I actually wish that as the case with lora...that he was designed to die...no he actually just doesnt climb vines instead teleports to you when you are pretty far away...the problem is there are 2 places at the start you are required to climb through that have poison underneath the vine, and while you are climbing he has such little HP that you cant get far enough away to force a teleport.
can he die? yeah they made sure to cover their bases there in that case by spawning him as a ghost later in the story...but its terrible that he died from bad game design choices and not the consequence of a choice i made. Im not helping no damn ghost, either i help him alive or i ignore him completely. you dont have a choice but to climb the vine, you cant get rid of the poison in that area with fire either as it seems like permanent status on ground. worse off the other way around is a area of 30ms of fire and poison cloud. so even if you avoid that (which i did with a 2nd attempt at playthrough. he dies at the 30m death pit of flowers that explode. then you have the area with the pigs so even if you get past that area Im positive he will die at pigs...
the cat and loras AI dont tell it to run from ground effect, instead they just stand there, but atleast the cat can survive both the spots I mention as he seems to have just barely enough more hp than lora that i can quickly heal him. Lora just dies in like 3 secs in either spot.
Someone goofed up and didnt give lora(a noncombat follower) enough hp or enough scripting to tell him to avoid standing in death pits. just bad design choices, Loras starting placement at fort joy was probably done as an after thought by someone that didnt actually try getting lora out of fort joy when they put that spawn point there. The Dev that made that choice probably has no idea how quickly lora dies there(as soon as 3 mins after picking him up if you go left and explore instead of going into the fort).
2nd point, the pet pal thing...the host player has to take it on thier MAIN charecter...you cant even just have a follower take it and talk to them. player 2 gets shooed away by Lora completely, as does the cat. The pet pal thing isnt completely terrible once you can freely respec in and out of pet pal. but it just seems so hackish and wrong that I have to visit the mirror over and over to proceed the quest and maintain my charecters build.
And on another damn note, why doesnt polymorph grant free pet pal...seriously. but thats another topic thats preference.
