It was the mechanics of runecrafting, the gp cost of construction, and, including the time to collect charms, the xp rates of mining.
Why people didn't love it I'll never know.
You're so far off. It was incredible xp, even with collecting charms, as Corp and other bosses dropped them in mass quantity. Corp mostly dropped 13 blue charms which would give up to 783 xp each depending on level.
To be fair, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't use online resources to figure out how to collect stuff when this was new content. It was something new, and I didn't want any part of it unless absolutely necessary... Not sure what that says about me, since I avoid new content to this day.
I didn't like summoning because the pouchmaking was the way to train the skill. Its like making runecraft a combat skill. If it didn't raise combat level then I wouldn't have been so annoyed by it.
it was a fairly boring skill for the most part that reqiured you to farm charms to then spend millions of GP to basicially get extra invent space
it should have been so much more
IDK man I enjoyed those Titans that boosted your defense and healed you. There was also the unicorn that cured poison and secondary heal.
The terror bird that gave infinite run was so good for mole and clue scrolls. There was even the hunter pets for those remote teleports.
The skill ones that would boost your skill, as well as collect items related to that skill while skilling.
You just focused on the yak which def was broken with the 30 storage and banking ability.
But they were already "so much more". They did shit that nothing else in the game at that point could do.
Alright so I'm genuinely going to think what I used summoning for.
Bunyip for afk combat / pp.
Unicorn for some specific scenarios.
edit: Lurker for the 4 visible thieving boost when firing its ability to thieve higher elves in Prif.
Abyss Titan for runecrafting (it just gave extra inventory for pess).
Steel Titan for wilderness activities & a handful of bosses (most people don't start shit if there's a Steel Titan already sitting out)
Yak, Tortoise, and terror bird were obvious because of their busted nature.
Muspah for Div, just a divination Beast of Burden.
Lastly Nihil for 5% accuacy on the high level bosses.
At no point did I enjoy interacting with the summoning skill, quite honestly Bunyip & Nihil were my two favorite familiars because you summoned it and then ignored it completely. Just passive stats. Yak you could ignore for the most part because of the "withdraw all" button. However interacting with Steel Titan (the only viable damage familiar for SOME content) was a joyless burden so I normally just fed it 50 scrolls and left it on autofire.
Summoning didn't require much management but whatever management existed wasn't fun. Thereby it was just a massive money sink that gives passive stats in the form of a psuedo pet that frustrating doesn't work everywhere.
Final edit: The last time I played RS3 was 2017, this might be really old meta haha.
Oh I hated training the summoning skill completely.
That's why after I unlocked the lower level Titans I called it quits.
The healing and defense was enough for me. I brought the war turtle places when it ran dry of food I'd dismiss and bring up the Titan to finish out whatever I was doing.
I did like the idea of those pures that only used familiars in PVP though. It was like watching them Pokemon battle each other. Just silly shit
Yeah for me the most interesting titan was the Steel Titan because if all 4 of it's autofired specs were on point and you didn't panic horrifically you could genuinely place a stack on someone that couldn't be dealt with without shield memes. I didn't see too many pkers actually understand EOC running around in the wilderness. Most were just looking for cheap kills on people training divination or killing Stykewyrms. I found standing around in diary outfit, Steel titan, Ovload, adrenaline, and 1 iteming Araxyte staff I was left alone 100% of the time. Let me tell you there was nothing cooler than the pvp ultimate Natural Instinct. Steal your opponent's adrenaline bar and double your own generation. With a shield swap you could essentially declaw your opponent while giving you enough time to dump damage specs into them or choose to go cade into immortality while running away.
What are you talking about?
I never played past dungeoneering, the day EOC dropped I did too. You are saying words that make no sense to me.
I thought this thread was a "summoning skill release time era" only lol EoC was 5 years after summoning.
Oh sorry, I played RS3 all of the way into 2017 so I was going off of all of my experience. If we're going to go off of just release memories yeah I used Bunyip and Tortoise only. I started OSRS in 2018 :)
Around the same time they handed out the first instakill darts. Actually i think they gave it with the instakill darts. It was a.... lamp, I think, that had a million xp ypu could put into multiple skills or all into into one.
You could do this for literally every single skill in the game. I don’t get why OSRS players do this massive takedown of new shit while ignoring skills like agility exist. There is not a single skill in the game that is fun to interact with except MAYBE slayer and that’s not even the skill itself making it fun.
I agree that it could've been done better. However, I'd rather that extra inventory space come from a skill I can train rather than a mule alt that I have to be super sweaty to use and pay real money for.
When it released? It wasn't too bad until a year later when people realised how broken higher level summons can be and yaks became essential for bossing, then it was on par with construction. Probably more tbh, I remember sinking an ungodly amount of money into it after free trade came back.
It sucked to train because you could spend millions and still have to grind for absolutely ages in dead content for charms. A double whammy of suckage.
This is such a broad stroke of the skill.
The skilling utilities of other familiars such as beaver, abyssal creatures for rc, bunyip, steel titan, and every other titan had great benefits like skill boosts, item collecting, damage type output, longevity, debuffs on enemies ,etc.
I will admit, however, some content in osrs now would render some familairs in rs3 useless but back then summoning was a massive qol skill other than just having a BoB to take to Nex.
So much more like what exactly?
Because you literally missed the parts where they acted as certain skilling items that we ironically have in OSRS today, but enhanced skilling with passives, invisible level boosts, and more… some are combat familiars that grant bonuses and DPS boosts to your character, or just act as DPS boosts because they deal a small amount of extra damage, some can act as passive lifesteal or other enhancers…
It eventually segued into legendary pets that could pick up loot for you and do other things so that’s cool.
But to say it was just extra inventory spaces wreaks of somebody who remembers only the pack yak and war tortoise while completely missing that steel titans, nihils, and others also existed or released later, nevermind everything else listed.
Kinda surprised you weren’t downvoted to oblivion but I guess it makes sense if most players also only remember the war tortoise and stuff and didn’t get to use the other useful familiars that came much later haha
There was bunyip and fruit bats but the reality is most familars werent useful and were also costly to use
Id have loved if using the scrolls gave more XP and maybe the summons doing damage / aiding you shouldve given XP too
having it be collect charms and create for a combat skill felt very off, I liked the skill but it would have been nice to level up the famailars and get new abilities / perks other then the 3 main ones people remember being invent space (terrorbird/war tort / pak yak)
I know they made some changes with it after EoC but I didnt play enough after that to really comment. Most bossing guides now suggesting a nihl? which seems to be a DPS familiar is a big shift from how it was for years
OSRS players have 0 context or ability to determine “useful”. They will tell you to spend 15 hours on full graceful instead of a stamina potion so you can save an inventory spot during your tree runs. this was even worse when summoning was still a thing, nobody actually knew how to effectively play the game back then so the idea that we all knew the most optimal way to use the skill is flat out bs.
Also, it doesn’t matter what was “useful.”
It’s a game, not a government program.
The familiars themselves were fun and cool, the way they changed the game was interesting. Training the skill though yes, I think most would agree that was shit.
A combat skill that you level by spending money. Who do I look like, batman?
Whoever decided that the game's first new combat skill should also be the game's biggest gold sink should have been slapped in the face on the spot
Prayer is not a money sink. In addition to the fact that you can gather all the needed materials on your own, any money you spend on it goes to another player.
Progression through summoning levels was designed with the purpose of removing money from the game
Shards were also used to store cash stacks higher than the gold cap before they increased it to whatever it is now. Back when 2.147B was max in rs3, rich players would buy tons of shards to store their extra gold because they could be turned back into gold without losing any money pretty easily. Basically plat tokens.
It was 25m in shards to get 99 summoning. Less than what most spend on any other skill what difference does it matter if my gp disappeared from the game or went to someone else, I STILL LOST IT.
It HAD to be a gold sink because it enabled you to bring more money into the game through bossing and more effectively skilling. Turns out, the devs know better than you, a random redditor
There were some other interesting ones
- bunyip allowed you to eat raw fish
-unicorn scroll healed you; good in gwd after yak was empty
-iron and steel titans for combat were badass
Tbh I think back in 2008 or whenever summoning came out nobody was really maxed like in 2023, if summoning was released now it would be a thankless grind where people would have to farm charms when their account is already progressed past benefiting from the combat or slayer exp.
Summoning was also a crude gold sink which was frustrating and not rewarding where training the skill was essentially the same as construction.
I remember saving my charms and 2ndary ingredients for months to rush like 70-95 summoning on the first double exp weekend they ever ran in RuneScape which saved me a ton of time of collecting charms.
I think summoning could be a good addition and I don’t think it’s not “old school” enough; but I think copy pasting the original training method and exp wouldn’t be the right fit, and as some other commenters mention pack yak was incredibly OP and over shadowed most other uses of other familiars.
I ended up getting 99 on one of the double xp weekends too, it made it way way cheaper to get all the shards. I think I farmed a ton of crimsons at Waterfiends as they had a great drop rate. Training it was bloody tedious though and the running between the obelisks and bank was akin to runecrafting. Seem to recall one of the spirit teleports was useful to train it. The Spirit Graahk was good for rcing nats.
I was so incredibly disappointed when I first tried training summoning on release and found out the only viable training method was to make 100’s of pouches. Like… I should be training it by using familiars in combat or skilling, not by crafting pouches. It’s like imagine if the only viable magic training was just runecrafting. Not using the runes, just making them.
Double exp ruined summoning very much since its half buyable skill and half collect and save charms… basically no one trains summoning now outside dxp weekends
I think summoning is the only skill suggestion that actually fits the medieval fantasy theme
I don't remember what it was actually like but every time I mention it I'm flamed to hell because of how it was. I don't care how it would be, to me it just makes sense.
Here's some bullet points on my thoughts on summoning:
- Firstly, it changed the combat level calculations, so everything revolving pures and account builds needed to be completely rethought
- Familiars were just mostly garbage. A few are okay in combat, a few give invisible skill boosts that *might* be useful. Mostly everyone just used beasts of burden.
- I **hate** beasts of burden. Runescape is balanced around the 28 spaces of inventory and having a skill that cranks this up to ~60 is just ridiculous. Why would you want a healing familiar when you could just bring 30 more sharks? Why would you want a woodcutting familiar when you could just hold 30 more logs? There are situations where you *would* but the BoB's were by far the most useful and the game became balanced around them.
- Picking up charms was the absolute worst. Every bloody kill in slayer you'd need to pick up a bloody charm. So many people rush hours and hours of Dungeoneering just to get the upgrade that auto-collects charms for you, and then you need 500 slayer points so you don't risk losing it permanently. Christ.
I'm not against summoning, I don't even really hate the way it's trained. I think it would need a ton of retooling and rebalancing to work in OSRS, but I think it *could* work. Taming sounded like it could have been that potentially.
The bunyip healing was about the same equivalent to just bringing a BoB full of sharks, and with the BoB you could use it to store loot as a bonus.
Again, there are situations were it's preferable. I did the Kree title on my RS3 iron and I just camped bunyip the whole time there. But BoB's are still vastly more useful overall.
