Atronach Thralls

Atronach Thralls

Introduction And General Information

While the general scope of this FAQ is about humanoid thralls, I think these too are worth commenting on. All Atronach thrall spells can be bought from Phinis Gestor at the College in Winterhold, with the exception of the Flame thrall, which is automatically received from Phinis for completing the Conjuration Ritual side-quest. Atronach thralls come in three types: Flame Atronach, Frost Atronach, and Storm Atronach. If you've played the game for a little while, you'll probably have noticed a common theme; the only elements represented in the game are fire, ice, and electricity. These are the only damaging elements you can put on your weapons, these are the only damage reducing enchantments you can put on your gear (not counting the general magic reduction), these are the only magical attacks enemies will use, and these are the only damaging magical attacks that you can use. Fire works well against Frost, and conversely, Frost works well against Fire. Lightning is in the middle with no weakness or advantage to an opposing element. Simplicity at it's finest. Atronach thralls fall into this category. A flame thrall will do well against an enemy that is weak to fire, and little damage to an enemy that resists it. A frost thrall will do well against fire and a storm thrall will be less effective (but not really since they have the highest damage potential), but not as vulnerable to a potential element. In addition to element, these thralls each have different strengths and weaknesses. A fire thrall, for example, has low health but is smaller and quicker, thus presenting a harder-to-hit target. It also tends to stay at range when fighting enemies which helps it retain its, otherwise paltry, health. In these next few sections, I'll go over potential strengths and overall detriments of these thralls.

TL:DR version, I don't think any of them are particularly bad. They are each are useful in their own ways, although the Storm Atronach certainly has an advantage in damage compared to the other two. If you like using any of the thralls, don't let me dissuade you from using a specific one because it's not the "statistically" best thrall. Each one will effectively serve their purpose and aid the player. None are "so bad that they are not worth using", so don't feel obligated to use only one because you have deemed it the strongest. Now, when the Atronachs are compared to dead thralls, well, there really isn't much comparison if you have beefed up your thralls with armor and weapons and if you have picked a strong human to thrall. A well equipped and high level dead thrall will utterly destroy any Atronach. That's just the way it is. Does this mean that Atronachs are not worth using then? On the contrary actually, I'd say that they are useful for a few different reasons. If you've read through the bulk of this FAQ, you can probably guess the first point I'm going to mention.

Thought of it yet? "That spell looks dangerous." "UUUUUHHHHHHH". Does that ring a bell? If you've played around with your dead thrall a while, you've probably already grown a little tired of these two phrases. If not, you must have the patience of a snail. You know, because a snail is slow and it takes a long time to get somewhere.....oh, whatever. The point I'm making is, any Atronach thrall that you summon will not annoy you with their constant and incessant yammering about the lack of you allowing them to sit in a chair and rest for a while. At least, that's what I take "UUUUHHHH" to mean. Aside from the soothing crackling of fire from your Flame thrall, or the thud of crunching ice underneath your Frost thrall's feet, or the quiet sound, that can be best described as having a sound akin to thunder but closer to the volume of someone speaking softly, that emanates from your Storm thrall, they are completely silent. You will hear no groans and no moans. You will not hear asinine comments that habitually spew out of the denizens of Skyrim's mouths about your current spell, that you intentionally and knowingly cast ( Yes, it really bothers me in case you couldn't tell ). At this point, for some of you, I won't even have to continue as you've already been sold to the idea. But I shall proceed nonetheless.

The next point of eminence, is the ability to summon them whenever you please. You do not have to kill someone. You do not have to worry about storing bodies in your house. You do not have to wait on your thrall to catch up to you. You do not need to revisit the previous area to look for your dead thrall because he or she sometimes forgets how to use doors and is now missing. All you need to worry about is having enough magicka to cast the spell. The player definitely has to micro-manage a lot less. The ability to freely summon whenever and wherever, as well as not having to worry about re-thralling, since they are always the same when you summon them, is a huge benefit. They can provide instant assistance with little worry to the player about maintaining track of their presence. This alone is a great benefit that Atronach thralls have over dead thralls. Being able to cast the same spell and receive the same Atronach lifts a certain "supervisory" feeling that a player can sometime perceive when maintaining and keeping dead thralls.

