Golemancy happens to be an incredibly good skill, one which I admit to having overlooked the virtues of up until recently (I hadn't actually used it very much until about 2 weeks ago). I do agree that the creature summons become obsolete long before you get that deep into the dungeon. But what you suggest would be overkill. 1 point in it for a decent pet (even one that goes obsolete fairly quickly), plus Living Wall, makes it a pretty good choice for any mage or hybrid build. As an alternative to what you suggest, add another spell tier to golemancy, and have that allow you to keep both a mustache golem and a Mortal Machine at the same time. But limit it to one of each, or you risk making it a real game-breaker.
Maybe every additional summon could debuff all your existing summons by a percentage of their Health / other important stat. The more summons you... summon, the less powerful they become. One or two are your personal goons, four or five are monster fodder to make a get-away while that Monster Zoo one-shots them one by one.
Pets just have to start casting spells: spellcasting pets keep their utility outside of combat in the form of being only meatshields and, on firsts floors, be a decent fighter. Spells can make a Mustache Golem cast a paralizing effect which a Mortal Machine could never make (but it is thougher and break asses in combat). Pets definitively must have spells. That's the only very way to really put differences between them without universaly change how pets work. And the only way to make them less easily obsolete in the time a character has to go through 15 floors, while not making them too powerful on the time they are taken. Just casting every single pet a character has is not a big solution, even more if you suggest to debuff them (since they just become obsolete pretty easy since their poor stats),
I was only addressing the suggestion of making new summons delete the old ones, not the issue of poor scaling! I think it makes sense, really. How many Bad-Ass Warlocks of the order of Blood Merlin, Drinker of Souls, would still use a silly spell they learnt at the start of their career?
Pets already can have the affect of making the first few levels relatively easy. So you have to ask yourself, how much better can they be without breaking game balance. It's not like people are saying 'don't take pet skills because they are useless'. On the contrary. Read almost any advice thread for struggling newbie players, and you'll undoubtedly see someone recommending that they take a pet skill. I'm not saying that nothing can be done, I'm just urging caution. Not every skill has to be equally useful throughout the game.
While things like Unliving Wall - and later on Digging Ray - are pretty awesome abilities, if they're the most noteworthy abilities of the class it kind of negates the premise.
Only if you assume the class' premise is "pets". Only 1/3rd of Golemancy's skills summon pets. Another 1/3 summon very powerful traps, and the final 1/3rd is great utility.
It is. It's just that not all those golems are pets. Some are spinning blades and walls and drills and what not.
The origin of Golem is from the Talmud, a book of Jewish law and mysticism. Originally, Adam was created as a 'golem' out of dust or mud. The story was reinterpreted in folktales to represent a kind of guardian -- a non-living form animated/programmed usually as a protector. Stories like Frankenstein, and early stories of robots owe some of their heredity to stories of golems. Like most old stories, they get reinterpreted and changed by whoever is telling the story. So I see Golemancy as being just another reinterpretation of golems, which is fine. It's still the same basic principle of inanimate non-living forms given animation. True, the mythic golem may have been conceived as in basic human shape, but just like robots were initially envisioned in humanoid form, there's no reason why that would have to be the defining aspect.
