Trying to create a follower that will heal and buff the player, occaisionally use some attack spells, and mostly avoid entering melee.

Idealy this follower would:

• Heal the player
  
• Engage the enemies with magic spells
  
• If engaged in melee switch to their sword, switching back to spells once out of danger

What I have tried:

• Setting their combat style to humanmagic
  
• Setting their aggression to unaggressive
  
• Making a new class for stat and skill weight's based of a desctruction mage
  
• Not giving them any weapons
  
• Giving them a staff of heal other
  
• Setting them to cautious

I have tried all of these things, and combinations of them, I have leveled them up to high levels and taken them out and allowed my character to get beat on, ultimately it always ends the same:

• It only heals itself
  
• It prefers to attack with a weapon
  
• It NEVER casts a spell on me, even allowing me to die
  
• Let's not forget that ****ing bow...even the mods that take them out don't seem to always do the trick!

If anyone out there has any experience with working with actors and AI in anyway that could lend itself to my needs I would be very greatful.
Thank you for reading.

Have you tried to create your own http://www.creationkit.com/CombatStyle (under Miscellaneous->CombatStyle)? Also I think in order to get the follower to heal the player you might need a script. I haven't stumbled across anything else that would enable you to precisely control what an actor does when during combat.

As far as I get it the combat style influences weapon choice under offensive aspects only by modifiyng the damage output of weapon classes and the final choice is made based upon damage output. This means if that actor has a weapon that does more damage than the best offensive spell you need a combatstyle with a stronger multiplier to spells to increase the spells damage output so the actor chooses it for combat.

That is something to chew on, however, I only ever give them the single weapon, and I never see them holding up an offhand spell, so I have my doubts. Going to go dive into that combat style thing now

Thanks so much for a reply.. other mod communities have been incredibly unhelpful.

bump

As far as I can tell from my very limited experience, NPCs will not cast many kinds of spells:

Will cast: Destruction, Conjuration, Heal (self only), Alteration (eg. *flesh, *Ward--self only).
Won't case: Illusion, Heal (other), anything else

I created an NPC with high Illusion and gave her every illusion spell in the CK (and no others) and she never cast a single one of them. I then removed those and gave her a bunch of Destruction, Alteration, Conjuration and she cast all of those perfectly. None of the NPCs have Illusion in the CK iirc; conclusion: they can't cast Illusion.

If you check the 'use info' on spells, you'll see that many spells are never added to NPCs (and I suspect a couple of the ones that are were added but don't actually work). In order to get NPCs to cast these spells, you'll have to script them. They don't have any native AI to tell them when to do it, so you'll have to provide them with it.

Jason Parker already explained how the weighting of different attack types helps to determine which attack they use.

Thanks for the great reply, I had pretty much scrapped the project due to this, but I may have a friend who can figure out the scripts as he is better with that than I.