Issues with companion rejoining the party

[Skye]

I don't know if this is something I've simply never noticed (despite my extensive playtesting) or if things have changed in recent versions of the EE engine but there seems to be a lot of baggage connected to companions leaving and rejoining the party now and it's wreaking havoc on my mods.

Namely, I've experienced two major issues. The first is that the companion's custom script gets reset. Was PARTYAI.2DA always a thing? It seems to have been around since at least v2.1, but I don't recall this ever being an issue before. Has the behavior changed? I kinda get why one would want to set a default Class script on first join if one is missing, but after that it's just extra work for the player. Is there any way around this behavior? I've sorta fixed this by adding entries to the table, so that it doesn't default to nothing, but that's not really what I want.

The second problem is that all the class/kit abilities get re-granted to the character. I've made several kits that have single-use abilities granted to them at certain levels. They can't be applied abilities because the player has to choose their effect. I can't for the life of me figure out why the game engine would want to re-grant those abilities after the companion rejoins, but it completely opens up my kits to abuse and I'm not really sure how to tackle this problem (aside from adding a bunch of script blocks to check for weird game behavior).

There are probably more issues that I've yet to discover, but I can only tackle one headache at a time (or two, as it were). Any advice would be more than welcome.

[Skye]

I did some additional testing in the hopes of somehow solving the second issue without dirty hacks. I created a new SPL file that grants one of the abilities in question and changed the entry in the CLAB file from GA_ to AP_ for the new spell and it made no difference; the ability was still granted. So then I thought, well maybe the AP_ abilities get reapplied as well and I just haven't noticed, but the static bonuses gained from the other AP_ abilities did not increase after the companion rejoined. I said okay, maybe only the first row in the 2DA doesn't get reapplied, but after changing the order, it still made no difference. Finally, I figured I just messed something up. I might have had a script or something somewhere that granted the ability and I've just forgotten about it. So, I deleted the entry for the ability from the CLAB file, asked the NPC to rejoin and.... nothing; The CLAB table does indeed control this ability being applied upon rejoin.

I am completely baffled by this. By what bizarre logic does the game apply the values from the CLAB table and why in the hell does it happen upon rejoin and not just upon leveling up? How do I even begin fixing this in any meaningful way that doesn't involve monitoring all six party members on every cycle and jumping through hoops to remove the abilities (since there is no script action to do so).

[Skye]

I could find no way to get around these problems, so I've added the relevant ability grants into the respective DPLAYER scripts. I hate padding those for stupid reasons like these, and you can miss the abilities if you play with the AI turned off, but it's better than having broken kits...