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Summoning Familiar Details - Granite Crab Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Scorpion

The word “wyrm” is an interesting one; it sounds like “worm” and is related to it, but is not the same. In fact, “wyrm” is actually from Old English, and is where the word “worm” comes from. A wyrm normally refers to a serpent, or in some cases a dragon—these guys do very much look and act like snakes, though unfortunately, it turns out that Jagex made them not much more useful than mere worms.

When I said the desert wyrm looks like a snake, well, it only mostly looks like one. J It has the requisite long cylindrical body of a serpent, but sports four short, clawed, very unsnake-like feet. Its body is a sandy color, as befits a desert creature, with brownish dorsal spikes, while its head is orange and brown with prominent fangs and evil-looking white eyes (see Figure 271). The wyrm is nicely animated, undulating gracefully as it slithers behind you, and its four dialog options are quite amusing—seems the wyrm is a big advocate of organized labor, and eager to recruit you to the cause…

This is the lowest-level familiar in Summoning that uses a charm other than gold for its pouch (green), and the shard cost is also much higher, at over six times that of the granite crab. Given this, the wyrm’s abilities are rather disappointing. It is slightly better in combat than lower-level familiars—but that’s really damning with faint praise, since those familiars are effectively useless in a fight. The wyrm’s special attack is supposed to stun its opponent, but frankly, does not. And its non-combat abilities—silently raising Mining by one level and burrowing for ores up to iron—are also really of little value.

The key information for desert wyrms can be found in Table 59; for an explanation of the table’s entries, see the topic Explanation of the Familiar Summary Tables.

The desert wyrm has two non-combat abilities. First, it will invisibly raise your Mining level by one; as with other invisible boosts, this doesn’t mean you can mine anything you couldn’t before, it just theoretically increases the speed at which you mine by a tiny amount. It is certainly not noticeable in practice.

The other ability is a right-click move called Burrow that causes the wyrm to dig down and mine an ore for you, up to iron. This sounds handy, but because of the implementation restrictions chosen by Jagex, it is nearly useless. Specifically:

• You must be standing adjacent to a mining rock to use the ability.
  
  
• It takes several seconds for the wyrm to burrow.
  
  
• Telling it to burrow interrupts what you’re doing.
  
  
• Unlike the fishing familiars, the ore retrieved doesn’t go into your inventory or into an inventory of the wyrm’s. It is simply dumped on the ground, and you have to go pick it up.
  
  
• You get no experience points at all for using the ability.

Add all of that up, and there’s really no point bothering. If I have to be near a mining rock to use this ability, why not just mine the iron ore myself? It’s very fast to mine copper, tin or iron, and the rocks respawn quickly. In fact, in my tests, I found that it took less time to just mine an extra iron ore myself than it took to deal with getting the wyrm to do it (see Figure 272).

The only players that might benefit from this, time-wise, are those with very low mining levels, who presumably take longer to get an iron ore than I do with my Mining level of 73. Unfortunately, that’s where the XP issue comes into play. Essentially, if you are low enough level in Mining that the wyrm is faster than you are at getting iron ore, you need that Mining XP more than savings of a few seconds.

The burrow does have a nice animation, I should say.

The desert wyrm is like most low-level familiars in that it is pretty hopeless in combat. It does at least have 22 HP—instead of the 12-15 HP of creatures like the dreadfowl and thorny snail—and it can hit up to 4 damage instead of the 3 HP maximum of creatures below it. But still, that’s nothing to write home about. It took a desert wyrm several minutes to kill a level 25 white wolf, while nearly getting killed in the process—that pretty much tells you all you need to know.

The desert wyrm’s special move would be pretty good if it actually worked! It’s supposed to do one point of damage and stun the opponent for a short time. Well, half the time the attack splashes, and the other half of the time, it doesn’t stun at all. I tested dozens of scrolls, and not once did using this special move result in any combat opponent missing even a single attack. This was tested?

This familiar is a big disappointment, and in my opinion, not worth using. It barely does anything in combat, and its non-combat abilities are essentially worthless.

None, other than, “don’t bother making or buying this familiar’s pouch”. Resist the temptation to use green charms on desert wyrms as soon as you hit level 18; the extra XP compared to granite crabs is minimal given how much harder it is to get green charms than golds. You are better off saving them for familiars that give better XP and have more useful abilities.

Summoning Familiar Details - Granite Crab Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Scorpion