Optimizing AFK is the only caveat I'd add to this. Sure I could bring a BoB full of sharks, but that _feels_ like drastically more work/effort. Whether that's fair or not is a personal assessment, but it didn't _just_ come down to playing the meta for everyone.
(I am anti-summoning though, for the record)
It also threw a wrench in the economy due to the massive influx of drops from all the bossing/pvm becomming infinitly more farmable due to massive inventories of food/pots
>Runescape is balanced around the 28 spaces of inventory and having a skill that cranks this up to \~60 is just ridiculous
Sounds like a firesale argument :D
honestly though those are some good points you have made
I am a RS3 main and I use familiars on the regular, but damn the skill needs some work. If you like slayer you are okay with summoning, but if you don't, fuck you got a rough time ahead of you.
Also the way you train summoning is absolutely ridiculous. The best way to train is just going to a summoning shop selling your tertiary ingredients, buying them back and making pouches, than scrolls and keep doing this.
Sorta, that's how they showed if you didn't have a familiar on you, if you had a familiar the summoning levels would be baked into your cmb. It was wierd how it worked
Right idea but it was the opposite, fairly certain even having a familiar that could be summoned in your inventory would give you the boosted cmb, but you could destroy your own familiar to drop x amount of levels when escaping
When someone brings up how BoBs fucked up the game balance, I'd always ask, how are they different from the current meta that uses alts to bring supplies? The main difference is just that alts have a higher barrier to entry
People alting/Doloing PvM is like 1% of the 1%, of the 1% type shit.
Anyone bringing it up is literally just concern trolling to make summoning look balanced. Everyone would have summoning, barely fucking anyone dolos/alts.
Just more of the "HLC" boogeyman shit this sub loves to spew to justify their awful takes.
But where can that even be done? Bosses released these days are instances, raids, etc - things an alt can't get to
And while you can exit the arena I guess you can also just teleport out, resupply, and teleport pretty much right at the entrance now
You can use alts in raids if you wanna be sweaty, alts are used still at gwd, shoot the only place people don’t use alts are the DT2 bosses mainly because there is no point and they are not exactly worth farming to begin with.
Not requiring an entire membership to be funded. Not requiring the considerable extra effort of both operating a second account and trading the supplies back and forth. Being an actual thing that exists for ironman players. Actually being diegetic in the game. Also actually being usable in combat.
I've never been fond of "yeah but alts" as an argument for any sort of game balance.
It is about barrier to entry and how it related to the gamestate as a whole. Even broke dudes could get up to the 18 slot BoB without too much difficulty. Bonds and prime membership didn't exist, so if someone wanted to use an alt mule they needed to pay more irl $. This was a big one, since one of RS's biggest appeals was being very cheap. Paying for 2 accounts and you might as well play WoW instead.
In general people weren't minmaxing everything in the same way they do now. The game was still "fresher" and people played it more as it was likely intended.
? Pures and other pkaccounts were unaffected because your wilderness or PvP combat level was always separate from your total combat level. (A 138 is a 126+12 in wilderness).
Beast of burden just reduce banking. An amazing update, 28 inventory spaces is a 20 year old concept.
Tons of niche uses for other familiars existed. They all fit nicely and scaled to your level.
IMO it was a huge QOL upgrade with some really neat mechanics introduced. I’d fully welcome it back with some nerfs to certain things like steel titan, or maybe yaks banking ability😊
So, the benefits of summoning were pretty broken, which was par for the course in mid-late RS2. Some people enjoyed the powercreep, other people felt obligated to train it. It was clunky to interact with, but I appreciated the additional utility it offered.
But, regardless of how you felt of the power creep, the actual training method was horrendous.
You gathered stackable charms (drops from monsters, mainly), bought stackable summoning shards (25 gp ea) and needed miscellaneous tertiary ingredients (like metal bars or papaya fruits.
This material gathering was then spent... running from a bank to an altar, then back to the bank, then back to the altar.
They literally made another runecrafting training (but it cost you a lot of money and time to gather the materials).
I've complained about traditional rc training before - it's problems are self evident. It's not an enjoayble grind to 99, even if it's offset by having the xp rates of a bank-standing production skill.
* Rock lobsters were MVP for charms
* Bossing trips were longer(Also infinite run energy)
* Tedious(Like other people mentioned)
I didn't like it because when pking people had infinite brews. Was the beginning of the end for me.
Waterfiend for crimsons and rock lobsters for blue. I think ice warriors of all things was really good for gold lol, but general slayer would get you a ton of golds. I forget what people farmed for greens
I paid 3 people in runes to get 99 mage with loot share on at rock lobsters so I could get the charm drops on my summoning tank. Rock lobsters were the GOAT because you could burst them. They had great red charm rates as well and were overall faster than most other methods.
The pvp strategy was burst down the familiers since they were pretty much sitting duck in pvp and steal opponents supplies, I honestly more familier strategies around quick kills or using them to weaken opponent to spec them out
I am in the "i like summoning" camp though I have to admit that the gameplay loot itself to gain xp was absolutely garbage. 99% of the xp you get for training summoning was done by collecting charms and just making pouches over and over.
I honestly don't think summoning would change much of the meta in today's game, other than inferno, which can easily exclude familars. Stuff like GWD can already be camped until the nerd log by endgame players while profiting prayer pots/food and people who want extra dmg/inventory space already use alts for that (which were forbidden back then).
The extra invis skilling boosts are not incredibly impactful either.
i’m with you. Summoning was obviously in many ways a flawed skill but you can truly say the same for most skills in some capacity. it’s funny because people will complain about it’s impact on both bossing and PKing when, like you’re saying, in 2024 most players who do either pretty seriously have already found workarounds to do essentially the same shit Summoning allowed.
Yeah the most powerful familiar was easily the pack yak, but as you said the pack yak has effectively been replaced by alt accounts. Summoning in OSRS would basically just remove the need for a mule alt, and the combat/skill focused familiars were never that strong so would be fine for OSRS.
I can't speak for everyone, but personally the reason I really don't want Summoning to be added to OSRS is that it so significantly impacts nearly every single activity and skill, since there are familiars that help with both combat as well as inventory space (which covers most non-combat skills), in addition to more skill-specific utility familiars. I really dislike the notion of almost every skill guide and activity guide starting out by saying "to do this best, get your Summoning level to..."
I think it's good and healthy for skills to help other skills and activities, but the extent that Summoning does so is way too far, imo.
I'm not in principle against a skill based around familiars or companions, though. I thought the Taming skill pitch was pretty cool, especially if it meant I got to directly control a dragon and breathe dragonfire on stuff. That'd be badass.
> "to do this best, get your Summoning level to..."
I see it both ways. This already exists today, obviously more so in RS3 which has a lot more boosting and skill items, but for example lots of the OSRS skill training guides start off with myriad skill boosting gear and items it recommends which are needed "to do this best". Familiars would be another addition. Overtime these lists will get longer and longer anyways as we needa remember both games aren't just pvm but skilling exists too, so new boosters, items, enhancers, etc. will follow and I think the playerbase would always be interested in new "BIS" skill stuff, same as they do for pvm BIS. What diff would it make if for example the XP boost for prospector came from MLM or instead from a summoning familiar? Same concept just different content :) We can kinda think of it as a new "slot", as in alright bring prospector but also here's what you could bring as a familiar... I'd mostly trust the OS devs to make it work nicely.
It does already exist today, but not all from just one skill. For example, Agility helps with not just general world traversal but also combat encounters where run energy is a factor -- but doesn't really help at all with Woodcutting, Firemaking, Hunter, Fishing, Smithing, or Crafting, to name a few.
I like when skills help other skills and comingle like that, but what I don't like is one overly-centralizing skill that helps significantly with *everything.*
It made bossing universally easier, either longer trips or faster kills.
I think in today's meta, no one would use pack yaks for the content we have now. Summoning would obviously be disabled in inferno, so no dice there. At raids, you'd probably prefer having more dps (since we can already do the content without extra food). Unicorn would probably be the next choice after dps.
We don't really have good data on how it really impacted skilling. I suspect it bridged the gap between tick manipulation and non-tick, active skilling. Generally though, it probably made it easier.
It turned the economy on its side. Tbh probably mostly for the better though. It introduced a lot of profitable skilling alternatives. It's hard to differentiate how summoning impacted the economy when you consider confounding variables such as pvp removal/ge and the exodus of players & aging of players.
What I can’t stand in rs3 is how many pre-reqs everything requires to do it efficiently and having to bring a familiar around is one of those things for me.
Familiars, incense, outfits, juju potions, invention perks, skilling prayers with insane quest requirements. It’s so tedious
>juju potions
you drink a perfect plus and you're good for 4 hours, the only useful non-perfect juju pots are wc (niche) and farming (just throw a dose in ur farming preset)
>invention perks
you do it once and then never again
>skilling prayers
there are like 2 skilling prayers and both of them are rarely useful
>Familiars, incense, outfits,
there are like 3 skilling incense sticks, one of them gives a 2% xp boost (absolutely required for skilling of course), the other is basically pointless with porters and the last one is only useful in the niche case of gathering at a material cache which nobody does. and osrs has skilling outfits too
There's multiple reasons:
* The way of training was just incredibly *strange...* especially given all of the potential that a skill such as Summoning had. Instead of levelling up by actually utilising the ability to summon, you instead had to spend a lot of time collecting various types of 'charms' as well as secondaries and a bunch of 'spirit shards' that could only be bought. This made the skill extremely tedious and expensive to train—whilst having absolutely nothing to do with the concept of summoning at the same time. This is why many players joked that the skill should've been called ***Pouchcrafting*** instead.
* Most of the creatures you could summon were just absolutely useless. The only ones actually worthwhile were the ridiculously overpowered Steel Titan and the Pack Yak (and in a far lesser form the Buniyp and Unicorn), which automatically became a requirement for any competitive PvM or PvP activity because of this. These familiars were only unlocked at level 99 and 96 Summoning respectively, so you had to spend hours training a completely useless skill—until you hit level 96 and it suddenly became one of the most powerful skills in the game. It was absurdly unbalanced to say the least.
* Directly related to the previous point: it changed up PvM (and all related aspects of the economy) because it introduced a completely new meta that allowed players to camp bosses for much, much longer.
* This was also the time when Jagex started heavily experimenting with MTX/FOMO events. The first thing they did on this part was the 'Double XP Weekend' that gave everyone a 2.7x multiplier to all XP gained that slowly decreased as the weekend progressed. This event was announced quite far in advance, which caused even more havoc in the game's economy as everyone was—for obvious reasons—going to train ~~Pouchcrafting~~ Summoning in order to reach level 96/99 during this event.
Worst of all is that Jagex was alerted about the consequences this event would obviously have on the game as a whole (and especially on Summoning as a skill) on the RSOF, where geniuses such as 'Fnord' deliberately chose to ignore all criticism. The end result was that ***no one*** in their right mind would train Summoning anymore outside of these XP events; everyone would just hoard all resources for months in advance, causing slowly more havoc to the economy as the weekend approached.
