Companion AI

[Talidus]

Is there something I am missing? I have made a hybrid "mage-healer" companion and pretty much all he does is use his melee (wands) and rarely if ever uses his magic or healing abilities correctly. He also never heals my pets and he ends up spamming direct heals on my charecter even though I am full health.

Am I missing something, can I change his AI settings?

[Rainbow Dash]

Ai is mostly made to assist you as "meathead" will run stright in swarm of mobs to meele fight them (just give him weapon with highest dmg). Will hardly use spells like heal correctly so better to give him regen friend spell (not regen party as it don't work correctly for some reason), dmg spells are very rarely used.

[Talidus]

Originally posted by Rainbow Dash:

Ai is mostly made to assist you as "meathead" will run stright in swarm of mobs to meele fight them (just give him weapon with highest dmg). Will hardly use spells like heal correctly so better to give him regen friend spell (not regen party as it don't work correctly for some reason), dmg spells are very rarely used.

Yea I gathered that much - hes pretty useless as a caster. I just wish I knew that before I spent all of the points on trying to make him a caster is all. A healer/crafting companion was really what I was shooting for so INT as his main stat is pretty key to that setup. I do not really see the point from a combat perspective why the companion exists. I do not depend on him for anything. With spells, everything melts so I dont need a meat shield. Event bosses are barely speed bumps. I am doing like 5k a hit at level 42 and just got to Rhunden.

[Mr Fantastic]

Originally posted by Talidus:

Originally posted by Rainbow Dash:

Ai is mostly made to assist you as "meathead" will run stright in swarm of mobs to meele fight them (just give him weapon with highest dmg). Will hardly use spells like heal correctly so better to give him regen friend spell (not regen party as it don't work correctly for some reason), dmg spells are very rarely used.

Yea I gathered that much - hes pretty useless as a caster. I just wish I knew that before I spent all of the points on trying to make him a caster is all. A healer/crafting companion was really what I was shooting for so INT as his main stat is pretty key to that setup. I do not really see the point from a combat perspective why the companion exists. I do not depend on him for anything. With spells, everything melts so I dont need a meat shield. Event bosses are barely speed bumps. I am doing like 5k a hit at level 42 and just got to Rhunden.

you can respec skills early in the game so no big loss.

nameless is good with high endurance with regen and revive spells, to serve as meat shield, so in case you die he will ressurect you

[Talidus]

Nothing survives long enough to be tanked. I do have him with res but again, almost useless. I do use him for crafting which saves me a bunch of points on my main. Wish we had something like Soda Dungeon 2 "scripts" that allowed us to help improve the AI.

[it's a gabe]

The AI needs some adjusting, tbh. If you give your companion any support spells (e.g. regen), they'll cast them as soon as they're available instead of when they're necessary, so that means their MP pool will always be depleted. Same is true if you switch to the companion, as the PC then starts acting the exact same way.

Coming from SAOFB, I totally understand why the AI would be more useful as a tank/healer, but this behavior is actually not that helpful when it'd be better for the AI (regardless of which character it is) to prioritize healing and support ONLY when party members aren't under any buffs or if they actually need healing. But for this to work, party-wide spells actually need to affect the entire party, including the AI's pets and the caster.

I thought tonight's update was gonna fix that cuz it's about time, but oh well. I hope that happens, cuz it's a bit frustrating to have my companion's MP constantly drained cuz they've been casting buffs all the damn time even when I'm chilling in town.

[ΑΩ]

Their is a way to help the companion's tendency to spam regen spells, its to give the companion the MP regen spell, basically it will take care of the MP needs of the companion, as the MP regen spell is meant to make you able to keep spam casting offensive spells, which have mostly a higher cost and a faster cast rate than your healing stuff would anyway.

[Sharklar]

TLDR: A.I. needs to know about walls, and should prioritize spells more highly than it does now, compared with wand attacks. Having full mana and several spell abilities, but choosing wand attack 90%+ of the time is not a good strategy.

Talidus, I did basically the same thing as you and found the same frustration. Just to clarify the issues for anyone that didn't try this:

1) the companion not using actual spells means that skill levelling happens at so slow a rate that you would be lucky to be eligible to buy the 2nd level of even the most basic spells (the ones available at game start) by the time you reach the final areas. I had to resort to manually controlling this character and spamming spells like mad in lower areas to try to level up skills. If you played Secret of Mana and noticed your allies' weapons skills always went up more slowly than the skills of whoever you controlled, it's like that all over again, but 20 times worse.

2) given the abundance of small cramped areas, 1-3 squares wide, twists and turns and walls everywhere, using a wand attack (or a number of spells that do not pass through walls) means the character is attacking the wall and hitting nothing. The A.I. appears to not know about walls or realize its attacks can't hit. It could have a clear shot to a further away enemy, but no, it's going to attack the wall with its wand because an enemy is right on the other side of it and 'closer'. It is incredibly frustrating to be controlling my main character, in a fight, and I can just hear the grating spam of the second character attacking the wall, and not helping. This happens so often that I named them AttackWall. Sure, I could try to swap to the caster and move them manually to be in range then swap back, but since this happens almost every fight in several dungeons, doing so would be quite draining, and might not actually save time if the battle would end during that time. Plus you'd have to hope that the main char didn't misbehave while swapped out.

I have had a lot of fun with this game so far and it is definitely worth the price. However, it feels like nobody playtested having a mage companion. I hope that isn't the case, but I can't imagine anyone who did playtest this felt it was acceptable. Any A.I. updates to help with this would be greatly appreciated.

[Do_Be]

Sorry to bring this thread back up but I am having similar issues on ps4. I had a normal mode playthrough going and gave my companion regen friend, as well as vicious party and tough party, he flawlessly used the spells as soon as the duration timer expired, it was great.

Feeling good about this, I started a hardmode playthrough and rushed to unlock the companion as fast as possible. But now that I have given him the same spells I was using on the normal playthrough he refuses to cast anything other than an inconsistent regen friend (sometimes will not even cast if i sit in a group of enemies taking damage) despite having full mana.

The only difference at the moment I can think of between the two savefiles is that the normal mode playthrough I had recently tamed my first rat, putting my party size at 3 instead of 2, which is where my hard playthrough is currently.

Is there anything I can do about this? Assuming there is not, would it be possible to get a screen for the companion where I can set up an order of actions to try to carry out? He's built to cast buffs but wants to hit things with his dinky wooden axe.

This game has been frustratingly good.

[solaris32]

Companion AI still sucks :(.

[Aven Valkyr]

Companion AI STILL sucks