My companions never consume charges on any items. Be it batteries/charges on a tech item, or charges on a Staff of Healing, they never decrement. Is that a known and unfixed bug?
To my knowledge, bullets and arrows are consumed normally by followers. Waromon is wont to eat every arrow one picks up, and Vollinger probably pops bullets like vitamins. Never playing a magickal party, I never actually noticed whether or not my companions used charges during combat, or otherwise. Plus, I never gave companions a charged staff or tesla gun. Always saved the fun stuff for myself.
I've noticed this before. Give a character a staff of healing and they can use the spells without using charges, and without even having to equip the staff! Very useful bug to use with your ogre bodyguards.
Aren't there some staves with charges of harmful spells? Infinitely spamming mages sound pretty intimidating.
I suggest trying out the Shocking Dagger (general shop clerk in Ashbury, 3 Bolts of Lightning) and the Screaming Scimitar (magickal smith in Tarant, 5 Fireflashes).
I'm surprised this is still unfixed. It's a fairly major part of the game. I use charged items extensively with companions, as the casters are mostly worthless otherwise. My last playthrough I noticed this with Sebastian, having given him regenerating jacket that never ran out. This playthrough I noticed Geoffrey had used his Staff of Healing on me about 100 times. It was really unbalancing until I realized what was happened and removed it.
The fact that it remains unfixed means either: A) Drog never noticed this problem, or B) Drog was aware of the problem, but the fix for it was either technically difficult or impossible without some kind of deep fix or something. At any rate, complaining that your magickal party is "unbalancing" in Arcanum is sorta like complaining that water is wet.
It's not A. I agree that a PC fully specced into magic (I'm not) is overpowered. I disagree that a magical companion is overpowered, since the frequency at which they actually cast spells appropriate and useful for the situation is low. Geoffrey's main task seems to be inflicting critical misses on himself. That's why I like to have him equip a staff, since healing spells are the exception.
Yeah, I suppose you're right on that one. Limiting yourself to support spells helps, but with a lot of melee/dodge companions things like the entire Temporal College gets pretty ridiculous pretty fast. *(English grammar sidenote: Is correct grammar in the previous sentence "things like the entire Temporal College gets pretty ridiculous" or "things like the entire Temporal College get pretty ridiculous"?) (And is proper closure of a parenthetical statement with a quote ending in a question like this "quote?") or "quote"?) ) (Ahhh, I should have used brackets in there, noooooooooooooo) Crazy that after everything stuff like this still crops up.
I am fairly sure this is reproducible, feel free to check it out. However it should be stated that I think my install is jacked, somehow. I have Arcanum, the official patch, the final UAP with extra content & alternative lizard men, Hi res patch, some additional portraits, HQ sound in .wav mode and the beta content mod. Additionally, the character I am now playing has been modified with Arcanum Edit. The editing was just to reallocate a skill point or two. The two of these that I would tend to suspect are beta content or the editor, but honestly I have no idea. I have noted various symptoms in this playthrough, but some current examples are: haste symbol seems to be permanent on Geoffrey (and I have no idea how it got there in the first place), first noticed after a few random encounters while traveling, and some strange behavior in the Throgg quest. I chose the combative option, and after killing the guards everyone just mills around the scene of the fight. No dialog options for Throgg, no apparent resolution, he just gives a generic greeting such as "Good day to you". Now, this may all be normal, but the strange graphical glitches on the surviving orcs aren't...I don't think.
