Death and familiars/animal companions/special mounts

[Kerrick]

Actually, one of my ideas for making your basic familiar more useful is to turn them into spell batteries. A wizard can choose to 'cast' a 1st level spell into his familiar, storing it for later use. Provided the familiar in in line of sight, he can later (even weeks later) cast that same spell again this time for real, in addition to his normal spells per day. Essentially, this allows him to take a little of his spell-casting from a downtime-day into an adventuring day.

That's an excellent idea.

This spell battery idea could also operate in reverse, allowing the familiar to soak up a hostile spell cast against the wizard of the familiar. This should probably involve opposed caster level checks; failure has no effect, and very bad failures injuring the familiar.

Or the familiar can just grant a bonus to saves vs. spells when it's within 10 feet. This gives mages a good justification for hauling them around.

Your idea of a caster level bonus is entirely appropriate, although I probably wouldn't extend that down to basic familiars from 1st level.

Nah. With the imbue ability and/or save bonus, that's all they'd need.

Another possibility is to allow a familiar to apply a meta-magic effect to a spell cast by the wizard.

You could do a bunch of different things with this; maybe instead of granting the familiar abilities (or in addition to them), you could add in stuff like this at every other "familiar level". For example, we've got "deliver touch spells" at 3rd-4th; at 7th-8th you could add the metamagic thing (with some kind of limit, of course); at 11th-12th, change the SR ability to become "grants SR to familiar and master while within 10 feet". And we still have to add in the spell battery. Obviously, this is just me tossing out ideas, so it needs polishing, but it makes familiars far more useful without overpowering the wizard overmuch - they're still vulnerable, after all, and losing one inflicts penalties.

Actually, targeting the familiar does make sense. Since enemies remain fully capable of delivering an "alpha strike" any time they are not on the floor, it makes sense to always go for the biggest thing you can be sure of downing in a single attack sequence. While for the BBEG, that is likely to be a PC or a major henchman, for his goblin archer meat shields, that raven familiar looks suspiciously like tomorrow's lunch, as well as being the biggest thing they are likely to be able to down in one attack sequence.

Only if a) they know it belongs to the wizard; and b) they think it will cause said wizard any harm. I would imagine that wizards would keep that penalty thing a tight secret - if word got out, everyone would be killing familiars left and right. Goblins wouldn't be worried about lunch in a fight against the PCs; they're fighting for their lives, and they'll target the person that looks like the biggest threat.