Things got pretty nuts last night... I've been -trying- to transition away from being two-handed+heavy armor to becoming a spellcaster. I've been out trying to build those skills, which means I'm rather vulnerable as my spells are still somewhat weak and I'm wearing robes rather than armor. So right now I absolutely have to rely on the combination of my companion plus a conjured familiar to be effective tanks. I was doing some random exploring when the dragon head icon came up on my compass, meaning a shout altar was nearby. So I started following the path toward it, up a mountain. On the way we crossed three different sets of ruins that were individually named, but all seemed to be interconnected, ultimately leading to the altar. Came around a corner and walked in on a fight between a blood dragon and some kind of high end Draugar lord. They were basically in a stalemate, until the Draugar messed up and the dragon brought him to his knees. I rushed in to attack the dragon when all of a sudden a bunch of skeletons showed up, too. While trying to avoid the dragon and clear out the skeletons the Draugar lord managed to get back onto his feet. At this point I'm getting torn up and my companion, Agris the Bulwark, is completely MIA. I have no fucking clue where he went off to. Probably stuck on terrain somewhere. I ended up dying.
Reload.
Repeat the encounter, but this time the Draugar and the dragon are not fighting each other and both go straight for me. Agris is basically useless the whole fight, accomplishing nothing more than constantly getting in the way. This despite the fact I'd given him all of my awesome armor plus a sweet dwarven shield and an ebony mace. Useless, I tell you. The dragon finally snatched him up in its jaws and killed him. So I ended up finishing the dragon, the Draugar, and the skeletons all by myself. I stripped Agris' corpse and left his ass to rot on the mountainside - you're fired as my housecarl, dude. At this point I'm like "fuck this wizard shit" and I equip myself with all of the awesome heavy armor I'd given to Agris. Fortunately I was also smart enough to bring my two handed greatsword with me, just in case things went off the rails.
So now I'm solo, fighting my way through these ruins, still trying to find the shout altar I'd originally been looking for, thinking that I could just walk up and collect the shout since the dragon was dead. Of course not. Turned out the altar was guarded by a completely different dragon than the one I already killed, so now I had to solo it. Fortunately it was the standard, lower HP dragon and bringing it down wasn't too difficult. But what a fucking mess that whole thing turned out to be. All I wanted was to collect a shout and I ended up having to solo 3 powerful mobs plus a bunch of harsh randoms (forgot to mention the ice wraiths) while dragging the gear of the now deceased Agris the Useless. And when I finally get home to Markarth Lydia is all cheery, "Hello, my love! Back from some adventure, I bet!" Yeah, if you only knew. I think from now on I'm sticking with Maurcurio, he seems to be the only companion who is not completely shit in a fight.