TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Understanding, Using and Benefiting From Familiars

Light Enhancement, Remote View and Other Abilities Familiars in Combat - Powerful or Pathetic?

The biggest disconnect when it comes to Summoning relates to the use of familiars in combat. On the one hand, in describing the skill before its release, Jagex portrayed it as being immensely helpful in combat, even going so far as to modify the combat level formula so that players’ combat levels increase as their Summoning level goes up. In stark contrast, many players have declared that they find their summons to be at best mediocre in combat, and at worst, completely pointless.

What’s going on here? Well, as is usually the case in these situations, the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes: the familiars released so far are neither revolutionary, nor useless, in combat. In my experience, I believe they are closer to how the more negative players view them, than to what Jagex hyped them up to be. However, I have found many combat-related uses for familiars, both in terms of damaging monsters so they die faster, and by indirectly helping me in my fighting.

In this part of the guide, I will share with you what I know about using familiars in combat situations. I start with a full exploration of the issues involved in using combat familiars, to help you understand better why there is so much controversy surrounding this subject. This is somewhat more editorial than the rest of the guide, but I think you’ll find it useful.

The subsequent two topics outline the details of how to use familiars, exploiting both their standard and special attacks to maximum advantage, and following that I look into the important issue of the impact that familiars have on combat XP. I then discuss how to use familiars for combat support, allowing you to do better in your fighting even if the familiars themselves don’t participate. I conclude with some useful tips on how to keep your combat familiars from being killed “before their time”.

Note that there isn’t a great deal in this section yet on using combat familiars in PvP situations. The various issues with Summoning at the moment, and the lack of places where they make sense for PvP, prompted me to choose to wait until Summoning is a bit more useful in PvP scenarios before writing up that aspect of the skill.

Light Enhancement, Remote View and Other Abilities Familiars in Combat - Powerful or Pathetic?