Pause Game

The game will auto-pause if a character is poisoned or is near-death. If the GUI bars are hidden then they will be automatically recalled.

Bards

Bards will use whatever songs are available to them to the greatest effect depending on threat level and party state. They do not sing continuously through a battle so that they can attack and defend as needed.

Clerics

The Icewind Dale clerics are smart enough to register when a party member is killed and will automatically cast Raise Dead or Resurrection if either is available. No character is ever deliberately completely healed (although it does happen depending on how the calls are registered) as this is considered to be wasteful of healing spells. However, you may also get the opposite effect where you think that a character should be healed but the clerics are ignoring him/her; this occurs mostly with low-level parties and happens when the number of hitpoints of that character fall outside the boundaries of the healing routines. Manually casting a healing spell on that character will usually move the character's hitpoints within the automatic scripting boundaries and the clerics will react correctly again. Healers will heal themselves first and then concentrate on the most injured. Potion use is restricted to combat only as they are considered too precious to use otherwise.

Druids

Shapeshifting is triggered by threatlevel if the druid is out of ranged ammunition - this means that shapeshifting may occur even if the druid is attacking with a staff. The druid will shift back after ten seconds of no combat – usually just in time to start healing. There is a huge bug in IWD2 with regard to Innate Abilities: they do not respond to a HaveSpell() check. Bioware state that this was an oversight on their part. To get round this problem, a series of checks is carried out to determine if the Druid is of a level to have the requisite innate ability and also how many times a shapeshift may be called during one day. This brought to light another bug in IWD2; the trigger event PartyRested() is also broken, so it could not be used to determine when to reset the shapeshift script. Instead, a hard-wired time-of-day has been used (05.00 hours) as in general, most parties will be asleep at this time. If you aren't, then you'll get back the Druid innate abilities FOC - but there's not much I can do about that...

Hide'n'Detect

When not in combat, all classes that have some level of Hide will automatically attempt to hide. As soon as they are hidden, they will also begin to attempt to detect traps (Search) but will hide again just before they come out of shadows. If the PC's hitpoints are below 75%, they will stay out of shadows to allow clerics to heal them.

Trolls

Mages will automatically go after downed trolls to kill them with Flame Arrow, Melf's Minute Meteors or Melf's Acid Arrow, or the various single-hit wands such as Wand of Fire/Wand of Acid. If they have none of these spells or items then they will revert to the far-less party-friendly Burning Hands/Aganazzar's Scorcher and their equivalent wands. Clerics will also go after downed trolls, using the Produce Fire spell or wands as detailed.

Cross-Class Spellcaster Co-operation

Mages and Clerics will co-operate in the use of the Planar Ally spells. Neither class will summon an elemental unless Protection From Evil 10 Radius has been cast. This means that a Mage must request the spell and the Cleric must cast it before any elemental is called. Secondly, the Cleric will not cast Protection From Evil 10 Radius unless all party members are within range.

Minions

Party-summoned monsters ('minions') will attempt to switch to threatlevel assessment and co-operative targeting to support the party. This applies to 'dumb' creatures only; all summoned elementals run their own default scripts to 'think for themselves'.

Rangers and Paladins

Rangers and Paladins currently have very poor spell support. I'll be looking at this problem soon.