THe issue lies with trying to get the follower to cast spells on the player. I can give my created follower just one spell healother, yet it is never cast.

I have had a look at various packages and combat styles and even created custom pacakages and styles which are set up to use magic, but this doesn't work.

Any advice would be most welcome

Im not at my pc to check, but you can select class for the npc. Is there a healer one in there somewhere?

I had a look at the classes, but from what i can see, these only determine skill and attribute weights.

UPDATE - I have successfully managed to get my follower cast healother, however he casts it on me before he becomes a follower.

How did you manage to do it?

Also, have you selected his info like Helps Allies, is Cowardly etc?

I think itll be tricky to make him basically ignore you when not a follower.

I copied the WhiterunTempleCastHealingSpellFarmer package, and changed the target to player.
This makes the follower cast healother on the player.
I put a condition in that checks for combat, which prevents the npc from casting healother before becoming a follower.
I have also tried adding the new package to the Alias Package Data in Follower ReferenceAlias
Unfortunately still can't get him to heal when he becomes a follower at all

How about also adding a condition that checks the rank of the follower faction?

- Hypno

Hmm that's a strange one. Hopefully someone else can shed some light

The strange thing is, i can add flames to the spell list and he will happily cast it in combat without any modification to the follower so i am assuming the failure to cast a healing spell as a follower is not a package issue

Hey this guy made a healing companion.

Healer Companion - Natalie (I can't post links at the moment)

Try to ask him, he made some type of custom script.

Hope that helps.

I had some success with making the follower a form of Battle Priest. I created a two magic effects, the first was hostile and did minimal damage to the target. The second had an area heal effect.
Conditions were set on the heal effect so that it didn't apply to hostile targets. When the follower cast the new spell at enemy targets, friendly targets, in the area were then healed.

You're going to have to deal with custom scripts, not AI Packages

AI packages are (usually) automatically disabled after they are recruited (have a CurrentFollowerFaction rank of 1). The best course of action would be to use custom scripts for them to heal.

Or if you want, let them use Grand Healing. I've seen my NPC do it, but only when he's almost dead so maybe not a reliable one.

Thanks Denmax, i was beginning to think this maybe the case. Although, i am going to investigate further the use of casting at a target and use an area effect attached to the spell.
I've had a look at a script from one of the mods where a follower can heal, and from my limited knowledge, it would seem that this effectively causes the follower to force cast a healing spell.

An idea that has stemmed from this, is to have a script attached to a followers damaging spells, which evaluates the players health and if below a threshold causes certain healing/support spells to be cast.

As an update, at last i have success to the inital goal of creating a follower that acts in a support role
I have a simple follower that casts the Heal Other spell on the player whilst in combat.
So far this uses no scripting and relies purely on the use of procedure trees within the combat override package.

heilghast, unless your goal is to not use scripts, I'd use both! I'm doing a lot of stuff for my follower and I am using both scripts and AI Packages. I'm most comfortable with scripting (as I'm an experienced programmer) but I've actually found some things are best done with AI Packages, sometimes I have to do it in script. I've found that setting up the conditions for the AI Packages have to be done in script, but then I can pull of some nice affects in the AI Package.

If you're having trouble with scripts, just post. I'll be happy to help if I can understand your request and I know many others are too!

Thanks Sollar, i appreciate that very much, however the idea wasn't to purposely exclude the use of scripts. I was beginning to think it was hardcoded by Bethesda not to allow followers cast healing or support spells on the player without the intervention of scripts .I am however glad to have proved myself wrong.
When it comes to scripting, having never looked at creating any scripts before the CK came out, i consider myself a complete novice however the more i read about other peoples scripting problems here and the more i script myself, the more i understand.

As i have altered the alias combat override, i may need at some point to force my new support follower into a new alias within the FollowerDialogue, however i will need to test this with existing followers first.