Will the AI use Greater Powers? I want to give a Flame Atronach a powerful Fire Shield spell that I can guarantee to be only one use, without having to play around with magicka and spell cost, and risk ending up with a creature that has much more magicka than I intended (and not use the special spell). I don't recall ever seeing an NPC use a racial ability, so I'm not terribly confident.

Also, Wraithguard has a Shield effect, but when the player equips it, the shield animation always goes away; on other items with Shield, it stays. Why does this happen? It's actually desirable; I'd prefer for my Flame Atronachs to not be encased in that swirling Fire Shield animation, if at all possible.

Edited for clarity.

I can't answer directly, but you can have force the NPC to cast it on the player using a script.

It would an on-Self ability.

as long as the power has a cost of magicka, i.e. not 0, it will cast it at the start of combat. i think someone did an extensive report on casting behaviors on this forum. otherwise, you can script it to cast a spell once too.

as for the shield, i'm not sure.

Alright, thanks. I'll test it with the ability's cost at 1 magicka.

No svck luck. I fought a few Flame Atronachs, and none of them used their Fire Shield power. Any suggestions?

i wonder if powers are limited to npcs and npc-like creatures. i'll test that out.

I modified the Power so that it's a spell, at greatly reduced Magicka cost (Fire Shield, 50pts for 30s on Self; base cost is normally 225, I adjusted it to 40). They still don't cast it. :meh:

I also tried to change it to an ability, but the Fire Shield animation looks pretty terrible in conjunction with their particle effects. Setting this as an ability would be my first choice, but only if the animation can be turned off.