In the 2014 PHB, there are a few spells that let you put more creatures on the battlefield to fight alongside you. These come in four schools of magic - Transmutation does this via Giant Insect and Animate Objects. Necromancy, as one might imagine, transforms dead bodies into undead creatures to fight for you with Animate Dead and Create Undead (and Finger of Death, which does the transformation as a secondary effect). Illusion gets to create a mount with Phantom Steed. And Conjuration, of course, has the largest number of these effects, with the permanent "Find" spells (familiars and steeds) and several "Conjure" spells, namely Woodland Beings and Fey (Fey creatures,) Minor Elementals and Elemental (elementals), Celestial (you get the idea) and Animals. There's also Planar Ally, which requires you to pay the summoned creature.
Now, these all work using existing stat blocks that are designed for DMs to toss creatures at the party to fight.
Generally, I think, moving away from that model for player features is a good thing. We've seen in the One D&D playtest that they've done this with Find Familiar and Find Steed, creating instead scaling stat blocks that use the summoner's spell attack bonuses and the level at which the spell was cast to scale the creature. We also saw this with the Beast Master's pets, first introduced as an optional change with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.
They also initially tried this with Wild Shape, though the kind of crappy quality of those stat blocks, and particularly the lack of various appealing bonus-effects like Pack Tactics saw them instead reforming Wild Shape to still use Beast stat blocks, but now limit how many the Druid can have "prepared" at a time to cut down on grinding the game to a halt when the Druid uses that ability. (Personally I'd kind of prefer they go back to stat block templates and give a menu of bonus features to choose from when shifting, but I also recognize that this is probably going to be the most satisfactory solution for the most people.)
What we have not seen, however, is how this will apply to most of the in-combat summoning spells.
As currently written, the School of Necromancy Wizard gets Animate Dead for free at 6th level, and gets to summon one additional Skeleton or Zombie with the spell, along with getting a bonus to their damage rolls.
Upcasting Animate Dead adds two more minions per spell level above 4th, so the damage potential, and the utility potential, goes up considerably with each upcast. But there are some big drawbacks:
The first is that you're going to wind up dominating a lot of combat time. Even at base level, you're now adding two creatures to the fight, which are each going to need their own movements and actions, with all the attack rolls and such that this entails.
The other is that the stat blocks don't really scale up. If you've got a bunch of zombies at your command, that's fine if you're battling mundane threats like Duergar or Goblins, but if you're dealing with supernatural creatures that are immune to nonmagical weapon attacks, they're at best going to be able to act as meat (or bone, in the case of skeletons) shields.
The Tasha's summon spells are elegant. And, if WotC had not been demonstrating such a conservative approach to the new core rulebooks, I'd have suspected we might get full replacements - replacing Animate Dead with Summon Undead, or Conjure Elemental with Summon Elemental.
Now, granted, I still think there's a chance that we could see something similar to that - we might not lose Animate Dead, but the spell might undergo a serious redesign to work basically like Summon Undead - using a single scaling stat block, rather than summoning multiple zombies and skeletons.
Now, I'd also be tempted to implement some kind of codified mass-attack feature if we wanted to retain the ability to summon multiple minions. The Minion Rules, derived from 4E and iterated on by MCDM, make it easy to let a group of monsters attack en masse.
I love the spell Danse Macabre, which summons the same number of minions as a 5th level Animate Dead (without the Necromancer bonus) but inherently gives a boost to both attack and damage rolls - making it far easier for these low-CR monsters to actually hit high-level monsters as well as dealing significant damage to them (barring immunities).
But, of course, this brings back that problem of having 5 new creatures to manage.
There is, of course, also the issue with some of the summoning spells and how it relates to spellcasting. Conjure Woodland Beings can spawn eight different Pixies, each of which can cast Polymorph once a day. It's a 4th level spell, so the party is presumably at least level 7, meaning that you can, with this single spell, effectively cast polymorph on the whole party (and perhaps some friendly NPCs) to turn them all into Giant Apes.
This is, so obviously, clearly, not the intended use of the spell. But it works.
At this point I think we're only able to wait and see what WotC shows off when we get the big spell list - I can imagine there will be an enormous UA that goes through spell changes (those that aren't being left unchanged - I think staples like Cure Wounds, Fireball, or Mage Armor are all likely to get through this totally unchanged).
And as for the Necromancer, I don't know if that's going to actually be in the 2024 PHB (though I really hope it is). But, in the meantime, I'm tempted to do my own homebrew revision to compare notes when if and when we see it.
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