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TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Familiar Analysis, Reference and Rankings Explanation of the Familiar Summary Tables

There are already 47 familiars in the game, at least two dozen more due to come out with Jagex’s next Summoning update, and still more likely to be added over time. With so many options, it may be difficult to choose which familiar to take with you on a particular trip to a dungeon, or a session working your favorite skill. And of course, many of you may not be convinced that you should bother taking a familiar at all.

I think this is a very important topic that’s worthy of some exploration, particularly given that so many players are convinced that familiars have no value. Properly understanding the costs and benefits of using summons will allow you to choose familiars that enhance your gaming experience, and even make you some money along the way.

Let’s start out by assessing the costs associated with using a familiar. To do this fairly, we must consider both financial costs (gold or items) and also time costs—because as I constantly remind my readers, time is money. This is relatively simple, because familiar costs mainly consist of the following four items:

• Pouch Cost: The money and time cost associated with either buying or making the pouch.
  
  
• Scroll Cost: If using the familiar’s special move, the cost of obtaining or making scrolls.
  
  
• Summoning Point Cost: Summoning familiars will use up special move points, which must be recharged. This will cost either time (to go to an obelisk to recharge) or money (for Summoning potions).
  
  
• Familiar Use Cost: Depending on the familiar, there will be costs associated with using it as well. This includes the time required to summon, monitor and renew the familiar, and also the cost of losing one or more inventory spaces for pouches and scrolls.

Some of these costs are rather concrete, while others are not; in some cases the answer really is “it depends”. J Consider pouches as the obvious example: if you buy them, then you know exactly what they cost you, but if you make the pouches, things become less clear. You have to consider the cost of the shards and secondary ingredients, the cost of getting the charms (if you don’t get them while doing other things), and also what you might do with the pouch if you didn’t use it. There’s also the matter of leveling the skill, which may result in you having pouches anyway; we’ll look at that in a moment.

Other costs can be similarly nebulous: how much time does it really take to summon, manage and use the familiar? There’s no real way to measure this. You will probably assess such costs subjectively as you use the familiar: you’ll end up feeling like “this familiar is really great” if it doesn’t seem like a big problem to use, as opposed to “this is too much hassle” if the implied costs are too high.

The cost of recharging Summoning points will depend to a large extent on how you play. For example, if your house is in Taverley and you are in the habit of teleporting home to recharge Prayer points at your house altar, recharging Summoning at the same time is pretty easy. If your house isn’t in Taverley, or you rarely go home, that cost will be more substantial, and you may even want to use potions instead.

In many cases, the cost equation for pouches will be distorted by the fact that you may already have dozens or even hundreds of them in the bank. Obviously it is best, if possible, to level the skill making pouches you’ll actually use, but that’s not always the best way to go. Consider that you want to get the most XP possible from your charms, and also that some pouches have secondary ingredients that are hard to get. For these reasons, many efficient players make the pouches that give the most XP, and just buy pouches for familiars that are useful but don’t give good XP to make.

If you’ve got a stockpile of “leveling pouches”, then this obviously distorts the whole cost equation a great deal. You won’t have an easy time selling these pouches, because thousands of other people are leveling with such pouches as well. So, you will end up with a big bunch of surplus pouches: even if you wouldn’t have bought those pouches, if you have them anyway, in many cases it makes sense to just use them as they are “already paid for” (Figure 258).

There’s an alternative to using all those pouches, which is to cast high alchemy on them. It seems wasteful to some extent to do this, but if you have hundreds of pouches you’ll never use, high alching often makes sense. The high alch price is based mostly on the cost of the shards for making the pouch (not the cost of the secondary ingredient, note), and in some situations can recoup much of what you spent on shards.

For example, I made hundreds of bloated leeches when I was leveling up Summoning. This is a rather uninteresting familiar in my opinion; certainly, it’s not exciting enough that I would ever use that many of them. So, I will probably end up alching many of those pouches—for 2,009 gp each, it’s worth doing.

On the other hand, in the case of pouches that use few shards, the high alch price is very low. For example, the high alch price of a spirit dagannoth is 269 gold pieces—obviously it doesn’t take much benefit to make using that pouch a better deal than alching it!

I occasionally run into players who think that assessments of Summoning should include the cost of raising the skill. For example, I may try to point out that the ibis is a useful summon, only to receive a response like this: “Sure, but how many millions did it take you to get to level 56 Summoning?”

This is a valid point only if I set out to raise the skill solely to be able to use the ibis, and if there’s nothing else I can do with it. And obviously, that’s not the case. The charms and other items used to raise the skill to a particular level are examples of sunk costs: they’ve already been spent, and can’t be recovered, so they have essentially no bearing on deciding if using a particular familiar is worthwhile.

These sorts of arguments simply don’t make sense, because you can use them for any skill. For example, if the discussion were about how much money one could earn by making super weapon poison (++) potions, would the “cost of getting to 82 Herblore” be of any relevance? Not really. And remember that there are many skills that are outright money losers in every respect, but people still train them for other reasons.

I won’t spend too long on this subject—since once I get started on the Grand Exchange and price controls, it’s hard for me to stop—but the matter has great relevance here.

In a real free market, the glut of pouches made by Summoning power-levelers would have driven down the cost of many of them to rather low levels. This would have not only allowed summoners to recoup some of their costs, it would have made buying and using these pouches an attractive option for more players.

