Heal me!

Terrorble

I have an encounter where my boss NPC will expend some of it's HP to animate corpses, but only if it has >50% HP. It can heal itself via its sorcerer spell vampiric touch, or the animated corpses have cure critical wounds as a special ability.

Of course, the problem is that it doesn't seem to use vampiric touch over any of its other spells and the animated corpses never attempt to heal it. The boss NPC's racial type is Outsider (so it should be identified as a viable healing target).

Generally speaking, how would I direct the NPCs to do what I want?

JFK

I think you'd be better off posting this in the Scripting forum. In brief, you'd probably want to have a script that fires when your boss NPC takes damage, checking its HP. When appropriate, cast the spell you want (Vampiric Touch) via script. Same for the animated corpses: have the script on the boss, that forces the corpses to cast Cure Critical Wounds and decrement it from their abilities or whatever.

I'd ask @JuliusBorisov or another moderator to move this to Scripting.

-JFK

Terrorble

Thanks for moving this. Apparently I didn't realize where I was posting.

OK, so feeding ActionCastSpellAtObject into AssignCommand in my EndCombatRound section is working well. The boss will demand they heal it and try to suck as much life out of you using vampiric touch until it is >50% hp.

Now, if I want it to use a creature ability (like psionic mass concussion) or scroll/wand. What's the approach?

Proleric

Monster abilities like Psionic Mass Concussion are added on the Special Abilities tab of the creature template in the toolset.

Feats and other talents which are not available there can be added to the creature skin item properties.

Wands can be added to the creature's inventory. IIRC scrolls work, too, but I'm hazy on that.

The standard AI will use all of the above when it sees fit. At lower levels, at least, both special abilities and wands tend to be used in preference to other actions, but that's not guaranteed.

A more detailed scripted approach depends on exactly how you want the creature to behave.