Pet behaviour while owner is incapacitated

[pblack]

I recently lost a bard to ghul paralysis and I noticed in the message log that my pet did nothing while I was under attack despite being right next to it.

I know there are some quirks to pet behaviour while attacking adjacent monsters. It seems to be an actual feature to diminish XP stealing. But I was wondering if anyone had means to test this. Paralyze a PC and see if the pet acts on your behalf while the PC is under this effect. I do not have the savegame so I cannot test this anymore, but if the pet is rendered immobile while you are paralyzed this would qualify as a bug IMO

[JellySlayer]

I've played around quite a bit with pets recently, and my experience is that a pet will not deliberately seek out and attack a monster that is attacking the PC unless the PC attacks them back. If they wander adjacent to a hostile monster, they might attack it, but they might not, or they might only a couple turns later.

OTOH, I'm pretty sure that I have had pets save me from paralysis deaths before where I had actually engaged the monster first.

[pblack]

Hmmm, OK.

Since it was a swarm of summoned ghuls I didn't get a chance to engage and maybe that's why my pet haven't saved me. Thx

[psy_wombats]

This sounds worth a RFE. I remember one recently that requested that pets be more smart that was a little broad, but I think it'd be an acceptable change to disable the pets-xp-hog check if the pet notices the PC is in no position to get xp.