There seems to be some confusion about how summons work. Traitsummons never summon outside of this specific level of the troop as it appears in the collection and spell summons, excepting the arena special case where they come in at level 15, always summon at the level of the user’s magic. Traitsummons include Infernal King’s Immortal, which is just a traitsummon for an Infernal King when the Infernal King dies. Spell summons include Sunbird’s spell, which is just a spell summon for another Sunbird as the last step of when it casts (after it dies and deals damage). For example, level 20 Sunbirds casting in NPC content revive at level 10 because they have only 10 magic without the backing of kingdom bonuses. PC AI summons are already allowed to “cheat” in one way - they can ignore the “collection rarity cap” for spell summons and be allowed to be summoned up to level 20 if they have enough magic to do so, although their rarity remains unchanged. For example, a Spider Swarm summoned from a 42 magic Giant Spider on Warlord VI of a challenge looks like this:
Because Warlord IV is x3 stats, it has base 8 attack, 12 armor, and 20 life. This lines up exactly with the numbers they would have at level 20 without being ascended.
When they added context highlighting for magic scaling, they removed the specific level summon from the text of summon spells (except Nysha’s skull for some reason), and then added the tooltip instead. But for spells, it has always (since the summon revamp) summoned equal to the magic, limited by the collection rarity cap, and then then the system level cap (except arenas level 15 rule, and NPC AI ignoring the rarity cap rule). The tooltip is correct in indicating it “cannot exceed its own current max level” (meaning, the max level of the troop being its current ascended rarity), but it could maybe be worded better. Some of this might have to do with the fact that transform is worded similar, (“the level cannot exceed its maximum level in the owner’s collection”), but always comes in at the current level of the troop in the collection and ignores magic completely (should be “the level is equal to to the level in the owner’s collection”.)
Anyways, I don’t think this trait needs to be buffed, nor does the Ancient Horror itself. They could allow the NPC content to “cheat” in a similar way they have inflated levels by giving them a full collection of that level and allowing them to also bypass the level 20 cap raising the level cap on any of their summons as well. They’d still be speed bumps in pet rescues with nothing more than an increase in annoyance factor. Potential annoyance factor would increase considerably for Raids where you can’t just spell chain and having another few hundred bulk to chew through because of a random trait proc ends up being annoyingly time consuming. Also, under this ruleset, a level 80 Sunbird, for example, would still revive at level 40 (because that is how much magic a level 80 Sunbird has), people would still be confused, and we’d still be right back here again with another similar thread (I’ve seen like 3 in the past couple weeks centered around confusion on how this works). Maybe if the AI is also allowed to “cheat” and always summon at the max level of the current content regardless of magic score, that would meet people’s expectations?
tl;dr:
- Spells summon based on magic, capped by collection rarity, ignores current collection level
- NPC AI ignore the rarity level cap for spell summons, but are still capped at 20
- Traits summoned based on current collection level, ignore magic
- NPC AI don’t have collections
- Daemonic Pact and Ancient Horror are both fine