ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Case 1:

Escort in old forest, portal somewhere southeast of escort. The only path goes quite a ways straight north before turning east, but escort doesn't follow at all. I dig an intersection into the n-s path about 10 steps above escort, but she still doesn't follow. I figure maybe she will follow when i move towards the portal (assuming maybe a max distance was set somewhere) with a backup plan of returning and digging a straight path after i found the portal, but apparently when you get out of range the escort fails (again, an assumption), because at some point the quest HAD failed and I don't think there were monsters to kill her.

So i suppose path finding may need a bit of an improvement

Case 2:

Portal on final old forest level. When i encounter the boss, my escort turns hostile.
I'm pretty sure i did not fire my sun burst to cause that.

P.S. Apropos allies turning hostile, that happened to me when i used sun burst with the kidnapped merchant in the area of effect. IMO allies should be a bit more tolerant towards friendly fire, i would have healed him afterwards anyway

Part 1: Escort had targeted something, and was trying to kill it. The way to unstick the poor bugger is to check the escort's tooltip, see what it's trying to kill, and then go kill that. Probably while you were digging, whatever th'bugger was after and the escort had a friendly meeting the escort didn't survive. Could have also stepped on some traps and died.

The escort doesn't die if you get to far away, only if something kills it. When you went away, said something killed it.

To a large extent, the escorts are intentionally stupid. Their bonuses are very much unnecessary to win the game, and you're expected to lose at least a few (Tends toward 2-3 out of 9, in my experience. Sometimes more, rarely less.) by the time you run out of escorts. Keeping the heavily concussed idiots alive is part of the challenge of the nice lil'extra the escort quests are, heh.

Part 2: Most not-mindless allies (Read: Not a golem. I forget if necrosummons turn on you, hum.) will turn hostile if they take any damage from you. Most harmless (i.e. no number damage, even 0!) stuff that hits allies will not annoy them. So that's not a bug, but you're right in that it might be fair to give a little more leeway to friendly fire incidents. That might be a good thing to suggest over in ideas

Part 1: Ok, i didn't check the escort's target, but there was a LONG path and nothing in sight..I went quite a way before actually tunneling and the moron did not move more than 1-2 steps past the bend into said path.

Part 2: The part where i DID cause damage was only a P.S., i'm pretty sure i did not fire my sun burst when the escort turned hostile in my encounter with Wrathroot.

Sometimes the targeting seems to flip out a lil' and the escort will target stuff it can't see. Usually on the other side of whatever bit of landscape the fellow seems to be stuck on.

Probably related to stuff on the other end of the map/inside unopened vaults occasionally deciding to hate you when you step on a level. That behavior'll be squelched eventually, but until then...

Damage is the only way to turn allies hostile, really, s'far as I can remember. There might be a few debuff effects that can do it, but stuff like blind won't -- I can't recall anything a celestial would have that could do it. They won't turn hostile of their own volition. Fellow could have stepped on a lingering searing light patch or somethin', though. That'll flip their switch just as well as direct damage.

Since when do escorts turn hostile? I remember that in b31 or 32 they didn't. I played an Anorithil, and sometimes I did hit my escort with a twilight surge, and a level 3+ sunburst (if I recall the name correctly of the blinding talent), (and healed it back up with bathe in light), to kill / blind a mob around me, and it never turned hostile.

Frumple wrote: There might be a few debuff effects that can do it, but stuff like blind won't -- I can't recall anything a celestial would have that could do it.

The celestial sun burst actually causes light damage in addition to blindness.

Frumple wrote: Fellow could have stepped on a lingering searing light patch or somethin', though. That'll flip their switch just as well as direct damage.

Again, I cannot check right now because TE4 runs unbearably slow on my work computer, but the searing light residue used to not cause hostility.

I've hit an escort in this beta with the two-handed ability Death Dance, and while it brought the escort down to 1-3% hp, they did not turn hostile and managed to keep them alive for the reward as well.

An escort survived a Death Dance? Wow.

I was pleasantly surprised too.