Really, the biggest detriment of an Atronach thrall, is the lack of potential power compared to fully realized dead thrall. I mentioned this earlier, but it is the reason why many players prefer dead thralls. However, I think the dispensable nature of Atronach thralls counteracts the lack killing power and, generally, low health pool. Atronachs have useful attributes, marred by downright physical weakness. It is, a fair trade, I think. It's also important to remember to take any perks deemed necessary in the Conjuration tree relating to the Atronachs if one is going to constantly rely on them. Notably, Elemental Potency, which increases the health your Atronach has by 50%, is the main one to strive for. Speaking of which, Elemental Potency does not increase the damage done by your Atronach, just its health. I have verified that it is a 50% increase, except the Frost Atronach (the 60 second version), which appears to get an even bigger bonus, however, the Frost Thrall (the permanent version) gets an increase to health that is much less than 50%. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but I'll cover it more in the Frost Thrall section. And before you ask, Atronachs are the only things affected by Elemental Potency. That means your Dremora Lord or your Familiar does not receive any extra health. Unfortunate, I know. It's a pity that there isn't permanent versions of all of the minions that you can summon.

I am 99.9% positive that thralls have static amounts of health. They have the same amount of health when the player is level 10 or level 60. From what I can tell, Atronachs do not have, or rather, have no need of magicka or stamina. Particularly, I've never witnessed them unable to cast magick, so I'm assuming that magick is treated more so as an ability rather than magick that requires magicka, at least with regards to how magicka is treated with the player or other NPCs. In other words, players use magicka to cast spells while Atronachs use no magicka but are still able to cast what is essentially the same spell, if that makes sense.

Flame Thrall

First up is the Flame Thrall, which is the first thrall that the player will have access to in the game. This is because it is a reward for completing the Conjuration Ritual Quest, as stated in the Obtaining the Dead Thrall spell section. All other thrall spells have to be purchased. The flame thrall generally is the weakest of the three, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the worst. It is very agile, prefers to stay at range when fighting enemies, and uses a different tactic when fighting close range encounters. The Conjure Flame Atronach spell (the 60 second spell, which summons a slightly different version of the flame Atronach, more on that in a minute) has a weak melee attack when enemies get close, doing right at 15 points of damage. Once it's AI has been triggered to switch to close range, it tends to stay that way, only switching back to long range if the enemy loses its attention or if the enemy or the Atronach happen to put a bit of distance between each other for a few seconds or more. This, however, is not carried over to the Flame thrall. The Flame thrall gets a Flames spell for its close encounters, that it casts with two hands (which apparently does NOT get the 2.2x damage bonus of Dual Casting). From what I've seen, the thralled version uses this in place of the melee attack that its weaker 60 second counterpart gets. The Flame thrall also gets a noticeable boost to it's health compared to the Flame Atronach. In fact, it gets the biggest overall percentage boost out of the three (technically two, I'll talk more about it in the Storm Thrall section), with over a 200% increase to health between the two versions, while the frost thrall gets around a 49% increase from its 60 second version to permanent version.

