Obviously it's farming off someone else's content, but the worst part is having to look at Xavier's stupid fucking moustache, or contemplate what the fuck a Memezar is. I don't want to know how much it cost to buy the memes Twitter handle either.
I remember the release of summoning and thought it was pretty cool, but as a kid I just could not figure out how to best use my summons, and it was quite convoluted to make the pouches, so it felt unrewarding to even try. Fast forward over 15 years and not much has changed there. Charms are still extremely hard to get, the secondaries are a fair bit more demanding than herblore, and they even take another ingredient, spirit shards, that are essentially just gold. These all feel like precious resources and it makes it hard to make and use the resources on the pouches you want to use. To make matters worse, when you do use a pouch you get put on a timer that puts you under the pressure of using your familiar as best as you can, which does not feel good. It feels even crazier to have to sacrifice your hard earned pouches to make scrolls to actually get any use out of some of those familiars. I have a few proposals for what might fix the broken foundation of this skill without introducing any new systems. It probably isn't perfect, but this is mostly the low hanging fruit that wouldn't involve totally flipping the skill on its head.
The timer on pouches is probably my biggest concern. For all the effort pouches take, having a timer attached to them feels really bad. Changing this alone could flip the skill around entirely. What I would propose is instead of a timer, the familiars degrade similar to equipment. Familiars degrade with combat charges (attacks, damage taken, and scrolls) on top of being able to be killed. Skilling familiars additionally degrade on resources gathered/processed. Timers can be used to deplete charges for things like remote view, though there are only a few cases like this. Your familiar should not be degrading if you are idle. Additionally, familiars could also be recalled and their charges could be stored on that type of pouch like a ring of recoil, sacrificing a pouch should add charges to the existing familiar to replenish it.
I went through the ironman skilling guide on the wiki and added up all of the shards you need to get 99.
| Gold | Green | Crimson | Blue | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1270 | 4342 | 16235 | 9146 | 30993 |
Compared to other skills, like herblore, that is a relatively low number of total resources. The biggest difference is the fact that gathering these is pure rng, and the best sources are not very rewarding, like Croesus rewarding just 20 of a random assortment... That is considered a good source! The distribution is also quite wild. Gold charms are treated like literal trash, Green charms aren't much better and honestly make some really strange pouches that are only created due to the secondary being low hanging fruit. Crimson charms make up the bulk of the pouches you make and they are relatively common. Blue charms are the most rare and precious due to their use in binding contracts later. I do think we need to take a look at how charms are used, they probably deserve a more equal footing, but the rest of the skill is holding them back more, and that hides the problems with their inequality.
Charms are easy to recognize as a pain point with summoning, but they might be one of the least worrisome parts of the skill. The pouches you go spending your charms on do need a pass, they have just been left behind by the game, but perhaps one of the best ways to "fix" charms would be for Bogrog and Lord Amlodd to refund some of your charms rather than spirit shards. The fact that those two refund spirit shards at a really pathetic rate is really quite puzzling when the money can be made up by other means, but charms are purely rng and you are often investing them in pouches you don't really want. I would even think it would be reasonable to refund charms when turning pouches into scrolls. The exchange rates could be Lord Amlodd: ~75%, Bogrog: ~50%, scrolls: ~25%.
Spirit shards are a whole other mess. Due to being tightly coupled with currency, they have become the platinum token of RS3. They sit at an almost completely stable market price because they're essentially only available at shops that sell them for 25gp each. I strongly believe every single spirit shard needs to be refunded for gp and shards added to drop tables. We are able to do this now due to the integer limit increase on the coin pouch. It is completely reasonable for a monetary cost to be associated with the skill, but if you add up all of the shards on the wiki guides it would take 5,300,380 shards or an eye watering 132,509,500gp. It is simply too much for a skill almost exclusively trained through processing. If shards were added to drop tables, so they were expected to be collected alongside charms, Jagex could aim for the player to receive around 1-2m shards throughout their total charm grind to lessen the blow. The cost is extremely high, but this is a skill that is able to give buffs like skilling boosts or combat support to help recoup the costs.
I do realize that some of my suggestions would require some balancing as to not make the skill any more "free" to skate all the way to 99. I don't exactly think that any of my proposals do that, however do to the fewer number of resources and the fact that the skill was balanced on the time it takes to gather mob drops, with rng, does make it a bit touchier than it has any right to be. Fixes like these are what we need to make the skill less painful to engage with, and will help later on if/when new familiars get added, or old ones get balanced. I hope you give some thought to the issues I brought forth in this post because I think the skill is a huge mess.