Hello experienced Conjurers,

I'm starting a 2nd playthrough but this time on legendary and are currently level 17, I've been using the flame atronach but it's damage is really bad, about as bad as my steel sword auto attack (legendary only 25% damage).

Now.. i've been wanting to do a melee/physical style character with a conjuration + resto magic perk tree and thought a flame thrall (ranged) or two at 100 would be ideal. What I would like to know though is how are they are level 50+? Are they going to be good with perks invested or weaker than a sick skeever. I've seen a video or two of them on youtube and they looked pretty good but that could've been on an easy difficulty or something, maybe they are weaker in legendary? Lydia was a boss on master! haha. I have no points in conjuration as I don't want to regret it later, I can still summon it fine at the start of combat now.

Thanks.

Bu the time i get to level 50 with 100 in conjuration im using dead thralls, dremora lords and wrathman. They just do way more damage.

Exactly this. Flame Thralls are entry level to mid game utilities. There are much better Conjuration minions than those girls.

What's annoying with flame atronachs is that they keep too much distance from the enemy, usually ending up missing their shots from behind me. And like Daedric_Dovah said, by the time you have enough perks to make them tougher (like Elemental potency at lvl 80), you'll have better summons. They might be good enough though, if you have a reason to stick with them. For example I like storm atronach, because I can remain in the back and attack it with lightning that'll bounce on the enemy I can't see.

I'll add that they can be effective with the right perks and if the enemy has a weakness to fire, thats about it.

Well that's not as good as I'd hoped.. I guess I'll keep leveling conjuration slowly and try out perks in it when its higher.

I was hoping flame atronachs would be good later on for a ranged assister.

If you have the Dawnguard DLC

I started Conjuration like you, early levels using the flame atronach. But trust me, once you're able to conjure dremora lords (2 if you have the twin souls perk) you'll never ever think about the puny weak flame atronach again.

Wrathmen are the best those sum [censored]es can take punishment and they have dragon bone weapons so win win!

Yeah they're definately bad ass.

All summons deal lower damage on legendary, but they also take way less damage.

The way it used to work, the difficulty only affected the player character, reducing damage they dealt while increasing their damage taken. Somewhere along the line, they seem to've made NPCs take 1/4th damage from all sources rather than just reducing the player's damage, but without having NPCs also deal more damage to eachother like they deal to the player. So your summons will essentially deal 1/4th their damage to NPCs that they deal on adept, but also take only 1/4th the damage from NPCs.

In practice this means summons will be incredibly tanky on legendary, but not such great damage. It's best to have them keep things off you while you pour out the damage from a distance or from a flank. Archery + conjuration is ideal IMO, I'm @ level 59 with a DiD character now and having a pretty easy time with it just letting summons keep enemies busy while I pincushion them from safety - often not even being detected.