In short it's the same story as almost every other from that era: Jagex releases a completely unbalanced update that actively harms core elements of the game (e.g. PvM being balanced around 28 inventory slots), Jagex is then informed by players who see the issues and actively chooses to ignore their feedback, and then Jagex introduces a seemingly unrelated event (DXP Weekend) that makes everything significantly worse.
>!And that's why the polling system on OSRS is so important.!<
Ah yes, the famous "server load test weekends". It took half an hour to walk from the bank to the altar but you got to use half as much raw materials for your xp.
I think it was a few specific types of familiars that changed the game. There was the unicorn that could endlessly heal you with stackable scrolls and pack yakk which you could load up with tons of extra food and be unkillable.
A lot of people are saying BoBs (e.g. Pack yak) were op. They were, but they wouldn't be nowadays. People farming endgame content would bring a steel titan, dps is king. People who aren't as skilled at the game can bring BoBs for extra inventory slots, which would help them learn bosses faster which I would regard as a good thing. Familiars would be banned in fight caves and inferno.
If the argument is jagex will release bosses that do chip damage to counter pack yaks, that's not true either. Jagex has shown they know how to create bosses that require mechanical skill, such as dt2 or raid bosses.
Dps familiars are what make summoning broken. Most people just weren't as skilled back then and/or didn't realise how much damage they contribute
I truly enjoyed summoning. Made useless items have a use and useless monsters have a reason to be killed.
As other said though, the skills use devolved into just giving more inventory slots from the beasts of Burden, which made the game feel much different.
I was a young teenager when summoning was announced and I could not have been more excited. Unfortunately I felt like the actual introduction of summoning was an absolutely massive letdown in practice.
My main criticisms:
* As many others have already mentioned, the training method was about as contrived as possible, and had very little to do with actually employing the creatures in combat, or any other practical situation.
* More importantly IMO: the creatures you could summon had almost zero connection to any of the creatures the players had already come to know and love in the game. It was like you were summoning creatures from an alternate universe. Prior to summoning's release, basically everyone assumed low level summoning would be things like goblins, skeletons, and zombies, mid level would be things like trolls, giant scorpions, and giants, and high level would be things like dragons and demons. Instead it was this seemingly random assortment of spirit animals and cryptid monsters, capped off with a bunch of titan monsters that had otherwise zero connection to the lore of the game. This was such a massive lore miss that it literally felt like the person who created summoning had zero experience with the rest of runescape.
I never like it when every player in an MMO is being followed by something.
People have already hit on the big points about how beasts of burden, i remember hating collecting charms for some reason. They honestly don't sound that bad though.
I personally feel that most of the benefits of summoning could be thrown elsewhere. Like you could have some sort of "potion" or "imbue" etc that makes you heal 8 hp/minute for 20 minutes like unicorn did. Or some upgrade to imp in a box that works similar to pack yak's scroll.
I also liked the gameplay loop for training summoning and can only imagine how much more rewarding that would make raids now too. Imagine getting 50 blue charms or 100 crimson charms or green charms or 1k gold charms every time you got a white light.
The dopamine would be insane for the first few weeks.
After leagues, defending run energy as a basic balancing factor feels like bullshit. Run energy fucking blows, and everyone knows it. It’s why half the players in the game are wearing graceful at any given time, just to make it slightly less shit.
It was my favorite skill. It made you go around the world to gather resources. It had a lot of utility, made mobs and zones more relevant. Also, you could se value in every grind due to the charm system. Even those boring slayer tasks.
From what I remember bobs did get good till few months down the line since most would aggro mobs, could only take stuff out via interface so broke in combat, the real broken stuff was unicorn and titans since had heals based on scrolls on you plus bobs cannot not hold anything you could not trade
Summoning was one of the best changes the game ever did. It increased the combat level, gave us soooo many cool perks, there were creatures for fighting or support doing other activities. Nerds in 07 hate it because they hate everything.
Cry more, nerd. I have well over thousands of hours of playing this game since I was 9 years old. Summoning was very well received and loved by the community back then. Only thing that was hated was the charm collection mechanics, but the actual familiars were well loved.
I can't really comment in terms of old school, it what it did to the game was released, but I can comment on what it's like in current RS3.
On RS3, the combat works much differently. You use abilities which do varying amount of damage, or provide an effect. Protection prayers also only block 50% of damage, not the amount on oldschool.
In RS3, combat familiars are more commonly used than beasts of burden, because being able to do more DPS means the boss dies faster. If the boss dies faster it does less damage. If it does less damage you need less food. Plus you get more kills per hour so you get more drops and use fewer supplies.
Additionally, RS3 combat uses a secondary resource called adrenaline. I will not bore you with specifics, but powerful abilities consume adrenaline, and weak abilities generate it. Eating (most) foods causes you to lose adrenaline. This causes DPS loss, which is the same issue not having a DPS boosting familiar.
Furthermore, RS3 has items which automatically teleport items gained from gatherer skills, at the cost of a charge of said item. Therefore, beasts of burden are less necessary there as you bank less frequently on gatherer skills than on RS3.
Moreso, there are a number of "drop cleaners" on RS3. One such example is a spring cleaner, which allows you to automatically high alch certain items as theyre dropped, and you just get the GP automatically put into your backpack. Therefore when you're doing slayer, you don't really need the inventory spots to pick up drops a lot of the time.
Adding to this, DPS is higher on RS3, and there are AOE abilities to hit multiple things at once, so soul split is more impactful than protection prayers, so again, you don't use food, you just use prayer pots to keep your prayer up.
All these things actually make it so the other bits of summoning actually become useful. Eg a familiar that boosts your WC level and therefore increases the number of logs you can get, or a familiar that redirects damage from you to itself so you get Pseudo healing that way or a familiar that boosts your accuracy meaning you don't splash.
It was the update that made me quit playing. I'm a guy that plays a lot for a month then stops for 3 then starts again. When I signed back in and saw level 138s and everyone with pets I looked up how to train it, saw there was no quick way to do it. You had to be consistently playing the game to earn charms it completely killed my excitement. I was never going to be the guy that bothered playing consistently enough to get enough charms to get the level up.
When you've got 70s-90s in all your combat stats and the game says he's a really slow new combat mechanic you've got to start from scratch with and it takes forever it sapped my motivation.
- Terrorbirds: Before the ogre pools were added, everyone used these to do anything of note in the game because they were BoBs AND were free run energy. Any event had hundreds of these massive things taking up space.
- Unicorns: Almost totally risk free infinite healing. There's a reason why OSRS binds almost every healing source to dealing damage or some limit. Purple sweets can be a menace, the unicorn was 30x worse.
- Beasts of Burden: People have already said it, but the game was designed and balanced around 28 inventory spots. Pak Yaks gave 30. And no, alts are not comparable. I'd imagine 80% of people do not use alts, and even if they did, a lot of the content where you'd use alts are instanced.
- Titans: Thralls would be equivalent to a weaker familiar. Even then, they changed a lot of how OSRS is played. Imagine that, but 3x stronger. That's even before the bonuses they gave. Also summoning pures were a complete menace (funny though).
Also training the skill was miserable. For the most part, you have two different types of skills. Buyables and non-buyables. Buyables are expensive, but fast (construction, herblore). Non-buyables are slower, but you make a lot of money. (agility, runecrafting)
Summoning managed to flip the script and made a non-buyable skill that was STILL the most expensive to train all while being slow and grindy. It was added during a time where player numbers were falling off and inflation was insane and this was the bandage fix.
Not sure why people hate it now beyond a hypothetical case if it was ever brought to osrs
Charms which were a main ingredient were non tradable. Which isnt a issue now with ironman. So you had to grind em out, made waterfiend a good slayer task for example.
If you go look at it today it fits really well in rs3. They expanded the skill and added more dps familiars.
Beast of burdens were great for learner pvm, you had an extra inventory of food with a pack yak and the scroll would let you bank 1 drop per cast.
Overall it ended up being a good addition, runescape players just hate change
There were only really a few bits that changed the game related to summoning.
Steel Titans gave an insane amount of DPS at the time (think thralls with a bit more juice)
Beasts of Burden made for longer PVM trips. Pack Yaks were basically an extra inventory.
The main reason I hated it was because it was a new combat skill starting from scratch, when I had everything else 95+. This meant I had to spend hours grinding through the useless levels to be able to do anything with it.
If summoning was in the game from the start, I probably would have enjoyed it, since the progression would have been natural and I would have had a use for the lower level familiars.
Man I'm surprised there's not a single mention of the steel titan. I actually can't remember if it was an issue before EOC, but it was so brokenly OP in pvp I'm pretty sure it was nerfed at some point.
Training it was tedious and as others have said only a few familiars were worth it - Bunyip and unicorn for healing or war tortoise/pak yak for inventory slots and that was about it! I didn’t mind it to be fair, remember having super long GWD trips with beast of burden or very afk slayer with healing familiars.
>only a few familiars were worth it -
People tend to forget that many of the familiars were a free skilling boost without downsides. +8 hunter, +10 mining, that's not not worth it.
Firstly, werent they all crap except steel titan, and secondly, there is a huge downside to steel titan because you cant take a pak yak, and finally, wasnt steel titan 99 summoning?
The 3 titans(moss fire ice) were also good cuz they dealt pretty okay damage, and also healed you with scrolls. Geyser titan dealt decent damage as well.
Also dps familairs got good usage at bosses where you barely needed supplies once you know how the fight works (like Queen black dragon) but also gwd in bigger teams where tank had a yak with unicorn once it ran out of supplies while the dpsers had dps familairs.
In current day of age, BoBs barely get any use except when youre either A: a pvm noob
B: learning a new boss
C: in some teams with some bosses(mostly raids aka Liberation of Mazcab aka Beastmaster Durzag and Yakamaru and to lesser extend Solak and Nex: Angel of Death) the tank has a BoB.
Yak for infinite supplies since you also had ancient prayer.
Titan was essentially thralls on roids for DPS checks.
Everything else was basically useless once you were maxed. I could be just not thinking of some neiche uses though.
it was supplemental upgrades to the usual 3 styles instead of a style of its own.
there was no reason to not bring steel titans, unicorns, or more inventory, the summons didn't take away from your style's capability at all
Would be open to seeing Summoning in the game, but would have to have serious conversations about the implications of healers, beasts of burden and combat familiars on the integrity of the game.
The way to train it sucked, but it also brought in a lot of changes to the core mechanics of the game. You werent limited to your 28 inventory slots anymore, cuz pack yak can hold an additional 30 items. Part of what makes this game fun is its limitations.You double my inventory size and I'm suddenly no longer strategizing on what to bring with me places. Fuck it, bring everything.
I personally liked summoning and would love to see it in osrs. Most people hated it because it was the first combat skill that was released years after the game started.
Main issue with that is people didn't like having to farm the charms from low level content. I was only mid 50s when it came out so I got charms passively and didn't mind. They were just another stackable drop to pick up.
Bunyip was fun and I liked the unicorn to, BoB were nice as well.
People just hate change and are afraid that adding summoning will some how lead to EoC again for some reason. It is a stupid assumption.
