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Summoning-Free Zones and Restrictions on Familiar Use and Travel Managing Summoning Points and Timing Summons and Dismissals

As soon as you call a creature from a pouch, a timer is started, beginning at a value that depends on the familiar and on your Summoning level. The timer starts at somewhere between 3 and 10 minutes and counts down in 30 second intervals. You must choose to renew your familiar before the timer expires (paying the same number of Summoning points that you did when you first summoned it) or your familiar disappears. A warning appears when one minute is left, as well as when 30 seconds remain.

Trust me when I say that as soon as you start actively using familiars, you’ll quickly learn to hate that timer. J I’ll describe what the issues are now, and provide you with some ideas for how to manage the timer effectively.

It seems perfectly reasonable that familiars should only last for a certain amount of time. This is a game balance mechanism, because having them stick around forever would make them too powerful. Unfortunately, the way Jagex chose to implement the familiar timer has made it an incredible nuisance. The main problem is that you end up having to “babysit” the familiar, constantly checking the timer to make sure you don’t have the familiar disappear on you.

Some have wondered why Jagex doesn’t just make the familiar “auto-renew” if you have enough Summoning points left. I can’t answer that, but Jagex has in the past emphasized wanting people to pay attention to the game while playing, and perhaps they felt that this was one way to do it. Fair enough; I don’t object to the concept of the timer, just with how difficult they made using it.

Those who aren’t accustomed to using familiars may wonder why players get annoyed about this timer, since it seems like you only have to check it once every 3 to 10 minutes. And that would be true if at any time, you could check the timer, renew it and have the extra time be tacked on. But here, you don’t get an extra number of minutes, you just get the timer reset to its start value. This means that if you renew too early you waste many of your Summoning points.

For example, suppose you just got to level 56 and can now summon a steel minotaur. When you do, you get a 3 minute timer. When that warning goes off with 1 minute left, if you renew right then, the timer doesn’t go to 4 minutes, it goes to 3 minutes. This means that, effectively, you are only getting 2 minutes per renewal, and that loss of a minute adds up given how short the timers are to begin with. So, you have an incentive to wait until the last second before renewing, yet if you do this, you increase the chance of being distracted and having the timer run out. This has happened to me dozens of times and is extremely frustrating.

The interfaces don’t help much either. For starters, the timer is only visible on the Summoning interface, so you have to constantly go back to it and check the time. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you are also eating, drinking potions, watching prayer points and hitpoint levels, juggling drops and so forth, that extra distraction can be an issue.

The warnings are also less than useful, because they are just inserted into your chat box where they mix with the regular “in-game spam” (“You fletch a longbow”, “Your dragonfire shield is already charged”, etc.) It’s very easy to miss them.

My hope is that Jagex will revise this system to remove the “babysitting” factor and make managing a familiar less irritating. Until then, though, you’ll have to remain vigilant.

After many hours of using familiars, I’ve come up with a few tips to help avoid the aggravation of having a familiar be unsummoned in the middle of an activity. I hope you find some of them useful:

• Check the Timer After Renewing: In addition to the annoyances mentioned above, the renew button has a habit of sometimes not registering clicks. Always make sure the timer is actually reset before changing screens.
  
  
• Renew With One Minute Left: Yes, this means you waste a fraction of a minute of every timer, and I know it’s tempting to wait at least until that 30 second warning shows up. You can do that, but you’ll lose a lot of familiars that way—trust me. I now try to always renew at the one minute mark unless I really need to stretch a familiar (such as one carrying drops for me on a dungeon trip that’s almost over.)
  
  
• Use Familiars With Longer Durations: At the time that I write this, I’m level 71 Summoning. At my level, a bull ant will last 7 minutes, while a spirit terrorbird will last only 4. The two are basically the same beast of burden except that the terrorbird carries one extra item. Believe me, those 3 extra minutes per renewal make using a familiar much less of a hassle, and more than make up for the one fewer item capacity.
  
  
• Insert a “Renewed” Chat Line: The game gives you warnings at the one minute mark and when 30 seconds are left in the timer, but doesn’t say anything when you successfully renew. This means that if you are in a quiet place or have public chat off, you’ll have stale warning messages sit on the screen for a long time. It’s easy to confuse older warning messages with the current timer, or think a current warning is for an older timer. (I hate when I see “You have 30 seconds to renew your familiar” and rush for the Summoning interface, only to find I already did it a few minutes earlier.)
  
  To avoid this, I now sometimes just type out “Renewed” and enter it in chat. This way, I only have to pay attention to any warnings that come after that message (see Figure 239).
  

  Figure 239: The Game Should Do It, But Since It Doesn’t...

  It would be nice if the game acknowledged renewals by saying something like “Your familiar has been successfully renewed”. Since it doesn’t, I often find myself confused about whether 1 minute and 30 second warning messages are current or old. (Here I have the familiar interface open, but I don’t always.) To avoid confusion, I just say “Renewed” after I renew a familiar, so I know any messages before it are stale (sometimes I just say “R”, especially in busy areas.)

  
  

Finally, another option is to use a real clock or stopwatch to keep track of your familiar. This seems like a bit of a hassle in and of itself, but some folks may find it more effective than all the screen-swapping. If you do this, be warned not to leave things for the very last second, or you may regret it...

Summoning-Free Zones and Restrictions on Familiar Use and Travel Managing Summoning Points and Timing Summons and Dismissals