NPC Pets: I need your opinion

[Angelox]

Originally Posted by fathernitwit

yes, NPCs cast pets because they have the pet spell in their spell set. The best course of action would be to make a new spell set for each pet class which has the default list as a parent list, and move all the pet spells into that list. Then assign that list to each NPC which should get a pet.

This would take a bit of work but I think it would be worth it. I think PEQ would be interested in this work if you do it, so if you want to contribute it, make sure you log your SQL updates somehow. PEQ editor would log all these actions if you used it.

I don't have these records, but I can explain to you how I did this, it's fast and easy, just took me a while to "dream it up";
first , I dumped the table/rows I would be re-numbering into an sql file - http://www.nahunta.org/~angelox/files/DefaultSpells.sql
Then, if all npc spells are still same in PEQ, this will work, else you have to fix the numbers:

UPDATE npc_spells_entries SET id=id+1614 WHERE (npc_spells_id>=1 AND npc_spells_id<=12);
UPDATE npc_spells_entries SET npc_spells_id=npc_spells_id+212 WHERE (id>=1615 AND id<=2725);
UPDATE npc_spells SET id=id+212 WHERE (id>=1 AND id<=12);

Now, since my defaults have been moved to the higher numbers, I have the original rows clear, so I can re-insert the original rows i dumped in DefaultSpells.sql. Next, I delete the pets from the first group of defaults;
http://www.nahunta.org/~angelox/files/SpellsDelete.sql
Now all I had left to do was rename the new groups of spellsets i made into something like "DefaultPetWizardSpells".

[John Adams]

Cool, it was annoying seeing every mage-based NPC in Nexus with pets flying around. I did exactly that to test, by switching their class to something else and removing their Spell set. No pets.

Angelox, not sure if anyone mentioned, but in Live, I seem to recall certain times when you would aggro (hit) an NPC that was a pet class, and Poof - a pet would step out of the shadows (like insta-cast or something). Not sure that's important, but it may be why visually speaking we do not see pets just because an NPC is spawned.

Maybe?

[Angelox]

Originally Posted by John Adams

Cool, it was annoying seeing every mage-based NPC in Nexus with pets flying around. I did exactly that to test, by switching their class to something else and removing their Spell set. No pets.

Angelox, not sure if anyone mentioned, but in Live, I seem to recall certain times when you would aggro (hit) an NPC that was a pet class, and Poof - a pet would step out of the shadows (like insta-cast or something). Not sure that's important, but it may be why visually speaking we do not see pets just because an NPC is spawned.

Maybe?

Magician class has a pet spell that does just that - probably what you saw. When the pet is not in "fight" mode, it turns invisible.