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Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Spider Summoning Familiar Details - Granite Crab

Glad to be free of the dark and dreary environment of the Mort Myre swamp, the thorny snail is ready to do your bidding. This poky little fella combines an introductory level beast of burden capability with a pretty nice special move that will make it useful in a few situations.

The thorny snail looks very much like the snails that inhabit the marshes of Morytania, except that it has three spikes (thorns, I suppose) on its shell. The secondary ingredient used to make the thorny snail pouch is raw thin snail meat, and appropriately enough, when you chat with it, the thorny snail will tell you that he comes from the same place that this ingredient does. Actually, this snail seems to be somewhat of an intellectual, and makes a few amusing comments as you go through its dialog options (Figure 266).

The thorny snail is the lowest level beast of burden in the Summoning skill, carrying a single non-essence item in its inventory. Like other low-level familiars it is capable of basic combat, though it has only 12 HP and poor defence, so it dies quickly if an NPC attacks it. The snail’s most attractive combat ability is a fairly powerful special move capable of doing up to 8 damage—this is a magic attack and works from a distance, which can make it pretty useful for a familiar that only requires level 13 Summoning.

The thorny snail’s essential information can be found in Table 57; for an explanation of the table’s entries, see the topic Explanation of the Familiar Summary Tables.

The only non-combat ability of the thorny snail is its single slot beast of burden function. To be perfectly honest, this isn’t terribly useful; the benefits of being able to take one extra item with you is largely negated by the overhead involved in summoning the familiar, keeping it alive, and then spending time accessing its inventory to store and then retrieve items.

That said, some beginning summoners may find it a good introduction to this aspect of the skill. And because it is very low level, it will stay around a long time: at level 54 Summoning, for example, you can keep one of these familiars alive for over three hours without needing to use a Summoning potion.

The thorny snail shares the same combat limitations of most other low-level familiars: a slow attack that does little damage, and defence so low that it dies almost immediately when attacked. Its regular attack seems to be melee and does only a maximum of around 3 HP of damage, so it’s not of much use.

Where the thorny snail excels is its special move, which launches a magical attack that is quite similar to the slime attacks of its Mort Myre brethren. The attack takes only 3 special move points—so that’s 20 scrolls per special move bar. It can be used to initiate combat like the special of the dreadfowl, allowing you to get the first hit and drawing melee monsters into close range so you don’t have to run after them. The major difference is that where the dreadfowl’s special maxes out at 3 HP, the thorny snail can do up to 8 damage (see Figure 267)—that’s a pretty big difference for only 9 extra Summoning levels!

Like the dreadfowl, the thorny snail can be used to “bunch up” monsters for group attacks with Ancient Magicks or chinchompas. Again, for a better explanation of this concept, see the section “Initiating Combat and ‘Gathering’ NPCs using Special Moves”.

This familiar is decent for its level, I suppose, but not terribly exciting. It doesn’t carry enough items to be very useful as a beast of burden, and it can’t do very much damage with its normal combat attack.

The only strength of the thorny snail is its special move. I might recommend it for those who want a cheap familiar for initiating combat or drawing in monsters to melee range, but be prepared to take many pouches on a dungeon trip, as the snails die quickly. Certainly, if you are someone who was using dreadfowl pouches for this purpose, the thorny snail is a much better bet.

A few extra things to remember about this familiar:

• Unlike most raw foods, raw thin snail doesn’t have the word “raw” in its name—it is just called “thin snail”. If you want to make this familiar’s pouch, be careful not to buy the cooked version, called “thin snail meat”.
  
  
• As with so many other familiars, this familiar’s pouches and scrolls are in huge supply, and can be easily bought on the Grand Exchange or even cheaper on the RuneScape Summoning forum.

Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Spider Summoning Familiar Details - Granite Crab