Instead, Jagex pulled its usual routine, by setting hard floors on most Summoning pouches, below which the price cannot fall. In doing so, the company has stifled the market so summoners can’t sell pouches, and at the same time, artificially inflated the cost of using the skill. This contributes to the feeling on the part of many players that the skill doesn’t give enough benefit for what it costs.

For a good example, take the spirit jelly. This is a rather ho-hum familiar: it can do a moderate amount of damage in combat, but its attack is slow, and it has a fairly ordinary special move and no very interesting abilities. I might use this familiar when fighting certain monsters if I could buy the pouches for a reasonable price, but Jagex has fixed that price on the G.E. at 3,775 gp. It’s not even worth considering for that amount of money, so I won’t buy it, and the people stuck with these pouches won’t sell them.

It always boils down to the same thing: free markets work; price controls don’t.

Some players enjoy using familiars just for their own sake. I must admit that it can be fun to summon up a karamthulhu overlord, just to hear the silly self-agrandizing comments it makes, and watch it conjure spells and toss them at monsters like magical volleyballs. J And the cockatrices (and variants) are really very pretty and superbly animated.

But at the end of the day, what most players really want out of familiars is some sort of practical benefit. They want to be able to fight better, get more resources, or attain some sort of other advantage that makes up for the costs of using this skill. Describing how to do that is the main point of this entire Summoning guide; here, I will now try to summarize the key benefits of familiars, so you can keep them in mind when considering how familiar benefits compare to costs.

First, a quick list of major non-combat benefits:

• Using beasts of burden to carry extra items, gather materials, and conserve run energy.
  
  
• Special moves and effects that enhance non-combat skills.
  
  
• Familiars that forage useful items.
  
  
• The ability of some familiars to produce herbs, logs, ores and other valuable materials.
  
  
• Other special abilities that can do things like restoring run energy, curing disease and more.

Next, combat benefits:

• Damage done by familiars reduces the time needed to kill an NPC.
  
  
• Combat support uses, such as bringing extra food and potions, increasing your Defence and creating food.
  
  
• The ability of beasts of burden to let you take home extra drops.
  
  
• The limited ability of familiars to “tank”, absorbing damage intended for the player.

In many cases with non-combat uses, it is self-evident that the familiar pays for itself—and then some. Take the spirit terrorbird: it costs a pittance to either make or buy, but you can use it to take home four extra dragon bones or hides from a Slayer assignment; that’s a no-brainer (Figure 259). The same goes for the macaw’s ability to forage herbs, the granite crab catching free fish, spirit cobras changing eggs into cockatrice eggs and so forth.

One final point is that you do get Summoning XP from using familiars and scrolls. It’s not a lot when compared to pouch-making, but every bit helps. Consider that in addition to whatever damage it does, summoning a mithril minotaur and using 10 of its scrolls will yield you 72.6 Summoning XP—that’s more than you get making a spirit terrorbird pouch. Combat benefits are much less easy to quantify. You’ll have to assess the value of the familiar based on how much damage it does, and how well it helps you do a better job of killing the monster yourself. Just remember that if you are fighting monsters with decent drops, and you keep your familiar alive for a reasonable length of time, it will probably eventually do enough damage to justify having it around.

Whether the benefits of familiars outweigh the costs depends entirely on what you are doing in the game. In general, though, I’ve found that in nearly any situation I find myself in, a familiar of one type or another can make itself useful, and usually pay off nicely if I am patient.

Here are a few ideas to help you get started on deciding when and how to use familiars, especially while doing other activities. Be sure to also read the detailed descriptions of the familiars, and also check out my favorites in the topic that ranks familiars from most useful to least useful.

First, if you are engaged in non-combat activities, you will most often want to use either a beast of burden or a familiar that generates or produces items. The beasts of burden are ideal in situations where you want to bank items you are creating, such as when Woodcutting or mining far from a bank. The other items are more useful for activities where inventory space isn’t an issue—for example, I sometimes bring a macaw with me on farming runs, to let me get a free herb every minute or so. That same macaw can improve herb yields fighting monsters like chaos druids or aberrant spectres.

Try using one of the fishing familiars when you are fishing. One ideal combination is using an ibis at Piscatoris while going for monkfish; you and the familiar can share a single fishing spot.

In terms of combat, I have not yet found many familiars that really do a superb job of doing damage to monsters; in most cases, I prefer to use familiars for combat support. For tough monsters I use a beast of burden to bring with extra supplies; for easier monsters, I use one to carry extra drops. As a reminder, a lower-level beast like the bull ant will carry less than a higher-level one like a war tortoise, but it will let your Summoning points go a lot further.

If you do want to use familiars for combat, try different ones to see what works well; the karamthulhu overlord is my favorite mid-level fighting familiar at the moment, because of its many attack styles. The special move of the barker toad is excellent as well, and while the minotaurs are slow, they can do decent amounts of damage.

Remember that you can also use non-combat familiars when in combat. For example, if you’re fighting something mundane with no good drops—like say, for a Slayer assignment—why not bring a spirit cockatrice to tag along? You’ll probably get two or three free cockatrice eggs out of the deal, if not more, which you can use to make Summoning potions, or even some more spirit cockatrice pouches! J

TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Familiar Analysis, Reference and Rankings Explanation of the Familiar Summary Tables