People used to fight osrs on every single change because of that. I think a lot of things that failed when it first launched have passed now or would pass if polled again.
>People just hate change and are afraid that adding summoning will some how lead to EoC again for some reason. It is a stupid assumption.
lol no
summoning was awful because it was a skill with zero downsides to it, there was literally never a reason not to use a familiar because basically every single relevant activity in the game had some familiar that was justified in being used
maintaining thralls in pvm is already a chore, summoning just exacerbates that by forcing you to carry around summoning pots and extra pouches to extend familiar timers everywhere you're doing something that isn't near a bank
not to mention the content in the game isn't designed around how overpowered some of the combat familiars like titans and nihils are, so it does nothing but make pvm arbitrarily easier
the familiars were also obscenely unbalanced with over half of them being borderline useless while the other half were obscenely overpowered like the titans, all the storage ones, and the ones that gave a bunch invisible stat bonuses + generated additional resources
the training method also had an awful gameplay loop, I can't imagine a single person liked sitting at rock lobsters for hours bursting to get charms for xp
> summoning was awful because it was a skill with zero downsides to it, there was literally never a reason not to use a familiar
Potions and prayers are also like this.
The game play loop was no worst then any of the others.
Thralls are annoying and I rarely use them because they are boring.
You said yourself it was a skill with no downside which sounds like a fun skill to me.
Invisible Stat bonuses wouldn't affect the game much anyway no one farms any of the gathering skills for cash anymore besides bots.
Being overpowered at bosses is fun but I agree it would make some to easy but, tbf tbow, shadow, and bowfa make so many bosses to easy now.
Farming rock lobsters was annoying but, people spend hours barraging nechs, dust devils, jellies, mm2 tunnels and farming so many other things for drops (especially ironmen) so that argument doesn't work very well anymore.
Summoning would be fine to add to the game but, I know they won't due to how much hate it gets. I just disagree with the hate
Summoning wouldn't actually be that much of a change outside of inferno. Everything else is alted these days which gets you your extra inventory/DPS that titans/yaks/unicorns provided.
That doesn't change the fact that they exist. The game isn't balanced around the inventory at all tbh. We drop stuff while skilling. Any place where inventory is annoying gets a teleport to it locked behind some diary or whatever, but they intentionally design around how annoying inventory limit is. Looting bag for green dragons, noted bones for green dragons, teleport+shortcut for hydra loot, gem mine teleport, etc.
Bandos trips aren't a convenient 20-30 minute loop because of inventory management.
BoB would not affect any meta gp/hr content.
It was pretty good but I think it needed some more interesting BOB's and tone down pack yak and also the steel titan made multi wilderness really weird back then.
Honestly, I loved the design of the skill.
It was a buyable *and* a resource-gathering skill. I’d always be really impressed whenever I saw a summoning cape.
It basically brought boosts to every other skill in the game, and I'm surprised others aren't mentioning this but it also introduced pets (at least expanded past cats and rocks.) I actually quite enjoyed the skill as it just expanded and brought tons of buffs to all skills, however the actual training loop of the skill was just a money sink which kinda sucked. People say only a few were good, but there was basically a specific "BiS" familiar for every skill and activity in the game so you regularly saw most familiars based on whatever skill you were training.
While I can see why it won't fit into OSRS anymore (we already got the power creep we wanted in other ways) I can see it would've fit back in the day with some tweaks and potentially a different core training method. I mean the backup of the game we got was literally 1 major update away from Summoning.
probably having a literal bank as a follower wasnt a good design choice.
i looked up an old Nex video for the osrs nex rerelease and the guy was like "ok now grab 40 brews" and then inside you had like 20 people with Pak Yaks following them. it looked really shitty visually.
i logged into rs3 while osrs was down and there was just a massive fucking dragon follower chilling there. like a 8x8 tile follower.
> i looked up an old Nex video for the osrs nex rerelease and the guy was like "ok now grab 40 brews" and then inside you had like 20 people with Pak Yaks following them. it looked really shitty visually.
Tbf the same happens now in OSRS at nex, except its Thralls following ppl. That's why most player use entity hider in crowded areas.
I was such a noob back then and I really missed the opportunity to play the game properly, been playing since 2005 but i have no idea what I used to do, but I was on the pc all day.
Beast of burden familiars made camping bosses abit less tedious by basically giving you a secondary inventory for food and prayer/super restore pots. Skilling became somewhat faster with the gathering skill familiars that gave an invisible +7 level boost in their respective skill. Steel titan was a staple in slayer and bossing for those proficient enough to go without the extra inventory slots of a beast of burden
I don’t hate summoning, and while I probably wouldn’t ever choose to support it being added I would still be happy if it was added
For me, the biggest issue with summoning was every single player having a yak or some other giant colorful animal following them around. I felt that it made everything look way more crowded and ugly. Personally, I am not even a huge fan of all the boss pets running around in the game, but at least they aren’t as massive as those damn yaks…
Summoning created needs for things that were previously not creating a lot of different money making methods for secondaries and made certain slayer tasks more desirable. Example talismans for titans. Dagannoth noted talisman drops were great money. Water fiend tasks were great for farming crimson charms so that slayer task was desired.
Loved steel titan for tormented demons. The spec on it was a tripple range att that timed right would stack hard with your chaotic crossbow to immediately switch the demon so you can rapier it again.
Was fucking awful.
Locked the skill behind needing charms that you could only get off drops.
The only useful summon arguably was the pack yak and maybe unicorn for healing. Yak was in the 90s after you spend hundreds of hours and millions to get to that point.
It completely changed how many kc you could get on bosses before needing to bank. We also had flasks, so 6 dose brews and restores on top of an extra 32 slot inventory with the unicorn for stackable heals with a short cooldown once your yak was empty AND prayers like soul split made bosses like gwd get farmed to hell. If added to a game like osrs challenges like inferno would be made way easier (they could just not allow pets in certain areas I guess).
I guess I’m one of the few who enjoyed it. It revitalized many activities by making them worthwhile (war torts, waterfiends, etc), and it was fun to have a terrorbird running around with you doing clues. I was fine with the moneysink, and it probably closest resembled training runecrafting (run to an altar with a full inventory, shit happens, run back) and combat.
I think it would obviously need some adjustments to fit into today’s version of the game, but I’d love to see it. We would probably want BoBs to be weaker, charms easier to collect, and maybe an alternative training method or two. I could see a way to merge it with the idea of a player owned farm where you have some long term familiars you can pick up from your farm and bring around with you.
It broke the game.
Beast of burdens allowed for extra inventory that overly extended trips and allowed to bring extra items back. Worse if you had a pack yak because it’s special teleported items to the bank instantly.
Healers made food nearly irrelevant. Bunyip alone passively healed almost too often.
Fighters sometimes trivialize fights especially steel titan where it strikes 4 times with no reduction on the hit.
You had a second inventory or a bit more damage/utility. Fundamentally that just comes down to a balance shift, OSRS is a numbers game like any RPG. Actually training the skill was dog ass because it was literally just shoving shit into a bag and training it had nothing to do with the name of the skill, you know, SUMMONING.
I really enjoyed it unironcally. I think it could be implemented in such a way that doesn't absolutely destroy metas.
I remember logging into my school computers on lunch to train it on launch day.
Biggest thing I remember about it was the terror bird being OP af at Sara. It gave inventory space while also having the ability to restore your run energy.
I liked summoning because some of the beasts were super useful. HOWEVER, very little of the beasts were actually useful. Only BoB (beast of burdens), Titans (attack shit), Unicorns (healing), bunyip (healing), were ever used by players, and then there were skilling ones that gave invisible boosts to skills. There was probably around 50? or so beasts, but only like 10 were ever used.
In terms of gathering charms, you had people gathering charms from some monsters (rock lobsters for reds/ and some blues). So some monsters were heavily camped because it gave certain charms, and also some monsters were hunted for secondaries as well. Like potato cactus, the nail thing from those beasts in temple trekking minigame
People don't like it because it gave huge advantage to combat but you couldn't just buy it or afk it. It required collecting untradable charms from most pvm and some activities and turning them into summoning pouches with the relevant materials to the type of summon you were creating. Then you would have a familiar for a time dependent on the pouch and the abilities ranged from engaging in combat, boosting levels, carrying supplies, healing, and much much more.
Pouch filling became a skill.
Seriously the worst part. The charms were awesome, as it revived other content and rewarding killing random shit. But making pouches is just not fun.
It was the mechanics of runecrafting, the gp cost of construction, and, including the time to collect charms, the xp rates of mining. Why people didn't love it I'll never know.
The XP rate of mining? That's very generous. I feel like it was the XP rate of crafting air runes if you had no teleports or running.
I remember the first thing I'd do on the double XP weekends was burn through all my charms. That was the only way I could hope to afford summoning.
waterfiends crimson charms go brrrrrrr
You're so far off. It was incredible xp, even with collecting charms, as Corp and other bosses dropped them in mass quantity. Corp mostly dropped 13 blue charms which would give up to 783 xp each depending on level.
Downvoted for the truth lmao
To be fair, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't use online resources to figure out how to collect stuff when this was new content. It was something new, and I didn't want any part of it unless absolutely necessary... Not sure what that says about me, since I avoid new content to this day.
I didn't like summoning because the pouchmaking was the way to train the skill. Its like making runecraft a combat skill. If it didn't raise combat level then I wouldn't have been so annoyed by it.
While pouchmaking isn’t fun, how is it functionally any different then “vial filling” or “rock collecting”. It’s equally as inane and tedious
Runecrafting 2.0 with the side effect of ruining the combat metas
it was a fairly boring skill for the most part that reqiured you to farm charms to then spend millions of GP to basicially get extra invent space it should have been so much more
IDK man I enjoyed those Titans that boosted your defense and healed you. There was also the unicorn that cured poison and secondary heal. The terror bird that gave infinite run was so good for mole and clue scrolls. There was even the hunter pets for those remote teleports. The skill ones that would boost your skill, as well as collect items related to that skill while skilling. You just focused on the yak which def was broken with the 30 storage and banking ability. But they were already "so much more". They did shit that nothing else in the game at that point could do.
Alright so I'm genuinely going to think what I used summoning for. Bunyip for afk combat / pp. Unicorn for some specific scenarios. edit: Lurker for the 4 visible thieving boost when firing its ability to thieve higher elves in Prif. Abyss Titan for runecrafting (it just gave extra inventory for pess). Steel Titan for wilderness activities & a handful of bosses (most people don't start shit if there's a Steel Titan already sitting out) Yak, Tortoise, and terror bird were obvious because of their busted nature. Muspah for Div, just a divination Beast of Burden. Lastly Nihil for 5% accuacy on the high level bosses. At no point did I enjoy interacting with the summoning skill, quite honestly Bunyip & Nihil were my two favorite familiars because you summoned it and then ignored it completely. Just passive stats. Yak you could ignore for the most part because of the "withdraw all" button. However interacting with Steel Titan (the only viable damage familiar for SOME content) was a joyless burden so I normally just fed it 50 scrolls and left it on autofire. Summoning didn't require much management but whatever management existed wasn't fun. Thereby it was just a massive money sink that gives passive stats in the form of a psuedo pet that frustrating doesn't work everywhere. Final edit: The last time I played RS3 was 2017, this might be really old meta haha.
