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The Impact of Familiars on Combat XP Keeping Combat Familiars Alive

Even if you aren’t convinced of the value of familiars in direct combat, you simply cannot deny their versatility in providing what I call combat support—helping you in ways other than doing damage. Well, I suppose you can deny this, but I’d prefer you didn’t, at least until you read this topic! J

In the sections below I’ll lay out for you a number of ways that you can exploit familiars to make combat easier, even if you do all the fighting. I think you’ll gain a newfound appreciation for them after you’re done reading this, and I hope to add more sections as I determine other combat support applications.

Beasts of burden are familiars that, in addition to their other abilities, can carry many types of items for you. They range in capacity from 1 extra item for the level 13 thorny snail, all the way up to the 10 items of the level 96 pack yak. Most players will likely use the middle-of-the-road beasts: the bull ant (level 40, 3 items); spirit terrorbird (level 52; 4 items) and war tortoise (level 67; 6 items).

The value of these familiars in combat support is simply that they allow you to effectively expand your inventory. This enables you to do the following:

• Carry Extra Supplies Into Combat: Beasts of burden allow you to bring extra food, potions and other supplies into combat, which can be very helpful especially with difficult monsters. They won’t hold prayer potions, but they’ll carry sharks, tuna potatoes and Saradomin brews, for example.
  
  
• Juggle Supplies and Drops While Fighting: Ever experience the frustration of getting nice drops early in a combat trip and not having anywhere to put them? Beasts of burden to the rescue! Instead of using the familiar to carry extra supplies into a fight, you can instead use it to offload supplies you would have otherwise had in your inventory. This frees up space for drops.
  
  
• Carry Home Extra Monster Drops: After you’re finished with a monster hunting session, you can use your beast of burden to take extra drops back with you to the bank. What’s six extra black dragonhides worth, hmm? J

Of course, depending on how you play, you can use the same familiar for more than one of these activities—it all depends on the monster and what you’re trying to do. Here are two examples.

When I fight the King Black Dragon, I need all the healing I can get if I want to stay for a while, so I bring a war tortoise carrying six Sara brews—that’s 384 HP of extra healing (see Figure 244)! I usually stay long enough that I don’t have enough points to keep him around for the whole session, but that’s okay. I renew him for a while and when done, let the timer expire.

As mentioned earlier, if in active combat, you can’t open the interface to withdraw items from a familiar. If you don’t plan to keep the familiar around, sometimes the easiest thing to do is just to let it expire and pick the items up from the ground.In contrast, when I fight waterfiends, I take a completely different approach. I can’t use a familiar to carry extra supplies into the Ancient Cavern—they won’t follow players into the whirlpool. What I do instead is to bring a bull ant pouch and summon it after I enter the dungeon, and offload Sara brews into it temporarily (Figure 255). This frees up three inventory slots that I can use to hold drops until I use up some of my supplies. Once I’ve got some drops I want to keep, I swap these for the Sara brews. The bull ant lasts long enough that I can take it back with me to the bank.

One final issue to be aware of is that these familiars can all engage in combat if you are in a multicombat area—and with a beast of burden, that’s probably not what you want, since it might get killed and drop all of your items. Ironically, this means that beasts are sometimes more useful in single combat areas than in multicombat. See the next topic for ideas on how to keep familiars alive.

There are several familiars that provide skill boosts, either automatically when they are summoned, or after you use their special move or other abilities; these are discussed in the topic Using Familiar Skill Boost Abilities. Of those, a small number are combat-related: the granite crab and war tortoise can improve your Defence, while the wolpertinger provides a Magic bonus. My hope is that future familiars will expand on this range of familiar combat boosts.

The wolpertinger is high level so I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but I’ve tried both the granite crab and war tortoise effects. The crab’s bonus of about +5% might be useful for a low-level player, but that’s about it. The war tortoise is more interesting; at level 96 Defence it bumps me up to 108, which is a nice boost. However, I can get to 113 using a super defence potion or 115 with a Saradomin brew. Last year, when those potions were expensive, the tortoise’s special would have been much more beneficial than it is now, though I can still see it being handy in cases where you’d have that familiar out anyway for its beast of burden ability.