In addition to it's Flames spell, it gets the Firebolt spell, which does 20 points of damage and sets the target on fire. Any target that is already on fire will take 10% additional damage (of the initial damage of the attack) over the period of one second. This also applies to the dual casting of the Flames spell mentioned earlier, but to a lesser effect as it also adds 10% additional damage over the period of a second, but at lesser damage because of the difference in damage between the Flames spell and the Firebolt spell. Realistically, we're only talking about a point of damage between the additional fire damage of two spells, but it's still there. Since the Flame thrall loses its melee attack, only to be replaced by a weak version of the Flames spell (that only does 8 damage a second), it is very possible that it will do overall less damage per second while fighting close range. It should be noted that the Flame thrall's dual-casted flames spell appears to be dual-casted in animation ONLY. It does not receive the 2.2x damage bonus, which would put it at 17 damage a second, which is unfortunate. It also does not appear to receive the correct damage of casting two flames spells at the same time. If two Flames spells are not dual-casted, but instead are cast in each hand at the same time (or roughly the same time since the dual-casting perk makes this impossible), the damage should be around 16 or so a second. This however is not the case and it appears that it is only counting damage as if there was one flames spell activated, which means a meager 8 points a second of fire damage. My guess is, even though we see the animation for two flames spells being cast, it's just that. An animation. Likely, it's just one flames spell being cast but the animation was done is a way that makes it look like two are going.

When the Flame thrall is at range, it relies on Firebolt to do damage. It also has a Flame Cloak that does 10 damage a second to any enemy at close range, and an extra 10% damage per second when the enemy is on fire. Flame Cloak is always activate on the Flame thrall. One last bonus that the thrall gets is a fortified healing effect of 1pt per second. It doesn't sound like much, but it's better than nothing.

Below is listed the attributes of the thrall, compared to it's regular counterpart, as well as various abilities that it possess. Also take note that health is estimated as I have been unable to find any information regarding this. I used a 100 damage axe, a 25 damage sword, and a 9 damage dagger to test amount of health, on Adept (normal) difficulty. It's also important to note the biggest differences between the permanent thrall and the 60 second version. The thrall gets additional health, an additional attack, and a fortified healing buff. Damage done is the same between the two.

• Abilities
• 100% Resistant to Fire damage
• 33% Weakness to Frost damage
• Waterwalking
• Immune to Paralysis
• Fortified Healing 1pt per second.
• Unique to the Flame Thrall. The Flame Atronach does not possess this ability.

• Attacks
• Melee Strike - Used by the Atronach version. The Thrall version uses Dual-casted Flames in place of this.
• Does 15 point of damage

• Dual-casted Flames - Close range attack that does 8 points of damage per second. Enemy on fire takes an additional 10% of damage per second.
• Unique to the Flame thrall. Flame Atronach does not possess this attack.

• Flame Cloak - 10 points of damage per second when enemy is in melee range. Enemy on fire takes an additional 10% of damage per second.

• Firebolt - Missile attack that does 20 points of damage. Enemy on fire takes an additional 10% of damage per second.

Frost Thrall

This is the bruiser of the bunch. He lacks any ranged attacks but makes up for it with the biggest health pool and decently damaging physical attacks. I must confess, while taking down notes on damage done, he was the source of much confusion. It appears that at least one of his attacks has a chance to do extra damage, which isn't necessarily noted by anything particular that I could tell. His Slam attack that would normally do 30 damage would now do 60, and there was no difference that I could tell in the animation. I'm not entirely sure what to call this, as it may have a percentage to do more damage based on the type of attack he is using or by some other means. I'm going to refer to it as a critical, but it's really not in the same sense as a critical for the player (as those do paltry sums of damage). The only attack that I could reliably notice this extra damage on was its Slam move. This apparent randomness makes him an interesting choice, as his attacks aren't all that strong to begin with, but he has the potential to fill his "heavy bruiser" archetype accordingly. Another interesting tidbit is all of his attacks are considered physical attacks and as such, are affected by one's armor rating. Most enemies in the game have very little armor rating, so this isn't a huge problem, but it should be taken into account all the same. He attacks in fairly rapid succession and does a decent job of keeping continual damage on the enemy. He's always within melee range, so his frost cloak is almost always adding small amounts of damage on top of that. From my testing, Frost Cloak only does 5 points of damage per second compared to that of the Flame Thrall and Storm Thrall which do 10 points of damage per second. UESP claims that the Frost Thrall's Frost Cloak does 10 points a second, but as of 1.6, it does not. Whether or not this is intentional, or whether or not this has been changed in an update, I cannot say, but it definitely is only 5 points of damage per second. Test it out in game if you don't believe me.

