you can realistically plant belladonnas only twice a day with a yield of 6 to 18, maybe three times a day if you have a Kronos plant in the farming guild. This means that you can obtain anywhere between 12 to 54 nightshades a day, so it would take you over 12.75 years to train herblore and earn a profit if you’re going for the lower yield and do this every single day. However, if you’re at 99 Farming already, it will only take you around 3 years of planting three times a day. This is still half as slow as getting 99 crafting purely from the Varrock diary battlestaves.
Compensation
There’s always a law of compensation governing everything, so keep in mind that the profit from one vial of weapon poison you’ll be able to compensate for the losses for 5 sara brews, 15 stamina pots. This means that planting belladonnas twice a day for a year will cut the costs of 21,900 sara brews or 65,700 stamina potions at a minimum so you’ll be close to reaching 99 without losing your GP on training this skill.
Conclusion
The conclusion is simple: start planting your belladonna and get 60k to 270k a day with minimal effort, so you can start training your herblore fast and profitable!
