Well, speaking of summoning mages in Diablo clones, in Sacred, if you play as a Vampiress, you can resurrect your dead enemies to fight with you. If they kill an enemy, there's a chance that this enemy will also become a fighter for you (without you needing to manually resurrect them).
As far as I'm aware, there's no hard limit on how many fighters you can have, although there's a soft limit that increases as you level up your skills. (You can only be a vampire for so long at a time before you transform back into a human. But that time increases as you level up your transformation skill.)
But I'll admit, it's not quite the same as having party-members you can deck out with gear and control individually.
In general, this episode reminded me quite a bit of Sacred, although that game does contain a few of the things you dislike, like respawning monsters.
