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

TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Using Familiars in Combat Combat Basics, Standard Attacks and the Combat Triangle

There are many reasons why familiars, in their current state, are less than the powerhouse that Jagex claimed they would be, and that many players would like them to be. Some of these are due to the familiars themselves, while others relate more to human nature and the way that Jagex chose to promote the skill. In the sections below I will lay out the relevant issues, so you can understand what the limitations and problems are with using familiars in combat.

Again, please don’t read too much into the information that follows. I want to be clear that I am not in the “familiars are useless in combat” camp; Figure 250 should do a nice job of showing up the most extreme of naysayers, and I will do my best to show you how to make good use of familiars in combat in other topics. I just think that they could be a lot better. It is my sincere hope that Jagex is actively working to improve some of the design issues, so that more people can enjoy using familiars in combat in the future.

One of the biggest issues with Summoning and combat is simply that you cannot use familiars in single combat areas. I suspect that Jagex did this in order to avoid having to rebalance every monster in the game—for example, a combat familiar could make monsters like mithril dragons much easier than they are now. They may also have been concerned about lag. But the end result is that familiars are simply irrelevant to the vast majority of the monster fighting that goes on in RuneScape.

Low level gamers are particularly out of luck in this regard: there are very, very few decent multicombat training areas in the game. Many people (including myself) have pointed out that low-level familiars seem underpowered when level 100+ players use them, because they’re intended for low-level players. But where are they supposed to use them? Fighting level 9 warriors in Al-Kharid?

The addition of the Chaos Tunnels, with their dozens of monsters all in multicombat areas, certainly helped a great deal. But this is really not enough, in my opinion. And putting this area in a place accessed via the Wilderness is a turn-off for many players.

While some RuneScape players will grumble about nearly anything, many of the complaints leveled against using familiars in combat are quite legitimate. I’ve used many different ones in a variety of contexts, and the problems with them are so obvious that it’s hard to fathom how Jagex didn’t expect a negative reaction. In fact, there are so many issues that I need to split this section up into subsections to cover them all.

That may seem blunt, but I’m afraid it’s accurate. I think most players had hoped that familiars would behave sort of like having a low-level player by their side helping them, which is reasonable; unfortunately, the familiars don’t act like players at all. They act like NPCs, and not even very smart ones at that.

For starters, they wait a long time before engaging in battle if you attack a monster. You can get them to join in by pressing the “call familiar” (whistle) button, but by the time you do that, and it appears and finally attacks, the fight is usually mostly over with. And if I wanted to have to do extra clicks for every monster I fight, I’d go kill warped terrorbirds! J

This problem is even worse with large familiars—ones that take up more than one square. In addition to the “normal” delays, you get to watch the familiar dance around the monster trying to find the perfect place to stand. By the time it does, you’re usually picking up the drop.

Familiars also don’t act or react in a smart way within combat. For example, they won’t attack from safe spots, and won’t even move out of melee range to avoid being hit even if they have ranged or magic attacks. They won’t run when hurt, and will gladly attack a monster 10 times their level even if near death, and even if they have a non-combat ability that would be more useful than them trying to fight. And what’s worse is that you can’t stop them from doing it.

Another big problem with familiars, and an area where they end up being much weaker than their combat levels might indicate, is that you cannot do with them what you can with your player character. If you consider a level 60 familiar and a level 60 player, the player can wear armor, eat to heal, drink potions to improve attack and defence, use prayer and so forth. You can’t do any of these things with familiars, which means they are exceedingly difficult to keep them alive. In particular, familiars are very easily killed by players in any PvP setting.

As I described when talking about interfaces and the timer, familiars are just generally a nuisance to use, and it’s even worse with combat familiars. On top of having to babysit the timer, so the familiar doesn’t disappear, you have to worry about keeping it alive, and also constantly tell it what to do.

Even familiars that have useful special attacks have that value negated by the need to have the player activate it. Using a scroll requires me to open the Summoning interface, click on the special move button, and then wait several seconds for anything to happen. Then, instead of attacking, my character does the goofy “throw an orange ball in the air” special move animation. I could have been attacking myself in that time, and I can always do more damage than any special move.

