How does this compare to using prayer pots in terms of speed and cost (assuming you snare the melee bros and use prayer on kharil and food on ahrim)?

 

 

 

I know that ancients are great for barrows, but this way you get the same effect without spending nearly as much money on runes.

I wouldn't imagine that this would be beneficial. Snare and Entangle last - what seems like - a very short time and miss quite often. You would end up using two or three spells per brother, which would be slow and may cost more than Ancients.

True, I suggest using Ancients or just plain old praying

Entangle and Freeze spells serve nearly no purpose, since holding the brothers will not stop your prayer run out. In fact the time taken to cast Entangle-type spells will actually increase the usage of prayer pots because you are down in the crypt for longer.

 

 

 

You have about 5 casts in between Prayer Drains, increasing the number of spells casted will increase the number of times your prayer becomes drained, and result in MORE prayer loss. This is completely counter-productive, and thus pray/mage is the best way to go about it. Freezing a target while you are praying at the same time means you are wasting your time and runes. If you don't pray, then you run into the risk of being hit badly if the brother gets you in between freezes, which again wastes food.

 

 

 

I am not even including the time needed to run around in the crypts...

 

 

 

so in my opinion, avoid the entangle spells. I also find the freezing effect of the ancient magicks to be only useful against torag and guthan (when you are maging in melee armor).