How many things can you conjure in this game? The two familiars, the three atronarchs, the daedra lord with a sword and a partridge in a pear tree.

Jokes aside am I the only one who feels this is a very limited selection? I've never played an elder scrolls game before skyrim and out of curiosity I checked the amount of conjuration spells in Oblivion and they are countless, I realize this game has much less to do with Oblivion and the Daedra but would it have killed anybody to brain storm a few interesting and diverse creatures to summon outside of the three basic elemental atronarchs, the Cannon fodder Spectral wolf, the exploding spectral wolf and the Invincible Daedra lord?

I understand that its not easy to think of these things as if you are going have these they may as well be useful, we can't just have four or five versions of cannon fodder before we get to the useful stuff but the guys at Beth are very creative, I know they are capable of it.

Is anyone else a little disappointed with the conjuration spell selection? Or the selection in other spell trees?

magic in general is very limited in terms of spells. gonna have to wait for mods to add more of that kind of stuff.

Would love to have access to mods, console players are not so lucky.

I don't see that it needs more than that. It also has zombies. I despise bloat and treadmills. Only have to upgrade to a new summon about every 20 ranks is good by me.

I'm particularly disappointed in the Conjuration school. Take bound weapons, for instance. Why can I only summon a battle axe, a sword and a bow? What if I want to summon a dagger as a magically inclined assassin type? And where is the bound armor? I realize that Skyrim's simplicity means armor for mages is taken care of with the Alteration school and we're not supposed to want anything else, but where are our options? What if I want to conjure a suit of armor and take care of my defense that way, instead of with alteration?

And as for the other half of the Canjuration school, I find the options of creatures to summon a bit lacking as well, though I can look past that a bit more than I can the bound weapon/lack of bound armor side.

I want my clanfears back.

This is true. I made this thread a long time ago which contains some data about spells in Skyrim and the last game in the series before Skyrim, Oblivion.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1302338-a-small-observation-on-the-amount-of-spells-in-the-game/

Looking at the Conjuration section you will also notice a distinct lack of "Conjure Armor" in Skyrim.

I'm talking about different uses, not just a fixed summon every 20 or so levels, while I'm sure everyone will find one they are comfortable with it would be nice to have a larger platter of creatures to choose from for there different uses.

Read about the spellsystem and possibilities we had in Daggerfall and then really despair, as Oblivion isnt a tenth of the game Daggerfall was.

i do wish i could still summon a daedroth, and i wish the dremora lord would come with different weapons/ spells cuz its always the same thing. i also wish i had more bound weapons to use.

It's been moved to alteration in the form of the 'skin' spells.

Don't forget you can raise up corpses too...

That is just not an acceptable answer for a game that is supposed to be all about the freedom of player choices.

No, the 'skin' spells replaced the "Shield" spell from Oblivion. Conjure Armor was a completely different thing.

Well of course. Buts thats more of a Necromancer thing, I'm taking about summoning creatures.

Though I will admit its fun as all hell having an undead giant fighting for me.

I wonder the same thing.

There are so many creatures that could've been added to Conjuration (spriggans, animals, more undead, chaurus, etc) but all we get are atronachs, familiars and dremora. Oh and you can reanimate bodies, which is cool but fairly limited as far as aesthetics go.

Should make magic expanding mods more useful at least.

Yes, this is where you get your variety from. There is a small set of things that can be conjured from nothing, and a large set of dead bodies you can raise.

The whole magicka system will be going back to formula on PC.

The spell selection, perks, scaling and ability to create new spells all need to be redone/added, the current effort is terrible and unrewarding, from stupid things like only having AOE spells for Destruction adepts, to self-obsoleting perks at later levels.
All bad and all will be replaced.

Thief and warrior archtypes are the only ones I find fun with the current system, unless I use mods to fix some of these issues.

In fairness, very few of the summons in Oblivion were useful.

- At Apprentice level, you used Zombie if you didn't have much magicka (likely at that level) or Scamp if you did.
- At Journeyman level, the Headless Zombie is vastly superior to anything else
- At Expert level, the Clannfear or Deadroth were clearly the best options, with Frost Atronach and Faded Wraith being acceptable if you needed range.
- At Master level, none of the spells were really worth using over the Expert spells. They were worse and cost more magicka.

