about the two ideas:
the SECOND idea first: this is very good. extremely good not to say. adding it is a piece of cake and it would be very very VERY useful. what you could ALSO do, if its too much work to add a synthesis description to every bullshlt item, just give the items that have NO synthesis the note: -no synthesis, so you just know what to sell and what to check out.
that would be damn nice.
to the first idea: as i posted in the pet system thread, i dont think having pets is any good and even having summons kinda sucks. i just had a playthrough on extreme with a full summon build and also summoning items and holy shlt do they suck. summons get weaker and weaker as the game progresses and they even suck at the beginning. controling them is a pain in the ass and positioning them... man, i got my hands full of microing 3 heroes. i play campaigns to chillax and have fun, if i want to micro my ass of, i go play solo ladder online.
so what i would do: this idea is ONLY for the three elemental summons (fire, lightning, ice), NOT for all the rest. but this at least owns:
if a hero summons an elemental, the summon doesnt appear as an individual unit but it actually "fuses" with the hero. the hero conjures the power of an elemental upon himself. you cant click on the elemental, it will just be fused with your hero. should be easy to make a nice animation for that.
then, if you walk around, the elemental will just always be ontop of your hero or "inside" him. it gets increased attack range (like 700) and can just auto-attack from the position of the hero without having to be controled.
ofcourse you cant use its abilities anymore when you cant click on it, so give it abilities that are triggered.
and since the elementals cant be clicked on, they cant be targetted. they are basically invulnerable, but for that problem, here's the solution:
fradz' elemental has this ability where when he drops below 25% hitpoints, it sacrifices itself to heal him up. i think with my idea of change, every elemental should have that ability as a passive and even with a little upgrade: the hero who is fused with an elemental cant get one-shotted. he just cant die. if he dies, the elemental dies and he heals up to 100%. if the elemental runs out of duration, it dies and heals up the hero by a certain amount, lets say: heroes combined attributes*elemental level.
man, my ideas are so good.
for all the other summons, i would rather remove them, except maybe the healer from the ologozo and the puppet from the omega helmet, but maybe even that. if you DO make a system where they automatically follow/run around your character, give them zero collision size, so they dont block. but really, rather just remove them, in most cases, having summons works against you. for example chapter 1 with those fire demon spawns: the ogre lord uses shockwave, the renegade wizard uses carrion swarm etc. basically you get
**** for having summons because those enemys never use their AoE-spells against single targets, thats how the normal blizzard-AI works.