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Managing the Familiar Timer Efficient Recharging of Summoning Points

Summoning points are the “currency” that you spend to use the Summoning skill. They are mostly employed to summon familiars from pouches, or to renew familiars that are already active. There are also some special abilities of certain familiars that use up these points.

Summoning points are often compared to Prayer points, and it’s true that there are some similarities, but there are also two essential differences. First, where Prayer points are drawn down continuously while a prayer is in use, Summoning points are discrete—you pay a certain number to do something like calling a familiar, and they are taken all at once, even if the familiar is dismissed ten seconds later. And second, recharging Prayer points is much more convenient than recharging Summoning points (which we’ll explore in the next topic.)

All of this means that properly managing Summoning points is a key part of getting the most out of this skill. Let’s see what the issues are in more detail.

As soon as you summon a familiar, the clock starts ticking, both figuratively and literally. We’ve already discussed how babysitting the timer is a hassle, and the next topic will show you how recharging Summoning points can also be a bit of a nuisance. All of this adds up to a simple conclusion: avoid summoning a familiar before you really need it.

When exactly you should use a pouch depends, of course, on the familiar type, and what you’re doing with it. Here are a few general guidelines:

• Carrying Supplies in a Beast of Burden: If you’re using a beast of burden to take extra items somewhere, such as into a dungeon, delay summoning the familiar until you are completely prepped and ready to go. Get out your equipment and inventory, temporarily put some items back in the bank to make space for a pouch, summon the familiar, store items in its inventory, and then refill your own. Then you’re good to go.
  
  
• Carrying Drops in a Beast of Burden: Another great use of these beasts is to take extra drops out of a dungeon. Here I usually recommend waiting until the last possible moment before summoning one. If killing dragons, for example, wait until your inventory is mostly full of hides, bones and/or other drops, then summon the familiar and transfer some items over to it.
  
  
• Combat Familiars: There’s a trade-off here. On the one hand, if you take the pouch in your inventory to the dungeon and summon the familiar there, you can save timer minutes and Summoning points. On the other hand, that costs you an inventory slot compared to summoning it before going to a dungeon and letting it follow behind you. Which is better depends on the particulars, and your personal style.

Also remember that in some cases you cannot go into combat with a familiar behind you, most notably the Ancient Cavern.

Once you have used up a pouch to summon a familiar, you will naturally want to keep it around as long as possible. This makes sense, of course, but even though it might seem strange, there are cases where deliberately dismissing a familiar early can be the more practical approach. This boils down to a trade-off between conserving pouches and conserving Summoning points.

In a case where you are using a summon continuously, it is best to renew the timer as many times as you can, to exploit the familiar for as long as possible. An obvious example would be a familiar being used for its skill enhancement or foraging capabilities—the longer it sticks around, the more you get from it.

However, in some cases a familiar is used only intermittently. The most obvious example is a beast of burden: if you’re using one, for example, to carry extra dragonhides from a dungeon at the end of a trip, what do you do when you are ready to go back for more? Keeping the familiar alive throughout the entirety of the second trip will mean a lot of “babysitting”, and you’ll use up most of your Summoning points.

It makes more sense to just dismiss the familiar at the bank, grab another pouch and take it with you on the second trip, summoning the new familiar at the end of that trip. The cost of doing this, of course, is that you use extra pouches: one per trip, instead of possibly one every two trips.

Whether it makes more sense to save Summoning points or pouches depends on various factors, including the cost/value of the pouch, how many pouches you already have (from leveling the skill), and how convenient a Summoning obelisk is to your location, for recharging. In the case of beasts of burden like spirit terrorbirds, the pouches are cheap and you’ll probably have a bunch of them anyway, so save your points—and your sanity, by doing less babysitting! J

Another situation where not renewing a familiar sometimes makes sense is in combat. If your familiar gets badly hurt and its timer is about to expire, it obviously doesn’t make much sense to waste points renewing it right before it dies.

While conserving Summoning points is important, don’t be shy about using those points to help you with combat or skills. I’ve been amazed, during the first few weeks of Summoning, to see so many people carrying on about how the “points get used up too fast and then you have to go recharge.” You wouldn’t go into a dungeon where you planned to use Prayer, let your Prayer points run out and then complain that you had to go to an altar, would you? No, you’d take a prayer potion and drink it. Well, you can do the same thing here: drink a Summoning potion.

Perhaps the reason for the reluctance to use these potions is that when the skill was brand new, these potions were hard to get and very expensive, but that’s no longer the case. In fact, they are now cheaper than prayer potions, and the price continues to drop. And of course, you can always make them yourself (from spirit weed and a cockatrice egg, Herblore level 40.)

I haven’t been able to reliably work out the formula for these potions yet, but each dose seems to restore around one-third of my maximum Summoning points, plus one or two extra points: at level 71, I get 24 points per dose. Summoning potions also restore a quarter of your special move bar (15 special move points.)

Managing the Familiar Timer Efficient Recharging of Summoning Points