Thus, out of 21 summons in vanilla Oblivion, I really only ever found 7 summons to be remotely useful. The Hunger and Shambles summons in Shivering Isles were solid and usable, but not better than the one's listed above, so it ended up being 28 summons with only 7 useful. I found this frustrating.

Skyrim only has 6 summon types (flame atronach, frost atronach, storm atronach, dremora lord, reaniminated corpses, and familiars). However, all of these can be useful. Flame Atronach is great early on. As you get better Frost Atronach becomes good. Storm Atronach is worse than Dremora Lords (and they are the same spell level), BUT they remain useful against dragons, which is important. Dremora Lords are obviously uber powerful. Certain reanimated corpses can be significantly more powerful than any other possible summon at your level. Meanwhile, Flaming Familiar has its uses due to its really high summoning distance.

So that is 6 useful summons. Not that different from Oblivion's 7, in my mind. Add to that the expel daedra, command daedra, and the ability to have a thrall, while taking away a lot of the bound spell options, and I'd say the conjuration options are actually relatively similar in Skyrim.

I'm a fan of making pure destruction mages focusing on the elements. It kind of svcks that it's not very strong late game, it should be powerful and I wish armor made the spells weaker like 25% weaker with lightarmor and 50% with heavy (or maybe less). I still use robes and mage armor because I prefer to role-play even if it makes me completely weak. And also I wish there were more elemements that would be awesome to me personally. I love magic especially the elemenal powers. I wish I had Earth, Wind, Water (Or at least mixed with Ice ). It would be awesome if the elements had to be combined to make other elements. Say If I had Water in one hand and Wind in the other and when I dual-casted them together it made an Ice spell.

If magic was like what I said above i'd be in my happy zone. I can always wish though and hope for TES VI with an awesome magic style. I love heaps of spells as long as they aren't stronger variations with the same moves. Like if I could put my hand to the ground or shoot some sort of spell/ball at the ground at it created a giant fissure/crack or earthquake that would be awesome. Or if I could use wind to blow things away and maybe even float

I don't want it to be overpowered and more like an MMO or something if that's the case. But personally I think this would be a dream. Fusing elements to create new ones.


Maybe use similar combinations like in Naruto? Though I wouldn't use Yin/Yan and all these extra elements may be too overwhelming
http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/User:Omnibender/Elemental_recomposition_table <-- see the Two Element combinations (it's the first graph).

I think the one above is slightly too complicated and is getting away. I'd stick to Fire, Wind, Lightning, Earth, and Water.
And then have some combinations. Only like maybe 1 combination for each element. So Wind + Water = Ice, Earth + Water = Wood? (Maybe Earth + Fire for lava or Earth + Wind for sand)

Well I think I'm going way off topic or at least too much advance on Magic in Elder Scrolls haha. I just love the idea of 5 basic elements and fusing them to make a new element.

Sorry for so much typing that no one will probably read.

Not dissapointed yet. I'm hopeful they'll have some more Conjurations in the future. Need more Conjurations to feed my lazy Conjurer.

Good. Less crap to cycle through every 5 seconds.

Choice does not mean freeform. You won't be able to make armor with destruction spells either. Even if you choose to.

I'd like to choose to be a raving madman who's naked and fights with his fists while speaking only in gibberish and stockpiling salmon. But does precisely as much damage as everyone else and operates as if he's wearing heavy armor. But they are limiting my creativity!

Also he can fly.

I have always wondered about complaints like this... You have a number of things you can already summon. You don't see folks that go into archery go "why can I only shoot a bow". I think in the magic schools you get a lot more options and variation then you would with going archery or melee. The trade off is in pure damage at times since magic is not the greatest at scaling but more flexible depending on the situation. You up against something that is weak to fire.. use that.. What options does a sword and board have.. "hm.. I can swing my sword or bash with shield".

Me too, Clannfear was my favourite summon (although I sometimes used Storm Atronachs when the going got tougher), I loved watching them scamper around and tearing my foes to shreds.