Accurate Familiar guide?

[mormegil27]

I am into familiars. I’d like to choose one that fits my place style. However, the guides I’ve found have wildly different stats on what the familiars can do. I can’t make a choice without accurate information.

For example, two guides I’ve found:

https://jaimas.livejournal.com/93579.html?

https://nwn.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Familiars

One says the Bat gets “rather poor damage reduction”, the other claims it’s 10/+X, which is better than any other familiar. Well which is it??

One says Pixies get sneak attack, the other doesn’t. Again, only one can be true.

Or: is there a way for me just to look at the code of NWNEE so I can just look myself?

Sure, I could start a test wizard and cheat level it with each familiar to see how it advances, but I think we all know that the in game descriptions are often bugged and wrong. Or maybe there’s a console command that tells you what the game actually thinks the familiars stats, and feats, and abilities, etc all are?

[allenayen96]

I know that Pixie gets sneak attack. A Pixie is a Rogue and is always at your caster level.

[Wizard of Woz]

The pixie is really the only useful one. If you are basing your play around your familiar you will be disappointed. They are useful for about the first lvl or so, then they just tend to get in the way after that.

[mormegil27]

Ok, I'll give the pixie a try and see. I'm not counting on the familiar to save my bacon, I just wanted to know what they can do.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

Pixie gets sneak attack, but it doesn't scale from level. It's always +1d6. Pixie is basically a pocket-thief for utility purposes.

Panther is your combat thief (and until lvl 40 is always 1 level higher than you), with full sneak attack scaling, powerful attacks, evasion, etc. But no utility skills besides scouting.

Bat has high damage reduction but doesn't offer much (also it's generally useless due to enemy scaling keeping their weapons largely in step with the bat's by-pass level, so it's usefulness defensively is extremely inconsistent). Fear abilities tend to be more annoying than useful.

Raven is ok, but it's status effect chance is super-low and hardly ever procs it.

Eyeball actually has the highest damage reduction (topping out at 25/+4) but doesn't get it till later (and is pretty meh until around level 20 as most of it's eye rays aren't available till 15+).

Also a lot of high level familars (30+) are bugged and need a 3rd party patch to fix them. (they lose a bunch of their feats/weapons and become basically useless in combat).

Not all of them are affected, but some are.

If you want a combat pet, Panther is solid early game (also good late game if you're fighting stuff that can be sneak-attacked).

Pixie if you want a utility rogue without needing a rogue. (though I usually just make a Wand of Knock and Wand of Find Trap to save time (make sure to enable the module option for crafted wands to always have 50 charges, since you're getting screwed on creation price if you don't. You pay full creation price in gold/xp but instead of getting the full 50 charges new wands are supposed to have, you get 1d20+caster-level (max of 50))).

Imp is a decent early option too since it's got regeneration and decent damage reduction while having a poison-on-hit attack and decent damage. Ends up with a decent amount of HP.

Late game, 20+ Eyeball is really good, as it's the tankiest of the pets and also attacks purely from long range due to having like 70+ eye beam charges to zap the enemy with, so it's less likely to get smashed by high level enemies.