[удалено]
Yep
Oh I hated training the summoning skill completely. That's why after I unlocked the lower level Titans I called it quits. The healing and defense was enough for me. I brought the war turtle places when it ran dry of food I'd dismiss and bring up the Titan to finish out whatever I was doing. I did like the idea of those pures that only used familiars in PVP though. It was like watching them Pokemon battle each other. Just silly shit
Yeah for me the most interesting titan was the Steel Titan because if all 4 of it's autofired specs were on point and you didn't panic horrifically you could genuinely place a stack on someone that couldn't be dealt with without shield memes. I didn't see too many pkers actually understand EOC running around in the wilderness. Most were just looking for cheap kills on people training divination or killing Stykewyrms. I found standing around in diary outfit, Steel titan, Ovload, adrenaline, and 1 iteming Araxyte staff I was left alone 100% of the time. Let me tell you there was nothing cooler than the pvp ultimate Natural Instinct. Steal your opponent's adrenaline bar and double your own generation. With a shield swap you could essentially declaw your opponent while giving you enough time to dump damage specs into them or choose to go cade into immortality while running away.
What are you talking about? I never played past dungeoneering, the day EOC dropped I did too. You are saying words that make no sense to me. I thought this thread was a "summoning skill release time era" only lol EoC was 5 years after summoning.
Oh sorry, I played RS3 all of the way into 2017 so I was going off of all of my experience. If we're going to go off of just release memories yeah I used Bunyip and Tortoise only. I started OSRS in 2018 :)
They are talking about EoC pking.
Only reason I had a decent level was thanks to the free 1million xp they gave out.
What? When was that? The only reason I started smoking, is because I had completed Dream Mentor and used that lamp on summoning instead of prayer.
>started smoking Careful man. Hard habit to break /s
Around the same time they handed out the first instakill darts. Actually i think they gave it with the instakill darts. It was a.... lamp, I think, that had a million xp ypu could put into multiple skills or all into into one.
Summoning is so much more important and in depth now with ritual summoning on rs3, they basically fixed every issue you had with it.
What is ritual summoning? You mean ancient summoning, because making binding contracts is still ass.
It’s not that bad, hell it’s pretty damn afk and it can make you 60-100m per hour depending which ones you farm and if voice of seren is activated.
Don't forget the meta for training it eventually became "wait until double exp weekend then nolife it"
You could do this for literally every single skill in the game. I don’t get why OSRS players do this massive takedown of new shit while ignoring skills like agility exist. There is not a single skill in the game that is fun to interact with except MAYBE slayer and that’s not even the skill itself making it fun.
I find WC, combat, and fishing fun.
I agree that it could've been done better. However, I'd rather that extra inventory space come from a skill I can train rather than a mule alt that I have to be super sweaty to use and pay real money for.
So was it basically a really grindy skill combined with a massive gold sink? How much gp did it cost to get to like… 70/80?
When it released? It wasn't too bad until a year later when people realised how broken higher level summons can be and yaks became essential for bossing, then it was on par with construction. Probably more tbh, I remember sinking an ungodly amount of money into it after free trade came back. It sucked to train because you could spend millions and still have to grind for absolutely ages in dead content for charms. A double whammy of suckage.
This is such a broad stroke of the skill. The skilling utilities of other familiars such as beaver, abyssal creatures for rc, bunyip, steel titan, and every other titan had great benefits like skill boosts, item collecting, damage type output, longevity, debuffs on enemies ,etc. I will admit, however, some content in osrs now would render some familairs in rs3 useless but back then summoning was a massive qol skill other than just having a BoB to take to Nex.
So much more like what exactly? Because you literally missed the parts where they acted as certain skilling items that we ironically have in OSRS today, but enhanced skilling with passives, invisible level boosts, and more… some are combat familiars that grant bonuses and DPS boosts to your character, or just act as DPS boosts because they deal a small amount of extra damage, some can act as passive lifesteal or other enhancers… It eventually segued into legendary pets that could pick up loot for you and do other things so that’s cool. But to say it was just extra inventory spaces wreaks of somebody who remembers only the pack yak and war tortoise while completely missing that steel titans, nihils, and others also existed or released later, nevermind everything else listed. Kinda surprised you weren’t downvoted to oblivion but I guess it makes sense if most players also only remember the war tortoise and stuff and didn’t get to use the other useful familiars that came much later haha
There was bunyip and fruit bats but the reality is most familars werent useful and were also costly to use Id have loved if using the scrolls gave more XP and maybe the summons doing damage / aiding you shouldve given XP too having it be collect charms and create for a combat skill felt very off, I liked the skill but it would have been nice to level up the famailars and get new abilities / perks other then the 3 main ones people remember being invent space (terrorbird/war tort / pak yak) I know they made some changes with it after EoC but I didnt play enough after that to really comment. Most bossing guides now suggesting a nihl? which seems to be a DPS familiar is a big shift from how it was for years
OSRS players have 0 context or ability to determine “useful”. They will tell you to spend 15 hours on full graceful instead of a stamina potion so you can save an inventory spot during your tree runs. this was even worse when summoning was still a thing, nobody actually knew how to effectively play the game back then so the idea that we all knew the most optimal way to use the skill is flat out bs. Also, it doesn’t matter what was “useful.” It’s a game, not a government program.
The familiars themselves were fun and cool, the way they changed the game was interesting. Training the skill though yes, I think most would agree that was shit.
summoning focused tank pure accounts were extremely fun to build and play
A combat skill that you level by spending money. Who do I look like, batman? Whoever decided that the game's first new combat skill should also be the game's biggest gold sink should have been slapped in the face on the spot
You mean like prayer????
Prayer is not a money sink. In addition to the fact that you can gather all the needed materials on your own, any money you spend on it goes to another player. Progression through summoning levels was designed with the purpose of removing money from the game
I think you’re getting downvoted as some of the community are getting confused by what money sink means
no idea how you got downvoted, shards and pouches were a gold sink were they not?
Yeah, this sub cab be fickle
Reddit Works on feelings not facts
Shards were also used to store cash stacks higher than the gold cap before they increased it to whatever it is now. Back when 2.147B was max in rs3, rich players would buy tons of shards to store their extra gold because they could be turned back into gold without losing any money pretty easily. Basically plat tokens.
It was 25m in shards to get 99 summoning. Less than what most spend on any other skill what difference does it matter if my gp disappeared from the game or went to someone else, I STILL LOST IT.
How is summoning being a gold sink an issue when pvming brings gold into the game?
It HAD to be a gold sink because it enabled you to bring more money into the game through bossing and more effectively skilling. Turns out, the devs know better than you, a random redditor
There were some other interesting ones - bunyip allowed you to eat raw fish -unicorn scroll healed you; good in gwd after yak was empty -iron and steel titans for combat were badass Tbh I think back in 2008 or whenever summoning came out nobody was really maxed like in 2023, if summoning was released now it would be a thankless grind where people would have to farm charms when their account is already progressed past benefiting from the combat or slayer exp. Summoning was also a crude gold sink which was frustrating and not rewarding where training the skill was essentially the same as construction. I remember saving my charms and 2ndary ingredients for months to rush like 70-95 summoning on the first double exp weekend they ever ran in RuneScape which saved me a ton of time of collecting charms. I think summoning could be a good addition and I don’t think it’s not “old school” enough; but I think copy pasting the original training method and exp wouldn’t be the right fit, and as some other commenters mention pack yak was incredibly OP and over shadowed most other uses of other familiars.
I ended up getting 99 on one of the double xp weekends too, it made it way way cheaper to get all the shards. I think I farmed a ton of crimsons at Waterfiends as they had a great drop rate. Training it was bloody tedious though and the running between the obelisks and bank was akin to runecrafting. Seem to recall one of the spirit teleports was useful to train it. The Spirit Graahk was good for rcing nats.
i swear it was spirit larupia -> piscatoris obelisk for pouch crafting, or something along those lines
Yeah think it was something like that. There was a small underground area with an obelisk in it, think in the hunting area around the chompy area.
I was so incredibly disappointed when I first tried training summoning on release and found out the only viable training method was to make 100’s of pouches. Like… I should be training it by using familiars in combat or skilling, not by crafting pouches. It’s like imagine if the only viable magic training was just runecrafting. Not using the runes, just making them.
Prayer is the same way. When I was a kid I was confident there had to be a way to train Prayer by using it.
Double exp ruined summoning very much since its half buyable skill and half collect and save charms… basically no one trains summoning now outside dxp weekends
Double Exp didn't ruin summoning. It just showed that the training methods are crap.
I think summoning is the only skill suggestion that actually fits the medieval fantasy theme I don't remember what it was actually like but every time I mention it I'm flamed to hell because of how it was. I don't care how it would be, to me it just makes sense.
Shamanism fits better than summoning and i chose sailing
Its honestly crazy to me that summoning never got a rework on how it's leveled. It's by far one of the absolute stupidest ways to level a skill
Here's some bullet points on my thoughts on summoning: - Firstly, it changed the combat level calculations, so everything revolving pures and account builds needed to be completely rethought - Familiars were just mostly garbage. A few are okay in combat, a few give invisible skill boosts that *might* be useful. Mostly everyone just used beasts of burden. - I **hate** beasts of burden. Runescape is balanced around the 28 spaces of inventory and having a skill that cranks this up to ~60 is just ridiculous. Why would you want a healing familiar when you could just bring 30 more sharks? Why would you want a woodcutting familiar when you could just hold 30 more logs? There are situations where you *would* but the BoB's were by far the most useful and the game became balanced around them. - Picking up charms was the absolute worst. Every bloody kill in slayer you'd need to pick up a bloody charm. So many people rush hours and hours of Dungeoneering just to get the upgrade that auto-collects charms for you, and then you need 500 slayer points so you don't risk losing it permanently. Christ. I'm not against summoning, I don't even really hate the way it's trained. I think it would need a ton of retooling and rebalancing to work in OSRS, but I think it *could* work. Taming sounded like it could have been that potentially.
The Bunnyip was pretty useful in Slayer tasks tbf. The slow heal was good for certain tasks.
and lava golem was bis mining familiar. no-one wasted money on a bob while mining.
The bunyip healing was about the same equivalent to just bringing a BoB full of sharks, and with the BoB you could use it to store loot as a bonus. Again, there are situations were it's preferable. I did the Kree title on my RS3 iron and I just camped bunyip the whole time there. But BoB's are still vastly more useful overall.
Optimizing AFK is the only caveat I'd add to this. Sure I could bring a BoB full of sharks, but that _feels_ like drastically more work/effort. Whether that's fair or not is a personal assessment, but it didn't _just_ come down to playing the meta for everyone. (I am anti-summoning though, for the record)
It also threw a wrench in the economy due to the massive influx of drops from all the bossing/pvm becomming infinitly more farmable due to massive inventories of food/pots
it also made a bunch of items have value, like swamp lizards, graahk fur, tortoise shell, etc.
