If you have been herbing in the new expansion you will have come across a few Verdant Seeds. Here we break down what these are, where to plant them and a strategy to maximize their potential.
Verdant Seed
Verdant Seeds are randomly looted while you gather herbs. As the tooltip suggests, you need to plant them in Rich Soil, which in The War Within is only located on the farm Beledar’s Bounty in Hallowfall.
Rich Soil appear as herb nodes on the minimap, and look like small glittering dirt piles on the ground. To plant a seed in the soil you simply click the seed when standing near the soil.
Once you finish the cast, a basic herb will grow immediately, which you and others can then gather. The herb is up for 1 minute after planting, or 30 seconds after the first gather, and can be any of the 5 herbs from The War Within. The quality of the materials you receive will be based on your herbalism skill and specialization choices.
The map below shows the location of Beledar’s Bounty in Hallowfall.
Specialization
The Botany specialization has the Cultivation sub-specialization, which lets you specialize in Verdant Seeds to loot them more frequently. It also unlocks 3 special variants: Crystalline, Irradiated and Sporefused which are looted from their respective modified herbs.
Group Strategy
Since herbalists can pick each other's planted flowers, Beledar’s Bounty can be a really good spot for farming herbs. If there’s a few other people planting and gathering you can get into a flow quite easily which feels a lot quicker than flying around and herbing the usual way.
Our recommended strategy with these seeds is therefore to gather a small stockpile of seeds (20 or more) and join some herbalist friends, who have done the same, and rotate the planting of the seeds. The herbs produced by Verdant Seeds can also reward Verdant Seeds, which means you will be replenishing your stockpiles of seeds, sometimes as fast as you are planting. This means the group can stay farming herbs in Beledar’s Bounty for a very long time.
Benefits
- Removes the monotony of usual herbing farming as it becomes a more social event.
- Also works with strangers, either from the group finder tool, but also just naturally forming at the farm.
- Mobs on the farm are skinnable making Herbalist/Skinners get no downtime at all.
- Large amount of Disrupted Earth spawns, to farm Odd Glob of Wax and other materials.
Disadvantages
- Small moments of downtime without any Rich Soil nodes.
- A few mobs around the farm, which you have to kill with some frequency.
- No modified herbs, unless someone has specced into it, which at this early part of the expansion few have.
- No Altered herbs.
