Why was summoning support removed from Vehumet?

[AzuredreamsXT]

And why wasn't it added to another, maybe even a new god? Necromancers have it made with Kiku, why were summoners given the shaft?

[Arrhythmia]

Because we are on a slow, steady march to make summons as useless as possible until someone removes them altogether.

[Wahaha]

Summoners always were and still are supported by Sif. Ashenzari too.

[crate]

tso is the secret summoner god

[dpeg]

And why wasn't it added to another, maybe even a new god? Necromancers have it made with Kiku, why were summoners given the shaft?

The idea shouldn't be that gods cater to specific playing style. Much better if they're skew to that. For example, gods like Makhleb, Lugonu, Sif Muna, Ashenzari and many more don't care how you kill -- they help various kinds of builds. Other gods are a playing style in a box, for example Elyvilon or Nemelex, at least if you want to take them to extremes. A god that just boosts a single thing is much less interesting. In this sense, Vehumet is a very narrow or, more positively, focused deity. I like to compare this with Trog, who is the melee-only incarnate.

Old Vehumet was useful, but also bland. New Vehumet kept the conjurations, because that's such a broad means of destruction. The god is a lot less slot-machine like than before (the gifts are changed and stopped being predictable, the range extension changes how you may assess some spells). Why summoning support was scrapped: there is no real synergy between the two, not even thematically. Old Vehumet's main audience was the conjuration crowd. Many gods deal with allies in some way.

Regarding summons: there are many changes at the moment. I don't think that it's clear the summon school will disappear. At least I think it has a lot of potential.

[RBrandon]

Yeah, the only time summoning and conjurations work together is if you have pets with immunities to what you are slinging, but really this only practically happens with ice beasts, undead or maybe air elementals. In any case conjurations certainly fit the destruction motif better than summoning.

I think that the changes to summoning make it do some very silly things now, but it certainly does have potential. There are a lot of good ideas on the dev wiki at any rate.