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Combat Basics, Standard Attacks and the Combat Triangle The Impact of Familiars on Combat XP

As you probably already know, every Summoning familiar has associated with it a special move. Some special moves are used for utility functions; we saw a few of them in the discussion of non-combat familiar abilities. A good percentage, though, are unique attacks that complement the familiars’ standard ones. There are also certain familiars that have right-click abilities, which typically launch some sort of special combat attack as well.

Below I will tell you all about both special moves and right-click features, and give you some ideas on how to exploit them effectively. This includes a look at a couple of interesting ways to use these that you may not have considered before.

Note that you can find a summarized listing of the special moves and other combat abilities of familiars in the familiar quick reference.

Special moves are activated using scrolls particular to each familiar. You can transform a familiar’s pouch into 10 matching scrolls at any Summoning obelisk. They are also tradeable, and easy to buy on the Grand Exchange since so many people are power-leveling this skill, and the GE prices are fixed at overly high values.

Using special moves can add a fresh dimension to combat, because most of the attacks they enable are rather different than the standard ones used by familiars. For example, while normal attacks by familiars usually affect a single target, there are several special moves that can damage multiple targets at once. Special moves can also have extra effects, such as poisoning, stunning, draining combat abilities and much more. (They don’t always work very well, but they sometimes can help.)

Another important aspect of special moves is that they frequently use a different combat style than the familiar’s standard attack. This means that in some situations, even a couple of uses of a special move may result in a lot more damage than the familiar could do by hacking away. For example, if I summon a mithril minotaur while fighting giant rock crabs, it won’t do much to them with its normal attack—they have extremely high melee defence. The Mithril Bull Rush special move, though, is a magical attack, and hits nearly every time.

The ability to target monsters from a distance is also very useful. For example, with a full special bar, I can unleash ten consecutive Toad Bark special moves from a barker toad on a high-level target, often doing as much as 100 points of damage without using any runes, nor having to go into melee range.

The key to getting the most from special moves is, as I constantly emphasize, creativity. Experiment with different attacks, effects and monsters until you learn what works best. Also see the detailed familiar descriptions for additional ideas.

To activate your familiar’s combat-related special move, you must have at least one of its matching scroll in your inventory. You then simply open the Summoning interface window and click the special move activation button, which is the wolf icon button just below and to the left of the special move bar. Of course, you must also have a number of special move points remaining at least equal to the number needed by your familiar’s scroll.

After clicking the button you will usually then be prompted to choose a target to use the attack upon. Once you select a target, you’ll see your character do the “special move emote” (as I call it), where he or she throws an orange ball of fire in the air. Then your familiar will perform an attack animation and the attack will be launched; an example can be found in Figure 253 below; you can also see many more in the detailed familiar descriptions, such as Figure 279. Some of these animations are very well done, incidentally.

As I mentioned in my laundry list of problems with familiars in combat, there’s usually a short lag (a few seconds) between activating the special and having it go off. This can be annoying, but over time you’ll learn how to time things for better efficiency.

One tip I can give you is that the game will, to a limited extent, “buffer” special move requests. If you want to unload a series of special attacks, you can click the special move button and the target over and over in sequence, and if you time it right, your familiar will keep casting until you run out of either scrolls or points.

One very clever way of exploiting the special moves of combat familiars is to employ them to initiate combat. All you do is to activate the special move and then target a monster you aren’t already fighting. This use of special moves is handy if you are meleeing and so do not have any way of attacking from a distance, as it grants you some of the advantages of ranging or maging. In particular, you get “first blood” in the combat, and in some cases perhaps even a second attack before the monster closes in on you to respond; an example is shown in Figure 254. You also don’t have to run around after monsters that are moving.

This can also be very helpful to those who are fighting with area effect attacks, such as maging with Ancient Magicks burst or barrage spells, or ranging using red chinchompas. In these situations you want as many enemies as possible all near each other; you can use your familiar’s special attack to make the monsters aggressive, causing them to crowd around you. In this way, even the lowly level 4 dreadfowl can be put to good use! J

Jagex must have known that needing to manually activate special move scrolls would be a hassle, because it created three special items designed to cast them automatically: antlers (level 10 Summoning required), the lizard skull (level 30) and several colors of feather headdresses (level 50). You “charge” these items by using scrolls on them that correspond to your familiar; they can hold 5, 10 and 15 scrolls respectively. Then, when you wear the headgear, the scrolls will be activated randomly when you are in combat.

Looks good on paper—in practice, it’s a different story. I already described the two main problems with these in my overview discussion of familiar combat: they don’t really activate very often, and having to wear them in place of a helmet messes up your defence and the use of Barrows sets. For these reasons, I recommend using them only when fighting monsters where you don’t need high defence or the ability to use Barrows gear. (And yes, I know that in those cases you probably don’t need a familiar either, which is part of the problem.) Even then, you’ll likely want to supplement with manually-invoked special moves.

Note that you can use the “Commune” option to check the number of charges (scrolls) remaining in a headdress. It is also possible to get the scrolls you used back out of it, so you can switch to a different familiar, for example; just unequip the item and choose “Uncharge”.

Several familiars have right-click abilities, so named obviously because to use them, you right-click the familiar and choose the relevant option. These are generally attacks, and Jagex likely implemented them using right-click options so that you didn’t have to deal with menus being closed while in combat. In some cases, a right-click combat ability appears in addition to a combat-related special move (the barker toad, for example). In others, the right-click option provides the only special attack on a familiar whose scroll move is not combat-related (like the cockatrice).

Right-click abilities will normally not work unless the familiar is already in combat—if you try to activate them outside combat, you’ll just get an error message. Unlike special moves, you won’t be asked for a target, the effect will just launch on whatever target the familiar is already attacking.

Some of the right-click specials on familiars are quite interesting. Since I mentioned the barker toad already, its right-click function lets you actually load a cannonball into the toad, which it spits out at your opponent! Other interesting examples of right-click features include the stat draining attacks used by the cockatrice and its variants, and the smoke devil’s flame attack. Note that not all right-click moves are attacks; the unicorn stallion has one that cures poison and disease.

The drawbacks of right-click features are many, unfortunately; I mentioned some of them in my overview of the issues with Summoning combat. Most of these abilities cost you Summoning points, which makes them much more costly in some ways than effects that use scrolls. Consider, for example, that using the barker toad’s cannon feature costs 2 points a shot, so it doesn’t take very many uses before you’ll need to start drinking Summoning potions. Some also have time delays to prevent “overuse”.

The limitations of right-click features mean that you will probably only use these effects when you find a particularly good application for them. And at this point, to be perfectly honest, I am still trying to figure out what these are myself…

Combat Basics, Standard Attacks and the Combat Triangle The Impact of Familiars on Combat XP