Conjuration followers tank your damage output and nobody talks about it

[DragonbornVet]

I've been running a conjuration-heavy build on my 6th playthrough and just realized how much my DPS tanks when I have atronachs or dremora lords out. Like, they're aggro-ing every enemy in a 200-foot radius while I'm trying to sneak around or line up spell casts, and half the time they're blocking my escape routes or standing directly in my frost bolt path.

The perk that extends summon duration is amazing, don't get me wrong. But there's basically no way to make them not completely derail any stealth approach, and in open combat they're drawing so much aggro that I end up doing less damage than if I just ran a pure destruction setup with Impact procs.

Has anyone found a way to make conjuration work without it feeling like you're playing with an AI-controlled meat shield that actively hurts your build? Or is it just one of those trees that's fun conceptually but objectively worse than the alternatives once you hit mid-game.

 

[WhiterunModder]

Yeah, this is the core problem with vanilla conjuration - the summons are dumb AI that don't respect your playstyle at all. They'll charge into a room and blow your stealth, or stand in front of you casting spells while you're trying to land your own damage.

That said, I think you're underselling pure destruction with Impact. A frost mage with the perk that staggers on impact can lock down enemies way better than a summon ever will, and you keep full control. But conjuration isn't objectively worse if you commit to it differently - you just can't treat summons as a side tool. They work better when you're the distraction, not the damage dealer. Summon a dremora lord, let it tank and draw aggro, then cast destruction spells while everything's focused on it. Swap your playstyle around the summon instead of fighting it.

On PC with mods the story changes completely though. Ordinator's conjuration tree has perks that let you command summons and make them way smarter about positioning, and there are behavior mods that fix the AI. Wildlander's whole conjuration rework makes it actually viable as a primary damage source. But if you're on vanilla or console, yeah, you're kind of stuck with the meat shield problem. The summons will always be a tactical liability in stealth and a damage loss in optimized builds.

What difficulty are you playing on? On Legendary the aggro sponge thing becomes less of a problem because you need that distraction anyway.