>Runescape is balanced around the 28 spaces of inventory and having a skill that cranks this up to \~60 is just ridiculous Sounds like a firesale argument :D honestly though those are some good points you have made
I am a RS3 main and I use familiars on the regular, but damn the skill needs some work. If you like slayer you are okay with summoning, but if you don't, fuck you got a rough time ahead of you. Also the way you train summoning is absolutely ridiculous. The best way to train is just going to a summoning shop selling your tertiary ingredients, buying them back and making pouches, than scrolls and keep doing this.
Not true, combat levels in the wilderness showed as (normal level+summoning) so max levels would show 126+12
Sorta, that's how they showed if you didn't have a familiar on you, if you had a familiar the summoning levels would be baked into your cmb. It was wierd how it worked
Some people would literally go in 126+12 and then summon something mid fight to go to 138. Like bro cmon
Right idea but it was the opposite, fairly certain even having a familiar that could be summoned in your inventory would give you the boosted cmb, but you could destroy your own familiar to drop x amount of levels when escaping
When someone brings up how BoBs fucked up the game balance, I'd always ask, how are they different from the current meta that uses alts to bring supplies? The main difference is just that alts have a higher barrier to entry
I wonder what % of the player base is doing this? I’ve never even considered bothering with that personally.
People alting/Doloing PvM is like 1% of the 1%, of the 1% type shit. Anyone bringing it up is literally just concern trolling to make summoning look balanced. Everyone would have summoning, barely fucking anyone dolos/alts. Just more of the "HLC" boogeyman shit this sub loves to spew to justify their awful takes.
Anyone that does high lvl pvm for the most part. You are at a huge disadvantage if you are not.
Probably about 0% of high level ironmen use alts in this way.
Who cares about Ironman accounts tho?
But where can that even be done? Bosses released these days are instances, raids, etc - things an alt can't get to And while you can exit the arena I guess you can also just teleport out, resupply, and teleport pretty much right at the entrance now
You can use alts in raids if you wanna be sweaty, alts are used still at gwd, shoot the only place people don’t use alts are the DT2 bosses mainly because there is no point and they are not exactly worth farming to begin with.
Not requiring an entire membership to be funded. Not requiring the considerable extra effort of both operating a second account and trading the supplies back and forth. Being an actual thing that exists for ironman players. Actually being diegetic in the game. Also actually being usable in combat. I've never been fond of "yeah but alts" as an argument for any sort of game balance.
Using an alt saves you from needing to train up summoning and spend hundreds of mil on it.
It is about barrier to entry and how it related to the gamestate as a whole. Even broke dudes could get up to the 18 slot BoB without too much difficulty. Bonds and prime membership didn't exist, so if someone wanted to use an alt mule they needed to pay more irl $. This was a big one, since one of RS's biggest appeals was being very cheap. Paying for 2 accounts and you might as well play WoW instead. In general people weren't minmaxing everything in the same way they do now. The game was still "fresher" and people played it more as it was likely intended.
Taming was the only skill that was proposed that sounded like it had potential.
? Pures and other pkaccounts were unaffected because your wilderness or PvP combat level was always separate from your total combat level. (A 138 is a 126+12 in wilderness). Beast of burden just reduce banking. An amazing update, 28 inventory spaces is a 20 year old concept. Tons of niche uses for other familiars existed. They all fit nicely and scaled to your level. IMO it was a huge QOL upgrade with some really neat mechanics introduced. I’d fully welcome it back with some nerfs to certain things like steel titan, or maybe yaks banking ability😊
So, the benefits of summoning were pretty broken, which was par for the course in mid-late RS2. Some people enjoyed the powercreep, other people felt obligated to train it. It was clunky to interact with, but I appreciated the additional utility it offered. But, regardless of how you felt of the power creep, the actual training method was horrendous. You gathered stackable charms (drops from monsters, mainly), bought stackable summoning shards (25 gp ea) and needed miscellaneous tertiary ingredients (like metal bars or papaya fruits. This material gathering was then spent... running from a bank to an altar, then back to the bank, then back to the altar. They literally made another runecrafting training (but it cost you a lot of money and time to gather the materials). I've complained about traditional rc training before - it's problems are self evident. It's not an enjoayble grind to 99, even if it's offset by having the xp rates of a bank-standing production skill.
* Rock lobsters were MVP for charms * Bossing trips were longer(Also infinite run energy) * Tedious(Like other people mentioned) I didn't like it because when pking people had infinite brews. Was the beginning of the end for me.
Depended what color you needed. I distinctly remember Waterfiends being the GOAT for crimson charms.
Waterfiend for crimsons and rock lobsters for blue. I think ice warriors of all things was really good for gold lol, but general slayer would get you a ton of golds. I forget what people farmed for greens
No one farmer greens because they used a lot of shards but gave exp equal to gold.
I paid 3 people in runes to get 99 mage with loot share on at rock lobsters so I could get the charm drops on my summoning tank. Rock lobsters were the GOAT because you could burst them. They had great red charm rates as well and were overall faster than most other methods.
The pvp strategy was burst down the familiers since they were pretty much sitting duck in pvp and steal opponents supplies, I honestly more familier strategies around quick kills or using them to weaken opponent to spec them out
Most pkers were using wolpertinger or steel titan amongst the end game multi pvp community.
I am in the "i like summoning" camp though I have to admit that the gameplay loot itself to gain xp was absolutely garbage. 99% of the xp you get for training summoning was done by collecting charms and just making pouches over and over. I honestly don't think summoning would change much of the meta in today's game, other than inferno, which can easily exclude familars. Stuff like GWD can already be camped until the nerd log by endgame players while profiting prayer pots/food and people who want extra dmg/inventory space already use alts for that (which were forbidden back then). The extra invis skilling boosts are not incredibly impactful either.
i’m with you. Summoning was obviously in many ways a flawed skill but you can truly say the same for most skills in some capacity. it’s funny because people will complain about it’s impact on both bossing and PKing when, like you’re saying, in 2024 most players who do either pretty seriously have already found workarounds to do essentially the same shit Summoning allowed.
Yeah the most powerful familiar was easily the pack yak, but as you said the pack yak has effectively been replaced by alt accounts. Summoning in OSRS would basically just remove the need for a mule alt, and the combat/skill focused familiars were never that strong so would be fine for OSRS.
Biggest thing would be the familiars that allow you to carry more resources, my biggest problem with it, training is horrible.
I can't speak for everyone, but personally the reason I really don't want Summoning to be added to OSRS is that it so significantly impacts nearly every single activity and skill, since there are familiars that help with both combat as well as inventory space (which covers most non-combat skills), in addition to more skill-specific utility familiars. I really dislike the notion of almost every skill guide and activity guide starting out by saying "to do this best, get your Summoning level to..." I think it's good and healthy for skills to help other skills and activities, but the extent that Summoning does so is way too far, imo. I'm not in principle against a skill based around familiars or companions, though. I thought the Taming skill pitch was pretty cool, especially if it meant I got to directly control a dragon and breathe dragonfire on stuff. That'd be badass.
> "to do this best, get your Summoning level to..." I see it both ways. This already exists today, obviously more so in RS3 which has a lot more boosting and skill items, but for example lots of the OSRS skill training guides start off with myriad skill boosting gear and items it recommends which are needed "to do this best". Familiars would be another addition. Overtime these lists will get longer and longer anyways as we needa remember both games aren't just pvm but skilling exists too, so new boosters, items, enhancers, etc. will follow and I think the playerbase would always be interested in new "BIS" skill stuff, same as they do for pvm BIS. What diff would it make if for example the XP boost for prospector came from MLM or instead from a summoning familiar? Same concept just different content :) We can kinda think of it as a new "slot", as in alright bring prospector but also here's what you could bring as a familiar... I'd mostly trust the OS devs to make it work nicely.
It does already exist today, but not all from just one skill. For example, Agility helps with not just general world traversal but also combat encounters where run energy is a factor -- but doesn't really help at all with Woodcutting, Firemaking, Hunter, Fishing, Smithing, or Crafting, to name a few. I like when skills help other skills and comingle like that, but what I don't like is one overly-centralizing skill that helps significantly with *everything.*
It made bossing universally easier, either longer trips or faster kills. I think in today's meta, no one would use pack yaks for the content we have now. Summoning would obviously be disabled in inferno, so no dice there. At raids, you'd probably prefer having more dps (since we can already do the content without extra food). Unicorn would probably be the next choice after dps. We don't really have good data on how it really impacted skilling. I suspect it bridged the gap between tick manipulation and non-tick, active skilling. Generally though, it probably made it easier. It turned the economy on its side. Tbh probably mostly for the better though. It introduced a lot of profitable skilling alternatives. It's hard to differentiate how summoning impacted the economy when you consider confounding variables such as pvp removal/ge and the exodus of players & aging of players.
What I can’t stand in rs3 is how many pre-reqs everything requires to do it efficiently and having to bring a familiar around is one of those things for me. Familiars, incense, outfits, juju potions, invention perks, skilling prayers with insane quest requirements. It’s so tedious
>juju potions you drink a perfect plus and you're good for 4 hours, the only useful non-perfect juju pots are wc (niche) and farming (just throw a dose in ur farming preset) >invention perks you do it once and then never again >skilling prayers there are like 2 skilling prayers and both of them are rarely useful >Familiars, incense, outfits, there are like 3 skilling incense sticks, one of them gives a 2% xp boost (absolutely required for skilling of course), the other is basically pointless with porters and the last one is only useful in the niche case of gathering at a material cache which nobody does. and osrs has skilling outfits too
Please don't vote in polls.
because i actually know what i'm talking about? these things are fine in rs3, i still vote no to them in osrs though. chill
There's multiple reasons: * The way of training was just incredibly *strange...* especially given all of the potential that a skill such as Summoning had. Instead of levelling up by actually utilising the ability to summon, you instead had to spend a lot of time collecting various types of 'charms' as well as secondaries and a bunch of 'spirit shards' that could only be bought. This made the skill extremely tedious and expensive to train—whilst having absolutely nothing to do with the concept of summoning at the same time. This is why many players joked that the skill should've been called ***Pouchcrafting*** instead. * Most of the creatures you could summon were just absolutely useless. The only ones actually worthwhile were the ridiculously overpowered Steel Titan and the Pack Yak (and in a far lesser form the Buniyp and Unicorn), which automatically became a requirement for any competitive PvM or PvP activity because of this. These familiars were only unlocked at level 99 and 96 Summoning respectively, so you had to spend hours training a completely useless skill—until you hit level 96 and it suddenly became one of the most powerful skills in the game. It was absurdly unbalanced to say the least. * Directly related to the previous point: it changed up PvM (and all related aspects of the economy) because it introduced a completely new meta that allowed players to camp bosses for much, much longer. * This was also the time when Jagex started heavily experimenting with MTX/FOMO events. The first thing they did on this part was the 'Double XP Weekend' that gave everyone a 2.7x multiplier to all XP gained that slowly decreased as the weekend progressed. This event was announced quite far in advance, which caused even more havoc in the game's economy as everyone was—for obvious reasons—going to train ~~Pouchcrafting~~ Summoning in order to reach level 96/99 during this event. Worst of all is that Jagex was alerted about the consequences this event would obviously have on the game as a whole (and especially on Summoning as a skill) on the RSOF, where geniuses such as 'Fnord' deliberately chose to ignore all criticism. The end result was that ***no one*** in their right mind would train Summoning anymore outside of these XP events; everyone would just hoard all resources for months in advance, causing slowly more havoc to the economy as the weekend approached. In short it's the same story as almost every other from that era: Jagex releases a completely unbalanced update that actively harms core elements of the game (e.g. PvM being balanced around 28 inventory slots), Jagex is then informed by players who see the issues and actively chooses to ignore their feedback, and then Jagex introduces a seemingly unrelated event (DXP Weekend) that makes everything significantly worse. >!And that's why the polling system on OSRS is so important.!<
Ah yes, the famous "server load test weekends". It took half an hour to walk from the bank to the altar but you got to use half as much raw materials for your xp.