One prominent problem is his bulky mass can sometimes impede the player's ability to move through small spaces. At which point, the player is forced to walk backwards to kite the Frost Atronach from the said small space. A plus side is he can unintentionally take hits that were otherwise meant for the player. I have not noticed a unique effect from the permanent version compared to the 60 second version, like that of the Flame thrall's flames spell. It is more than likely because he does not have one. It is worth mentioning though that his attacks drain enemies stamina by the same damage that is done to their health. This is much like the Flame thrall's ability to do extra damage to enemies that are on fire or the Storm Thrall's ability to do extra damage to magicka.

Lastly, it appears that there is some type of mix up in the coding when the player has Elemental Potency. Normally with this perk, the Atronach receives a 50% increase to its health, but in the case of the Frost Atronach and the Frost Thrall, that is not true. The Atronach version (the 60 second spell) gets around a 65% increase to its max health, while the Thrall version only gets around a 33% increase.

• Abilities
• 100% Resistant to Frost damage
• 33% Weakness to Fire damage
• Waterbreathing
• Immune to Paralysis
• Fortified Healing 1pt per second.
• Unique to the Frost thrall. The Frost Atronach does not possess this ability.

• Attacks
• Regular attack - This includes the right hook, uppercut, and backhand.
• Does 20 points of damage.

• Charge - Uses this only from a distance, and very rarely at that.
• Does 30 points of damage.

• Slam - Staggers the enemy.
• Does 30 points of damage.
• Does 60 Points of damage for a critical hit.

• Frost Cloak - Damages any nearby enemies
• Does 5 points of damage a second to health and stamina.

Storm Thrall

The final of the three and the intended strongest. I say intended because, there is an unfortunate bug holding this version back. The Flame and Frost thralls each receive additional health and a fortified healing effect over their 60 second version counterparts. The Storm thrall, however, does not. This is more than likely an oversight and an unintended function, but it is currently part of the game (still as of 1.9). The same version of the Storm Atronach is used for both versions of the spells, instead of the thrall being a completely different version (which should have its own unique ID number). What the Storm thrall does receive however, is particularly strong melee attacks and a decently strong spell that is not resisted by any enemy. Toss in the fact that it is not weak against fire or frost and you get an all around, above average thrall. It has access to a 30 damage spell that will jump to another enemy nearby for (assumedly) the same damage. It also has available to it, huge amounts of melee damage, which is a bit of a slap in the face to the Frost thrall, as it is intended to be the melee type. Single target attacks that are in the 50 - 65 range, and a melee explosion that does a little less damage, but will hit all nearby. Unfortunately, the Storm thrall really doesn't get to bask in all it's glory because of the aforementioned bug, but despite that, it is still very usable and arguably the strongest Atronach even without the increased health. You just may end up summoning a new one pretty often though.

I know different places have the Storm thrall listed as having two spells that do 50 and 60 damage, but from my testing, I've never seen these. Just the 30 damage chain lighting spell. It's also important to note that all of the Storm thralls melee attacks are mitigated by armor, while its chain lighting spell is only affected by shock or magic reducing enchantments.

• Abilities
• 100% Resistant to Shock damage
• Waterwalking
• Immune to Paralysis

• Attacks
• Right hand slap
• 50 Damage

• Left hand slap
• 60 Damage

• Charge
• ~ 65 Damage

• Short range explosion
• 40 - 60 Damage to all within melee range (may do different damage based on how close the enemy is, not sure)

• Chain Lightning
• 30 Damage

• Storm Cloak
• 10 Damage per second, 5 damage to magicka per second.