lol, so I found out that there is no way to get yourself out of the Plane of Growth if you're a silly ranger like me. Alla doesn't seem to mention this anywhere, so I thought I'd keep others from finding out the hard way - the only way to get out is to gate or port!
I've been on PoG for 15 minutes with 200 forage skill and have 2 of these branches so far. The post says that the branch is for two bows. Actually it is needed to make the Blessed Fishing Rod that is needed to obtain the Solstice Earring. The sale price can be higher than 350pp due to this....
They still exist, although they seem to be much harder to come by. I spent around 2 hours there while doing housework checking back every 6 minutes or so to hit forage and got nada. After work, I jumped on again and after about 30 minutes, foraged 2 out of three clicks in a row then went back to nada for another 30 minutes. They're very rare, but they're still there!
I could swear that these only seem to turn up during the day in pog. Maybe it is just the luck of the random number generator. I have managed to forage 10 in a combined 2 hour period with a forage skill of 167. i got a tip from a druid to use kei to boost wisdom. I doubt it makes a difference but it took 2 days to forage 6 without it the last time i tried. Also somewhere along the way they introduced karana bow (AFTER AN ETERNITY) for those of us that can't use the wood elf cultural ones, and a set of karana arrows as wel. As a side benfit i finnally have enough foraged items to continue working on brewing.
The planar oak is used for wood elf cultural fletching. It's used for 2 out of the 4 special bows that wood elves make. The Blessed Faydark Cloudburster, and the Blessed Faydark Thunderbolt.
On a side note. These things are kind of a pain to forage. It can take a while to get even one. If you have one, put it up for sale in the bazaar. You wont become rich off them, but some money is better than none.
Wont become rich? On 7th, only one trader is selling them and at 500pp each! For a forage?? Im a ranger and if these sell for that price will ill forage till the cows come home!
The only reason i can think that these would sell for over 200pp is BECAUSE there was only one person, they had a monopoly and could charge as much as they wanted. Thats how supply and demand works