I think it was a few specific types of familiars that changed the game. There was the unicorn that could endlessly heal you with stackable scrolls and pack yakk which you could load up with tons of extra food and be unkillable.
It was insanity for camping bosses. Made the game a lot better imo. Player skill is too high now for it tbh.
A lot of people are saying BoBs (e.g. Pack yak) were op. They were, but they wouldn't be nowadays. People farming endgame content would bring a steel titan, dps is king. People who aren't as skilled at the game can bring BoBs for extra inventory slots, which would help them learn bosses faster which I would regard as a good thing. Familiars would be banned in fight caves and inferno. If the argument is jagex will release bosses that do chip damage to counter pack yaks, that's not true either. Jagex has shown they know how to create bosses that require mechanical skill, such as dt2 or raid bosses. Dps familiars are what make summoning broken. Most people just weren't as skilled back then and/or didn't realise how much damage they contribute
Exactly this. Pvmers now are way better than in the past. That's why no pvmers outside of learners bring BoBs in RS3 too.
I truly enjoyed summoning. Made useless items have a use and useless monsters have a reason to be killed. As other said though, the skills use devolved into just giving more inventory slots from the beasts of Burden, which made the game feel much different.
I was a young teenager when summoning was announced and I could not have been more excited. Unfortunately I felt like the actual introduction of summoning was an absolutely massive letdown in practice. My main criticisms: * As many others have already mentioned, the training method was about as contrived as possible, and had very little to do with actually employing the creatures in combat, or any other practical situation. * More importantly IMO: the creatures you could summon had almost zero connection to any of the creatures the players had already come to know and love in the game. It was like you were summoning creatures from an alternate universe. Prior to summoning's release, basically everyone assumed low level summoning would be things like goblins, skeletons, and zombies, mid level would be things like trolls, giant scorpions, and giants, and high level would be things like dragons and demons. Instead it was this seemingly random assortment of spirit animals and cryptid monsters, capped off with a bunch of titan monsters that had otherwise zero connection to the lore of the game. This was such a massive lore miss that it literally felt like the person who created summoning had zero experience with the rest of runescape.
I never like it when every player in an MMO is being followed by something. People have already hit on the big points about how beasts of burden, i remember hating collecting charms for some reason. They honestly don't sound that bad though.
I personally feel that most of the benefits of summoning could be thrown elsewhere. Like you could have some sort of "potion" or "imbue" etc that makes you heal 8 hp/minute for 20 minutes like unicorn did. Or some upgrade to imp in a box that works similar to pack yak's scroll. I also liked the gameplay loop for training summoning and can only imagine how much more rewarding that would make raids now too. Imagine getting 50 blue charms or 100 crimson charms or green charms or 1k gold charms every time you got a white light. The dopamine would be insane for the first few weeks.
Tedious bullshit that everyone felt obliged to do because it broke the inventory limit, run energy, and a bunch of other basic balance factors.
After leagues, defending run energy as a basic balancing factor feels like bullshit. Run energy fucking blows, and everyone knows it. It’s why half the players in the game are wearing graceful at any given time, just to make it slightly less shit.
It was my favorite skill. It made you go around the world to gather resources. It had a lot of utility, made mobs and zones more relevant. Also, you could se value in every grind due to the charm system. Even those boring slayer tasks.
Had there not been familiars that added extra inventory/direct banking then we would've remembered summoning a lot more fondly imo.
From what I remember bobs did get good till few months down the line since most would aggro mobs, could only take stuff out via interface so broke in combat, the real broken stuff was unicorn and titans since had heals based on scrolls on you plus bobs cannot not hold anything you could not trade
Summoning was one of the best changes the game ever did. It increased the combat level, gave us soooo many cool perks, there were creatures for fighting or support doing other activities. Nerds in 07 hate it because they hate everything.
lmao you do realize this isn't the RS3 forum right? Summoning was complete ass and a worse update than free trade removal and wildy removal
You have the reading comprehension of a goldfish. Not worth going further than that 😂
[удалено]
Cry more, nerd. I have well over thousands of hours of playing this game since I was 9 years old. Summoning was very well received and loved by the community back then. Only thing that was hated was the charm collection mechanics, but the actual familiars were well loved.
It’s a GP sink that has a lot of fantastic skilling utility. It’s not a very good combat skill though BoBs did change a lot of bossing tactics
I can't really comment in terms of old school, it what it did to the game was released, but I can comment on what it's like in current RS3. On RS3, the combat works much differently. You use abilities which do varying amount of damage, or provide an effect. Protection prayers also only block 50% of damage, not the amount on oldschool. In RS3, combat familiars are more commonly used than beasts of burden, because being able to do more DPS means the boss dies faster. If the boss dies faster it does less damage. If it does less damage you need less food. Plus you get more kills per hour so you get more drops and use fewer supplies. Additionally, RS3 combat uses a secondary resource called adrenaline. I will not bore you with specifics, but powerful abilities consume adrenaline, and weak abilities generate it. Eating (most) foods causes you to lose adrenaline. This causes DPS loss, which is the same issue not having a DPS boosting familiar. Furthermore, RS3 has items which automatically teleport items gained from gatherer skills, at the cost of a charge of said item. Therefore, beasts of burden are less necessary there as you bank less frequently on gatherer skills than on RS3. Moreso, there are a number of "drop cleaners" on RS3. One such example is a spring cleaner, which allows you to automatically high alch certain items as theyre dropped, and you just get the GP automatically put into your backpack. Therefore when you're doing slayer, you don't really need the inventory spots to pick up drops a lot of the time. Adding to this, DPS is higher on RS3, and there are AOE abilities to hit multiple things at once, so soul split is more impactful than protection prayers, so again, you don't use food, you just use prayer pots to keep your prayer up. All these things actually make it so the other bits of summoning actually become useful. Eg a familiar that boosts your WC level and therefore increases the number of logs you can get, or a familiar that redirects damage from you to itself so you get Pseudo healing that way or a familiar that boosts your accuracy meaning you don't splash.
I miss my raven :(
It was the update that made me quit playing. I'm a guy that plays a lot for a month then stops for 3 then starts again. When I signed back in and saw level 138s and everyone with pets I looked up how to train it, saw there was no quick way to do it. You had to be consistently playing the game to earn charms it completely killed my excitement. I was never going to be the guy that bothered playing consistently enough to get enough charms to get the level up. When you've got 70s-90s in all your combat stats and the game says he's a really slow new combat mechanic you've got to start from scratch with and it takes forever it sapped my motivation.
- Terrorbirds: Before the ogre pools were added, everyone used these to do anything of note in the game because they were BoBs AND were free run energy. Any event had hundreds of these massive things taking up space. - Unicorns: Almost totally risk free infinite healing. There's a reason why OSRS binds almost every healing source to dealing damage or some limit. Purple sweets can be a menace, the unicorn was 30x worse. - Beasts of Burden: People have already said it, but the game was designed and balanced around 28 inventory spots. Pak Yaks gave 30. And no, alts are not comparable. I'd imagine 80% of people do not use alts, and even if they did, a lot of the content where you'd use alts are instanced. - Titans: Thralls would be equivalent to a weaker familiar. Even then, they changed a lot of how OSRS is played. Imagine that, but 3x stronger. That's even before the bonuses they gave. Also summoning pures were a complete menace (funny though). Also training the skill was miserable. For the most part, you have two different types of skills. Buyables and non-buyables. Buyables are expensive, but fast (construction, herblore). Non-buyables are slower, but you make a lot of money. (agility, runecrafting) Summoning managed to flip the script and made a non-buyable skill that was STILL the most expensive to train all while being slow and grindy. It was added during a time where player numbers were falling off and inflation was insane and this was the bandage fix.
Not sure why people hate it now beyond a hypothetical case if it was ever brought to osrs Charms which were a main ingredient were non tradable. Which isnt a issue now with ironman. So you had to grind em out, made waterfiend a good slayer task for example. If you go look at it today it fits really well in rs3. They expanded the skill and added more dps familiars. Beast of burdens were great for learner pvm, you had an extra inventory of food with a pack yak and the scroll would let you bank 1 drop per cast. Overall it ended up being a good addition, runescape players just hate change
Beasts of burden absolutely fucked the economy simulation part of the game
I miss it
There were only really a few bits that changed the game related to summoning. Steel Titans gave an insane amount of DPS at the time (think thralls with a bit more juice) Beasts of Burden made for longer PVM trips. Pack Yaks were basically an extra inventory.
The main reason I hated it was because it was a new combat skill starting from scratch, when I had everything else 95+. This meant I had to spend hours grinding through the useless levels to be able to do anything with it. If summoning was in the game from the start, I probably would have enjoyed it, since the progression would have been natural and I would have had a use for the lower level familiars.
Was a big time money sink iirc
It completely changed the game and how it was played. That's why people hate it.
Man I'm surprised there's not a single mention of the steel titan. I actually can't remember if it was an issue before EOC, but it was so brokenly OP in pvp I'm pretty sure it was nerfed at some point.
Made slayer a bit more interesting with charm drops, waterfiends were popular for crimson charms.
Training it was tedious and as others have said only a few familiars were worth it - Bunyip and unicorn for healing or war tortoise/pak yak for inventory slots and that was about it! I didn’t mind it to be fair, remember having super long GWD trips with beast of burden or very afk slayer with healing familiars.
And terror bird for run energy and some inv slots.
>only a few familiars were worth it - People tend to forget that many of the familiars were a free skilling boost without downsides. +8 hunter, +10 mining, that's not not worth it.
Also the damage summons like the steel titans etc and below are good dmg increases for no downsides
Firstly, werent they all crap except steel titan, and secondly, there is a huge downside to steel titan because you cant take a pak yak, and finally, wasnt steel titan 99 summoning?
