Oh my. Summoning version 2. Its brilliant :D. I have played this game for many years (around 6½) and I have never seen anything as usefull as summoning. I love using it (I used it more or less for everything I do in rs) and I love talking about it :P (just ask Mercifull) When version 2 came out I was around 80 trying to get all my stats to 80+. I did not find summoning usless, but it could be VERY annoying to use as one have to concentrate on timer etc. But when version 2 came out I ended up powertraining it for 8-9 months at waterfiends. The thing about this is, I ALWAYS get bored with combat after a small period of time, so this was almost the hardest thing I ever did in rs. Using familiars for combat things like slayer was helpfull for me (being 114 when summoning came out) from around lvl 83 where the lava titan can hit 19 and has a quite nice magic special attack. I found that he did indeed speed up my tasks. Of couse it was not before Iron titan and up that summoning almost seemed to be overpowered in the combat part :P I did not lose money on it, waterfiends was very nice to me, noted orbs (made millions on crafting those) Mithril arrows (millions here too) and clues. I did a clue each 50-100 waterfiends i killed, this is a lot of money when you go for 99, even if you have unlucky clues :). I am also sure that if I DID pk i would be able to use summoning very much for my own benefits :)(steel titan in multi combat, pack yak to hold food in single for instance) Summoning is not perfect. The AI can be really bad when you use it in combat, but there are ways around it. Also when you get higher lvl combat familiars it seems a waste to use them to fight your monster when your familiar can hit up to 96. So I make sure a lot of monsters attack me at the same time and then let my titan fight his own monsters. This to me at least is a very usefull way to do it. I agree that charms should be possible to get with skills to :) just have to be same speed/price as combat in my oppinion. That potions are more or less useless is true. When fighting with a bunyip for 4 hours or so I only use 2 doses of a potion. As for the combat lvl being increased I as a non pker really dont see the problem. When I fight in multi combat with my titan I kill things a hell of a lot faster then when I do not use them. When I fight in single combat areas I can stay a hell of a lot longer with summoning then without (from 8 max to 15+ mithril dragons using melee as an excample) And when I do duel from time to time, even in what many would call inferior armor me and my titan kills MOST people who attacks us (unless they use dragon claws, those are nasty :P). Maybe if it does not work well in clan wars as someone mentioned there is something wrong with clan wars...and not summoning? Well this is my personal oppinion and I enjoy using summoning. /Thrawn