Hello everyone.

My problem is as follows:

I made a new NPC and fitting Race for a huge Fox. I tried to give it a spell. It has the spell, it has enough magicka to use it (5 times before it runs out) and it has the slot (voice) to equip it. IN the Combat Style i made it favor magic as much as Unarmed, so it should WANT to use it too.

Now my problem is:

It keeps attacking me with claws and bites, but it never ever uses it's spell that it's supposed to use. It is supposed to be a bossfight, but this way it gets much less interesting, does anyone know what i could do to make it start using my spell? I can't figure it out.

It seems like NPCs that have no casting animation have difficulty casting. I had enough trouble with this on my Fire Guardian boss (which uses the Wolf model) that I resorted to writing its spellcasting AI in Papyrus tied to animation events.

hm....i don't have a lot of knowledge in papyrus yet i think, do you think you could help me a bit there, or maybe give me the code you made so that i can put the spells with properties or something similar?

Thank you in advance

Bump. Someone help me?

You said that you made your npc favour unarmed damage as much as magic. I assume you used the Equipment Score Mults, and set Unarmed the same as Magic. One thing to note in regards to these settings

Equipment Score Mults - the higher the number, the more likely the actor will be to use that weapon. This number is multiplied into the damage output of the attack. So if you have a melee attack that has a small amount of damage, and a spells that do a lot, you have to 'jack' this mult up very high on the melee attack for the actor to prefer melee attacks over magic.
Quoted from http://www.creationkit.com/Combat_Style

If i understand this correctly if your unarmed attack deals more damage than your magic attack, even though you set the ESM equal, unarmed will be preferred as this is just a multiplier.

I don't know whether your npc is capable of casting, but if it is, you might want to look at creating a usemagic package as a combat override.

Well the magic is much stronger, so that shouldn't be it. But i figure that a fox is not able to cast.

If you really want your actor to use a magic attack, you can give it to your actor as an attack spell. I haven't checked whether an attack spell uses magicka. However, if you go to the Attack Data tab in Actor, you can then add an attack spell to an attack event.

You do this by

• Highlighting the attack event
  
• Click override data
  
• Select the required spell in the Attack Spell box

I can't say for certain whether this causes a spell cast effect to play, but it is a way in which your actor can use a spell as its attack, albeit tied to a melee attack. If you add a condition to the magic effect, based on a random percentage, the spell then doesn't cast on every attack.

If i use this variant will it still take magicka? It was supposed to be able to do it twice or three times before it ran out, thus beeing unable to use it.

bump

It would seem spells cast this way do not use magicka, however you could use this work around.

Use a condition on the magic effect which checks for the magicka value of the actor.
Optionally use a random chance for the magic effect to be applied
Attach a script to the magic effect which damages the magicka value of the actor.

The way I handled it for my Fire Guardian was to set a timer that updates once a second, with a counter that increments on each update. When the counter gets above a certain number, it sets a Boolean that is checked to allow it to cast the spell. When the spell is cast, it resets the Boolean and the counter.

Checking the actor's Magicka value on a timer and using DamageAV("Magicka",value) as heilghast suggests is also a good idea.

Thanks i will try it this way.