I was just running through some character testing around the zombie perk, and ran into an interesting situation. Every enemy I came across that had healing capabilities dumped them on me, no questions asked. I know that is zombie's specific downside/backlash, but for the AI to know that from the start seems questionable. I'm certainly not one hundred percent on this but wouldn't enemies need to tell that by using loremaster like players need to in order to learn things about foes (assuming they don't already)? And ignoring all of that a healing spell used offensively like that should be treated as a hostile spell and have to go through magic armor, which I don't believe it does right now. Also having the healing spells function exactly the same except hurting seems kind of overpowered to me. Most of them heal a significant amount over a handful of turns, done to a zombie player that translates to one spell nuking more effectively than any standard offensive spell. Especially when you consider that your party's healing spells can't be used on you.
Suggestions: change a percentage of a healing spell's total healing into flat damage, take resistances and/or magic armor into account, change the AI to not know to take advantage of the zombie weakness unless an enemy has loremaster (depending on difficulty setting), and finally having some kind of variety of targeted geomancy poison spells that could potentially be used both as a single or small target DoT or as healing for players with zombie. Example: single target geomancy poison spell that deals X poison damage over 2 - 3 turns and causes the target to emit a small poison cloud. Or perhaps a single target or small AoE spell that makes poisons the targets and has them leave a poison trail on the ground when they move. I realize the zombie perk's intention as high risk/reward but as is it is more Achilles' heel than boon, given that the amount of healing gained from being poisoned is always outshone by traditional healing spells, let alone if said healing spells are being cast offensively on said zombie character. Anyway, really looking forward to this and keeping my fingers crossed that this all gets worked out. Sry for the long post.
