Custom Hirelings

[w0rstn4m33v3r]

Let's face it, playing a class that can't self heal sucks. I grinded out 16 levels of pure fighter either waiting around for a LFM to pop up or trying to solo with a cleric hireling, which dies easily on elite, keeps me nervous on hard, and sometimes does something stupid and dies on normal.

So I suggest a way to make your own custom hirelings that will level with your character, you can equip them with decent gear and specialize them any way you want. The idea wouldn't be too hard to implement.

Offer an "Eternal Scroll of Summon Hireling" in the DDO store for ### TP.
When you first use this item it binds to your character/account like a companion pet, and can be summoned in the same way.

When your character gains a level, so does the hireling. You can talk to a new NPC "Hireling Quartermaster" to choose which class/feats/spells/etc you want your hireling to have.

For the gear just create a 3rd tab on the inventory page that shows its stats and equipment, much like the companion tab, which you can slot and unslot as you please. This way when my fighter is running a solo quest and pulls a BtA/BtC caster item, or duplicates, there's more use than just vendoring it.

Give us the option to toggle AI skills on or off, it would be great if my cleric hireling would automatically cast blade barrier when he's set to aggressive, instead of smacking enemies for 10 damage.

To counter inflation due to people not buying hireling scrolls, you can give it the option to give your hirelings a stack of healing/spell point potions, which cost more than most hireling scrolls, but would give them the option to use the potions.

[KilzCasualKillers]

This or something like it would make life much easier for people without a regular playgroup. Another idea would be to allow you to use your other characters as hirelings and choose which abilities/spells they could use. I'd also like to see some sort of custom command interface so you could program the AI yourself. That would stop a lot of the dumber stuff the AI makes hirelings do/when they'd do them. For instance, you could program them to stay out of combat and heal you when your hit points are down to 50% or whatever.

[w0rstn4m33v3r]

This or something like it would make life much easier for people without a regular playgroup. Another idea would be to allow you to use your other characters as hirelings and choose which abilities/spells they could use. I'd also like to see some sort of custom command interface so you could program the AI yourself. That would stop a lot of the dumber stuff the AI makes hirelings do/when they'd do them. For instance, you could program them to stay out of combat and heal you when your hit points are down to 50% or whatever.

I also had the idea of using other characters as hirelings, but with a twist, you can "hire" your character out to other players, etc. I figured that's a little too much to ask for right now and would settle for plain old custom hirelings.

As for the programmable AI, I had a similar idea but either have preset toggles which would take up a lot of of interface space but would take less code to program. I think your idea would make for better hireling customization but would require more coding and player input/experience to work with.