User blog comment:BorosPaladin/Josiah, the Hand of Flame/@comment-70.231.230.106-20121008055528/@comment-5441738-20121009032333

See, all of those placement issues already have ways to be dealt with in the game code in case multiple summoners do the exact same thing at the exact same time. Also, Heal is not one of the summoner spells mentioned (because I did think of that issue), and so is not copied by the clones. The summoner spell copying is mainly to keep them together.

See, that's the thing: The damage DOES scale because of more copies available. I'll be toning them down - I'm thinking of giving them separate statlines that may level with the ultimate - but I don't think it's useless even at rank 1. See, you don't place them at your location; note the 600 range. Need to pick up a kill? There's 600 free range, plus more for abilities. The range and the behavior are there to separate it just a bit from other pet-oriented abilities, most notably Shaco's.