I should probably also mention here the honey badger. Its Insane Ferocity special move isn’t so much a straight skill enhancer as a “mini berserker effect”, reducing Defence, Magic and Ranged while boosting Attack and Strength slightly. None of the skills are changed by much, though, so again I don’t see this mattering much to any but rather low-level players.

In combat, more healing means more staying power, and that in turn means more drops and better XP rates. We already saw that beasts of burden will let you take extra food into battle; several other familiars can also help you “stay healthy”, by generating food, enabling you to eat food you otherwise couldn’t, or even healing you. Here are the some of the more notable ones, with their Summoning level indicated in parentheses:

• Albino Rat (Level 23): Its special move generates five pieces of cheese, healing 2 HP each (see Figure 275). It’s slow to use, but can be handy for low-level players, or in situations where you have time to prepare before a fight.
  
  
• Evil Turnip (Level 42): This familiar forages evil turnip slices, which heal 6 HP when eaten. Foraging is unreliable (since it’s both slow and random), but this could definitely be at least a small help in certain combat situations.
  
  
• Ibis (Level 56): The Fish Rain special move causes shrimp, mackerel and cod to be generated; you do need some way of cooking them, however.
  
  
• Bunyip (Level 68): This familiar doesn’t generate food, but its special move, Swallow Whole, allows you to eat a fish without cooking it if you would otherwise have been able to (i.e., your Cooking level is high enough.) This can be useful when fighting monsters that drop raw fish, such as dagannoths or waterfiends (Figure 256).
  
  Of course, the trade-off is that you have to take less food because the pouch and/or scrolls take up inventory space. Also, beware of Murphy’s Law when trying this strategy with monsters that drop fish only irregularly—sometimes waterfiends can give you big dry streaks in this regard, and it always seems like they do it more when you bring a bunyip with! J
  
  
• Fruit Bat (Level 69): This familiar’s special is like that of the ibis, but it generates fruit instead of fish. The upside is that fruit can be eaten without cooking, though pineapples require a knife.
  
  
• Hydra (Level 80): Its special move replicates fruit or vegetables in your inventory; I can’t comment on it in detail until I have a high enough level to use it.
  
  
• Unicorn Stallion (Level 88): This very impressive-looking familiar has a special move that heals up to 15% of your hitpoints. Depending on how well it works, it could revolutionize some forms of combat.
  

  Figure 256: Gulp!

  Waterfiends drop unnoted raw sharks and lobsters four at a time, so some higher-level summoners like to bring with a bunyip to take advantage of this bounty. The special of the bunyp, Swallow Whole, causes the familiar to eat the raw fish, and then you magically get the healing points for it. The animation has the critter toss the fish in the air and then swallow it, which I captured here for your amusement. J

  
  

In a multicombat situation, a “tank” is a character that absorbs damage from a common opponent, so teammates can fight without using up their prayer, food or other resources. Normally the person acting as the tank will have good defence, armor and food to be able to take the punishment without dying. In some situations, multiple players may share this role, alternating between being the tank and taking a break.

Even if familiars cannot do much damage on an opponent, they can still often play the role of the tank, absorbing damage from monsters that otherwise would be done to players. The difficulty here is that you cannot force a monster to fight your familiar instead of you—in my experience, NPCs will often randomly decide when to attack my familiar instead of me, and will also randomly switch back. I hate seeing a familiar get killed, but at least when my familiar is taking the hits, I’m not!

This point should also be kept in mind when assessing the value of familiars in PvP situations. I completely agree with the prevailing sentiment that right now, familiars are too easy to kill by other players, and it’s a waste of a pouch for them to die so quickly. But as before, when another player is attacking your familiar, he or she is not attacking you!

Obviously, higher-level familiars will do better at tanking than lower-level ones, since they have more HP and will last longer before dying. You’ll need to experiment to figure out which ones do best on the monsters you are fighting, but in general, the ones that look big or tough—the minotaurs, war tortoise, granite crab and so forth—generally have better defence than ones that seem, well, soft.

The Impact of Familiars on Combat XP Keeping Combat Familiars Alive