Companions

azophael

Here a few things I noticed:

1. The dancing shield is useless. Most of the time it just stands around and does nothing. I get attacked, it stands there. I attack, it stands there. What's the use of this companion if he doesn't defend?

2. Pathfinding of companions. Terrible, especially when ascending/descending stairs. I always have to dismiss and resummon them.

3. Sometimes it's impossible to move companions to the idle bag. Neither through drag and drop nor through pressing the make idle button. And I'm not in combat and the companions are not in training. Relogging helps.

4. It would be useful if you could tell the companion who to attack. Do they attack the npc your character attacks. I want to be able to tell them to take out the casters while I am occupied with the melee or vice versa without them running around and changing targets mid combat.

gwalahad

only tried the cleric thus far, anf havent come across issue 2. and the others dont really apply to it. but one thing that does annoy me, is everytime i get to a boss. without fail, it'll stand back at range healing me(as i want) but if adds injure it below about 50% it will then charge in and melee the boss and die, and then i cant heal, and i die. everytime it's heavily injured

grimloon

I've now seen issue 2 on multiple characters, particularly in the Orc Barracks area in the Tower District (my characters are all <35 so far). I've used the fighter, cleric and dire wolf companions with exactly the same issue on each - they can go downstairs but can't find a way back up them. The pathfinding algorithm seems to be a touch borked at the moment.

With regards to the OPs 4, while target select functionality would be great (attack/guard/designated target would be enough initially) I realise that would require a large degree of code change. It would, however, be nice to just know the target weighting for each companion type so we know how they'll respond as a rule.

kalizaar

The Cleric seems to be active in just about every battle, although many times that involves standing toe to toe with whatever I'm fighting and searching out every trap and red circle on the ground.

The Wizard companion seems to participate in combat most of the time. Once in a while he'll stand there pointing and laughing at me as I'm dying.

The other companions will participate in combat maybe 25-50% of the time and the rest of the time just stand around slack-jawed and drooling.

All companions like to get stuck at various boundary lines (between rooms, between changes in terrain, etc.) and stairs are avoided at all costs unless there are mobs up or downstairs that I don't want to engage in which case 100% of the time they'll rush at super speed to engage in smacking their faces against the enemies. If there is a locked door with enemies on the other side they will also rush as fast as they can to engage the door, sometimes managing to push hard enough to meld and finally phase through it to engage on the other side.