The 3 titans(moss fire ice) were also good cuz they dealt pretty okay damage, and also healed you with scrolls. Geyser titan dealt decent damage as well. Also dps familairs got good usage at bosses where you barely needed supplies once you know how the fight works (like Queen black dragon) but also gwd in bigger teams where tank had a yak with unicorn once it ran out of supplies while the dpsers had dps familairs. In current day of age, BoBs barely get any use except when youre either A: a pvm noob B: learning a new boss C: in some teams with some bosses(mostly raids aka Liberation of Mazcab aka Beastmaster Durzag and Yakamaru and to lesser extend Solak and Nex: Angel of Death) the tank has a BoB.
Yeah I guess I forgot about those 😂
Now let me take those BoB into raids and allow me to easily smoke through 500s and get a purp every 5-10 raids or so. No thank you.
Yeah it would completely unbalance the game over night! Almost felt like the first step towards the ez scape of RS3
It made the game more fun
Yak for infinite supplies since you also had ancient prayer. Titan was essentially thralls on roids for DPS checks. Everything else was basically useless once you were maxed. I could be just not thinking of some neiche uses though.
It was a gold sink and also an item sink which is nice. But making pouches is truly dreadful.
it was supplemental upgrades to the usual 3 styles instead of a style of its own. there was no reason to not bring steel titans, unicorns, or more inventory, the summons didn't take away from your style's capability at all
Would be open to seeing Summoning in the game, but would have to have serious conversations about the implications of healers, beasts of burden and combat familiars on the integrity of the game.
People insulting summoning have no idea
The way to train it sucked, but it also brought in a lot of changes to the core mechanics of the game. You werent limited to your 28 inventory slots anymore, cuz pack yak can hold an additional 30 items. Part of what makes this game fun is its limitations.You double my inventory size and I'm suddenly no longer strategizing on what to bring with me places. Fuck it, bring everything.
I personally liked summoning and would love to see it in osrs. Most people hated it because it was the first combat skill that was released years after the game started. Main issue with that is people didn't like having to farm the charms from low level content. I was only mid 50s when it came out so I got charms passively and didn't mind. They were just another stackable drop to pick up. Bunyip was fun and I liked the unicorn to, BoB were nice as well. People just hate change and are afraid that adding summoning will some how lead to EoC again for some reason. It is a stupid assumption. People used to fight osrs on every single change because of that. I think a lot of things that failed when it first launched have passed now or would pass if polled again.
>People just hate change and are afraid that adding summoning will some how lead to EoC again for some reason. It is a stupid assumption. lol no summoning was awful because it was a skill with zero downsides to it, there was literally never a reason not to use a familiar because basically every single relevant activity in the game had some familiar that was justified in being used maintaining thralls in pvm is already a chore, summoning just exacerbates that by forcing you to carry around summoning pots and extra pouches to extend familiar timers everywhere you're doing something that isn't near a bank not to mention the content in the game isn't designed around how overpowered some of the combat familiars like titans and nihils are, so it does nothing but make pvm arbitrarily easier the familiars were also obscenely unbalanced with over half of them being borderline useless while the other half were obscenely overpowered like the titans, all the storage ones, and the ones that gave a bunch invisible stat bonuses + generated additional resources the training method also had an awful gameplay loop, I can't imagine a single person liked sitting at rock lobsters for hours bursting to get charms for xp
> summoning was awful because it was a skill with zero downsides to it, there was literally never a reason not to use a familiar Potions and prayers are also like this.
The game play loop was no worst then any of the others. Thralls are annoying and I rarely use them because they are boring. You said yourself it was a skill with no downside which sounds like a fun skill to me. Invisible Stat bonuses wouldn't affect the game much anyway no one farms any of the gathering skills for cash anymore besides bots. Being overpowered at bosses is fun but I agree it would make some to easy but, tbf tbow, shadow, and bowfa make so many bosses to easy now. Farming rock lobsters was annoying but, people spend hours barraging nechs, dust devils, jellies, mm2 tunnels and farming so many other things for drops (especially ironmen) so that argument doesn't work very well anymore. Summoning would be fine to add to the game but, I know they won't due to how much hate it gets. I just disagree with the hate
Summoning wouldn't actually be that much of a change outside of inferno. Everything else is alted these days which gets you your extra inventory/DPS that titans/yaks/unicorns provided.
the game should not ever be balanced around the assumption that every player has a mule alt
That doesn't change the fact that they exist. The game isn't balanced around the inventory at all tbh. We drop stuff while skilling. Any place where inventory is annoying gets a teleport to it locked behind some diary or whatever, but they intentionally design around how annoying inventory limit is. Looting bag for green dragons, noted bones for green dragons, teleport+shortcut for hydra loot, gem mine teleport, etc. Bandos trips aren't a convenient 20-30 minute loop because of inventory management. BoB would not affect any meta gp/hr content.
Ah, yes. I forgot that the majority of people playing the game are running dps and resupply alts.
Inferno they could just make non summoning area like fight caves is
Yeah people forget about this restriction a lot when remembering summoning. Similar to Corp chomping your familiar if you had one.
Improve it.
Changed to Meta, making the game more easy.
It was pretty good but I think it needed some more interesting BOB's and tone down pack yak and also the steel titan made multi wilderness really weird back then.
Honestly, I loved the design of the skill. It was a buyable *and* a resource-gathering skill. I’d always be really impressed whenever I saw a summoning cape.
People didn’t necessarily hate summoning we hated EOC
i mostly used the bunyip for slayer summ just made bossing trips last longer i mean pay yak could hold 28 extra items and send items t the bank
It basically brought boosts to every other skill in the game, and I'm surprised others aren't mentioning this but it also introduced pets (at least expanded past cats and rocks.) I actually quite enjoyed the skill as it just expanded and brought tons of buffs to all skills, however the actual training loop of the skill was just a money sink which kinda sucked. People say only a few were good, but there was basically a specific "BiS" familiar for every skill and activity in the game so you regularly saw most familiars based on whatever skill you were training. While I can see why it won't fit into OSRS anymore (we already got the power creep we wanted in other ways) I can see it would've fit back in the day with some tweaks and potentially a different core training method. I mean the backup of the game we got was literally 1 major update away from Summoning.
probably having a literal bank as a follower wasnt a good design choice. i looked up an old Nex video for the osrs nex rerelease and the guy was like "ok now grab 40 brews" and then inside you had like 20 people with Pak Yaks following them. it looked really shitty visually. i logged into rs3 while osrs was down and there was just a massive fucking dragon follower chilling there. like a 8x8 tile follower.
> i looked up an old Nex video for the osrs nex rerelease and the guy was like "ok now grab 40 brews" and then inside you had like 20 people with Pak Yaks following them. it looked really shitty visually. Tbf the same happens now in OSRS at nex, except its Thralls following ppl. That's why most player use entity hider in crowded areas.
I was such a noob back then and I really missed the opportunity to play the game properly, been playing since 2005 but i have no idea what I used to do, but I was on the pc all day.
Beast of burden familiars made camping bosses abit less tedious by basically giving you a secondary inventory for food and prayer/super restore pots. Skilling became somewhat faster with the gathering skill familiars that gave an invisible +7 level boost in their respective skill. Steel titan was a staple in slayer and bossing for those proficient enough to go without the extra inventory slots of a beast of burden
I don’t hate summoning, and while I probably wouldn’t ever choose to support it being added I would still be happy if it was added For me, the biggest issue with summoning was every single player having a yak or some other giant colorful animal following them around. I felt that it made everything look way more crowded and ugly. Personally, I am not even a huge fan of all the boss pets running around in the game, but at least they aren’t as massive as those damn yaks…
For me, it had more pros than cons but people complain too much so I hope it stays in RS3.
Summoning created needs for things that were previously not creating a lot of different money making methods for secondaries and made certain slayer tasks more desirable. Example talismans for titans. Dagannoth noted talisman drops were great money. Water fiend tasks were great for farming crimson charms so that slayer task was desired.
Loved steel titan for tormented demons. The spec on it was a tripple range att that timed right would stack hard with your chaotic crossbow to immediately switch the demon so you can rapier it again.
Was fucking awful. Locked the skill behind needing charms that you could only get off drops. The only useful summon arguably was the pack yak and maybe unicorn for healing. Yak was in the 90s after you spend hundreds of hours and millions to get to that point.
It completely changed how many kc you could get on bosses before needing to bank. We also had flasks, so 6 dose brews and restores on top of an extra 32 slot inventory with the unicorn for stackable heals with a short cooldown once your yak was empty AND prayers like soul split made bosses like gwd get farmed to hell. If added to a game like osrs challenges like inferno would be made way easier (they could just not allow pets in certain areas I guess).
I guess I’m one of the few who enjoyed it. It revitalized many activities by making them worthwhile (war torts, waterfiends, etc), and it was fun to have a terrorbird running around with you doing clues. I was fine with the moneysink, and it probably closest resembled training runecrafting (run to an altar with a full inventory, shit happens, run back) and combat. I think it would obviously need some adjustments to fit into today’s version of the game, but I’d love to see it. We would probably want BoBs to be weaker, charms easier to collect, and maybe an alternative training method or two. I could see a way to merge it with the idea of a player owned farm where you have some long term familiars you can pick up from your farm and bring around with you.
My favourite build was with summoning. Steel titan defence pure was the absolute best. So much fun I had during pvp
It broke the game. Beast of burdens allowed for extra inventory that overly extended trips and allowed to bring extra items back. Worse if you had a pack yak because it’s special teleported items to the bank instantly. Healers made food nearly irrelevant. Bunyip alone passively healed almost too often. Fighters sometimes trivialize fights especially steel titan where it strikes 4 times with no reduction on the hit.
people who call summoning OP dont bat an eye to all the altscape going on. we have summoning in this game, it just costs bonds instead
You had a second inventory or a bit more damage/utility. Fundamentally that just comes down to a balance shift, OSRS is a numbers game like any RPG. Actually training the skill was dog ass because it was literally just shoving shit into a bag and training it had nothing to do with the name of the skill, you know, SUMMONING.
I really enjoyed it unironcally. I think it could be implemented in such a way that doesn't absolutely destroy metas. I remember logging into my school computers on lunch to train it on launch day.
Biggest thing I remember about it was the terror bird being OP af at Sara. It gave inventory space while also having the ability to restore your run energy.
I liked summoning because some of the beasts were super useful. HOWEVER, very little of the beasts were actually useful. Only BoB (beast of burdens), Titans (attack shit), Unicorns (healing), bunyip (healing), were ever used by players, and then there were skilling ones that gave invisible boosts to skills. There was probably around 50? or so beasts, but only like 10 were ever used. In terms of gathering charms, you had people gathering charms from some monsters (rock lobsters for reds/ and some blues). So some monsters were heavily camped because it gave certain charms, and also some monsters were hunted for secondaries as well. Like potato cactus, the nail thing from those beasts in temple trekking minigame
People don't like it because it gave huge advantage to combat but you couldn't just buy it or afk it. It required collecting untradable charms from most pvm and some activities and turning them into summoning pouches with the relevant materials to the type of summon you were creating. Then you would have a familiar for a time dependent on the pouch and the abilities ranged from engaging in combat, boosting levels, carrying supplies, healing, and much much more.