#ensouled chaos druid head

[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.

[lord-radish]

For some reason, no-one wants ensouled chaos druid heads in old school Runescape. They grant low prayer XP as far as heads go, but they offer more XP than ensouled dog heads and they're still 200 coins less per head than dog heads.

I'm gonna use them to train my magic, prayer and attack stats all at once.

[mrmallard]

So back on lord-radish I had a sideblog called osrs-stonks. It was a blog where I would talk about the in-game stock market - which is called the Grand Exchange, and is basically a player-driven avenue to buy and sell useful resources - and like fun little items with odd patterns in the in-game stock market.

One of those items was the Ensouled Chaos Druid Head, which is an item you can resurrect with a spell and kill again to gain a large amount of prayer experience. The game has ensouled heads as lowly as the goblin head, which gives you like 150xp in prayer experience, and as grand as the dragon head, which I think gives you a couple of thousand xp per head. Keep in mind, the other methods of training prayer tap out in the upper hundreds of experience points - ensouled heads are a crazy efficient way to train prayer.

My post on the ensouled chaos druid head called attention to the fact that it was the second cheapest ensouled head on the market, even compared to other ensouled heads that gave you less experience points for killing them. Like it was the goblin head at 380gp or something - the weakest head - then the druid head at 404gp - which is like the middle of the road, granting as much prayer xp as the most expensive type of bones would - then like the dog head at 425gp etc. You could buy something like five druid heads for the price of a demon head and get more experience through those five cheaper heads than the demon head.

I looked at the Grand Exchange today.

Since that post came out? the price of chaos druid heads has almost tripled. They went from 404 gold pieces per head to just over a thousand gold.

[osrs-stonks]

OSRS Stocks Quickie: Necklace of Faith

I like enchanting jewellery. Or to be a bit more accurate, I get a lot of superfluous currency to buy bags of gems with, so I like to make time to enchant jewellery for profit. It's only been recently that I've learned the value in teleportation jewellery like the games necklace or the digsite pendant, usually I'm just trying to make a buck.

I will say though - heads up to anyone who isn't very enthused about training their Hunter skill, birdhouse traps on Fossil Island give out a lot of XP and a lot of extremely valuable bird nests. Digsite pendants are your friend if you've unlocked the Fossil Island location. Again, teleportation jewellery is a fairly recent appreciation of mine.

I don't know why I was looking up enchant spells, but I came across the wiki page for Lvl-3 Enchant and came across the Necklace of Faith. And after checking some of the other enchanted jewellery, this thing just kinda sucks.

Now, granted - I'm not familiar with the necklace of faith. I tend to make bracelets of slaughter because they're worth more on the GE. And while I could say that they're the least valuable item as far as enchanted red topaz jewellery goes, that's technically not true - Efaritay's aid has more of a value drop on the GE than the necklace of faith:

But Efaritay's aid - as limited as it is - lets you use non-silver weaponry to fight vampires. Your damage cap is stuck at 10, but I still think that's kind of a neat effect.

The effect of the necklace of faith, verbatim from the wiki, is:

"When worn, the necklace will restore the wearer's prayer points by 10% if their hitpoints drop below 20%. Once the effect takes place, the necklace will degrade to dust. However, if the player is reduced to zero hitpoints from above 20%, the necklace will have no effect and the player will die as usual."

Personally, I think that's a weak-ass effect. You might get enough oomph out of this if you're at level 70 prayer or so, where you get a measly SEVEN prayer points to work with, but at the lower levels this item is genuinely useless imo. You also have to get whittled down to 20% health before it kicks in, at which point it's entirely possible that the next hit from the opponent will kill you, rendering the effect meaningless. They even accounted for the possibility that the player would be killed with a hit that damages them for more than 20% of their HP. If you're at 20% health and you've already burned through 70+ prayer points, chances are you're hosed.

I did introduce this item by saying that it sucks, but I can see how going into combat with this could help you pull a hail mary if you're good enough at the game. But I feel like it's not particularly appreciated anyway, which is why I wanted to cover it.

Looking at the value chart, this item's value peaked at almost 2,000 gold pieces when it was introduced:

Went into freefall and bottomed out at 628 gold pieces two years later - seemingly due to high demand, which didn't even breach 500 daily trades on the Grand Exchange:

Then hit a peak in 2020:

After which it fizzled out and maintained a steady value - it ebbs and flows, but it's nothing too crazy.

What gets me is that in February 2023, the daily trading volume hit a significant peak of 399 items, but the price was barely affected. You can see how the absolute nadir of the necklace's value was when there was a huge spike in GE sales, and the little anthill where it was briefly valuable again is nestled between two little peaks of GE sales. This thing did numbers - at least compared to its entire life on the Grand Exchange - and nothing happened to the value. Ebbs and flows, but nothing significant.

I'm rather fond of the ensouled chaos druid head, which is why I wanted to talk about it and bring attention to it. The necklace of faith is just kinda silly though. Low value, sucky effect and ridiculously unpopular.

As a postscript, though, I did look into onyx jewellery - and I found an item that increases the damage of all granite weapons by 20%, but it reduces your accuracy and your defense against all styles of attack. The best part is, you can't even use it with the necklace of faith, because they're both necklaces!

I would consider making a regular post about the berserker necklace, especially since it's worth like 500,000 gold pieces less than an unenchanted onyx necklace, but that side of things is way out of my wheelhouse. But man, look at that frigging GE value chart - this thing was worth over three million gold at one point.

Moral of the story, the necklace of faith sucks. Let's point and laugh at it.

[osrs-stonks]

Also while I'm here, the next post is gonna be about ensouled chaos druid heads. Stay tuned.