TL;DR - Make the Sorcerer Daedric Summoning line like DAoC's Theurgist.
As a long time player of the TES series since its inception in '94 (I will admit I was born and grew up in Bethesda so it was a pride issue when buying the game) I have always loved the conjuration tree at least with respect to it in Morrowind and on. I'm also a long time MMO player from the UO/EQ/DAoC days.
I currently play a Nightblade healer and I'm loving that but when I was testing in beta, I noticed that the pets for the Sorcerer were permanent. This concept irked me a bit and as the game went live, they became exactly what I had envisioned.
They were limited, weak and had too many detriments to include taking up a consistent slot and not having any real use for 50+ content.
I then had an idea which I'll discuss later. As the game continued and 1.6 released on PTS, I tested the feature out and still found that regardless of how this system is implemented, if it's maintained as a consistent pet, there will be too many factors that play into it as being too powerful or too weak.
What I propose is this; treat the Daedric Summoning as it is in the single player games, allow them to expire with time. However, change their function in such a way that you can cast any of the 3 pets as often as you want. With their current cast time, but as the pet is summoned at the target, it has a duration specified by balance. Anywhere from 5 seconds to 15, it could be anything and could possibly be altered with certain buffs or passives.
A similar class had this in Dark Age of Camelot called the Theurgist and it is one of the most unique class designs I have ever played; your direct damage spells in physical form.
- Familiar - (28 range) Allows you to summon a familiar at the target for 10 seconds, it will close to the target and at 20 meters, launch fireballs at the target which does immediate damage and damage over time.
- Clanfer - (28 range) Allows you to summon a clanfer at target for 10 seconds, it will charge the target and periodically utilize a tail sweep snaring the target by 30% for 2 seconds.
- Winged Twilight - (28 range) Allows you to summon a winged twilight which closes to the target to 15 meters and launch a gust of wind which does damage and stuns the target for 1 second.
Now, for attunement reasons, you can either adjust to where you can summon as many as you want in the given time where the decay caps the number, or you can allow only one of each and they do a far larger amount of damage.
This system allows the daedric summoning tree to be at comparable level with the other two trees in terms of design and usefulness.
I hope to hear some input from the masses.
Thank you.