Dead Thrall should work on any enemy that is your level or lower. I don't really understand why it was capped in the first place. It's situational until you first use it, the perk for undead only adds an additional 100 health, and you can only have the undead minion equip a weapon of your choosing -- not armor. Atronachs, on the other hand, get a perk to become 50% more powerful and don't require a dead body to be summoned. Dremora Lords seem to be the most powerful of all, and it's easy enough to just keep summoning them.

Necromancy is like the Horse Armor of Skyrim (along with children.. and marriage), only it isn't a DLC which makes things a tad better, I guess.

other magics are the same way... capped to lower levels making them useless. I'll stick with summoned dremora which are more powerful anyways, and ignore other schools of magic in favor of increased damage to one handed and archery.

There are quite a few good ones it works on, even at 81. The biggest problem is how buggy they are. There are several areas they cannot enter due to certain quests being active, in which case they just vanish, leaving the thrall buff in your active effects but no where to be found. Also, the corpse cleanup code does not exclude them and it is very difficult to keep them around as corpses for later use. Even worse, say you are low enough level to get the Arch Mage or Astrid or someone fun to keep around, once you complete stages in their quests, the thrall poofs because their corpse is no longer supposed to exist in the game.

Dead Thrall is an extremely fun way to play, but the way it is implemented is a constant battle in frustration and repeated loss of your beloved undead companions.

At level 81 it's impossible to find any random spawning that is weak enough to use it on.

Why do you say that? At what level did this happen?

In the low 50s I am still finding suitable NPCs. When do they become impossible to find?

If you want your destro to make big dmg in skyrim you need

destro dmg pot + weakness to element poison your enemy + weakness to magic poison your enemy and then nuke them with a double cast expert spell.

If we had spellmaking you would just make one 1 handed spell named NUKE that is: 2xfire dmg expert spell + weakness to element + weakness to magic in one spell

You dont have the hastle of poisoning an enemy to get the extra dmg from spells ( no need to play tacticaly ) you just spam one spell and nuke everybody. If your lucky you can double cast that spell to get a double nuke. Couple that with the dmg destro pot once in a while and you can one hit Alduin with the lowest bolt spell :celebration:

Thats why ppl want spellmaking back, because its a hastle to play tacticaly when you can just spam nukes left and right :flamethrower: