My Sith Inquisitor recently picked up Malavai Quinn as a companion after Iokath. Along the road to power, he skipped some of the earlier planetary stories (Nar Shaddaa, Taris, etc). Quinn definitely has reactions/influence gain to planetary story conversations with the Sith Warrior ("Malavai Quinn disapproves", etc). Can my Inquisitor also get reactions from him when experiencing those earlier stories?

 

I am experimenting with this myself, but am not completely familiar with Quinn's reaction (or lack thereof) to story points, so I have not been able to reach any conclusions yet.

No. Quinn barely interacts with non-Warriors, and the companions we get back are are new versions of them that are not meant for going back over earlier stuff.

 

If you bring any companion that was returned to you back through the old content, they no longer speak.

Like it was said above, I wouldn't expect any special dialogue from him, but when it goes to influence gain, I would try it in story flashpoints like Boarding Party and The Foundry.

Do the characters even still have influence gains?

Sadly, I was able to confirm that the post-Iokath companion Malavai Quinn does not gain influence from conversations (at least, with non-Warrior characters). Drat.

 

He's still good at standing around looking decorative, however.

Mechanically, Quinn and the other returnees are different companions from the original ones. That's why they no longer comment on old content and no longer move their mouths in ambient dialogue. It's probably also why the companion customizations were forgotten in War for Iokath. Edited June 15, 2017 by OldVengeance

This makes sense. I ran The Esseles months back after getting Jorgan with my Consular, just to see if it would give him Influence, and it didn't. I'm actually glad it works that way, because canonically at that stage in the story these companions couldn't have been with the those PCs.

Also of note is that Quinn only calls Sith "my lord" so the number of spoken lines he has (ie. the ones you get when you click on the companion) is drastically reduced for non-Sith. I guess he can barely make himself talk to the anyone else, especially any Republic characters.