I still believe that conjurations and especially summoning are much stronger than melee. Possibly conjurations are worse than missiles at the moment but I don't see how they could not be better than melee.
It's unlikely that the proliferation of "melee characters" has much to do with strength. Look at species: recently the 5 most played ones online are Ds, Mi, Op, DE, Gr. Only one of these species (Mi) is even better than median*. DD and Ce, which are unambiguously 2 of the 3 best species in the game, are the 7th and 2nd
least popular, respectively. Vehumet and Cheibriados are awful but a lot of people find them fun so they're two of the most popular gods, while Fedhas is even less popular than the god that
only one species can worship.
If popularity were a good indicator of strength then you would, at the very least, expect the number of summoners to be several times larger than it actually is, especially in older versions.
It's more likely that people play the characters they find fun, and overall "melee characters" are more fun than "casters" because melee combat has better mechanics and a better interface than the spellcasting system, conjurations, and
especially summoning do.
The game also explicitly tries to funnel new players into playing characters that don't start with spells. The first option in hints mode is MiBe. The first background is Fighter (yes this has an effect, Fi is
more than twice as popular as the second most popular background, Be, which is blatantly obviously better). Almost 20% of all new characters are fighters.** If you want to start with spells you have to either pick Wn, which is always greyed out, or go to the opposite side of the screen.
*though you can give Gr some credit since it is one of the easiest species to bot, as a lot of players play like bots or worse
**you can counter this by pointing at Human's middling popularity, but HuFi is actually a very popular combo. It's only one place after CeHu at the moment, which is only one place after GrBe.
Avigdore wrote:It's not like melee types have to learn several weapon schools to, and there's no creature in the game who's resistant to a type of weapon (that I am aware of).
Monster resistances aren't actually a problem for conjurers. At all. They make poison magic even more ass than it already is, but that's about it. And there are a ton of monsters that are extremely bad to melee.
I find characters without spells much more interesting than characters with spells, and melee much more interesting than ranged attacks.
I should note that I also believe heavy armour is extremely overrated.