Getting Gargoyles to cast spells

[EinarrTheRed]

Okay, first let me give a little background / context to my topic.

 

I've been making my own personal magic mod, mostly as a practice exercise as I learn more about working with and modding magical effects, spells, enchantments, etc.  Among the things I've been attempting is to create a new type of familiar, the mephit.

 

Mephits are supposed to be a type of daedra, small and imp like and able to toss off firebolts.  They're sneaky, don't affect your stealth, and kind of cowardly.

 

So made my own race by taking a gargoyle and duplicating that.  Then reducing the size of them down and changing their race abilities and visual effects.  That all went pretty smooth.  I still plan to re-skin the lil guy to make him look a bit more "daedric" but for now i've got a small impish like, flame-enshrouded gargoyle to conjure.

 

Conjuring spell works fine, so far so good.

 

For attacks the lil guy has two spells, flames and firebolt.  Both are on his spell list.  But in actual combat he doesn't seem to be casting them and I'm not sure why.  With playable races this is usually easy, just add the spells to their spelllist and you're in business but apparently with creatures there is something more that needs to be done and being inexperience at working with creatures I'm not sure what that is.

 

From what little I've been able to find, it seems maybe attaching a spell to particular attack on the Attack Data Tab may work, but this doesn't use magicka which isn't an ideal solution if it works.  I've also read it might require scripting to get it to work, but I'm only just starting to learn Papyrus.  Another thread suggested it will never work because the creature doesn't have the relevant animations which may be true and would be disappointing.

 

So what I'm looking for is help, advice, links to tutorials, etc. on how to get my lil mephit / gargoyle dude to toss off firebotls.