My Rants: Elder Scrolls: Conjuration

Oh boy, this topic. So for many of us that are magic users, you can see that some of the spells are a bit botched, especially when you get up to higher levels and certain spells that you would most commonly use now dont work anymore. But that is not the topic I want to discuss, no that's for later. What I want to talk about is the school of Conjuration, one of my favorite skills. The ability to both summon creatures from the various realms of Oblivion and harness the power over the undead? Sign me in. In Oblivion, there was no time in my playthrough where I was either summoning dremora or calling forth skeletons to bring ranged cover fire while I rushed in with sword and spell or vice versa. I was a pretty good Conjurer if I say so myself. But with Skyrim, Conjuration felt sort of lacking. As in there's not a lot of things to conjure. From the looks of the base vanilla game without any of the DLC's, there are a total of fourteen conjuration spells not counting the Thrall spells because it's just the summon atronach spells only it's permanent until they die. Where as in Oblivion, there are sixteen and that's both counting all the bound weapons as one spell and bound armor as well, including not counting the more upgraded spells like Dremora Lord or Skeleton Champion.

To be fair, even counting every Conjuration spell, Skyrim would have a total of thirty two with Oblivion having a total of thirty five. It doesnt seem all that bad until you look at the variety of spells. With summoning, you can only summon the three basic types of Atronachs, a Dremora, and a Familiar. I'm counting Arniel's Shade as a Familiar because just look at him and the Familiar, they are exactly the same. Same goes for the Flaming Familiar because again it's the same as the normal Familiar but on fire. Things tend to expand upon the DLC's with Dawnguard adding the Wraith/Mist/Bone men, as well as Arvak. And Dragonborn adding in just the two Ash creatures and the Seeker. Leaving a total of twelve different summons. But upon looking through this, I questioned myself; what happened to the other summons like the Scamp or the Daedroth? "Oh well it's because after the Oblivion Crisis the daedra couldn't go through and enter the mortal realm anymore". Then if that was true, then why is it we can still summon Dremora Lords and Atronachs, they're daedra? What about the Seeker, that's definitely a Daedra. So I'm not taking that whole Oblivion Crisis thing as an excuse.

Did people just forget about those spells? And even taking the after events of the Oblivion Crisis where possibly a bunch of people took every Conjuration spell tome they could find and burn them or what ever, what about the mages that already know of those spells? They could easily remake those spell tomes, and even if they couldnt write it down they could possibly train other mages on how to summon daedra like they did in Oblivion with buying spells? And what about Necromancy? As far as I know, Necromancy isnt really looked down upon as it was back in Oblivion. It's not considered illegal anymore so why isnt that subject of magic looked into more? The only form of Necroancy spells under Conjuration is just the reanimation spell and Soul Trap, but here's the thing; you cant just reanimate every corpse you see.

When you get to a high enough level, you'll start to notice that some of those spells just wont work. This is one of them. I dont know the exact details on what level the reanimation spells stop working, seeing as how the second most powerful reanimation spell states that it can reanimate a body by thirty points. What does the points mean, does a point mean a level or a percentage? I'm just going to take it by level, but even with that it doesnt sound all that powerful? Why cant these spells level up with you, that way you dont have to worry about having a useless spell?

And it goes even further with the Bound spells, okay what the fuck happened here? I mean I guess Bethesda did Conjuration as they did with Mysticism by taking the Bound Armor spells and give it to Alteration, I can give it that, but what about the weapons themselves? There's only the Battleaxe, the Sword, and the Bow. Okay, you think that also sounds fair. You know, one for each of the three main fighting styles; Two Handed, One Handed, and Archery. Not bad, until you see that Dragonborn added the Dagger. So if they can add the dagger on the roster of bound weapons, why not the other weapons like the War Axe or the Mace or the Greatsword? I found that rather confusing for me that they would apply the dagger but not the rest.

Here's what I think they should do to improve Conjuration. For the casual Daedra Summoner, have more summons. There are a variety of daedras out there, of various realms. Like say if the Daedra summoner alligned themselves to a Daedra cult or did a service to one of the Daedric Princes, you could have them learn a spell to summon their specific daedra like Sheogorath with his Saints and Seducers, Hermaeus Mora with his Seekers, or Molag Bal with a more unique and powerful Daedroth that's all black and blue that can breath blue fire? For the Bound spells, Bound Armors can still be under Alteration, but hows about having a bound weapon for every type of weapon in the game. Lets be honest, not every player of the game is going to be the same. Some may prefer the slightly sluggish but more powerful mace, some may prefer the weak but nimble dagger, and even some may even prefer staves. That's right, hows about there should be a Bound Staff that just fires bursts or beams of raw magical damage? That would be great for builds that doesnt rely on bladed or blunt weapons and just staves.

For the necromantic side of Conjuration, I suggest a few things. The first being harvesting, hows about that when we kill an enemy or find a dead body we can either harvest certain body parts and organs or just the whole body to take and use for later whether it be to drop and reanimate the dead body at the spot or construct your very own undead abomination ranging from simple skeletons, to zombies and draugr, to going as far as making Bone Colossus's and Flesh Atronachs. I also think that we should be able to customize our freshly made reanimated corpses, where instead of letting them continue in wearing that hide armor they died in, hows about opening up their inventory and give them more stronger armor and weapons, tell them what sort of tactic they should follow and take commands. Giving you a more tactical approach when faced against enemies with your walking undead.

And on a world basis of necromancy, why not we bring back those shrines back in Oblivion having the ability to turn soul gems, Grand Soul gems mind you, into Black Soul gems. There is a lot of potential in all of this, I just hope Bethesda or whomever will work on ES6 realizes this before all is said and done.