The right-click special attacks are even worse, because they not only are a distraction, they use up your Summoning points! To add insult to injury, this isn’t even described in the knowledge base, either.

The barker toad is a perfect example of both of these issues. Its special move is a very nice attack that can hit up to 18 damage from a distance (see Figure 251). Sounds great, but in order to use it, I basically forfeit one round of attacking myself—and I can hit a lot more than 18. This doesn’t make this special move “useless”, but it certainly makes it a lot less useful than it would be if the skill were better designed.

Then there is the right-click Cannon special effect. I have to stop fighting, load a cannonball (only one!) into the toad. Then wait until I’m in combat, and activate it. Sorry, but that’s a lot of hassle that makes it only worthwhile in limited circumstances. The cost of 2 Summoning points every time this is done (plus the cost of the cannonball, mind you) is also a lot, if you plan to use the ability often.

There are too many examples of special moves and attacks that simply don’t do what they’re supposed to do. For example, the spirit scorpion’s Venom Shot scroll is described as having “a chance of making your next Ranged attack mildly poisonous, provided the ammunition you are using can be poisoned”. I tested this on a mid-level monster using steel arrows, and it worked 10% of the time. And when it did work, the poison was only 2 points anyway. This is a waste of time even for a low-level player.

Another example is the “stun” ability mentioned on several attacks. Take the desert wyrm’s Electric Lash scroll: “Magic attack that inflicts one damage and stuns your opponent”. Well, no, it doesn’t. I tried it dozens of times, and it doesn’t stun at all.

The antlers, lizard skull and feather headdresses were allegedly intended to remove some of the hassle associated with using scrolls, by casting special moves automatically. They don’t work very well, however, simply because they don’t cast the scroll very often; it’s just a “once in a while” sort of deal, as opposed to the scroll being used continuously while you have points.

Jagex also doesn’t seem to realize that giving up a helm to use one of these toys is a big deal. I use Barrows sets a lot, and I’m not going to give up my Veracs, Guthans or Dharoks special effect for a 1 in 20 chance of a scroll autocasting—not to mention losing 50 points of defence bonus. Wouldn’t it have been smarter to implement this ability in a ring, perhaps?

I can fully appreciate that Jagex wanted to avoid having Summoning unbalance combat in the game. But given that concern, and knowing that the familiars were thus made rather conservative in their abilities, why go overboard in hyping the hell out of the skill? We really did not need four development diaries on this skill (even including one celebrating the hype itself, no less!) Small wonder that, after listening to this nonsense for two months, players got themselves overly excited about familiars and were primed for disappointment.

Even with that said, though, some players really need to be a bit more realistic about what they expect these familiars to do. Is it reasonable to expect a honey badger to do massive amounts of damage on a gargoyle? Probably not. On a forum thread recently, I saw someone complaining because he tried the spirit wolf’s Howl ability on a high-level revenant in the Wilderness and it didn’t work. What did he think, that Jagex was going to make a level 1 summon grant effective immunity from revenants? Get real.

A related issue is not appreciating that small contributions by familiars can be very useful. Some players will take a familiar to the king black dragon, and if it does 20 damage on the KBD while they do 220, they declare it “useless”. Personally, I’d see that as 20 less damage I have to do, and maybe one or two fewer rounds of the thing trying to poison me. In fact, I had a familiar once finish off the KBD while I was frozen in place and helpless, which I thought was rather handy indeed, even if it only was 3 HP that it had left.

This is another area where both Jagex and players are to blame. For its part, Jagex took its usual cryptic approach when it comes to new content, of providing virtually no useful information about how best to use familiars in combat, letting players “discover it on their own”. Most players, unfortunately, showed themselves to be utterly lacking in terms of their ability to do that, or of being creative in trying out several familiars in different ways. They typically try one familiar in combat, notice that there are problems, and give up.

In reality, most familiars have different strengths and weaknesses in combat. They have different attack styles, and some can be quite useful in ways you might not notice unless you give them a chance and try different approaches. You also have to match familiar types and attack types to monsters where they do well.

(Of course, all of that is a big part of why I wrote this guide. J)

TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Using Familiars in Combat Combat Basics, Standard Attacks and the Combat Triangle