Maia Feature Request: Pick Up Ishiza

[Unreason]

Things I like:

• Rangers. They're good at ranged DPS and I like ranged DPS characters.
• Maia. Her commentary is funny and her personal quest is interesting.
• Ishiza as a character. Stinkfeathers is a good bird, despite only liking me for my meat.

 

Things I do not like:

• Microing Animal Companions. If I could take the option to have a Ranger with no Animal Compaion or force every Ranger to be a Ghost Heart, I would. Unfortunately, Maia is a Gunhawk.
• Bonded Grief. I especially dislike Bonded Grief when my party gets AOE'd and there's very little I can do to stop an Animal Companion from dying and tanking my Ranger's effectiveness.
• Ishiza as a combatant. His damage and durability are just not high enough to be useful, especially on POTD. He regularly gets shot to death or blown up with the rest of the party, and the only way to keep him alive consistently is to send him to the furthest corner away from enemies when the fighting starts.

 

What I want:

• The ability for Maia to pick up Ishiza to remove him from active play. Nothing extravagant, just a dialogue option that stores/retrieves Ishiza from Maia's pack like the Familiars from Baldur's Gate.

 

I noticed how badly I wanted this when I was screwing around on Poko Kohara and Maia's mentioned putting Ishiza in her pack because of the poor weather conditions. I'm really tired of Ishiza getting dunked on by enemy ranged attacks and AOE and I'd like the ability to put the bird away so she's not such a pain to have along.

 

I tried modifying the files to remove her Bird Companion ability as part of her progression and, surprisingly, it worked perfectly. Her dialogue doesn't experience any bugs without Ishiza there (except for a missing portrait), so such a feature wouldn't cause any major hiccups for her conversations. Hell, you wouldn't even need to record new dialogue - the bark line she uses for Poko Kohara would be perfect for the pick-up, and her line demonstrating her "come" command would be perfect for retrieval.

[Manveru123]

I set Ishiza to Passive and keep her away from combat. That's the only way to make her useful.

[Androoh]

Would be good if the ranger pets had talents based on passive activity, so they don't have to always have to directly attack enemies.

For example, lets say Ishiza is flanking an enemy and at range, Maia receives a perception bonus?

[Unreason]

I set Ishiza to Passive and keep her away from combat. That's the only way to make her useful.

I straight-up modified the character files so Maia never has the Bird Companion ability in the first place. It worked wonders.

 

 

Would be good if the ranger pets had talents based on passive activity, so they don't have to always have to directly attack enemies.

 

For example, lets say Ishiza is flanking an enemy and at range, Maia receives a perception bonus?

I think overhauling the Ranger class is a bit outside of the scope of the discussion. While I also feel that Rangers need a little something, right now I'm focused on having a method to put away Ishiza so I don't have to use a mod to get rid of him.

[Incendax]

On 6/29/2018 at 2:21 AM, Unreason said:

I tried modifying the files to remove her Bird Companion ability as part of her progression and, surprisingly, it worked perfectly.

How did you do this? I'm familiar with modding Unity, but I don't know what file(s) I should be changing.