TruthScape.com - Aviansies Magic/Ranged Training Guide - The Care and Feeding of "Zamorak Pets"

The factions of the four gods—Armadyl, Bandos, Saradomin and Zamorak—are constantly battling each other in the central area of the God Wars Dungeon. The same monsters fight each other, die, respawn and continue battling. While most people consider this just idle entertainment, we’ll see how the smart aviansie trainer can turn this eternal conflict to his or her advantage.

The monsters that will be of particular use to you are the ones in the Zamorak faction; for this reason, I jokingly refer to them as “Zamorak pets”. Read on to learn how to “train” these “pets” to get kills for you, help you heal up and much more. (Please don’t send me hate mail, pet lovers: it’s just a phrase, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that anyone should send their beloved real life dog or cat into battle! J)

The main way in which Zammy pets will be of use to you is that they can get you many extra kills than would be possible without them. The reason for this is the way RuneScape treats situations in which a target is damaged both by a player and another monster. No matter how much damage the target takes from the monster, if the player does even one point of damage, the player gets the drop.

There are several Zammy monsters that will actively engage in combat with the aviansies. By keeping an eye on them and timing your attack appropriately, it is possible to get drops nearly for free. For example, if you see a Zammy pet attacking an aviansie while you are fighting another one, you can quickly switch to the one the pet is fighting, get a single hit in, then let the pet finish the battle. When the aviansie dies, you get the drop.

Note that as soon as you attack an aviansie, it will immediately stop attacking whatever other monster it was engaged with, and will go after you instead. In other words, it is not possible to use the Zammy monsters to “tank” for you to get free kills. However, if you attack the aviansie when it is near death, or if you have Protection from Ranged enabled, the extra attacks from the second aviansie don’t matter much.

Using pets in combat is especially helpful when ranging with prayer. You can start combat with a lot of different aviansies and let the pets continue the combat; they don’t get attacked because the aviansie is going after you. In combination with poison from emerald drops, you can average three kills per minute.

The most important Zammy pet you will make use of is the single gorak that very conveniently spawns right in the middle of an area populated by several aviansies. The gorak is useful because it is very high level (149), has a lot of hitpoints so it lasts a long time without dying, and it does a lot of damage in combat. It can easily kill off an aviansie in a short period of time, so when you see it go after one, be sure to get a hit in on the aviansie before it dies (Figure 450).

**Figure 450: Exploiting the Gorak**
Once the gorak engages an aviansie, attack it yourself. The aviansie will then turn on you, while the gorak continues to do a lot of damage to it. This greatly increases the number of drops you can get in a given amount of time.

The gorak most often engages in battle with a particular level 71 aviansie that spawns in the northwest part of its roaming area, and a level 83 aviansie that spawns to the southeast. You can see these regions in Figure 455. The gorak will occasionally roam farther away from this zone, but not often. Sometimes the gorak will just hang around and not attack, though; it’s all rather random.

There are also some “lesser” Zammy pets that will occasionally engage in battle. There are two pyrefiends that spawn in a little alcove (see Figure 449 and Figure 455) and will sometimes hang out there, but will also attack aviansies (Figure 451). They are relatively weak, however, and the aviansies will tend to kill them off fast. There are also a couple of werewolves and vampires, though these rarely seem to want to “get involved”. They last a long time in battle but don’t do nearly as much damage as the gorak.

**Figure 451: Pyrefiend “Pet” in Action**
The pyrefiends are not as reliable as the gorak but will sometimes fight the aviansies for you.

To get the most from your pets, you need to “take care” of them. Again, I’m using a joking parallel to real pets here, because you certainly wouldn’t do to a real pet what I’m about to recommend with these Zammy minions. J

First of all, as I mentioned above, if an aviansie is attacking a Zammy monster and you attack the aviansie, it will then go after you and leave the pet alone. This can be to your advantage though, as the Zammy pet will then be able to keep attacking the aviansie without taking any damage, speeding up your kills.

On occasion, you may find that a Zammy pet decides to “go to sleep”, just hanging out in a corner of the dungeon. If so, you can sometimes “wake” it by hitting it with a single bolt and then stopping. While it will sometimes come after you, more often it will—for reasons I don’t understand—ignore you despite you attacking it and go after an aviansie instead. If it does go after you, run away and return and it will attack an aviansie.

Finally, you’ll find that some pets, especially the gorak, can get “stuck”. What usually happens is that the pet will see an aviansie and try to attack it, but there will be an obstacle between them so it won’t be able to reach. The aviansie likewise won’t be able to attack over the obstacle, so they just sit and stare at each other. To “rescue” a pet in this situation, just kill the aviansie that it is trying to go after.

In addition to their primary value for getting extra kills, Zammy pets can also be useful for a few other things, especially pyrefiends. If you find you have used up all your fire runes alching items, for example, pyrefiends drop them very frequently. They are also a good monster to use for healing if you have a Saradomin godsword, as described in “Extending Trips with the Saradomin Godsword”. This is shown in Figure 449.

You can also get drops from “pets” that are nearly dead by finishing them off, such as the gorak in the area. Goraks don’t have earth-shaking drops (considering how tough they are), but you can get uncut gems from them, and they are also the only source of gorak claws for magic essence potions—not that those are anything terribly exciting. Be sure the gorak is nearly dead when you attack, though, because they hit hard and prayer doesn’t work on them!