I too have noticed a dearth in evil and neutral conjies. Evil's basically went with Scion, IMHO because despoil was just SO good for an evil conjie.

Neutral conjies seem to suffer pretty badly from changes made way back in the day for alignment to matter more. Elementals just aren't that good (and are very limited and die fairly easily) and you have to work harder to get the full oomph out of the Aligned servitors. Demons and Devils do seem to be way way easier to keep happy though...

Re: 1) My experience with neutral conjie and angels doesn't match yours. I too will call zero mana angels (for ranking purposes), but haven't had one turn unexpectedly on a decent chr conjie basically ever. I will say this as speculation:

a) Angels have zero tolerance for killing good and very little for use against neutrals. If you've done any killing of good or neutral, they'll turn. Even when it is their fault (pillar!).

b) I don't believe bind strength has anything to do with them turning. In fact the only thing I believe more mana into bind gives you is a better chance to land the bind. Duration and turning aren't effected in the slightest.

c) Bind also boosts their mood (I think), which is why my archons and angels are always more effective right at the start of conjuring than later, regardless of what activities I've been doing. This seems to be a weakness in the neutral conjie... No matter what you do, archons and angels just won't stay happy. If the scale is something like happy, content, mediocre, unhappy, angry, they will just slide toward mediocre, regardless. Archons especially seem to not give a #### what you are doing... They just won't stay happy.

Re: 2) My experience is that only para-elementals can be used underwater for anything beyond basically 1 kill. I would argue that since you have angel/archon and demon/devil, it would make sense for there to be elemental/para-elemental. It would also inject some much needed utility as well as shoring up a serious weakness and ditching the silly hoarded unique items. Honestly, when fighting a conjie I will almost always just murder their elemental, even if I can't kill them. Worst case scenario it takes enough damage to get pissed and become useless and/or turn... If you kill it, you've basically crunching kot'd them for up to 48 hours.

Re: 3) Not all familiars are created equal. They're a bit like shapeshift forms. Some are complete losers. My current has cost me nearly 2 con. Honestly I hate the con loss aspect and wish it was turned into ranger bears style nuking. Conjies eat enough con loss due to the nature of the class, having a little mook that follows you around and behaves like a retarded merc that also takes a third of your con with it when it dies isn't fun. That and some of them (looking at you original familiars) pale in comparison to things like phase wasp so bad it makes you want to roll the bones on familiars.

Re: 4) Tribunals are chumps. Just murder them. I just can't get behind this one, or help... Don't go into town if you are worried. It isn't that hard.


Re: 5) I've never had this. Nor would I ever take it, but then the number of times I want my familiar next to me in a fight is generally incredibly low since they are such a liability.

Re: 6) My experience doesn't match this at all. As far as circles go, they're basically good for 3 ticks vs. turned servitor and more vs. one that you just summoned (5-ish) which is plenty of time to do whatever you need to do. That or you die and that's on you. That's all zero mana circle too. I honestly don't know how long one would last with more mana. I'd assume roughly 1 tick per 100-300 mana but I've never tested it. As for binding, I think you misunderstand what they do. It is all basically a way to blow all your mana to replace spellcraft. I'd love to take a conjie and get spellcraft instead and see how that went someday, but I don't see that happening.

One thing I'd love to see if someone (finally?) fixing the servitor bugs that disallow area affects and cause stuff like cabal inners to hit servitors/familiars. Because if any class is set up to use offensive wands/talismans/scrolls it *should* be conjie, but the fact that you will hit your own servitors with area affects makes that a death sentence.