Summoning - skill leveling

Well, it's been a while. Thought I'd start a thread to see if any has developed some longer term insight, now that the skill has been out for a bit.

For me, I've tried two strategies.

1) Minimize use of shards (and thereby cost), no matter how long it takes to collect the seconds. Marigolds and abyssal charms were probably the slowest things to collect (for me at least). This took forever.

2) Maximize exp points on charms. This means, make the highest exp. pouch possible for a given charm, no matter what the cost in shards. This is faster, until you run out of money. Then it slows down too.

3) Chuck it all and work something else, until that major update they're promising comes out. This is my current strategy.

What about you folks?

That's my major source of Summoning exp right now

Work on Slayer, or camp out at your favorite monster that just happens to drop charms. Collect all drops (clues, actual items, etc) and use those to buy 2nds and shards. This seems to work decently, unless you're like me and you get bored easily when the skill seems 100% pointless.

Good luck with whatever you do

Tears & strategy numba 3 seem to work for me, I wasn't very pleased when I spent 1mil right out of the gate with construction and I don't want to do that for summoning, no matter how many levels it gets me.

i've found one time that not having a familiar can be crushing to you... a duel tournament. if you fight someone with level 70 summoning, in a summoning enabled tournament, and you don't have at least a bronze minotaur, your chances of winning are almost 0%. the first really good combat familiar is the karamthulu overlord. his special is a water wave independent of your offensive bonuses. untill then the only familiars worth taking into combat are your highest level minotaur. even after that you're probably better off skipping the mithril minotaur for karamthulus anyway. thus you won't get a better combat familiar till somewhere in the 70s.

also, its a good moneymaker if you ignore the exp you get as a bonus... spirit spiders and egg spawn scrolls, and macaws with herbcall scrolls. two guarantee'd ways of making money in summoning. unfortunately they only use gold and green charms, so they don't give great exp, and they aren't high leveled for their charm type, so they give even less exp. but it is guarantee'd to make you money.

I train by collecting a set number of crimson charms. 250, 500, 600 or whatever. I pick up all other charms too, obviously.

I then train by getting the most experience per charm. I work this out by using a spreadsheet in excel
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Money's really no issue for me, so shards or no shards, I just go for the best exp.

Three better words: One Small Favour