I like playing sorcerers. I find I like the summoning line a bit (Daedric Curse is a very underrated spell in my opinion) but I've run into something of a quandry--that is, if you invest heavily in summoning you wind sacrificing quite a bit, and I'm not sure how best to work around it.
What do you sacrifice, you ask? Well, six slots and 30% of your magicka. 30% of your magicka is an unfortunate but understandible sacrificate to make, but six slots, jeez, that's where it hurts.
In detail:
So I run around with the Clannfear summon pretty much all the time, because it seems to tank fairly well and so far it's proven to be rather durable. I'm starting to appreciate the Dremora as well, because aside from giving you decent air support from what I understand when you get a chance to fork it you can choose to either boost party magicka or heal you any time you drop below 35% health (one every 30 seconds I think).
And the Daedric Armor spell looks ridiculously good, on paper at least. I'm hard pressed to think of a reason not to use it.
The nice thing about these spells is that they're persistent. You sacrifice 30% of your magicka to keep them running. Unfortunately, they also take up a spell slot, so you have to work around that...
... well, no, after level 15 they actually take up TWO spell slots.
See, if you switch your weapon, and your summing spells aren't on the other skill bar, your summoned creatures go away. So if I want my Clannfear up when I switch between my Inferno Staff and my dual swords, I need to make sure that the summon clannfear spell is on BOTH my staff skill bar and my dual swords skill bar.
So if I decided to go all out and have a clannfear, dremora, AND daedric armor up, that means that on each skill bar I have two spaces to allocate to "externally facing incident management."
I won't deny that I find that annoying--I'm not just sacrificing my mana, I'm also sacrificing the utility of having extra slots available for other things. But I'm pretty sure the developers were well aware of this, and that it's an intended side effect of running around with all those summons. So my question is, how best to use those four extra slots?
And also, how best to use those spells without accidentally detoggling my summoned creatures, which for the record I manage to do ALL THE TIME.
Any thoughts or recommendations? Preferably both, together?