Hello!

Across all of the Elder Scrolls games which ones have the best summons? Is there one game where all summons are superior, or does each game have summons that stand out?

I'm asking because I made a character in Oblivion who is a cultist that summons daedra. I have a similar concept for a character in Morrowind (necromancer), and one for Skyrim (elementals/atronachs). I haven't made the latter two characters yet.

Thanks for replying.

I haven't really used summons for combat, but some of them have nice utility uses.

Morrowind:
Ancestor Ghost is a nice cheap summon. If you attack it 4 times, it will start using its spells against you; these aren't dangerous, but can be absorbed (if you have spell absorption) to restore your magicka; very useful for an Atronach birthsign character. Also, these ghosts have 100 point common souls; not bad for such a cheap summon.
Flame Atronachs have spell reflection; this can be useful against enemy spellcasters, or if you deliberately want to reflect a spell (or magic item effect) onto yourself.
Golden Saints have grand souls, if you have a way of trapping them.
One interesting healing strategy: Put multiple cheap summons on a spell, cast the spell, then cast an AoE Absorb Health spell. If the numbers are right (short duration summon, decent magnitude Absorb Health), this might be more magicka efficient than simply casting Restore Health on Self spells.

Oblivion:
Ghosts have the most Magicka of the Apprentice tier summons, making them good for Atronach birthsign characters who want to steal a summon's Magicka.
Some summons come with weapons, which can be obtained by hitting the summon with Disintegrate Weapon effects. Liches come with high level staves which can be obtained this way. You can also use Liches to restore your magicka by absorbing the spells cast from their staves, though this is risky and you'll probably want to make a shorter duration version of the spell.
Liches have spell reflection, making them good summons against enemy spellcasters.

Thanks!

My favourite Oblivion character doesn't fight him/herself, but lets a Storm Atronach do all the fighting (with occasional support by offensive distance spells). This doesn't work from the beginning, of course, but if you focus on growing your summoning skills, you get there quite quickly (I'm not even using trainers). The biggest difficulty we (my Storm Atronach and I as a team) have encountered until now were a bunch of (5?) enhanced trolls we met (using a mod, I don't remember which mod), because of their superior regeneration capabilities. Took a few attempts and much running away.
Works well, feels almost like cheating, because spell points regenerate too fast in Oblivion, But I prefer using a bodyguard over doing the dirty work myself :-).

If you increase the difficulty of oblivion using its ingame slider, conjuration becomes extremely powerful in comparison to other offensive abilities, as the summoned creatures remain at their full power.

Conversely, if you *decrease* the difficulty, summons will become comparatively less effective, as you will get stronger, but your summons don't.

Edit: I don't recommend playing Oblivion on high difficulty, as enemies will take way too long to kill, as summons will be the only reasonable way to deal damage (except *maybe* weakness stacking, which has the advantage of scaling faster than linerally with the number of times you hit an enemy).