What familiar/ Animal Companion do you use?
britishj
Member Posts: 44
Generally interested in what familiar or animal companion people use with their characters. I personally use the beholder for its array of spells and roleplaying purposes.
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Sometimes it's like having actually a party of 8. At least the panther is from the Sandrah mod, it joined her when I visited Waterdeep.
In older BGT games I had other NPCs who had animal companions but I haven't seen any of them in EE yet - and I forgot who they were.
1-15 fire mephit, it is the most usefull familiar early because he is immune to fire spells so he can be used as a meat shield and you can aim your burning hands and fireballs on him without losing him
16-35 pixie, make up for rogue skills, opens every lock, finds and disarms every trap and casts improved invisibility
36+ beholder, once I acquire rogue skills via usage of skills saving and taking rogue at high level I no longer need pixie so I take the little beholder as he is strongest dps familiar out of all of them and has also several crowd controll abilities
as for animal: bear is strongest on all levels, but here Im roleplaying, I'm picking badger and pretend he is a weasel.
The Pixie is my second choice but she is discarded after I find the spell knock.
All familiars are good at disarming traps. They run over traps and you feed them to make them better.
I love summoning undead to come to the party as well.
Palemasters (my favourite class) don't get to re-choose their familiars at each level so I find it important to choose right. The beholder is fun though but a ball that dies at low levels.
I don't play wizards and sorcerers a lot, but the Eyeball is my absolute favorite familiar because its just so silly, and it seems to have a contradictory role to what you'd probably want in a familiar, seeing how you're already ranged damage and its a poor tank that can't unlock doors or disarm traps or provide much of any utility outside of (as far as I'm aware) poor DC's that most enemies can reasonably save. Seeing the developers comment on that dwarven wizard's Eyeball in the recent livestream made me chuckle a bit. Hell Hound is a close second because I think its badass, but I don't play enough evil characters to warant using it for any roleplay reasons. (The Eyeball may be chaotic evil but I see it as the Dodo of the familiars)
Side note, but going by the 2da table, it seems the Panther was supposed to be a Crag Cat. I should probably make it one in my next round at redoing the familiars.
I usually think of it as female and name it Ariel, after one of my former cats that's passed away, or sometimes think of it as male and name it Blue, or Blue Cat, after my current male cat.
I also like to keep a dire tiger summoned and name it Leia, after another female cat I had that had similar markings to the dire animals. Usually, all my dire animals of any level are "Leia", and I just think of her as growing bigger and getting stronger with experience. Except the dire wolf, who is usually "Rufie", "Rufus", or "Wolfie", and I never use a spider (yuck!), instead keeping Rufie through those levels until I can get the bear.
I usually name the bear "Ursa", or just simply "Bear", and it goes back to being my cat "Leia" when it becomes a tiger.
I don't usually name the elementals, because you get a different random one every time you summon, but sometimes I call the air elemental "Jeannie" if I get her, because I think she looks like Barbara Eden from "I Dream of Jeannie", with the ponytail and crossed arms. She looks like Jeannie blinking and casting genie spells.
My absolute favorite would be Summon Monster I. "Hey Badgy, I think those monsters have ranged knockdown beams. Check that out for me." One flat badger later, "Yep, thanks Badgy." I've given that badger a lot of abuse over the years. Mostly from summoning him between me and monsters to give myself time to flee.