Pet fizzling, wasted mana usage, monster AI issues
See this post for a general proposal for increasing pet control, that would help in many cases.
- If a player casts "Bless" on their pet, or another pet which is a magic using pet, that pet will repeatedly fizzle, apparently attempting to cast bless on itself... A pet will repeatedly fail to cast certain beneficial spells on itself when under the affect of same effect from player originated spells. You get the fizzle sound and the pet wastes a move trying to cast something that will fail.
- Pets and monsters will repeatedly cast spells when already under the effect of that spell. For instance, monsters and pets that have high EI and Magery will cast bless on themselves several times in the span of a few seconds. These spells should only be cast if not already under the effect.
- Various special moves appear to get used repeatedly in a short time window, when the effect is already active. This appears to waste mana, as well as moves. A future post may elaborate on which moves are impacted.
- When monsters use certain area impacting spells, like Wither, they will cast this even when no targets are in range of the spell (e.g. wither a few tiles around the monster).
There are probably some pretty contained changes that could be made that would significantly beef up the monster AI. We have power creep with player equipment, which is fine, but there should be similiar offsets in monster capabilities too.